 Hi, I'm Lynn Brockington community experience coordinator at West Vancouver Memorial Library Welcome to the third in our trio of gardening talks We have Linda Gilkinson with us again, and if you were able to join her webinar last week on resilient gardening You'll know how fortunate we are to have her back Linda has been a keen organic gardener on the West Coast for over 30 years She has a PhD in entomology and worked as the research director of a biological control company And then for the BC government coordinating programs to reduce pesticide use She has written books on gardening including backyard bounty The complete guide to year-round organic gardening in the Pacific Northwest and it's now in its second edition Linda is also a regular instructor in master gardener programs and gives talks and workshops on organic gardening and pest management for community education programs, garden clubs and other groups She currently lives on Salt Spring Island where she enjoys harvesting food from her garden all year round Okay Here you are Hi Great You have arrived Excellent I've arrived Okay, great I'm gonna mute myself now and turn off my video and I'll just turn it over to Linda Okay I'm going to share screen. Thank you, Lynn Well, I know you're all out there because in the past webinar we realized there were quite a few people so I'm going to talk tonight about how to Have a successful year-round vegetable garden in this climate and I'm really emphasizing Garden design and and the soil feeding the soil that seems to be An area where especially beginning gardeners have some trouble getting soil fertility up to what it should be And then I'm going to talk about the kind of schedules we need to do to get food Such food that we're going to harvest in the winter and food that's actually going to overwinter and we can pick it next spring And that includes some really intensive ways to increase maybe the amount of Vegetables that you're growing in the size of garden that you have because most of us actually don't have a very big garden on Salt Spring And many of you probably have this too. We have to fence every inch for deer So any any garden is already a fairly expensive proposition So I'm really into very intensive planting methods and I'll talk a bit about some of these other topics and The questions at the end. I'm happy to take questions on anything. I have pictures of pests and different Common gardening problems that we might be able to get at so Let's get going with garden bed design and soil first and get that sorted out So just so that we're all on the same page just in case you're a gardener that maybe was used more to landscape plants or even native plants What vegetables need is more than anybody any other kind of plants need they need direct sunshine Six hours minimum eight hours better during the growing season We're going to have food all winter things are not going to grow in the winter so we don't have to worry about whether there's sun on your garden in the wintertime Now and they need a high level of available nutrients and it's just much more food has to be at their little root tips Than would be required for a rose bush or a tree or something and they also need soil that has A pH which is a measure of how acid it is that is close to being neutral and the reason I bring this up is that Most of us not not necessarily every garden but a lot of soils on the coast is the most common condition is that it's quite acidic Very acidic and grows blueberries beautifully and rhododendrons beautifully but when we get into other plants garden or sorry vegetables They don't thrive at that and they'll need the addition of limestone which is readily available and easy to do And then of course in me gardens need water and vegetables need a lot of water They need during our dry season they're going to need water every every week maybe twice a week if it's very very hot But I can talk I will talk about a few ways to reduce the amount of water that they need So starting off how deep should the soil be if you're in you know say you're building beds on top of an old in this case An old driveway some friends were gardening 12 inches of soil 30 centimeters is very difficult to garden in It would be much better to have a minimum of 45 centimeters or 18 inches and of course if you could do two feet that's even better But if you're building beds on top of existing soil then the beds wouldn't be Need to be nearly as deep because the existing soil underneath will become part of the garden the roots will reach down to that And I actually I always think that it's much better to spend your money on buying amendments like compost and organic fertilizer than it is to buy soil If you have soil of any kind even if you think it doesn't look very good it will be much better to to just build that soil up and make a good quality garden soil out of it So unless you are gardening on rock or gravel or filling quite deep beds you probably don't need to buy soil So if you do buy soil try and buy the very best quality soil you can And I'll just warn you that soils that are sold as good gardening soil they don't actually have nearly enough nutrients for vegetables But they'll be a good texture for the garden so it'll be fine but you will still have to amend it quite a bit to have a successful vegetable garden So raised beds are very popular on the coast for a very good reason because they provide good drainage And what I mean by raised beds is usually they have sides so they don't have to necessarily but the soil is higher than the pathways so that water drains off The beds warm up earlier in the spring If you're gardening on a slope or on rock or a patio as I just showed you You will need sides and a bed and the beds will be raised because you have to have some way to contain that soil and hold it on the spot Someone with a bad back might very much prefer a raised bed this one this picture is actually it's a little hard to see but this is already raised beds on top of a raised bed So it brought the gardening beds up to the height where the gardener could easily bend over and it was a back breaking work The only thing about raised beds however is the soil does dry out quickly and that's an advantage if you're in a low lying wet spot But it's not an advantage if you're on a very well drained site or you might have sandy soil it takes more water And of course there's money to be spent building these beds so there isn't a magic to raised beds unless you have a particular need for the drainage or the height Beds don't have to have sides they can actually be ground level this is just the walkways here and there's these are permanent beds But they don't have necessarily to be raised and in this case this gardener has raised beds but the soil is just heaped up So if you're renting or you're not sure you're going to be where you are for for too long or you're in a community garden and you don't want to have a large investment But you need you want to raise the beds then heaping the soil up works really very well It doesn't as long as you're not going to walk on this soil it won't spread out sideways and you know and then sort of migrate away So there's permanent beds are a great idea but again they don't even have to be raised so it just depends on your circumstances So where you're going to grow things in the wintertime anytime you can find a place that is protected from the weather A little more protected than maybe the rest of the garden that's great the in this case excellent drainage is absolutely essential because of the winter rain So you might still have to have a few raised beds in a garden when they're not all raised beds but maybe you will have difficulty growing winter vegetables if the soil is too waterlogged And so that would be why you might want to raise the soil up but you might also find that you have some spots that you're in your yard that you haven't thought of as good vegetable gardening spots Because they don't really get much sun in the summer this picture here with the the stone bed here was actually at a house I used to own and had quite the south side had a very very wide overhang And in the summer the sun was only right here it only came to this little edge in front and I would just put petunias in here and let them sort of sprawl around But this picture was taken I think in early March it was the best bed I ever had to grow salad greens for the winter because they were protected from the rain But and they were warmer against the building this is the this is my basement wall here events to the basement And it was just it was just a wonderful spot to grow winter greens which are not that happy about getting rained on all the time And again as I mentioned earlier don't worry about sun exposure in the middle of the winter but do look for sort of more protected spots that you might might use And just a few notes on pathways you have to get around the garden somehow Permanently growing plants that can be mowed is one rather easy solution if you're already mowing a lawn elsewhere If you have clover pathways or sod that's easy to maintain with the mower you just make the path as wide as your mower Most paths you can make the many width you want to and of course in my garden you'll see some slides as we go you'll probably wonder where there is any paths Because I make quite narrow paths I have I keep expanding my beds without changing the paths because I want to grow ever more vegetables And I need very easy pathway solution is to put down something heavy paper like newspaper or cardboard Undo some boxes and then use that to mulch the pathway which really kills the weeds absolutely just completely keeps them under control And then I put wood chips or actually have a big Arbutus tree and part of the year I can get enough Arbutus leaves They look very nice spread on top of the cardboard or paper and it's very neat and it's a permanent weed killing mat And next year I just can lay down more paper if I need to and put more leaves on top or wood chips or whatever you have What doesn't work very well in the long term is stone pathways gravel pathways landscape fabric weeds always get into those They root right in on top of landscape fabric and our fire departments are being very adamant now about warning us about those fine bark mulches When they dry out in July and August they are a pathway for fire to move to your house basically there's a rather horrifying video watching the flames just shoot right down a bark pathway So if you're in an interface zone that's not a good plan for bark wood chips don't do that wood chips are quite moist so just some tips there Now going on to our fertile soil Nitrogen is the element that plants vegetables need in the highest amount of all of the elements and yet it's usually in the shortest supply In an organic garden in the first year or two and that's because the nitrogen does not come from the soil part like the minerals in the soil there is no nitrogen there Nitrogen only comes from the living or recently dead component component of the soil it comes from the compost and any other amendments that we put into the soil that were originally alive like think blood meal or fish fish ways to fish compost that sort of thing so nitrogen is coming from a build up of organic matter in the soil and it just takes a few years to build up enough that it's continually becoming available to plants So if you think of your garden as a it's like a safe deposit box you don't get any interest back from your nitrogen deposits for the first couple years and then you get more each year and the more nitrogen you put more organic matter you put in The more your nitrogen interest is that comes back to your garden and after after a year or two there is enough nitrogen being broken down by the soil microbes and made available to the plants The other important elements are potassium which you'll see in the fertilizer the fertilizers the commercial fertilizers will give you numbers that show you nitrogen phosphorus and potassium in that order on the bag Oddly enough phosphorus is not needed in nearly as much quantity as potassium calcium and magnesium but it is a common for element and fertilizer and yet most of our soils actually have quite a lot of phosphorus it's just not necessarily very available to the plants So I'll talk about how to how that's going to become more available in a moment Micro nutrients you may have heard of people worrying about whether they might have zinc deficiencies or or other elements in an organic garden when you're using compost and a variety of ingredients and and tree leaves and all of these ingredients have plenty of micronutrients already in them They're all kinds of trace elements there so it's just not a problem in an organic garden using these kinds of amendments but what we do have to remember is that compost alone is usually not enough to provide not does not provide enough nutrients Especially homemade compost which will be fairly low in nitrogen it's very valuable absolutely do it but unless it's something like fish compost and well decomposed it's not quite going to have enough in the way of nutrients but this is very easily remedied very very good organic fertilizer products are available I did want to talk about the microbes in the root zone these are the these are the creatures that are breaking down that organic matter and are also they're also work on the minerals in the soil and making them available to plant roots So the really interesting thing and this is recent science I mean this is in the last maybe 15 years the discovery that plants actually leak a lot of the sugar that they make back out into the soil through their roots and is like why do they do this I mean why would they and it's tremendously beneficial to the microbes that live around their roots so the plants are basically One researcher said they're putting out cakes and cookies for the micro microbes which means bacteria protozoa little one-celled organisms that eat bacteria there are fungi and some of you may have heard of mycorrhizal fungi they're really key in helping plants get phosphorus out of the soil but there's a whole host of organisms that goes right up the protozoa eat bacteria earthworms that's their diet is protozoa and earthworms do a tremendous amount of shredding a plant material making an available fungi and bacteria break it down So they do the hard work of making the nutrients available and there are special bacteria that actually can take nitrogen from the atmosphere which is in a form that plants can't use most of what we breathe we might think we're breathing oxygen and yes there's some there but mostly we're breathing nitrogen but it's not a form of nitrogen that a plant can use these bacteria take that form of nitrogen and convert it into a form that plants can take up through their roots so the more the research goes on in this field the more absolutely astonishing it is I mean it's just it's studying it's a difference in how plants can take up iron and nutrients and some of these organisms stimulate root growth some physically protect the the roots this beat here note the nice beat look at the weird looking roots these are probably actinomyces which is a fungus like group and they're actually coding the roots and you would think that this looks like a disease but clearly that's a lovely beat there's this is a very beneficial relationship that's going on there so if you want to learn more if you Google USDA soil biology primer you will get a very readable chapter by chapter online document it's free and it's just it's really interesting to read and I recommend that you do it because you'll have a new respect for what we mean when we're feeding the soil is we're not feeding it we're feeding the soil we're feeding the soil microbial community and then those creatures are feeding our plants and our plants are feeding them which is it's quite a quite an interesting story okay so how do we build up the organic matter well why we want organic matter is obviously to get this slow release of nutrients but it's also like little sponges in the soil and if you have sandy soil it'll it improve the ability of that soil to hold water in the summertime and if you've got clay soil which is very very fine particles so that it compacts easily and it doesn't drain well it improves the aeration to have these little sponges basically mixed into the soil and as organic matter is broken down the super digested form is called humus and that is sticky it's like brown goo it doesn't look like compost anymore it's really down to the very sticky elements and that is how soil structure is improved it sticks together the particles of the soil and makes it hold water better and nutrients are much more available from humus and that holds carbon in the soil which is very important to not to be letting any more carbon going into the atmosphere than is already on its way so what kind of organic matter any kind of organic matter compost of all kinds leaves you can compost them first or just use them straight on the garden plant roots I'll talk more about that in a minute and crop waste just keep that stuff all right there in the garden grass clippings really benefit the lawn but sometimes if you have surplus clippings if you were away and the lawn was long when you cut it of course grass clippings can certainly be used but any organic material people even use shredded paper and the trick there is to get it really wet first so it goops sticks down to the soil or it'll blow all over the yard so leaves in urban areas we are absolutely blessed with free free material that we can use to as a mulch that just as a mulch in the summer and it's among the corn here it's keeping the water from evaporating from the soil it's keeping the soil cooler in the winter and mulches protect the soil from heavy rain from erosion at any time mulches control weeds and they are also continually being broken down so there's this continuous addition to the soil organic matter though I fill bins I mix it with compost and that you can get leaf mold but I also stockpile some dry leaves every year in the fall usually the first leaves that you rake up are probably when it's driest I stockpile those you can put them in a bin with a lid on it whatever you do you want to keep them dry because then I've got bags of mulch now for this garden this summer so they're for the next season garden because at this time of year the leaves that have fallen naturally have all been collected or decomposed and there's nothing to pick up and I said I would talk about roots in a moment and this is what I mean the roots of your crop plants should stay in the garden unless there's some particular reason like a big cabbage stalk gets in the way or something you know take it out if that's the case but this example here of a corn this is a corn plant that's what the root system looks like on the day I would harvest the corn if I just cut it off right here and leave it in the soil all winter that's what I get out in the garden in the spring so all of this fine organic matter and all of the bacteria and microorganisms of all sorts that lived there stayed in your garden if you hold this all off to the compost bin it's a lot of work it's very unnecessary and you will kill those little guys if they go through a calm hot composting process so roots decompose really fast and if it's legumes the peas and beans they actually are able to produce nitrogen in the soil because they have bacteria essentially that parasitize their roots and make these little pink tumors inside that the bacteria are taking nitrogen from the air and converting it to something the pea plant can use and once that pea plant is killed or you cut the tops off then these nitrogen factories break open and the nitrogen is available to the next crop so leave the roots in the soil quick trip through fertilizers NPK means nitrogen phosphorus potassium and K stands for potassium that's not at all intuitively obvious the numbers on fertilizers give you the percentage so the guy agreeing all purpose organic fertilizer is 4% nitrogen 4% phosphorus 4% potassium the thing to watch for is this nitrogen number that is equal to or more than the phosphorus number for vegetables and this is or or goonie I cannot say the name of this brand there are a number of brands around I'm not I'm not saying these are the best brands to buy I'm just giving you examples of the kind of products that we see this year and some places some nurseries some garden centers get a custom blend that they get made and it's 444 one that was available here is 244 and I have to warn people to add some nitrogen a better nitrogen source when they use that fertilizer and here's some ideal amendments alfalfa meal 2.5 nitrogen 1% phosphorus 1% potassium is actually really quite good that's a good ratio and fish compost is the same both of those amendments actually look low but that's a good level of nitrogen to phosphorus to potassium in in a soil amendment if you really need to bump up the blood the nitrogen blood meal if you don't mind using animal products in your garden blood meal is the quickest fastest way to add nitrogen and you don't need very much of it at all it's 12% nitrogen the bone meal I have a warning here it's quite common for people to overuse bone meal I mean you'll hear of rose growers that every year they throw a handful of bone meal under their roses and that is eventually the phosphorus levels get so high that it ties it that unbalances the soil and it ties up other elements and so you really don't want to do that so I I don't even suggest people buy bone meal unless they've already got some blood meal and some sometimes like I burn wood so I have potassium so I might make a fertilizer with blood meal bone meal and wood ashes which are very high and potash the potassium but if I think what most people should really do is get one of the already balanced all purpose fertilizers and then you don't have to worry about ratios and if you're overusing phosphorus compared to the nitrogen and I'll just have to say I can't believe how common a nitrogen deficiency is I did a workshop in a local community garden here where we could actually walk around the real garden all spaced out and I'd say at least a third of the plots were low on nitrogen and you can tell this by in this case this is corn it's a little this is a little greener over here the little yellow over here but they're all too light so a light yellow color in crops is definitely a nitrogen deficiency now this is some composted it was a fish compost from a supplier there was something wrong with their batch and these people had put it into their community garden beds and this the everything that needed nitrogen could hardly survive these little plants that are just dying and of course the peas are enormous but guess what peas make their own nitrogen so the peas were happy enough but everything else was really suffering it was a perfect diagnostic picture for nitrogen deficiency if in the first year or two of a new garden you might want to sprinkle some blood meal where you're putting individual plants like squash or corn that are heavy feeders and they're going to be the roots are in individual areas not like lettuce that might be sown over a whole bed so you might want to dig in a little bit of blood meal or alfalfa meal or one of the fish composts like sea soil or earth bank one of those they they're quite good as an amendment right where a plant will go and be prepared to have to possibly add some liquid fertilizer during the summer this is in your first year or two I had to do it in the garden I have now for the first two summers it was a brand new soil out from under trees actually so a tree area and had had no amendments at all so after the second year there was absolutely no need to do it but in this community garden that I was in last weekend they really needed to give some of those plants a quick shot of soluble nutrients and you'll see them if you're trying to remedy a nitrogen deficiency you'll see the plants get darker colored and start growing within a week or two ten days to two weeks you will see a response it's pretty quick in fact sometimes actually a way to diagnose nitrogen deficiency is give them some nitrogen in in water like fish fertilizer or something and if they respond quickly then you know that it was a nitrogen deficiency so you can you can make your own very cheap all we're trying to do is take the soluble nutrients out of something like a bag of horse manure just one shovel of horse manure or some earth bank or sea soil fish compost in a bucket of water and we're just soaking it for a day or two that's all we're going to do because we're trying to just get the soluble nutrients and nitrogen is highly soluble and in this case this is a shovel full of horse manure now you're going to dilute that you'll take that liquid out and dilute it to this color before putting it on the garden you can certainly buy concentrated fish fertilizer and there are other products and you know they'll be like a tablespoon to a liter or two of water and they'll tell you on the bottle how to mix it you water it in around the roots of the plants now another part of the picture this is as I mentioned earlier is that many soils here are naturally acidic that's the natural state of soil in a high rainfall area and under the kind of trees that we have most areas have so our pH here if you're if you're thinking of numbers a lot of soil native soil is 5.1 5.3 and we need to make the soil less acidic by adding ground up limestone and you know some nice people say well I think my potatoes grow fine potatoes grow on acid soil and so do tomatoes they tolerate it well enough but if you're not able to grow lovely beets and carrots but you're growing lovely potatoes then that's actually really diagnostic for the fact that your soil is too acidic because beets are the most sensitive crop to pH they just do not like it at all unless the pH is up so if your beets are poor and your potatoes are great you probably have acid soil I'll show you this little diagram then the chemists have a scale for acidity of the soil and alkaline soil would be like the prairies and naturally the coastal soils are probably in here so this is a scale that actually goes from 1 to 14 so 7 is the middle so 7 would be completely neutral and tap water would be around 7 although tap water is often just slightly acidic what these black bars show you is they're just a relative idea of which nutrients become most available at this range of pH and nitrogen is most available closer to this neutral zone here and as it gets more and more acidic less and less nitrogen becomes available and that's because the soil microbes that we want to thrive do not thrive in acid soil only the fungi thrive in acid soil but the bacteria don't and the bacteria are a really important group for making nitrogen available so we have this kind of best of all possible zone here where the things that we want to become available are available and the things that we don't want which is the heavy metals and aluminum should be on this here somewhere aluminum is a very common it's a naturally occurring element in our soil and iron but plants can take up too much of it when the soil is acidic and they'll have symptoms of toxicity and not grow well and it's not just because the soil is acidic acid it's because the soil is acid and that makes them take up these heavy metals too much so we add ground limestone and then the nutrients that we want are more available and the heavy metals that we don't want are less available we have this healthy community of soil microbes and we also add calcium and if you remember the earlier slide calcium was right up there as the third most common most used element in the greatest quantity for plants so you might be asking how do you know if your soil is acid there are soil test labs around that will do a ph test there's several on the lower mainland some garden centers will take in your soil sample you can google this or look it up what you don't want to do is get a test from using a little kit that you get at the garden center or using an electronic probe those are not accurate at all and the reason they don't work is that they can only tell you what the ph is of that little tiny bit of soil that you touch with the probe the paper or whatever you're doing whatever kind of kit it is and in fact soil ph you know from particle to particle within the soil can vary very widely what you're doing when you're getting your soil tested at a lab is you're taking an average sample of soil over the whole bed and taking a set of that and you're getting an average reading you can't get that from a test kit so you know when you have to add lime the usually the company that's doing the test will ask you what you're going to grow and usually there'll be a recommendation for how much lime or if you need lime or if you don't need lime for that crop and generally a common rate of application if you're trying to raise the ph is half a kilogram per square meter which is about oops there's a typo there I'm sorry that should be one pound per square yard it's one pound per square yard or half a kilogram per square meter and that's actually not very much ground up limestone it's half of a cottage cheese container of a little half liter cottage cheese container half of that is half a kilogram and you can just measure that out with cottage cheese container a couple times sprinkle it on the soil and you can see how white the soil looks and then just go ahead and sprinkle it that way it's not critical that you have exactly the exact number of grams per per square square meter and people will ask what kind of calcium what kind of lime gets what you can get there is sometimes a shortage of one or the other calcitic lime comes from a kind of rock that just has calcium dolomitic lime that kind of limestone actually has calcium and magnesium and they're both great dolomite is usually more expensive and it's a good plan to use it but you don't need it very often maybe every five or ten years and if that's all you can get that's fine use it but if you have a choice calcitic lime for most years and dolomite every now and then is fine so the soil fertility program I've really spent a lot of time on this because this seems to be the area where people have the most trouble getting their plants out of the ground and growing properly is compost every year the first year of a brand new garden or new soil that you've just brought in from somewhere try and get ten centimeters on but pretty good thick layer inches of it mixed in after that we're looking at something like an inch or an inch and a half or so every year if you can do it and also a complete organic fertilizer added to the soil as you put the compost in you would put the fertilizer in at the same time and read the label on the product and if the garden has been growing for a few years go by how the crops have been if the crops are growing really well then you can back right off there's no need to overuse fertilizer and if they're not growing well then you might need to bump that up a little bit and then if you if you need to lime your soil then all of this can go in at the same time spread the compost the fertilizer in the lime at once now and you just do it once a year even if you're growing multiple crops like you might grow lettuce and radishes and after that it'll be planted to peas and after the peas there's still time for more lettuce through the season as long as you have fed the soil once you don't need to keep feeding it between crops because all of these amendments are slow release and they just build and add to that bank of nutrients in the soil and remember anytime in the growing season you can give things a boost if you need to and I had to put the bragging picture in for my leaks because like why wouldn't I right the blue ribbon leaks anyway so this is what the soil looks like in this picture after I just sprinkled online compost and a little bit of fertilizer you can't see the fertilizer because it's just little brown grains but now what well anytime you can minimize cultivation you're going to have a healthier community of soil microbes and you will build soil organic matter faster in soil that is not cultivated but we have to do a little bit of mixing here so once a year when I lay all this material down using a fork I just stir it into the top layers now once your soil is loosened up and you've been adding compost for a few years you'll probably find that you can just kind of comb it in what we definitely do not want to do is take a shovel and turn this all upside down because the microbes that are benefiting making this whole system work are in the just the top 10 centimeters of soil if we took a shovel full and turned it upside down we would put them down into a cold dark hole where they can't get in the air so we don't want to do that but we do need to mix in the lime and so stir the soil do it once and don't overdo it and that preserves your structure it also minimizes the amount of weed seeds that you bring up the whole soil column is full of dormant weed seeds and every time you disturb the soil overcome the weeds and it also allows if you're on a natural soil column as opposed to say a raised bed that might be on if it's just if it's a bed full of soil on a patio or something this doesn't apply but if it's soil that is on a natural soil column below it moist there's a lot of moisture that kind of comes up by it's called capillary action it's kind of like it's wicking upwards and when we break up the soil like this we disturb that and that means we end up watering our plants a lot more and anyway it's way too much work to be digging up gardens so don't do it it's hard any time you can plant without even doing that is better whenever possible just leave the roots of the soil from the previous crop seed around them it's a way in the spring you can just push seeds into the soil that's ready to go just push the seeds in you don't have to cultivate it at all one of my favorite examples is in the early spring March or April I will have planted peas and they're done in July they're pretty much finished so in preparation of the bed for the peas if I have to put in lime or some compost that's what I would do then the peas grow then I cut the peas off and leave the roots so now what I have is a bed that has already had its compost in lime and it's also now has nitrogen because the peas grew it in place and it's also got the mulch because I just leave the pea vines right there on the surface of the soil so I just take a trowel and go in and plant the, and this I think is a cauliflower actually but any of your winter broccoli or winter cauliflower or Brussels sprouts just plant them right in there absolutely no work at all beyond cutting down the pea vines and going over and getting your flat of seedlings over here this is my corn stalks that are cut off I'm just going to leave them to leave all that organic matter in the soil and I seed it all the way just see the seeds are beginning to come up here they don't show up too well in the picture but I've got lettuce and fall greens for salads over the winter is coming up between the corn stalks so moving on to how we're going to provide food all year round it's kind of those pictures I just showed you are kind of the intermediate steps this is my braggy picture from May 7th this year I was harvesting beautiful cauliflower that week and purple sprouting broccoli and scallions and there was chard everywhere those had all been in the garden over the whole winter but I was also picking lettuce and zucchini which I had started this spring and put out in the garden so it was like both ends of the garden met in this basket of food here so we have a six month seeding season and a 12 month eating season in our gardens so what to plant right now I've blocked in both the April May because everything in this April May thing you could still plant now the weather is just fine to plant all of this plant material now and we're now in the mid-May early June period when we can be putting out more warmth loving things although I have to say I have some melons that have decided I have done something very cruel put them out now the weather is cool so I probably should have held on to the melons in the sweet basil a little longer but don't be in a rush to put your warm season plants out if the weather is like this but what I really wanted to show you here is that we have months of planting of all these cool season crops there's plenty of time in our growing season when we can plant in the spring depends on the soil temperature and the weather if it's a late cold spring we plant later if it's warm and dry we plant earlier and just hold that thought because I'm going to contrast that with planting for winter so this is spring planting basically what we're going to eat this summer and fall if we try to plant too early we run into all kinds of problems just because it's not too bad in February and it's getting better in March doesn't mean that it's actually a good time to put vegetables out this is cut worm damage over the winter and there's disease and there's botrytis and there's a zillion slugs there's cold lake frosts there's all kinds of things that can happen to little seedlings when we put them out too early but this is the important thing that we don't see in gardening books for the rest of Canada because nobody else really has this problem this is called vernalization and what this is is biennial crops and we have quite a few of our common vegetables are actually biennials meaning that they don't they would produce flowers the second year they're in a garden so if you've got kale that's finishing up blooming right now that's a biennial plant so last summer when you planted the kale it was just growing leaves then the winter happens and that's a signal for biennials that now they're ready to go into their second year and so when it warms up in the spring they start producing flower stalks so chard and onions and kale and all our root crops celery all the big cabbages some cabbages some cabbage family plants are not biennials but most of them are so all of them if they're held in the garden over the winter go to seed in the spring and you can't stop them from doing that well that's all well and good and we would expect them to do that but what if you put your leeks out this spring and then in July they start sending up flower stalks here we go and that can happen because if we plant too early and they grow pretty well and then we get some cold weather like in April or May we might get a couple of cold weeks the plants are fooled into thinking winter has happened and then suddenly in July you find your chard all going to seed and your kale and your not your kale your leeks your onions things doing strange things flowering prematurely so if you plant too early and your plants are fairly good sized if we get a cold spell then we have a risk of this and like I say it doesn't happen to anybody in Canada because nobody in Montreal or anywhere else is putting any plants out in March or April which is what our gardeners really try to do so very small onion sets can't do this very small leeks looking like little blades of grass they won't convert seedlings that are really small so if you put out little tiny leeks seedlings this isn't going to happen because they're just not big enough to make this conversion but I used to think that when I bought onion sets the biggest ones would make the biggest onions but of course they're the ones that can vernalize and go to seed on us so what I really want to emphasize here is that the more overwintered crops you have the less need you need to sow early anyway we don't have to go out there and push the envelope on trying to get early crops if the garden already is full of leafy greens this is leaf beet that was sown in July and this was spinach sown in August and this was cauliflower that was sown last June this is an April picture this is what's in the garden in April after all of these things got through the winter so I don't have to be hurrying out there with plants that might go to seed prematurely so this is when to plant winter crops and this is why I was saying well you know this how this how this differs from the spring crop spring planting rather is that the planting dates are really critical here remember I said you had like four months to grow a lot of those to seed a lot of those crops I showed you well here we don't have these big planting windows because we need to get the seed started in time to reach the plants to have it reach full size before winter they're not going to grow in the winter they're just minuscule amount of growth will happen in cold weather so they actually have to be done growing or reaching a nice size of cabbage or a full size of leek or nice plump carrots we need that by the end of October because that's really the end of our growing season in any meaningful way if we plant too late these a lot of these are biennial crops we plant them too late and they're small they just go through the winter and what they'll do next spring is just make flowers they're not going to get bigger carrots or better kale or anything they will just be going on to their normal flowering pathway so narrow little planting windows of a couple weeks now I hope you're not madly scrambling and writing this all down because this is planting charts on my website if you go to my home page right in the middle of the home page there's a little pdf click click on that and you can print this out and if you have any of my books it's in there there's much more expanded information but you can print that out right from my home page and you'll notice it isn't about tomatoes because this is the planting schedule for things that we will seed over the course of this summer that we will eat next winter and next spring so just go there later and print that down and keep it on your fridge or stick it to your gardening notebook or whatever whatever makes it very handy I have one stuck on my fridge I still can't remember when to plant things so the goal here is to have your living refrigerator which is your garden completely full by October this is totally different than gardening elsewhere where by October people are putting the garden to bed meaning that their crops are being harvested and stored and they're mulching and they're done what we want is full-sized crops here this is all this this is not empty actually this is garlic this bed is going into the winter completely full of food and even this bean trellis here these pole beans which are obviously not going to continue much longer I have already seeded underneath them some leafy greens and I'll show you that in a minute so every inch of this garden is full of food for the wintertime and that's winter at my house that's a January harvest from under the snow you'll see leaks in all my pictures there's Brussels sprouts back here broccoli I think the carrot bed was in the front here but this is the important thing here is this garden looks really beat up it's gone through a miserable winter but all the kale and the greens and there's radicchio there coming back this is a list of everything that was in that garden that day when I took the picture in March and no matter how kind of beat up it looks it's all going to grow back very quickly the leafy greens like chard have big roots on them they have roots like big skinny beets out there and they will very rapidly replace all of that growth and grow very quickly and very well much more robustly than you could ever do if you started with seeds in the spring so when you get your garden on to an overwintering schedule you'll have these really busting ahead robust plants in the spring that can take a few cutworms and slugs and frosty weather and not be too bothered so the rules for having year-round harvest is to be really aware of the right varieties frost hardiness obviously for winter heat tolerance for summer when you think about things like lettuce there are lettuces that can freeze absolutely solid in place and when the weather thaws out a little bit they are fine but it's only some varieties can do that there are other lettuces that can take quite a bit of heat in the summer without going to seed but these are not the same varieties so you need to get the right stuff and then sew them at the right time and the planting chart I showed you I was just trying to emphasize that you plant soon enough that they can get their growing done in the growing season so here's some examples here of an important difference is the cauliflower and broccoli that we use to overwinter is not at the same varieties as what you will be growing and eating this summer so I have out there some green Goliath and some green sprouting broccoli and I seeded it this spring and they're starting to make heads now and I'm going to eat that broccoli all winter, sorry, all summer and all fall but in a few weeks we'll be starting purple sprouting broccoli, red spear and that will just sit out in the garden and be a lovely little plant all summer and by the end of the summer it will probably be about two feet high and the cold chill of winter will make this broccoli make heads and so from the end of February or March onwards I'll start getting broccoli from them so these are biennials and they're different than the varieties for summer so galleon is a fantastic cauliflower I will seed it in a few weeks but I won't see any cauliflower until next spring so just be aware that there's some differences there unfortunately garden nurseries get plants from wholesalers and in August you can see for sale snowball cauliflower which is going to completely fail in your garden as a winter crop it's not hardy and it will just make little button heads if anything else, if anything happens galleon is extremely hardy, I live up a mountain on salt spring and it's fine here so just in some cases you need the right stuff so now we have a tip here about sowing these seeds in the summer because you can see an awful lot of this was for summer sowing the soil dries out really fast, it's too warm it won't germinate lettuce or parsnips, carrots won't germinate when it's too warm so plant the seeds a little deeper, shade the seed then plant the seeds, water it and then cover it with something, anything this is burlap here but it could be newspapers, beach towels, old bed sheets it doesn't matter as long as it truly shades the soil and then it will also keep the bed evenly moist so seeds germinate quickly but keep considering that seedlings need to be shaded if you've only been used to seeding things in the spring you may not realize that when you seed that spinach in August it's going to need some shade protection if we get hot weather when you have tiny little seedlings growing the soil gets really hot and the little roots just parboil these plants aren't big enough yet to mulch so anything you can do, upside down, seed trays, make some laugh houses water more, all the kind of common sense things but just be aware that little tiny plants in the summer need some care now the next bit of slides is on using every square inch of soil I love this view, it was someone's garden on a garden tour in Victoria you had to basically just pick your way through the yard because it was just food was falling off of plants everywhere it was really amazing so dense planting, do you need rows in a raised bed? well you're not going to be walking on your raised bed that was really the point of making a bed that you have pathways on the side usually you can space plants a little closer than the seed package especially if you offset them like this so that they have as much root room as possible and if you're kind of having trouble visualizing that if you can get a hold of a little piece of chicken wire like just a sort of a foot square piece of chicken wire, two inch chicken wire you can lie that down on the ground and put a seed in the middle of each one of these little honeycombs and that's perfect spacing for all kinds of things for carrots and beets and lettuce and any of the smaller plants that's actually perfect spacing just to give you an idea of how densely you can plant but if you're going to plant densely the soil does need to be very fertile so in your first year or two of a garden don't push it too hard you're going to need water and a good nutrient supply if things are too crowded then you still may need some supplementary liquid fertilizer but you know when they're this crowded they control the weeds the chart here is actually shading out all these weeds but be also prepared to keep some law and order here if your plants are just in this case the cabbage is doing fine but the lettuce really needs to be harvested this is a spring bed, I'm just started harvesting cabbage but I had to get the lettuce out because this is a little too crowded at this point so you need to be just keep an eye on it if you're going to really go for dense planting and dense doesn't mean overcrowded these are far too close together here and any kind of greens of any sort obviously can be used in a salad so just keep thinning them as soon as they come up because they'll just choke each other out they won't grow if they're not thinned beets and chard unfortunately always have to be thinned because that little seed that you plant isn't a seed it's a fruit it's a shriveled up little fruit inside is several seeds so that's why the mystery of spacing your seeds out nicely and you still end up with seedlings that you have to thin out succession planting is a way to keep good quality crops always present in the garden and to keep the best use of space a Dutch grower once told me he said never leave a place empty more than 24 hours so just be right on top of it a plant comes out plants go in plant comes out put some seeds in put another plant use up all that space and when it's things like lettuce and especially radishes and lettuce that grow very quickly and then quickly go off to being a poor quality if they're left too long just grow small amounts eat it up and every few weeks to seed more and you know keep succession plantings of corn and beans and peas and your winter harvest crops can work right in as a summer succession if you think about if you've got a patch of onions or a patch of garlic if you grew the onions from sets and if you planted your garlic last fall it'll all be out in July and on that planting chart you'll see a lot of things seeded in July so that whole block of plants that's coming out in July can be immediately replanted to your winter crops and I just say keep editing the garden if your family's not eating it or if the lettuce is getting kind of weird just get it out of there pull it up and lay it right down on the ground and use it as mulch it's going to serve your garden far better than sitting there being a crop that maybe nobody wants to eat so we can push the envelope on inter planting with our favorite plants a lot of different ways you probably figure out things that you work really well for you this is one of my favorites in inter planting think about plants that have different heights and different root zones different root depths so something like lettuce grows quickly and it's shallow rooted so it can actually be inter planted with almost anything the yellow circles here are five broccoli plants and I like the sprouting broccoli which gets really tall it gets enormous they get maybe three or four feet tall and quite wide at the end of the summer those five plants will be taking that entire bed but meanwhile before that happens I've got a whole crop of cauliflower that's going to be in there and of course when you harvest the head of cauliflower it's over so we just remove the plant and before either the cauliflower or broccoli needs the space I can get a whole crop of lettuce in there so there's three crops in this bed but I had if I was only growing this broccoli it would have to still be on this spacing because that's how much space those really big plants need so as I said lettuce goes where with anything this is first year just putting strawberries in and takes them a little while to grow from the new crowns the lettuce is great put in radishes among carrots put this is Brussels sprouts put some lettuce under that so as long as you're being aware like the cabbage lettuce picture that I showed you earlier when they're starting to really struggle there long as you're ready to sort out the interplanting and use up the salad greens if they're getting too crowded lots of times we can put winter crops and summer crops in the same bed this is cucumbers running over the soil here cucumbers need a lot of sprawling room if you're not going to trellis them up and I can put the spacing the normal spacing for cucumbers still allows me to put the winter this is a winter cabbage and winter I don't know there's a cauliflower anyway the big winter crops that in the summer are not really very big they don't get much of the size till fall you can pluck them right in the middle of the cucumber patch and let the cucumbers be a living mulch there's another dense high density or more intensive planting method called under planting and commercial growers call it relay cropping you've got one crop growing in this case it's squash and you just under plant the next crop so that when you take the squash out or the tomatoes or the peppers or any of these crops that will be finished in October when you take them out then meanwhile this other crop will have been growing underneath so this is where that squash was growing and by the time that has all been hauled off to the compost bin this is where the roots were there were several squashes here the soil is completely covered with greens and that's what I did under the pole beans that were in the back of that picture that I showed you of an October view the beans are beginning to look pretty bad but I've sown corn salad which is a very useful little salad green extremely hardy you don't ever have to worry about the hardiness of this plant and it's got a nice thick root system if I don't eat all this in the winter I'll just dig it in as a green manure crop in the spring so now somebody about there I know is saying well she's mixing up all these plants how am I going to rotate my crops well in this region for a garden the important crops to rotate for disease management for root diseases there's just a few families that are really important and everything else we don't really have a problem with so crop rotation doesn't matter so forget all the systems that go by whether it's fruiting or flowering or roots just like forget all that stuff it doesn't apply to a home garden crop rotation on a big scale like this to feed to to consider the nutrients in the soil is an important part of agriculture there will be a legume crop and then there'll be a heavy feeding crop and then there will be grain crops to help manage the weeds and then there'll be a legume crop again and then there'll be a heavy feeding crop but that is to manage nutrients in a home garden just put on another shovel of compost and you will have balanced up the nutrients so don't worry about nutrient rotation for gardens just worry about the most at-risk plants for disease so and it's root disease it's soil-borne diseases have dormant spores that stay in the soil and some only last for a year some last for four years there's a two really nasty diseases they last much longer but basically most of what we're worrying about would attack plants of a certain families and if the soil doesn't have those plants in it for three or four years the spores start to death basically they just go they just lose their viability and die and there's to some extent root maggots and carrot rust fly and carrots we only need a rotation of a couple months there to allow the flies to get out of the bed so if you had carrots I see my carrots that I'm going to eat in the winter I sow them on the first of July and they're in the garden until the end of March and then I take the carrots out because then I don't want them to sprout and grow tops and grow flowers and if I really had to use that same bed again for carrots in July I could do that because even if the carrot rust fly was in there they would have all emerged by then but it wouldn't be a good idea to take those carrots out and immediately plant parsnips or carrots or dill or cilantro that is susceptible to the same pest because they could be infested so it's onion family this is if you rotate nothing else do this and in small gardens it's hard to even do this but this is really important because the onion family and potatoes are really high risk for disease if you don't rotate it doesn't mean you'll get disease it just means that you have a higher risk potatoes are high risk because we buy seed potatoes and put them in the soil tomatoes and peppers are in that same family they're at risk if you put them out in after potatoes but if you have a good tomato spot and you're planting the potatoes there in the same place every year usually that's just fine it works out fine because tomatoes and peppers are grown from seed and there's very low risk of bringing in diseases if you can rotate your cabbage family plants on a two years at least that would be great better if you could do better but most of us growing off a lot of these plants so it's hard and the carrot family we just need a couple months between plantings to allow the rust flies to emerge and I just put this little warning down here you know kale can self sew all over the garden and suddenly how are you going to rotate your cabbage family if the whole garden has kale seedlings or if dill or cilantro has gone all over the garden then how are you going to rotate your carrot family so just be aware of that and be alert and you know make sure the beds don't have those plants in them if you're trying to rotate the crops but the good news is basically everything else you can plant it wherever it works and whenever it works and you can interplant it so you can use spinach and lettuce and some of these smaller plants on all kinds of interplanting and you don't have to worry about crop rotation so we want to mulch all year round that keeps the soil cooler in the summer warmer in the winter reduces water loss in the summer and protects the soil from erosion and as you saw earlier it's building organic matter and controlling weeds and I do I rake the mulch off in the spring to allow the soil to warm up but then as the seedlings grow up a bit I put the mulch back and you can use literally anything you can get a hold of it's the same as I mentioned with adding organic matter to the soil anything and leaves are fantastic but crop residues even these corn stalks I just chop them and lie them down on the soil I don't even chop them up very finely I just lay them down and they all decompose very quickly so anything you can get if you're going to buy straw it's really expensive you know so buying the fall one is a little less expensive I leave the bales out in the winter in the rain and let all the seeds in the straw sprout keep the strings on the bale and just leave it there then in the spring when you go to pull the straw off it's kind of started to decompose and it comes off in flakes and sticks together really well if you've ever undone the strings of a fresh bale of straw and then had a wind come up you'll know that sticking together is a really good idea because straw just blows all over the place a couple last slides on getting through the winter mulch again and in the fall really beefing the mulch up you see here I'm really putting lots of leaves now right up around the necks of these little overwintered broccoli just get a really good layer on here and then when it really turns cold you put a layer of mulch right over the top of the root crops this is because we want to protect the shoulders of the roots that stick up from the soil the carrots and beets and things if that gets frosted then those roots will rot these plants don't need to grow so the fact that you've covered right over their tops really doesn't matter and it's really the safest way to maintain that that's how whole beddy carrots under there and be ready for arctic outbreaks you know unfortunately in February 2019 the arctic outbreak went on for weeks but usually it's only a few days if it's going to be forecasted to be minus five I tend to cover some leafy greens if I've got a tarp but the hardiest things like kale and hardy leeks and these winter broccolis they're usually good till minus nine it's going to get colder than that where you are then it's really good to have some tarps you can do this very informally temporary I just keep a pile of plastic tarps in the garage and a lot of rocks because we have arctic outflow winds when that happens and you need something really heavy to hold your tarps down and then I just fold them up and put them back away when the weather warms up if you want to have a permanent cover just make sure it's very sturdy and that the plastic can't flip off you know clipping plastic to sorry clipping a plastic onto hoops works fine for summertime or springtime but that will often just come apart in a bad winter wind and of course now we're getting windstorms we had a bad windstorm here last the day before yesterday actually and so if you're going to do this make sure these are low profile super sturdy this little thing latches down this was just something someone designed and it's got rebar legs on it so glass cold frames are wonderful for this because they're so heavy and otherwise also brace for wind and snow heavy snow breaks plants off just as badly as heavy wind and this is a great place to use your tomato cages this is my winter broccoli and winter cauliflower getting ready to go through the winter and I just I take a tea towel and wrap it around the plants holding all the leaves into the middle and then I just winkle the tomato cage down on top if you've got lots of extra tomato cages put them down and the plants are smaller or just use three or four stakes around the stems the point is to get the plants through the winter without their necks getting broken or their roots torn up if their leaves all blow off it doesn't matter because they're going to grow leaves in the spring anyway so really what we're trying to do here is just make sure that the stem doesn't get damaged or the roots get dislodged and that can happen with heavy snow and heavy wind so just a review of what I covered vegetables grow fast but they need full sun very fertile soil slightly acid soil most of the time we're going to need to add lime they'll need water in the summer and in order to have vegetables all year round you've got to choose the right varieties just for the you know suited to the time of year and plant them at the right time the only really critical planting times are the summer dates for the crops that you're going to eat in the winter and then be prepared to protect your plants whether they're seedlings from a heat wave or cold weather in January or February just be prepared to step in there and then take care of them happy gardening so we do have time for questions I went a little longer than I thought but I thought I would be good to emphasize the soil fertility so so Lynn I guess you probably have the questions lined up um yep so um Elaine Cameron asks when you are making your own fertilizer using manure does the manure have to be mature or can it be fresh? manure should always be composted so you know the old gardening books you know they would have you know well aged cow manure well what happens to well aged cow manure is that the rain has been on it for months and all that nitrogen has leached away into the environment where it is a pollutant and it's not available to your garden um manures that come from commercial farms should always be composted because of the risk of human disease in the manure so if you're getting horse manure it's advisable to compost but it's less you don't really need to for safety's sake but if it's cow or chicken or pig manure it absolutely must be hot composted before you use it okay um Andrew asks when is the best time to compost fall or spring? it's when you've got the stuff now if you're going to compost a lot of garden waste and leaves then the best thing to do is pile all that material into the bins and then when you have the leaves in the fall you can make your final compost with layers of leaves and garden waste and maybe you can get some manure at that time what you also definitely don't want to ever do is put manure out in your garden in the fall don't spread it in the fall because it just leaches away all the nitrogen so if you actually are lucky enough to get manure then layer it in the fall in together with leaves and garden waste and whatever else material and then you it's moistened as you're composting but then cover it put a lid on it something to shed water you need air circulation but you've got to have that rainwater not percolating through the compost and basically just taking away the nitrogen okay Richard asks I have new raised beds with new garden soil and I believe there is wireworm in it do you have advice on how to deal with this yes we can go quickly through okay see all the pictures that I have here I'll find my wireworm pictures this is easier than if how fast can you guys read oh there's the wireworms I am surprised if it's new soil then in fact that you have wireworms unless there was lawn underneath in which case it's not a surprise because the beetles this is one species there are other ones that are similar looking are just brown come in the spring and lay eggs on grasses and weeds and they love lawns and then the little tiny larvae they start out really small when they're about this size is when we notice them but it takes three or four years for them to get this size so when you first do a garden out of a lawn you will have wireworms for sure I'm not really quite sure why you might have wireworms in new soil that you bought but you can trap them I'll show you right now chunks of potato on a stick and buried in the soil an inch or two and these are wireworms that have been attracted to the potato and they just burl right through it and you can you know well I'm really cheap I do this every spring but I pull out the wireworms and reuse the potato but whatever you want to do you can clear them out of the bed before you plant they are quite hard on things like corn seedlings this is a seedling that was failing and there was the wireworm burrowing right in but mostly they damage potatoes and carrots that sort of crop so yeah hand pick them as you see them don't leave any weeds in your garden for over winter and never use fall rye as a cover crop because that just gets filled up with wireworms again in the spring and by using leaves as your garden mulch that does control the weeds while you're feeding the soil and it makes it much less hospitable for wireworms so after three or four years of cleaning them out of the soil and not allowing them to come back then the last of the ones should be maturing and then you'll have relatively few to deal with okay Nancy writes I have sun chokes in the garden bed and they keep popping up in places where we have seeded things and they have uprooted them any suggestions on how to handle this no but if I wasn't an organic gardener I'd use Roundup on the darn things but no I'm afraid you're just going to have to dig them up they are very invasive some people really like them they're better and worse flavors of sun chokes some are not too bad I'm not real fond of them myself but definitely it is just an invasive weed problem and basically all you can do is just keep digging them up if you keep catching them as they first sprout then I know it's going to disrupt the plants that were there but just keep at it I mean you will eventually get there there is no real easy solution because really every little bit of root will sprout okay so the next question is a container garden from Nerris my garden is my deck I plant lettuce and tomatoes and some herbs what advice can you give me for planting winter crops in pots on my deck well the biggest pots possible or pots that you can drag right up against the house to keep them a little warmer the thing is that plants in pots the roots are exposed to cold more than they would be if they were growing in soil and roots are less adapted to cold so tops of plants can take cold more than the roots can so what you'll need to do is be able to have them quite protected you certainly can grow winter crops but I would stick with crops that are pretty hardy like kale and things like that and try and move them into a pretty protected area to do it you could seed underneath that tomato plant in the same pot you could sow that corn salad or winter lettuces in in in the end of August just in that same pot where you have your tomatoes okay I've been gardening in my backyard for three years and this is the first year that I've had mushrooms popping up in my garden they're also popping up in my news raised beds which have purchased soil compost and leaf mold are mushrooms a sign of good nutrient content should I be concerned they're not really a sign of anything other than spores are in there and spores are everywhere so don't be concerned I you know if you've got children or pets that might eat the mushrooms people will go out in the morning and just make sure they stomp down the mushrooms because then no one's tempted to pick one most of them are not poisonous but occasionally somebody gets you know can have some pretty bad reactions they're just the fruiting form of what are really like roots mycelium in the soil and they're just part of the natural system that's decomposing that plant material and there probably was some woody waste in that soil that you bought it's composted but it'll it'll you know this is the west west coast we have a lot of mushrooms species if it's not warm and wet the we don't see them that we've had a warm and wet spring relatively warm certainly wet and it's just perfect conditions but I wouldn't worry about them at all it's not an indication of anything particularly okay so the next person can't grow spinach help yeah they didn't say anything else that's it can't grow spinach probably you're seeding your spinach in the spring because that's when everybody thinks they're supposed to seed their spinach spinach is a funny little plant and we live way too far north for spinach to do well the reason is that spinach in response to our long days I mean this far north right now look how light it is really late and those long days that just makes spinach go to seed and if you seed spinach in March it'll go to seed now if you seed it in May it'll go to seed now and if you seed it now it comes up going to seed it's very disappointing but if you seed it in August the days are getting substantially shorter and I kind of buzzed by it I had a picture where I showed you some spinach that I sowed in August and I was picking it in April that's the same plants so one or two might go to seed when you seed them in August but most don't and they grow you can pick spinach from those plants all fall and then there's not too much replacement in the winter I find I don't count on spinach in January but the roots come back to a huge crop in the spring and then they go to seed at this time of year along with all the rest of the spinach so if you seed the spinach in about the second week of August those plants are just being pulled out of my garden now but if you try to seed it here in the spring it's a very short crop but when you harvest spinach Linda do you harvest the whole plant or do you just take the leaves off until the plant goes to seed and then trying to prevent the plant from going to seed never works it's just they're just going to do it so even trying to break that flower out you won't get more leaves that way so up until the flowers form I pick leaves off but when the flowers form my last harvest is to take the whole plant out I just did that actually except the roots right you leave roots I just leave I just cut them bring them in the kitchen pop off the leaves I want and then good okay next question is can you please help me understand the downsides of using non-organic fertilizer very soluble fertilizer soluble fertilizer well one of the downsides is is it is so soluble that when you put it in the soil it doesn't stay there it's not slow release so for one thing in between each crop you're going to have to put fertilizer plants can use that nitrogen that comes from the chemical fertilizer I mean it goes right on by they can take it to and use it but it also leaches out and when nitrogen leaves your property it is a it is a serious pollutant when it goes into a ditch and goes into a stream and goes into a harbor and globally we're having a lot of trouble with excess nitrogen in the atmosphere it's one of the greenhouse gases so there is this soluble fertilizer and also in the presence of that kind of nutrient supply these soil microbes do not break down the organic matter the the whole thing kind of comes to a halt so some of those organisms will be there and some won't but you won't have this complete system that is breaking down organic matter and feeding the plants so you know it's there's a lot of good reasons not to use it and you don't need to because the organic fertilizers are really very good but they stay in the soil and they don't leave your property okay and sorry there's also an acidifying effect of some of the nitrogen fertilizers the chemical fertilizers do acidify the soil right you know I was asked this question earlier by some of us and I wanted to say the organic material sorry it's the Rodale Research Institute I'm just trying to remember what the name of it is if you Google that I've just gone blank I think it's Organic Research Institute it's in Pennsylvania they have some really good very in-depth reports and they're all available online you have to register but they don't cost anything and then you can read some extremely in-depth reports on how to hold carbon in the soil the impact of of soluble fertilizers on microbes in the soil and that sort of thing okay great you'll learn more about that yeah excellent Jane is asking does remae work for shading seedlings in summer oh I'm glad you brought that up because I meant to mention that not a good plan remae is meant to keep heat in so just putting it over the plants and draping it down to the soil would keep heat in would make the situation worse I have actually used remae by taking it folding it over four or five times and then laying it just on top of sticks so in fact it isn't acting like remae at all it's just like a piece of fabric so as long as you're you know not using it like remae would be used to completely cover a crop which would actually do the opposite of what we want okay okay is it okay to add boron to be you don't need it it's it's really not okay to be messing around with micronutrients like this and the boron is an interesting situation because soil sterilant herbicides are made with boron you can kill everything if you if you screw this up it is it's one of those dose makes the poison it's a perfect example and and you just won't need it so again the kind of ingredients that go into compost and the complete organic fertilizers actually have all these elements in there so you really don't need to do it it's very risky to be playing around with boron Epsom salts all these kinds of strange things that people put on their gardens okay Irene is asking when is the best time to lime the garden yesterday you can lime anytime if you didn't do it you know the next time the soil is open lime if you were if you had a lot of soil that didn't have plants in it in the fall liming in the fall is great because it has all winter to work in the soil it takes quite a while for lime to change the pH but just lime whenever you're in there just do it once a year and there's no toxicity I mean you can lime and seed five minutes later it's just ground up rocks so it's there isn't any downside to liming but do it as soon as you can if you haven't limed then try and lime immediately for the crop now anything that's not been planted yet okay so she's also asking in the photographs of your cauliflower there are these white squares of paper oh those are little um those are little barriers here and this is what I'm showing you it's actually in this case it's plastic or it could be thin foam or waterproof paper anything that would last kind of most of the growing season and this is it's a six inch 15 centimeter square and I've cut a slit down to the middle and I cut a little tiny X and so it needs to be a material that isn't too stiff because you can see I've slipped it around the stem of this little plant this is a cauliflower here or something because cabbage root maggot comes and lays its eggs right here where the stem goes into the soil and it won't lay its eggs out here because there's no plant and if there was lettuce out here it wouldn't lay its eggs on that so it only wants to lay its eggs beside a cabbage plant a cabbage family plant so this little barrier prevents most of them from doing that now you just put the mulch over the top and you just leave it for the rest of season and don't even think about it but if you've ever had a patch of cabbage or cauliflower or broccoli where one plant looks fine and one plant dies and a couple plants don't do very well it's very spotty that is very typical of cabbage root maggot attack okay Nancy wants to know see I collected my parsley last week and noticed lots of aphids is it because the plant is under stress the parsley has overwintered and I'm wondering if it is time to cut them down before it goes to seed or let them go to seed it might have been a bit dry aphids do like plants that are a bit drought stressed but aphids on parsley are not going to necessarily go on anything else aphids are very there's aphids for different crops so if they're on the beans they stay on beans you know if they're on the roses they stay on the roses really let that if you can possibly leave that parsley and let it go to flower it's just fantastic for beneficial insects that will attract aphid predators into your garden so that you know by leaving those to flower you will actually solve the aphid problem and solve the aphid problem on other plants as well okay is it okay to use weeds for compost once dried sure or just as mulch yeah as long as if they have seeds then obviously that isn't such a good plan but any time you weed like you're weeding right now you can pull a weed up and leave it right there on the soil you don't even have to haul it away to compost it but yes as long as the weed seeds are not formed yet they're fantastic components in your compost or your mulch okay Tracy wants to know how do I get less rhubarb leaf and thicker stalks that might be a variety he might you know some of the variety that has very green stalks has really thick stalks but the rhubarb red one doesn't have very thick stalks there's there's some differences in the varieties of rhubarb that may not be something that you can change I can't can't think of any way that you would alter that it's really big than the plants doing well and the stalks are thin that's just that's probably the variety of rhubarb it is I'm just going to follow up with her other comment is that her rhubarb starts to wilt and die off at this time of year okay now that is a that's a disease problem and I would again I would start with rhubarb root from you know a completely different root from a clean a clean supply and put it in a different place but that can that it can very much be a root disease yeah unfortunately the weather we've had for certain soil-borne diseases there it's just been perfect for those diseases to spread okay so Yvonne is putting in a plant bed soon and she's noticed some grub in the lawn is it okay to put bed over top I am going to be layering cardboard before putting the soil down okay don't don't put that cardboard down that would be the first thing I I'm not sure what grubs might be in the soil I don't know it depends what it is most of them would be probably not a problem for vegetables but I don't know I don't know what the what the what the insect is but but really don't put that cardboard between the natural soil and your new soil you really want to mix some of that natural soil into your new soil because you want your native beneficial organisms that are in that soil to be mixed in there and you want the natural flow of water and you want roots to be able to get past if you put in if it's long if it's lawn right now and you're concerned about killing that just putting a deep layer of soil on top will do the same thing as the cardboard would have done so yeah just put the soil in on top and that's that's sufficient okay asparagus any asparagus tips for inter planting and does anyone have any I don't think you're going to be able to answer this does anyone have any Jersey crowns they'd like to sell yes well yes well if you put that on Craigslist yeah that's right the tip with asparagus is don't do any inter planting I mean honesty those plants need huge amounts of nutrients feed them incredibly generously make sure the soil has been lined and heavy thick mulches in the summer and do everything you can to just feed them feed them feed them they just need a lot of nutrients okay and right Jersey night's a really good really good one that's an excellent one but it is getting a bit late to try and find them so Linda we've got 11 more questions and I haven't even got to the chat and how are you doing for your time let's do a few more minutes I can hear my puppy is having a dream on the couch I can hear her looking at her sleep so I've got a few more minutes so I'm going to stay on if that's going to okay the next question is about spittle bugs and this person noticed some today on their arugula just wash them off just blast a little blast of water the poor little creature that's inside there the spit the spit foam it's a it's a juvenile of a little bug it once it's washed out of the foam it just dies so you can blast it off with water you don't there's no need to spray anything and it's just a temporary stage I mean in in in a week or two they'll be gone or two weeks or so and you won't notice them anymore so yeah just wash them off with water okay okay um then another rhubarb question is that Susan is wondering whether rhubarb leaves can be put down as a mulch absolutely sure excellent big fat leaves like that okay even though they're I guess they're toxic for humans well they're not toxic they have oxalic acid which is the same thing as in spinach and chard but in high quantities so it's not a toxicity as such if we ate them it would tie up calcium in our bodies but it's fantastic to use as a mulch okay okay I'm going to do two more so the next one is about leeks from Laurel I planted small and by small she means eight to ten inches tall leeks this week will they overwinter or be eaten this summer it's entirely up to you one first they won't overwinter unless it's a hardy variety now there are they aren't all hardy some are just what they call fall leeks and they will freeze out so if it was a hardy variety you could overwinter them but leeks are something that can be eaten practically at any size I mean you know a centimeter wide right up to big fat leeks they're all edible and they're all usable so it's entirely up to you as to how and when you want to harvest them but it will depend very much you know if it's going to be trying to overwinter them it's going to be a frost hardy one and I'll just do one one more and I do apologize there's so many so many questions but I will ask get Linda to answer one more I've made compost tea and put it in containers with lids to put on the garden on a regular basis however I just read that I may have introduced parasites by not keeping it open to the air could I rectify by just taking lids off for a few days or not risk ruining my great garden and make new compost tea compost tea that's been sitting like that there is a risk of disease organisms I wouldn't put that on a garden and I would dump it in your compost bin that'll be fine I mean use it to moisten compost or pour it on the soil I would start over there's aerated compost tea but when you're just sitting there and it's just soaking you'll notice when I said earlier about making these nutrient teas it's only for there to that we're soaking it and the purpose is to extract the soluble nutrients and once we've done that we can just take the spent manure whatever we're using in the bucket and put it on the soil somewhere as a mulch so we're not leaving it set you do get some pretty peculiar things there is some human health risk just sitting there holding compost tea like that and there's no real benefit to it you know despite what you may have read you know usually someone is selling a product like this it's if you've got a healthy soil already with soil microbes there isn't really any advantage to trying to brew up some microorganisms and pour them on already healthy soil it's like you know selling someone a can of oxygen to breathe when you've actually got pretty good air if you're in downtown Tokyo yeah you buy a can of oxygen to breathe but if you're living out where the air is good then there's really no need for it so I would just dump that out and I wouldn't put it right on something that you're going to eat fresh like salad greens I would pour it under broccoli or on a fruit tree or something like that or put it in the compost and probably not bother making it unless you need to soak up some nutrients or something to make a nutrient mix you do get some really strange insects living in there there's some those sounds awful they're called rat tail maggots that will colonize water like that and it gets some pretty strange organisms it's not safe wow okay well I have I have a question that I want to ask and present really quickly I just want to do these slides on squash because this is a really common problem and nobody asked about it yet but I bet you if we did this in July somebody would ask it's you have a squash the the flowers come and then the flowers fall off and the little squash grows for a while and then the little squash stops growing and it shrivels up and it rots or falls off and people think that maybe they didn't water enough or what it was something was wrong what was wrong was the flower never actually got fertilized it didn't get pollinated so what you have to do is go look at your squash plant in the morning and look for female flowers which have the little baby version of whatever it is this is a zucchini here and male flowers which have just a straight stem there's pollen in that male flower and it has to get to the female flower and we have a lot less insects to do that now and if it's rainy weather the insects aren't going to do it anyway so what you need to do is go find your female flower here here it's open in the middle you can see what the middle of it looks like pick the male flower and pull the petals back and just tap that yellow dust the pollen is right here just tap it in the middle of your female flower you can see this is going to be a female flower that hasn't opened yet and this is one that's already opened and shriveled up the flowers only last for one day in the summer so you know on your way out of the house in the morning if you're just going to work that's just a perfect time to do it grab a male flower and you can tap it on several squashes if you've got one male flower and many female flowers it's fine great just do that can't over pollinate can you can't overdo it the only thing is that the slightly complicating thing and I'll just quickly go through it is that we have three species of squash we grow and you kind of have to stay within the group now if you take a zucchini flower you can go to patty pans and acorns and another zucchini all kinds of squashes are in that family of summer squash and if you look at the West Coast Seeds catalog right there underneath the name of the variety it will say whether it's a pepo a maxima or a machata and if you know that it's really handy because then you can use a male flower from any pepo to go to any other pepo now if you don't know what variety you've got is all too much trouble just stick with a male flower from the same plant to the same female a female flower in the same plant but it is handy to know because sometimes a it's very perverse one squash plant will have one male and there'll be about 10 female plants on every those flowers on everything else and then the next time there's you know only male flowers and hardly any female flowers so if you know that you can take that one male flower and go to many different female squash on different plants it's really quite handy that's great and someone actually said in the chat that they've had this problem so they really appreciate everybody has this problem yeah yeah great just remember the female flower has the little fruit it'll look like it'll be round if it's a pumpkin or heart shaped if it's an acorn but that's not the one to pick you pick the male flower okay okay good oh my goodness wow so so terrific so much information is just great and there's loads of thank you's in the chat Linda for thank you so much and yeah and there again is her book and I think you can order it from your website right yes you can or go to your bookstore but support your local bookstore yeah you can order it from me but I'm sorry the postage from me is fairly expensive because postage is just really expensive so you can get it from your bookstore probably you won't have to pay postage and you can certainly get it from me and I'll have it in the mail the next day great okay good alright well thank you again so much for doing this second talk I just it's been great and they say the thank you's keep pouring in from the chat so I know people have really really appreciated it yeah great good okay alright thanks everybody for coming and thank you for all your questions I'm very sorry we didn't get to all of them I think we would have been here till midnight but much appreciated your participation okay and you better take care of that little doggy yeah so we'll have to get little pippy out here okay good night good night Linda good night pippy okay see ya bye bye