 I'm Ron Smith, NDSU Extension Horticulturist. Today we're gonna be talking about getting the garden ready for the fall. We've had our killing frosts and so the plants are ready to be pulled out and to get the garden cleaned up so that next spring we can have a clean garden to start out with and we won't have too many pests, too many insects and disease problems that we're gonna have to battle with. So we might as well go ahead and get started pulling out some of these marigolds over here that have enhanced our garden and are now functionless. So we'll go ahead and get those out. We've got some dead marigolds here that we're gonna pull out and you probably look down into the canopy of this marigold and see some tomatoes. These are not tomato producing marigolds but we had tomato plants in here that have been pulled out already and what we do in our gardening is we plant marigolds around to not only make the garden attractive but also to help to confuse insect pests in the garden. Marigolds as you know give off a little scent that will disguise some of the odors coming from the vegetables that would attract some of the destructive insects and so we've had essentially no insect problems in our tomatoes this past year in the years that we've been using this. So we'll go ahead and get some of the marigolds pulled out and pick up the dead tomatoes as well and as we're doing this we're gonna be pulling up clumps of soil and you just wanna shake the soil off that you can. You don't have to get every bit of it off but knock it off somewhat and you can see the root system that was developed there and then we're gonna take this over to the dumpster here in the community. And so these big bulky things can be crammed into the bag. These things are almost big enough to convert to lumber. Get as much of the dirt off the roots as you can reasonably so you don't have to be fanatical about it but if you have good garden soil you wanna leave as much behind as you possibly can and this is our square foot garden soil which has been amended quite a bit. So we take it off, take it off and then we try to compact this thing as much as we can to get it into our bag and then we're done with it. We got those characters up. We wanna get rid of these tomatoes because if we don't we're gonna have a lot of volunteers next year and who knows, we might end up by having some disease carryover problems and of course good gardening would require or should require that you don't plant tomatoes or any other member of the tomato family, so an ACA family, in the same spot again. So next year we'll probably plant something else in here like cabbage, beans, corn or something of that nature. Well depending on how fussy you wanna be after you've pulled your garden stock out your tomatoes and peppers and cabbage and basil and herbs and everything else you can go ahead and just simply take a garden rake and go over and rough up the soil or like you see here where you're gonna be disrupting that and maybe exposing some of the eggs or the pupil stage of the insects that might have decided to take up residency in the soil. You can do that or if you're very, very fussy you can take a shovel, just turn the soil over here very simply just go down to it at one depth turn the soil over that'll bring the soil that was down below there up to the surface and perhaps expose some more insect problems and that soil should be pretty much ready to work next spring without an awful lot of work on your part. You get it done here in the fall and you don't have to wait for the ground to dry out nicely in the spring because we can't be lived in North Dakota for one year you know doggone well that spring weather is not very, very dependable and you might wait a couple weeks for the soil to dry but on a day like today a nice autumn day like you see here you can work the soil, has a little bit of moisture certainly not muddy and you can see how good the garden soil is that we have here breaks up nicely this is our square foot gardening soil that my wife has worked on over the years and these old roots that are left there will just simply decompose and add to the organic matter there in the soil and the freezing and thawing that we have going on during our winter, fall, winter and spring weeks will help to sanitize the soil through the cold weather and help to condition the soil somewhat. One of the plants that need protection are raspberries the bunnies and voles just love the nibble on these raspberry canes during the winter months and you can see here I've put up some protection chicken wire protection around the little raspberry patch that I have to try to keep them out and I also have an extra bit of insurance here called, material called liquid fence now you can use this exclusively around the base of plants like raspberries or apple trees or things like that it's a very repugnant smelling material and I guarantee you if you could smell this stuff on the video you would agree with me it's very, very powerful smelling material that will drive them away it's not toxic to the animals so it won't kill them but it'll just drive them away looking for food from some other source so as an extra bit of insurance I can go ahead and spray this material down around the edge here which will have leave a very, very strong odor and will help to keep them away from the raspberries during the winter months and it won't hurt the raspberries at all. Hi I'm Todd Weiman with the Cass County Extension Office with NDSU out of Far North Dakota and we're going to talk today about planting stiff neck garlic, this was grown locally and if you're wondering, well I don't know where to get garlic, you can talk to your local nursery and they many times can order plants or bulbs or cloves or what have you for you that you might not think that they could and go from that route or you could give me or you could contact your local extension office and see if there is someone that grows it locally if you wanted to go that route also this garlic does very well here this is called Spanish Roja a nice stiff neck garlic that does well here and what you do simply is to take your hand and break it apart, it's not that hard they come apart like this what I like to do with the ones where the outer tunic has come off I will actually eat that part in whatever I'm making with garlic some of you may wonder why I wouldn't plant one that has the outer layer, outer tunic off of it the outer brown layer is a protective layer for the plant and by leaving that on you're giving the plant an advantage over things that might attack it various fungus or insect what have you this gives it a little bit of a shield where this one does not have that and so that's why I like to plant these and I like to use these for consumption but where the tunic has stayed on I will plant that approximately 4 to 6 inches deep in some nice loose friable soil cover it up next spring what I'll have come up there is a broad leaf grass like plant which is the garlic that grows very well and have an advantage over the ones that are planted in the spring the garlic that is planted here needs the cold dormancy period to help it to make a nice sized break apart type of a plant versus a solid almost like an onion type of a bulb that you can get without a cold period that's all that's to it later on you'll want to remember that you planted it here put some stakes here with what it is and where you've got it and you'll be ready to go for next year what we have here is an onion patch and a garlic patch that we planted in mid-October to have a good crop for next year and this covering that you see here serves two purposes it protects the crop from the extremes in temperature this is a frost blanket as it's commonly called or REMA, R-E-M-A-Y just about any garden supply store then the chicken wire reinforcing material there also keeps the bunnies and the voles out of the area so what this does is it allows for sunlight to come through air to pass through there and moisture to pass through there so you're not really cutting out any air or light or moisture as it comes down but it's kind of giving it a buffering effect from the extremes in temperature that we've experienced here in North Dakota so planting onions and garlic in the fall around Columbus Day is a very good idea