 Earlier this month, LTI was at the Wisconsin Garden Expo where I gave three different presentations and we staffed a booth for the duration of the weekend. We had great chats with folks and a good time sharing what we're all about with the gardening public. I recorded two of the talks, which I'll share with you here as super-sized episodes. This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome to another break from our current season. I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Institute. You're a host for Podcast Number 77 on February 23rd, 2024. I'm coming to you from the Lotech Recording Booth. Thanks for joining us. Today, we're going to take a break from our visit to Cooksville in 2100 to hear about how gardeners today can adapt to a warming and more variable growing season, recorded live at the Wisconsin Garden Expo. And don't bother following us on Twitter, X or whatever it's called right now. We don't post there anymore, but you can still like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube, and check out our website, LotechInstitute.org. There you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute and its research. Also, you know the spiel about advertising on podcasts. If I'm not doing the ad, someone else is getting paid. We put out all of our content for free, but if you're in a position to help support or work and be part of this community, please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as $3 a month through our Patreon page. That's patreon.com slash Lotech Institute. Supporters do get the podcast a week early, and another way to support us is to donate your used car. If you're in the US and have an old car you want to get rid of, contact us for details. So we're about to get going with the recording, but first two housekeeping items. First, this is a live recording, unedited, so the quality may be slightly less than usual. And also, the slides referenced in the talk are available on our website's blog, or can be seen if you're watching this on YouTube. Enjoy. So in a minute, I'll start my regularly scheduled planned talk, but it feels like every time I give a presentation, Ben can test to this. Last time I gave a presentation in a different group, I said, oh, in the news right now or something that makes my talk even more relevant. This was the scene two days ago, about two miles south of my house, where an F2 tornado ripped through Evansville, up through north of Edgerton, through Albion, destroying some barns and houses. And luckily no person died. There were some injuries. But, you know, F2 tornado, beginning of February, you know, that's typical Wisconsin weather for you. So it makes what I'm going to talk about today even more, I guess, timely, because it seems like there's extra heat in the atmosphere somehow. No idea how that happened. And I run the Low Technology Institute, and we're kind of looking at, how are we going to live in, I don't know, the year 2100, or whatever, into the future. It's much better to come up with solutions today for problems we're going to face tomorrow, rather than tomorrow when we're really in trouble. And so that's why I'm looking at gardening in a warming Wisconsin. I'm just recently wrapped up a series on our podcast talking about what sorts of power sources we might be using in the year 2100. And now I'm going to start talking about how we're going to feed ourselves in the year 2100. It's kind of a speculative fiction sort of imagining, excuse me, speculative nonfiction, I guess, because I'm using actual information to kind of speculate what are some ways in which we could feed ourselves in 80 years, or I guess 76 years from now. And that got me thinking, and I'd already put this in for the Garden Expo, but it was very timely about what's going to happen when things are a little warmer. How are we going to garden? And these lessons for deeper into the future, when I probably won't see the year 2100, hopefully my kids will, how are they going to be gardening? And that gives us a lot of ideas about how we can be gardening today, because these adaptations that we're going to need can still be useful today. As you'll see within our lifetimes, our gardening is going to be changing. Just look at last year. It was real hot and dry, and I wasn't prepared as much as I could have been. So I'm very excited to present this to you today. I'm glad to answer questions. Feel free to raise your hand. I'll try and get to it. I will leave time at the end also. That will be a good time for questions also. So feel free to hop in. Today I've split up the talk into three sections. First, understanding the change in growing season that we're going to be experiencing, and then adaptations for today that you could actually use already this year. And then adaptations for tomorrow. That section will be a little shorter, but just kind of an eye on the more distant future. All right, so today we are in what's term the DFA or Continental Humid Hot Summer, or zone 5A slash B, depending on if you're coming from northeast, yeah, northwest of here or southwest of here, you're in 5A or B. Tomorrow, meaning 50, 60 years from now, and this is based on scientific study by Beck at all looking at a number of different climate models, we might be at the edge of the CFA, which is Humid Subtropical. Which, I mean, you think, subtropical, that's ridiculous. St. Louis is subtropical, technically speaking, from this model. And so I used to live in St. Louis. I also lived in New Orleans, and gardening there is very different. And my first years gardening in St. Louis and New Orleans were very difficult. I'm from northern Minnesota, so that was quite a rude wake up for me when everything I tried to plant in New Orleans died. People were like, why are you planting that? That's not going to grow here. I didn't listen, and I learned. So this is where we are now, and this is how things are projected to change in the next 75, 80 years. Temperature is expected to rise five, six degrees, which I'll talk about the ramifications of that. Look how much more it is. So it is in the Arctic, though, so, right? That's a graduated change, depending on our temperatures now. Now, this is the humidity, or not humidity, sorry, precipitation. We're projected to get more precipitation, but it also could be more variable, where we get more dry years and then more wet years. Maybe we'll get more wet years than dry, but still, more variability is probably something we should be dealing with or thinking about. I'll talk a lot about dealing with variability, and that's really what we want to be able to be robust rather than we're going to lose some efficiency, but hopefully we'll be more resilient to variability. Analogs. So today I'll be talking a lot about analogs, and I'm basing my suggestions on thinking about places that are already like what we're going to be like. For example, Fitzpatrick came up with this a few years ago. It's a really cool interactive map where you can go and click, and it will tell you where the best guess is. Excuse me, not guess. The current projections suggest what our current, what our future temperatures will be like in 60 years. And if you've ever lived near Kansas City, that's expected to be what Madison will be like in 60 years. I lived in St. Louis, so I have a little bit of background knowledge about what it is to garden there, and how to change what we're doing here in Wisconsin. And I find it so much easier to garden here in Wisconsin, like I said, coming from Minnesota than St. Louis. It was a steep learning curve, and if this were to happen overnight, we would all be on that steep learning curve, but we got 60 years to adapt, so we'll start talking about that. So that is Zone 7A. That's a big change, but it'll happen gradually, so we have time. Other analogs we could look at are Central China, Argentina, although they're slightly different for other reasons, but climatically these might be areas that we look at for analogs today. So I will pull a few examples from these areas. So the adaptations for today, I've split into three segments, Botanical. We'll be plant varieties and talking about that. Methodological, so how we plant, how we garden, things that we can adapt. And then gardeners, things for you specifically, for you as a person to adapt to these different variable temperatures. So we'll jump right into the Botanical. I want to start with an anecdote. I'm an archeologist by training, and the ancient Inca depended on potato as their staple, and they grew between 3,000 and 5,000 varieties of potatoes, depending on what's a variety and what's not. And so the way that they did it is unlike probably most of us who plant one row of red norlins, one row of Kennebec, one row of Oneida, they would mix all their potatoes together and plant them together. And some of these potatoes were adapted for the usual, and their usual is cool and dry. But then between every two to 11 years, somewhere in there, they would get an El Nino year, and their weather would be completely reversed. They would get hot and wet. And imagine here in Wisconsin if every year, we have our average growing season, which is warm and fairly wet, what if we had very hot and very dry every two to 11 years with no warning? How would that change how you garden, right? If you garden your normal way, well, that year you'd basically just throw in the towel and say, oh, okay, I'm not getting anything this year. But they couldn't do that. They were dependent on their potatoes. So they would plant a wide variety knowing that a third of their potatoes weren't gonna do very well because their El Nino adapted potatoes. But then in that one year where they had El Nino, those plants would do well and the rest would do just okay. And so they had a, it's not as efficient, but it's more resilient. And we all kind of learned about the difference between efficiency and resiliency with the climate, or excuse me, with the supply chain issues we've had, right? We are so used to these really economically efficient just-in-time systems where we don't keep things in a warehouse when we're building widgets. We don't keep our parts. We just expect them to come by UPS. And then we build them and then we send them out immediately. Whereas when we have a disruption in that supply chain, well, we're in trouble because it's very efficient, but it's not very resilient. So we wanna be resilient gardeners. We don't necessarily, we're willing to give up a little bit of efficiency for that. I'd rather have medium, good harvest every year rather than a good, good harvest most years and then some years nothing because that would be a problem. And so if we're looking at botanical adaptations, we all have our favorite varieties. So I encourage everyone not to just throw away what's working for them now, but to do AB testing or have your favorite variety and then start trying out a couple different varieties, especially if you can start your own seeds. Seeds are fairly cheap. So you can, if you're starting your own seeds, you can get a couple different varieties and when you're looking for these new varieties to try alongside your old faithfuls, look for things that are more heat and drought tolerant because these are, it's just going to get hotter and we're gonna have more variability for moisture. So if you can get something that's a little more drought tolerant or a little bit more, lots of rain tolerant, although most plants do find if there's more rain. But yeah, so heat and drought tolerance varieties that you get used to now is gonna be helpful later on and there's a lot of them out there. Again, I'll post all this on our website, lowtechinstitute.org. So learning to save seeds. We just had a presentation, did anyone from the last presentation was here? Yeah, it's just about saving tomato seeds. There's a lot of little ins and outs, but it's not rocket science, you can save them and you can take notes on what you're saving. But learning to save your seeds is gonna become increasingly important because we're gonna want locally adapted seeds for what we have going on here in Wisconsin and they'll change slowly over time. By saving seeds, they will slightly change each year as the temperatures do too. I'm not gonna go too deeply into save your seeds. Avail yourself of the great resources we have here at the Garden Expo as well as online and other places. Right, so dwarf those plants. We like to add nitrogen, we like those big, fast growing, hybrid, bigger, beautiful plants, but those aren't as robust. There's something about being, something really resilient about growing slightly slower varieties, slower to bolt varieties. When you put on a lot of nitrogen fertilizer and or have those quick growing varieties, they're putting on a lot of leggy growth real quick. It's not as robust when you get a drought because those cell walls, the structure of the plant isn't as strong and so you get a lot more wilting or falling over or failure of the physical structure of those plants. So dwarf varieties will actually do a little better because they are a little more conservative in their growth habit. Additionally they will, my presentation tomorrow is on growing through the winter or maybe better said gardening through the winter or four season gardening. So I'm focusing a lot on the winter and dwarf varieties do better in cold weather too. So this could be a talk on the in praise of dwarf plants. So this is a lot about different collards and all kinds. Anything that's slow bolting or dwarfing is gonna be by design a little better in dry hot conditions. Okay, and now is the time to start noting your perennials. We're probably not gonna change a lot of our perennials in the next couple of years, but you wanna start thinking about, okay, taking notes. All right, I have an apple orchard with five varieties. This year was really hot and dry and these three varieties did really well. The next year was hot and humid. These two varieties did really well. The next year was cool, this one did well. And you wanna start noting that now because later on when you start culling or planting new or grafting or reconfiguring your orchard or your perennials, you'll wanna start doing more of the plants that are doing well on those years that are on the warmer and drier or warmer and wetter end. But you need that background data to do that. And how many of us have, show of hands, how many of you have started a gardening notebook with lots of information for the spring and almost no information for the fall? Yeah, I've already started the one that I'm not gonna finish this year. I came up at the last time I get to talk, off the top of my head, I came up with this great idea. If you wanted to sell something, you could sell a garden notebook. It would be a gag gift where the first, half of it would be like April, May, June, and then the last two pages would be like August and September. And it would be perfect for most of us. Okay, good on you if you're a very diligent note taker. So we're already seeing this in scientific studies. Obviously, I'm not mentioning them, but looking into scientific studies about how people are adapting to challenging environments today around the world is very helpful. That goes along with the analogs. Okay, so let's talk about methodological. You can never go wrong improving your soil health, right? I mean, who's saying decrease your soil health? That would be ridiculous. But one of the easiest ways, and I'm a big proponent and evangelist for mulch, I have almost no, I'm trying to think if I have any empty or bare soil in my garden. I grow wheat, and I guess my wheat field, I don't mulch my wheat field because I don't have that much mulch. I would mulch it if I had enough. I mulch everything. And mulch is great for the obvious reasons. It adds, it breaks down and adds more organic to the soil. It really suppresses weeds. It helps maintain or at least moderate the loss of evaporation from the soil. And you can do really cool things with mulch. Like last year, my potatoes did really poorly. And the primary reason is because I had a dark mulch. I just happened to have a huge pile of composted blue stem. And it was like a dark brown. And I put that on everything because I just had it. And the soil got too hot under my potatoes and it stunted their growth. I got really poor tuber production. Now had I used straw, straw will mulch and keep the moisture in, but it will bounce the solar radiation off and keep that soil cooler and acts as an insulating blanket on my potatoes. And I would have gotten a lot better production. I know that because I've done straw in other years and it's worked out much, much better when it was also hot and dry. So mulch helps you moderate what's happening to the soil underneath. It maintains that moisture. Yeah, it's, I mulch everything I can. And if you think about it, nature really abhors a vacuum. There are very few natural systems out there that are healthy where you see bare soil. If there's bare soil in the woods or on a prairie, it's not bare very long. There will be something growing in it. And so if you're dealing with a lot of weeds in your garden, that's not the weeds fault. It's, they're opportunistic. You know, I live out in the country. I see bare soil on big ag fields and I see bare soil in deserts. And that's about it. No comment further on this. I come from an egg family. So I have cousins and yeah, family that, yeah. So I'm not throwing anyone under the bus. It's a difficult thing making a living doing that. And I understand why people make the decisions they do. It's just, I wish there was a different way. Okay, so that's why we're here. No dig, if you've ever tried no dig, hopefully it's worked out for you. If it didn't work out for you, hopefully there's another method. But if you haven't tried no dig, this is a great chance to do some of that A-B testing I talk about. If you've always exclusively done deep tailing or double digging, maybe try, you know, one plot, one way and another with no dig. And there's lots of different ways to do it. Charles Dowding has lots of YouTube videos. And I will warn you, don't watch his YouTube videos in August. Because he has a beautiful garden and it always looks pristine, Instagram ready. And if your garden looks like my garden in August, you feel really disheartened. And he goes, oh, I failed again. I'm being hard on myself. I mean, we all know what I'm talking about. But right now it's great to watch it for inspiration. Just understand he has a whole team of people and it is his job to be a gardener and educator and market gardener. He's got a whole team of people to keep his stuff looking beautiful. So unless you have a whole team, don't be too hard on yourselves. But what he does, he'll lay down cardboard and then a whole bunch of compost. There's the root stout method just using lots of hay or other mulch. And then there's the famous lasagna gardening. I mostly do kind of a combination. I'll do a weed barrier and then a mulch on top of mine because I have a pretty good built up compost structure. He's often colonizing like grass and stuff like that. That doesn't have a very good O horizon. I got plenty of O so I'm not too worried about it. But yeah, that helps build soil structure. It helps keep the microbiome intact. This is all helping build your soil. It's more resilient. It holds more water. It's just gonna be easier on your plants as things are hotter and drier. Plant diversity and keep it active. So again, nature abhors a vacuum, abhors bear soil. So if you have a bed that's bare, consider. So this, oops, sorry about that. I hit the wrong button, there we go. If you plant a cover crop. So this is rye grass and clover. I just do clover because I don't wanna deal with rye grass growing up and I harvest rye. So I have, yeah, I don't wanna use my rye seed for that, I wanna actually eat the rye. But if, yeah, you could just do clover. That turns in really easy. You can just like till it, just going in an inch, just to till it in. You can also do succession planting or companion planting. Most of us, I think, have heard of those terms already. But companion planting is planting plants together that can be symbiotic or at least coexist together happily. Maybe they're different heights or use different nutrients and so they're not competing too directly. And then succession planting, of course, is when you take something out, you've already got something started a couple weeks ago in the seed pack that you're gonna plant, transplant to take its place. The nice thing about this is it keeps that microbiome active. There's different root systems going through, using different nutrients and it's just constantly being an active soil horizon and can be a very good way to keep your soil happy and healthy. Obviously composting and fertilizing, but fertilizing judiciously, right? If you're putting too much nitrogen in there, you might be getting fast legged growth that doesn't do well if you get hit with a hot spell. So fertilize judiciously and one of the best ways to do it judiciously is to have your soil tested. And I'm no longer sponsored by the Wisconsin Horticulture Division of Extension. I lost that in my, the controversy, no, I'm just kidding. I had to take their sticker off of my race car. But no, you can soil test here and they'll tell you what you need. So instead of prophylactically just throwing on tons of fertilizer you may not need, see what you need. See what micronutrients, minerals your soil is lacking. And there's a lot of resources on their website about how to do your own collections and send that in. It's not too pricey. The cost of your soil test might save you the cost of all the fertilizer you might have put in anyway and not needed. Maybe you have great soil already, who knows? All right, adjust your calendar. So as time marches on, our calendar is gonna change. So I said that in 60 years we're gonna be according to current models similar to Kansas City, Missouri. This is the planting calendar for Kansas City, Missouri and this is Madison, Wisconsin. If you look, it's about 30 days different over 60 years. So in 60 years we could be 30 days early in our planting calendar. What does that mean? It means every other year you could move your planting up a day. That'd be one way to think about it. That's every other year. So that's affecting us now. You can start planting stuff a little early. I always feel like I'm always, maybe it's just because of the volume I'm planting that I feel like I'm always behind, but I always feel like I'm behind in the spring. Oh man, I could have started this a week ago. And another, in addition to slowly marching your calendar up a little bit, you can also do bracketing. And this again, if you're saving your, or if you have your own seeds, seeds are real cheap compared to buying starts. If you can start maybe not growing out all your own seeds this year, but if you haven't started your own seeds, maybe you do some this year and work up. Everything I'm suggesting, please do it gradually. Don't throw out what way you've been doing it and just change everything. And if you have some failure along the way, it can be frustrating. So do a little bit at a time. Gradual is best. And so I was recently doing my seed order and I realized that if I'm buying say, I forget the exact price and the exact thing, but if I'm buying say a quarter ounce of radish seeds for $4, if I look at the next option, it's a half ounce of radish seeds. It was only a dollar more, right? So get twice as many seeds and then bracket. You can plant, if my planting date for radishes, I'm saying radishes, I wouldn't, that's a bad example. Peas, if my, or here, let's just use beets. It's the May 7th, okay, for plant seeding. Maybe I'm gonna do some starts a week earlier than May 7th and then some a week later than May 7th. And that way I've bracketed, if I can get those early ones in, early, great. And then I have a succession to put in a couple weeks later, right? If it's freezing, I may lose some seed, but it's a pretty minimal amount if you buy a little extra. Or if you're saving your own seeds, it's moot because you end up with way more seeds than you can possibly plant. For example, I have, you can stop by our booth, we're in the main hall. If you come in and go to the main crosswise aisle, we're on the right-hand side. We have a big spinning wheel, we're easy to find, the low-tech booth. We've got kale hybrid seeds that I planted my kale next to my mustard one year and now it comes out like kale but it tastes like mustard, so it cooks up really nice. And I've got plenty of seeds. I give them away every year and I don't plant it in my garden anymore because it's now basically a weed and I just hoe it down where I don't want it to grow and it's easy. Anyway, if you have your own seed saved, this is really easy to bracket. It's, if you have a, that way you can kind of hedge your bet and not lose a lot. All right, let's see. So let's talk a little bit about, let's talk a little bit about heat stress. So, oh, one thing I will note here. So if we're, if you're doing your own starts, one of the other investments that you might want to start thinking about and building up slowly are season extending equipment. So if I'm doing earlier planting, sometimes we have those late rogue frosts that can really throw you for a loop. And if you have fleece or ag fabric to cover your rose with, that can save your butt sometimes. And also, this is something I should note for your perennials. In years where we're getting less snow like this year, perennials for grapevines or other things that are low to the ground that do survive most years under a blanket of snow when we get to 20 below, if we don't have snow and it gets cold, they might die at zero. So you might want to consider artificial snow, essentially, or something straw and then ag fabric to keep it down or something to keep your perennials, although then you have to watch out for mice, I know. So you want to consider something for your perennials to help them get through these times where it's not as cold as before, but we don't have that snow covered to give them that insulation. Also, drainage, and this goes back to soil health. If you have good drainage, that's going to help get that water down and away from the roots and not inundate them and be so super saturated that the roots essentially drown. So these are all small little things that we can start doing now thinking about more variable climate. All right, people love examples. And so I recorded a segment with, this was like 10 years ago, with a student of mine who was doing a climate change podcast in Canada. And I said, well, yeah, climate change on balance, bad. But not all changes are bad. Canada's going to get more growing days because climate's going to be warmer and where most of their ag is, they're going to have a longer, frost-free period of the year. And they didn't air the segment because I said that. It's like, whoa, okay. We have to be realistic about these things. And you don't have to believe in climate change. It's going to happen whether you believe it or not. So don't believe it, that's fine. But I'm going to adapt and think about the future in a proactive way and say, okay, climate's changing. What can I do to make myself and those around me more resilient and able to handle it? And so, if you like tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers, hot weather is good. They do well with the warmer temps. You might have to select away from your tried and true varieties that you've been using over time. You might need to migrate to more Southern types, but they do really well in the South, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers. Squash does, although we do obviously have to, we'll talk about irrigation here in a minute, but you'll want to think about irrigation systems that keep them not looking like this tomato here. That has some watering stress, right? So too much water, too little water, feast or famine, they can split. That can be an issue. But for the most part, they like heat. I grow these in a polytunnel where it's 120 degrees every day and they do. Squash does really well. Squash is from Central America. So it's going to do great. Maybe different variety, corn, beans, all of these things come from the South and they had to be adapted to grow up here. So it's really easy, it's frankly really easy to get stuff from the South and move it North. You might want to think about something like the three sisters, inter-planting them. Unfortunately, powdery mildew does fine in the heat and even dry conditions. It's frustrating for me and probably others. Brassicas, you might think, oh, hotter temperatures. Brassicas aren't going to like it, but really it's like we're adding a hotter month in the middle and subtracting our colder winter month, which my wife will be excited about, but I guess I shouldn't complain because I don't have much choice. But brassicas, you just can move their early season earlier and then your later season later and they'll still have a reasonable amount of time to grow carrots. Since they need such a long time, they're going to have to grow in hotter conditions. That's where you might think about a strong mulch that keeps the moisture in, but also bounces some of that excess heat radiation off. Potatoes, ah, I love potatoes. I'm really bullish on potatoes. I have this whole thing about how you could like grow two thirds of your calories for the entire year in potatoes in 40 hours over the summer. I'm not even kidding, I've done the math, I've done multi-peered studies of efficiencies of labor input to growing potatoes by hand without mechanization, and you could grow two thirds of your calories in 40 hours if you get a good year. That's a lot of calories and it's way easier. I also grow wheat and rye. I have a whole talk on homescale grain and I would much rather eat more potatoes because they take nothing to process or harvest compared to grain, grain socks. No, I love bread, I'm kidding. Being a little hyperbolic, sorry about that. Okay, another thing that you might want to think about adapting is they say grow what you like to eat. Well, maybe let's reverse that. Start to like to eat other things, how about that? I have to tell you, I love okra. I'm from Minnesota. The first time I ate okra I was a full grown adult because we did not eat okra growing up. Sweet potatoes very rarely. We had like candied yams on Thanksgiving, that was about it. But I lived in New Orleans. I love okra and sweet potato and all that sort of stuff. It's great, learn to make it now because it's gonna be easier to grow. I grow okra now, I love it. I grow sweet potatoes now. I grow them in a polytunnel, but I almost said hopefully I'll be able to grow them outside the polytunnel only and that'll be able to grow more of them. Pickled okra, my wife will make and eat. She would eat a pint of pickled okra every day if we had that much okra. There's a lot of great stuff out there to the south that we have trouble growing now, but in the coming time we'll be good. So yeah, broaden your palate, broaden what you like to grow and what you like to eat. Bug-aware, as we're all aware, bugs will get different and potentially worse as they have less mild winters. And in doing the research for this, I thought, oh yeah, less mild winter, that's why they're gonna over winter. It's not actually, I found out through a number of studies, it's not the winter that kills the bugs, it's a cool wet spring because while they're still dormant, the fungus wakes up and starts to eat them in their dormancy and that will actually do a lot of bug reduction. So it's not actually the very severe cold winter that will kill them, but still having a longer growing season above freezing means potentially more bugs because they have more time to eat and damage crops and to breed all the things that we don't necessarily need them to do. However, like I said, you gotta roll with it as much as I complained about the drought last year. I was very cognizant of the benefits. I don't think I got bit by a single mosquito last year. So, I mean, if you can adapt to it, if you're set up to adapt to a drier condition and have that variability built into your planting where you can do well in a wet or a dry year because you've hedged your bet, then you can, oh, sorry, visceral reaction, potato bugs, yeah, same thing with potato bugs. They may start moving earlier. And so if you're planting, potentially, you're planting your potatoes earlier and so maybe you'll start to outrun the potato bugs a little bit until they adapt, right? They're adaptable too. They're adapting at the same time we are. So, microzones, this is not a place for kids to play laser tag, although if I did open a laser tag thing for kids, it would be called microzones. Microzones are a strategic use of infrastructure to raise or lower your growing zone, right? So even this example of a stone wall, you know, this might be a six, a zone six in front and a five or a four behind, right? That solar radiation bouncing off that structure and then absorbing and releasing at night will make a difference. And there's, you know, you can look at pockets in valleys or up on southern slopes or behind houses or trees. And you can, this is actually, it's a little late. I'm sorry, I couldn't keep the snow here any longer, but this is the time of year when I like to go through my garden and look because my garden's always changing and see where are the hot spots and where are the cool spots. And watching where the snow comes off your garden is one way to do that because the hotter area is gonna lose their snow first, all things being equal. It's a little, that's not a foolproof method because we don't have leaves on the trees. So if you have a lot of bare trees, it's a little different solar radiation right now than in the summer. But what I did for this, this is my garden. This side by me is north, away from me is south. And what I did was every hour on the hour, one day in the summer, a sunny day, I walked through and I measured, okay, what has full sun? And those numbers represent how many hours a day these different places have full sun. And if you look, this is my house right here. This is almost, I would say, this is probably a zone six. I get a lot of sun bouncing off my house. It's like this really pocketed, warm, nice area protected from the sun. We grow all kinds of hot weather stuff. They're really great. And then there's some shade. There's some trees along the line here. And so there's a bit of shade and some of the cooler stuff grows on the edge. And then, yeah, and so this is what I've done to look at the micro zones in my backyard or in my garden. I had very fanciful beds at that time. Now they're a lot more simple because yeah, I have two kids now. I don't have the time to maintain all these ridiculous things that I used to. I blame my kids for anything. Okay, weeding. Weeds will, of course, compete for water and nutrients with your plants. We all know that. And so by weeding, I'm being diligent. And I know who likes to be told to be diligent about weeds, right? And I should talk. Here, I will show you my secret shame. So I guess it's not so secret. So here are two beds. If you know, this one is mulch, very heavily with straw. And this one is not mulch. And here they are weeded, right? So look at the difference. I did nothing different to them other than mulching. So there's a significant, and this is from years ago, they look pretty different now. But, and I had very significant weed load I moved in after. It had been a fallow for five or six years and it was just overgrown with brush and everything imaginable, fighting black locusts for years. Anyway, so yeah, you can see the big difference that the mulch makes, but also keeping weeds down is another great use of mulch. No-till lasagna type. By the time a weed pushes it way through lasagna bed, it's pretty weak and you can pull them out pretty easily if you're on it. And yeah, that weeding will really go a long way in making sure that those plants that need water get the water. All right, irrigation. Obviously we're gonna come to this. We all know about drought symptoms in plants, the droopy leaves, the upward curling of the leaves, the yellowing over time, the off-flavored fruits, the dropping of fruits, the, yeah, the susceptibility of disease because they're water stressed, diminished winter hardiness, all of these down the line effects of not having enough water or water at the right time. So one thing you can do is you can prioritize which plants need water more often. And one way to do this, so my mother is a saint and we were out of town for two weeks and I said, oh, great, you can water for me. Here, this is not what I gave her, but this is basically what I gave her. Here's all the plants and here's how often they need to be watered. And she's like, I'm just gonna turn on the sprinklers twice, so two or three times a week. How about that? I'm like, okay, but this is the schedule. How easy is this? You have to remember, okay, today is the basil, but tomorrow is the tomato and this is a nightmare. So one thing you can do is you can group, you can group plants that need the same amounts of, and this is pulled from the internet, but, and your individual varieties may vary, so this might not be exactly, so you need to experiment and see, okay, I'm grouping all these twice a week, all these once a week and all these 10 days to two weeks and I try them out and you find out, oh, my beets, the beets I'm growing, that's too much water for them and then you move them to the categories, right? So this requires note-taking, I know. But if you have these in similar beds or zones in your garden and you can do a micro or you can do a sub-segment, right? Like, oh, the twice a week's with full sun, twice a week partial sun, twice a week partial shade, right? And then you group them like that, it's a lot easier to do a sprinkler or any type of zone watering twice a week, once a week, every two weeks. This is a really efficient way to kind of batch your watering so that you're not second guessing yourself or having to break your head over, what was I supposed to water, I forget. Mulch, did I mention mulch earlier? I don't think I spent a half hour on mulch already, but yeah, bare soil will transpire a lot more water. Mulch will help keep that in. You can even do, like if you get drip hoses, and again, drip hoses, I know it's an investment, so do a little bit at a time, start building it up. The things that are more water-heavy maybe first, and then you mulch over the drip hose so that water never gets a chance to evaporate. It goes right into the soil. It does take a little bit more. With the mulch, I should mention, you push the mulch aside, run your fingers into the soil or get one of those probes if you want to see if the soil's wet and needs to be watered. That's another thing, monitoring, right? Not just prophylactically watering, but doing it when it needs it rather than just doing it on schedule. Oyas, O-L-L-A-S, comes from Spanish for the most part, but I was looking into the origin of this word. It might actually be Arabic, but this is the idea of terra cotta, unglazed terra cotta being buried in the ground, and then the water seeps out and the plants are attracted to it. You could then fill each of these pots and then go away for a week, and they would still be seeping water out into the soil. So this has been a low-tech solution for a long time. You can make them. There's tons of DIY videos on YouTube about making oyas out of pots you buy at the... Ooh, yeah, get them in the fall when they're cheap and people are getting cleaning them out. And then you can bury them. We can talk a little bit about rain barrels. Obviously, we like rain barrels. They extend that rain, right? You get that nice rain. You're like, all right, I don't have to water for three days now. And then once you start watering, you use the water from the barrels. You get a couple of days of from that. You're basically prolonging any rain that you do get, and that's great. And no problem with rain barrels. Love rain barrels. Great idea. However, gotta be careful. Cause I don't know about you, but I have birds at my house and they poop on the roof. And then so I'm running all that bird poop into my water and then I'm watering my lettuce and then I'm eating it and getting E. coli. No, I don't. I haven't. But it's something you'd want to think about, right? And especially if it's been a long dry spell, there might be a lot of guano up there, which is, I mean, on the one hand, there's probably some nitrogen in there or certainly is nitrogen in there, but I'd rather worry about the E. coli. So there are actually some rain barrel systems that divert the first few gallons off and run it off so that you're not getting that first dirty runoff. You also might want to think about what you have on your roof. If you have brand new asphalt shingles because you just had a tornado rip them off in my neighborhood, that's gonna be putting off a lot of chemicals in the first couple of years. And older asphalt shingles do it a lot less. Metal roofs are a lot better. Slate roofs. So let's all go get slate roofs. Actually, we all collectively win the lottery. And then I have cedar roof and people say that cedar has my antimicrobial stuff. And so I don't necessarily want to be putting antimicrobial, antifungal stuff into my soil. I need to do some testing on that myself just to see if that's doing anything because definitely worth considering. Rain barrels are great with a couple caveats. Just make sure you're paying attention to what you're up to. Another thing to think about for water is how you're planting. So ridge gardens. These ridges will hold more water in the low troughs and they'll be dryer higher up so you could plant plants between each other. The wetter ones in the bottom, the drier ones up top, they help with, they make tiny, tiny super micro climates. There's other things you can do. Pit gardening to help retain water. So this is a pit garden. It's essentially a raised garden but not raised. Does that make sense? So you dig, instead of building a wooden frame and then filling it or whatever, a cement frame or whatever and filling it with soil, you dig out a foot down or eight inches down your pit and then you fill it with the same thing you would put into a raised bed but then you don't have to worry about like, oh, am I using treated lumber or am I using anything like that and the soil will retain it and then you just plant them there. So that's another option. That's from China, pit gardens. And then, so low tech institute, we look at people in the past and also in the present and how they survive with less resources, especially less fossil fuel resources and energy. And one of the things you could look at for irrigation solutions is the sustainable sanitation water management toolbox which is really geared towards less developed parts of South America, Africa, Asia, other parts less built up places but the solutions they have there are really low energy intensity and really effective, simple to build solutions for cleaning and managing and using water for agricultural purposes. There's no reason we can't use them. They're very efficient. They're just sometimes not as easy as the more high input ones that we have around. Compost, I'm getting down on time here so I may have to jump ahead of compost but we all know that locally made fertilizer and the judicious use of that is very useful. I'm not gonna get too, recycling local nutrients will become more important as we have less access to fossil fuel generated nitrogen synthetic fertilizers, right? I think many of us should know that if we're here at the Garden Expo. Okay, so gardener adaptations. This is for you directly. And I say this as a former field archeologist who worked in Mexico doing my dissertation where sometimes we would come back in the afternoon and the thermometer on my backpack which went up to 125 was maxed out, okay? So I know about working in the heat and I would make people bring out a gallon of water every day and the new people would complain, I don't wanna carry a gallon of water and by the end of the day they were out of water and I told, I would tell them, I'm not telling you to bring out a gallon of water so you don't get heat stroke. I don't want to carry you back. It's for me, right? So know the signs and symptoms and yourself for heat exhaustion, heat stroke and obviously we don't wanna get this far. So take breaks, take it easy. If you feel any of these, stop, nothing is more, nothing you're doing in the garden is so important that you can't take a break really if you're starting to feel the effects of heat exhaustion or heat stroke. I, for example, I'm terrible, I get working on something and I listen to a podcast and all of a sudden I realize it's lunchtime and I haven't drunk water since eight, you know? And then I'm like, oh, and then I'm drinking as much water as I can to hopefully stave off the headache that I know is gonna come. So in the summer I set an alarm. Every hour, on the hour, my alarm goes off and I stop, I take a two minute break, I sit on a stump, I drink some water and then I do not get, I never get heat stroke that way when I remember to turn on my alarm, right? So, but seriously, do something if you're forgetful like me, do something so you're a little more regimented. Actually the Israeli army used in the 1950s had people dying of heat stroke and so now, every hour, on the hour, they have to finish drinking their leader canteens of water, then they get refilled and they have to stand there and hold them upside down their heads and they are famous for having to go to the bathroom all the time, like, out in the field because they institute this policy but they don't have people die of heat stroke anymore. It is important. Clothing, modifier clothing as needed obviously. I have big, dumb, floppy hats, I love them. I don't usually give tours or anything in them because they're huge but they are definitely worth it. I wear long sleeves, find things that work for you. St. Vinnie's has all kinds of good long sleeve stuff that you don't mind getting destroyed in the garden and then scheduling, change when you work. Coming up, I'm gonna be working in the afternoons outside and then as soon as it starts to get hot, I work outside in the mornings and I'm done at lunch and then I do inside or other stuff that I don't have to be out in the garden if I can absolutely help it, right? So change your schedule around if you have the flexibility. I know if you're working, it's tough. You come in at five and then you go out to the garden and it's one of the hottest parts of the day so I know that that's tough and not possible for everyone but if you can at all, vary your schedule. All right, I'm gonna briefly touch on, sorry, jumped ahead, adaptations for tomorrow. They're really just continuations of what we're talking about today. So new and existing varieties, pulling in things from points south, adapting what you have over the long term by saving seeds, saving seeds from plants that are doing better than others. Modify your perennials. So this would be the time where your notes that you've taken now about your perennials, which ones are doing better in the heat in the hot and the dry and hot and cool, or sorry, hot and wet. That's when you start propagating and putting those in place and then variety as insurance. Think back to the Inca. Don't just say, okay, I've got one variety of tomato that works really well in the heat no matter if it's hot or wet or dry. So I'm just gonna plant this one type of tomato. Have a couple, have two, have three. We can't all grow brandywine because then if something goes wrong and the brandywines can't grow in the new temperatures then we're all in trouble. So we need that variety. It's really important that we maintain a diversity. Seed savers just had a big seed swap out here. I wish I talked this morning because then I could say, go out and swap all your seeds to get a variety. Methodological, more soil improvement. And then this, so now I'm saying, start experimenting with drip hoses. Start experimenting with these things by in a decade or two, start thinking about a permanent irrigation and storage systems that are gonna work for you for what you're growing and building those in and getting them functioning smoothly. The time to do that is before it becomes difficult. And that's pretty much all I have. We do have some time for questions. I don't have gardener adaptations for the end because, okay, sorry, I'll stop now and then yeah, questions if we have them. Yes, right here. Excellent point. Oh yeah, excellent point. So if you couldn't hear, they did straw mulch and they had voles eat a lot of things, especially potatoes. And I know that it looks like someone shredded your potatoes when you go to harvest them. I've had that problem. Yeah, that's one thing to think about with mulch. The straw mulch can be a vole apartment. And one thing I found anecdotally, I did a potato study in 2018 with USDA funding looking at different ways to grow potatoes. I have a whole talk on it, but not today. And one of the things that our gardeners found was those that had their potatoes more in the middle and there was some bare soil around the outside of their garden, the voles had trouble crossing over that. Once they got in, it was a bit of a mess. But they didn't like going over bare earth. So that is one nice thing about bare earth is it does keep the voles down. So if you can do moats or it can cordon them off. Yeah, did you have a follow up? Maus traps, sure. 150. Oh, 150 voles, that's a lot. Or garter snakes or maybe a terrier. Cats, there you go. All right, yeah, others. Yes, ma'am. So the question is, would, let's say, shredded wood of unknown provenience be a good mulch? Well, so yeah, I often get wood chips dropped off. And I just say, no walnut and no oak shredded. But yeah, I could be getting something weird. It's a mixture you don't know. Right. And so you can always, if you have the space, you can always let it sit, do some tests. There's something called the bean test for like pesticides and stuff where you plant beans in different things and beans are pretty susceptible to herbicides and things. So they won't grow very well in straw that has herbicides still affected with or in it. But I don't put wood chips on, I don't mulch with wood chips. I should have mentioned that. I don't mulch with wood chips for the most part because wood being nitrogen sucks, excuse me, being carbon sucks a lot of nitrogen out of the soil to decompose. So I'll put it in my pathways because I don't mind if we lose some nitrogen out of my pathways into the wood chips to decompose and I'll just shovel them on to the beds next year but it'll help decrease the weed load. But yeah, straw is better. Yeah, straw is better or yeah, semi-composted stuff that's already starting to break down is, yeah, yeah. Grass clippings, grass clippings are a green so I would compost them before I put any. You wouldn't put them directly in. Especially grass clippings, most, most, there's a huge amount of synthetic fertilizer put onto grass. And so if you have a lawn that's not fertilized or you just have clover or whatever, that's a different story. But if you're getting it from your neighbors and they're putting fertilizer on, yeah, you wanna be careful and figure out what they have on there first. Maybe pesticides or whatever they're putting in there too. So that's the thing with grass. I don't have, I can't stand grass. I mulch it, yeah. I mean, it happens. Grass is beautiful, it's nice, whatever. Okay, I'm not gonna get on a diet, try about grass. Sorry, make a room there. Yeah, other question, yeah. Oh, uh-huh, yeah, yeah. That's great, and yeah. So one of our audience members here keeps meticulous notes. It sounds like for many years running. And that sort of information, even though it is hard to do, especially when the season gets tired and then you come in and you're all tired, that sort of information is crucial for adapting yourself to the future. Yeah, knowing what worked in what year, looking back on that, grouping those things. It's extra work, but as things change, we need to work to adapt to them. That's part of the issue. Yeah, other questions or comments? Yeah. It's not a comment, it's a warm one. Yeah, yeah. Especially the whole audience. Yeah, so yeah, the comment is, now is a good time to start weeding ahead of time. Yeah, and I find, like in my wheat fields, if I knock down, not till, but if I knock down that top inch of soil a couple of times and then plant in it, it's significantly less weed load in my wheat field where I don't mulch. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, okay, so I get more online comments about, well, that's not hey, that's strong. Oh no, that's hey, and then people get into arguments of what's strong hey. So yes, hey is, well, okay, fodder, hey is fodder, right? So it often has seeds and other things in it. So generally one wants to avoid hey, although a lot of times at Home Depot or whatever, they don't know the difference between hey and straw. So yeah, you wanna be planting things that don't have seeds in it into your garden unless you wanna grow those seeds. Yes. Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, ah. Oh really, okay, so there you go. So that would be an option. You said you spread it on the bed or you compost it? Yeah, okay, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. So you're basically composting, you're composting the hay. Yeah, yeah, perfect. Right, if you can get it over 160 degrees, it's gonna kill a lot of those weed seeds, yep, for sure. There you go, all right, you heard it directly. All right, I'm gonna have to wrap up and get out of here so the next person can get set up. I'll be at our booth with the big spinning wheel on the center line if you wanna come to say hi. All right. And that's where we wrapped up with this talk. Next week, we'll go to the opposite end of the spectrum and talk about winter gardening in Wisconsin. Stay tuned for that. That's it for this week. The Lotech Podcast is put out by the Lotechnology Institute. The show is hosted and produced by me, Scott Johnson. This episode was recorded in the Lotech recording booth in Cokesville, Wisconsin. Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere. We hope you've enjoyed this free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do, please consider going to patreon.com slash Lotech Institute and signing up. Thanks to our forester and land steward level members, the Hambuses for their support. The Lotech Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants, and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Lotechnology Institute membership and underwriting at lotechinstitute.org. You can find us on social media and reach me directly, that's scottatlotechinstitute.org. Our entry music was Snowdrift off the album Winter Lo-Fi from Halizna. That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative comments, attribution, and share like license, meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks so much and take care.