112. Gardening, Building Community, and BLT Sandwiches

This episode emphasizes the importance of community, realistic expectations, and small beginnings in gardening. We explore how to nurture connections with neighbors, set achievable goals, and adapt to various living conditions to create a rewarding gardening experience. 
• Understanding why content creators should be careful with gardening recommendations 
• Setting realistic expectations about food production at home 
• The vital role of community in successful gardening practices 
• The benefits of starting small to prevent burnout and build confidence 
• How climate zones affect plant selection and gardening success 
• Encouragement to grow what you love for a more sustainable gardening journey 
• Practical advice on basic tools and soil preparation techniques 
• An overview of seed starting and maintenance strategies 
• The significance of planning for pest management and post-harvest practices

Chapters

• 0:00 Plantthropology Podcast Returns With New Season
• 7:24 Realistic Gardening Expectations and Tips
• 17:01 Building Strong Community for Successful Gardening
• 24:39 Essential Tips for Successful Gardening
• 33:56 Starting Seeds and Gardening Basics

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

What is up? Plant people it's time once more for the Plantthropology podcast, the show where we dive into the lives and careers of some very cool plant people to figure out why they do what they do and what keeps them coming back for more. I'm Vikram Baliga, your host and your humble guide in this journey through the sciences. And, as always, my dear friends, I am so, so excited to be with you today after well, it's been a hot minute, a hot minute, I think. I was looking back and my last episode I posted was in like August of 2024. And I know it's weird to talk about the date on an evergreen content platform. In fact, I've been told not to do that and I just don't care. It is now February of 25 and a lot's happened. A lot's happened in the last six months or so. But I'm getting back to this and I wanted to talk a little bit and I will here in just a second about where I've been, what I've been doing, what's going on and where we're going. But I just wanted to say thank you for sticking around and, if you're hearing the sound of my voice right now, for being a part of this. Still, even after the long breaks I've taken the last couple of years and have taken the time to figure some stuff out about this podcast, but Plantthropology is back. It's going to look a little bit different, the schedule is going to be different, some stuff will change, but it's back and I'm very, very happy about all of that.

Speaker 1: 1:12

So where have I been? I've been here and there and in a lot of places. I took on some new responsibilities at work here at Texas Tech. If you don't remember, I'm an assistant professor of practice of horticulture in the plant and soil science department at Texas Tech University and I can still get all that out in one take. So I'm pretty proud of that. But in the fall, I also took on new administrative responsibilities as the assistant dean of outreach and engagement for the college and, ironically, I stopped outreaching and engaging through this platform at the time.

Speaker 1: 1:42

So am I doing a good job? I don't know, not sure, but life was overwhelming. It gets that way right. There's been a lot. There's just been a lot, a lot happening, and so I took a break, recalibrated, restarted, evaluated what I was doing here with the show, and I think over time I have come to realize that it's something that I love and it's something that I care about and something that I want to keep doing, and so I'm going to keep doing it and I hope you'll keep coming along with me.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So the format of the show is going to change just a little bit. We're going to stick with sort of every other week recordings as much as possible. There may be a time that I skip an episode and stretch it out. I may do some extra ones in there, I don't know be a little bit different, but it's going to be basically every other week and I'm going to start running it in seasons. I think what burned me out before and if you're a content creator of any kind, you probably understand this that there's this pressure to just indefinitely produce and to be, I don't know, on all the time forever, and it just gets to be a lot.

Speaker 1: 2:44

So I'm probably going to run the show in 10 to 12 episode seasons and then take a couple of months off to record and come up with new content and things like that. It'll be a pretty healthy mix of solo content. These first couple episodes of season oh gosh, I should have looked this up. I think this is going to be season six, because I'm going to go back in time and categorize each year that I've done the show as its own season, and I've been doing this since 2019, which is bonkers, cuckoo, bananas, and so I think that would make this season six. But each season I'll have 10, 12 episodes again a mix of solo content, like these first couple episodes of the season will be, and then some great guest interviews, maybe some live stuff and a lot of other things. So I hope that you enjoy that. It's going to be a little different and I'd love to hear your feedback. I'm hoping here in the next few weeks to send out a listener survey just so I can hear more from you. So I think I'm going to try to tackle some more topical things as we go through this, to answer your questions, like we've done in the past of Q&A episodes, try to find guests that I think will answer some of the questions you may have about what's going on in the world, what is happening with horticulture and the environment and nature and everything else, but I also want to take some topics that I think are going to be very important for us going into the future, about how we can interact with the environment.

Speaker 1: 4:05

So all that to say that a friend recently asked me if I would start creating more gardening content. And I thought that was weird at first because I was like that's kind of my whole thing. Right, I create gardening content. But then I really started to think about it and I do, but I come at it from a different way. Right, I talk to experts, I talk to people in the industry, even on my social media. A lot of times I'm debunking stuff and I realized I don't create just a lot of content that's like here's how you garden. I work that into other things, but it's never just that. And I started to think about why I have been hesitant to do that. And I want to talk about that real briefly here at the top of this episode. Why am I hesitant to create gardening content and say this is how you grow your tomatoes? Because that's something I care about. Right, I want people to learn to garden. I teach vegetable production, I teach introductory horticulture, I'm going to be teaching fruit and nut crop production. So I'm very much a growing food kind of guy, very into urban agriculture and urban horticulture and things like that.

Speaker 1: 5:10

But I think over the past several years something I've seen in the social media space, and I'm going to say up front right now that I think this episode in this sort of idea in my head may rub some people the wrong way and I'm sorry for that. That's not my goal. But I have decided that I need to be very, very honest with the way I approach some of this, because it's important that we have the context for the things we do, right? I think it's important that we really critically evaluate why are we doing what we do? What are our goals and all of that. And over the past several years, I've noticed that with some particular accounts that pop up on social media Instagram, tiktok, some different podcasts, some different ideas the content they make in the gardening space is very, very good and a lot of the well. I'm friends with those people, right, I'm in the same space. I do that too, but sometimes we send the wrong message and I think I hesitate because I don't want to send the wrong message to people.

Speaker 1: 6:07

I think when the world starts doing the thing whatever the thing is for you, right, going a little funny Sometimes one of the things that we start to stress about is food what am I going to eat, what am I going to do? And gardening is a great tool to help address that. But I think it's important to understand that for most people the vast majority of people, maybe most of you listening to this it may not be super attainable, and some of that is education, which I'm going to try to help with, but some of that is socioeconomic. Some of it's just life right. Maybe you live in an apartment, maybe you live in a rental house where you can't do things, or it's harder to do things. Maybe you live in an apartment, maybe you live in a rental house where you can't do things, and or it's harder to do things. Maybe you move around a lot. Who knows?

Speaker 1: 6:50

Whatever it is, there are limiting factors and I think sometimes, as content creators in this space, we unfortunately, either on purpose or infinitely, send the message that, oh, start gardening, you'll never have to go to the grocery store again. Right, I know we've all seen that out there and that's just not the case. That is not a lived reality for most people. Now, some people can do it, and those people are blessed to be able to do that, and more power to them. I think that's amazing if you can grow all of your own food, but for most of us, and myself included in this. It's just not realistic. It's not real life.

Speaker 1: 7:24

So this episode is going to be about sort of gardening 101, how to take control of growing a little bit of your own food. But I'm going to try to approach it as honestly as I can in terms of what we can expect, what we should expect, how we should go about it and maybe where some of the pitfalls are and things like that and some tips and tricks to being more successful. Okay, and some of them may be surprising to you. So that was a very long introduction and it's kind of just my first point in this episode I'm going to say right now, because some of you have already not heard this from me or have taken this in a certain way. I think if you can garden, you should.

Speaker 1: 8:01

I think everyone can do something, whether it's just growing herbs in your windowsill or something else. I think we should all be trying. I just want to make sure we're being clear and that our contact is good, so I'm going to play some music at you and then let's jump in to more of this. Hey, thanks for being here. I love you guys. Okay, we are back.

Speaker 1: 8:42

So there are three basic things I want to talk to you about today. Okay, and I'm not going to say these are the three best steps, the three things you need to know if you're going to grow a home garden and you're going to grow some of your own food, because that's clickbaity and that's not what I want, even though it would get more people to listen to this. Here are the three things you need to know. All right, and I'm going to go maybe out of the order that I think a lot of people would or that you may expect. Okay.

Speaker 1: 9:10

So, number one, the first thing you should do when you're thinking about growing your own food and again I said it before the intro break everyone should be able to do something, whether that is, again, you grow some herbs and pots in your windowsill or you, I don't know put a pot or a container on your patio, you find some old boots or a toilet and you fill it up with plants. Okay, that is gardening, right, you can grow a few things. So I think everyone that can should 100% full stop. Okay, grow some of your own food. Can should 100% full stop. Okay, grow some of your own food. It's very empowering. But I also think we need to set very realistic and very manageable goals and expectations about ourselves in the garden. Okay, because we all live in sort of different circumstances. No two people's circumstances are really the same.

Speaker 1: 10:05

So for a long time, my wife Alana and I lived in a rental house and they had some very specific rules about what we could grow, what we could plant, which was basically nothing right. We had grass that we watered sort of and mowed sort of even though the backyard is about the size of my desk and it was just not real manageable to grow a garden. Now we did a few things. We had a little indoor hydroponic system Several companies make it where you can grow some like herbs and lettuce and, if you're real bold and real good at it, some tomatoes sometimes or peppers or whatever, but usually it's going to be greens and herbs. We had some pots that we would put outside and plant flowers in and maybe a few other things, but generally speaking, there wasn't a lot we can do. When I was in college, it was the same story. We had some pots with some different plants and that was kind of it, and this is like lived reality for I think a lot of people, a lot of people right.

Speaker 1: 11:01

Either they have a rental space or they live in an apartment. Now, if you live in an apartment, there's some stuff you can do, right, you can get pots and you can set them out on your patio. Sometimes there are limiting factors. Maybe you don't get any light at all because of the way that your building is situated. Maybe your apartment complex has rules about actually having containerized plants Some do I know that sounds weird, but some do where you cannot, based on your lease, grow anything on your patio. You can't have plants out there, and that again makes it very, very challenging to grow plants. Now you could put some pots in your windowsill again and grow some herbs. You could do a lot of things Even if you live in a home. You own your own home, you have a front yard and a backyard and all of these things.

Speaker 1: 11:51

I think people don't understand sometimes the time and the effort and commitment that goes into actually producing food right now. If you're good at it, if you get lucky, your, your climate is well suited to something. You can grow a lot of tomatoes in a four by four foot bed. Okay, it's possible, and I've had someone comment that on my social media when I was talking about this. But that's not the case all the time, right? Maybe your soil is not good, maybe you live in a place where your sunlight is inadequate or it's super dry and you don't have the resources to add a whole bunch of extra water. Maybe you're in a homeowners association that limits what you can do on your own property. I'm going to go ahead and say and I guess someone will get mad at me for this I don't care. Homeowners associations are like thinly veiled organized crime. So there's that, but anyway, I can already like taste the angry emails for that it's okay.

Speaker 1: 12:52

I think it's important to understand that, regardless of our circumstances, even if we have the ability to plant a full backyard of plants, it's really hard to sometimes replace our shopping trip Because, depending on where you live, you may not be able to grow a lot of the things you need. So I live in Lubbock, texas trip Because, depending on where you live, you may not be able to grow a lot of the things you need. So I live in Lubbock, texas and I think a lot of you know that where it is a billion degrees in the summer and negative a billion degrees in the winter, we have big temperature fluctuations. This week. As I record this, we had freezing fog last night. I think our low tonight is 17 degrees Fahrenheit. Last week, one of the highs, one of the days, was about 91 degrees Fahrenheit. It's early February, by the way. We'll hit negative temperatures sometimes in the winter. We'll hit 114, 115, sometimes in the summer.

Speaker 1: 13:42

That is limiting on what I can grow If I want tomatoes in well, now, february. Where do they come from? Well, they come from the grocery store. They're grown in Mexico. They're grown along the Gulf Coast. They're grown in parts of California, arizona. Internationally, there's a lot of places that grow tomatoes right now. It's just not us, unless you have a big greenhouse and there's some challenges there as well, and when it gets hot in the summer, my tomatoes are going to shut down, and so there's big sort of chunks of the year where I may or may not actually be able to grow anything, and so or grow the things I want. So if I want tomatoes at different parts of the year, I probably have to get them from elsewhere.

Speaker 1: 14:23

Okay, so sometimes when we think about I'm going to grow my own food, I'm going to make my own garden, we really have to couch it in. What is practical to grow where I live? What can I use and am I going to be able to preserve this? Right? Maybe I have the best year growing tomatoes that anyone's ever had and I grow 5,000 pounds of tomatoes out of a pot on my back porch and I'm the whatever number wonder of the world in my tomato production. If I don't preserve those, they're not going to get me through winter, right, because they're not going to sit on the counter. They really won't even sit in the fridge. So I have to think about dehydrating them. I have to think about canning them or pickling them or freeze, drying them or doing a lot of different things with this product so that it gets some longevity and so I can continue to use it. So we have to think about that. We have to really think about what can we grow when, what limitations are on my growing space and, based on all of that, what are my practical, reasonable goals and what can I really really accomplish?

Speaker 1: 15:25

I think we should think about as we venture into growing our own food, how do I supplement, not how do I replace. How do I supplement what I do? How do I grow some herbs that I like, maybe there's a specialty crop from maybe a different ethnic group or something that you really want that it's hard to get locally. Okay, maybe think about growing those. Grow the things you like, grow the things you wanna eat. But again, for most of us, the thought of completely replacing our vegetable intake, our fruit intake, from our backyards is just not real. It's just not real. We gotta think of different ways to get that. That actually leads me into my second thought.

Speaker 1: 16:10

Okay, so, after we've set realistic goals and expectations, what do I actually feasibly expect to get out of my garden? I think the second most important and, if we're being honest, I actually think this is number one. Okay, I'm burying the lead a little bit here, because you can have the best goals. You can actually have best roadmap and plans for starting a garden. You can have all the skills you need People. We have to build community. We have to build community. I think the most important thing you can do when food supplies get scarce, when we're really questioning how am I going to be able to have enough tomatoes and lettuce, how am I going to be able to make it through financially or nutritionally or whatever else there is, I think, the number one thing. One of the most important things we can do to weather some of these storms is to build community.

Speaker 1: 17:01

In sort of popular media there's this very I don't know idealized in a weird way picture of the lone survivalist who has a compound and has all this frozen food and they grow strawberries and all these things that on their own they take on the world and they don't get eaten by zombies or whatever, and that's kind of fun. It actually lends itself well to our sort of at least in my growing up experience this idea of individualism, exceptionalism. But again, I don't think that's real. I don't think that's how it works. I think when things start to go bad, the best thing we can do to make sure we have the fruits and vegetables we want, that we're successful in our efforts, is to build community. We multiply our skill sets. So maybe you're really really good at growing tomatoes, but every bit of lettuce you've ever put in the ground has died Well, it's hard to make a BLT sandwich without the L right and you get all the tomatoes you want.

Speaker 1: 18:01

Bacon's a whole other issue. Who's got pigs? Who has grain to make bread? You just have tomatoes. But maybe your neighbor is the best darn lettuce grower in the world, right? Maybe someone that lives a town over grows and mills their own flour or their grains, whatever. Maybe someone raises pigs and you can make your BLT sandwich by being a part of a community.

Speaker 1: 18:25

I think that's something we miss so much in not necessarily the garden space, but overall. Sometimes we lose the forest for the trees and we're like okay, we've got to do this and I've got to have the fertilizer and I've got to have the raised beds and I've got to have all these things to make it work, when really we just need to trust the people around us and we need to build a strong network of people that we can work with. So get to know your neighbors. I think one of the best garden tips I can give you is go meet your neighbors. Go talk to them. Hey, what are they growing? Maybe they're not. Maybe you can help them right. Maybe they're someone that has been growing plants for 45 years and they've just been waiting for a neighbor or someone to come talk to them about how great they are at doing it right. Learn from each other, build on each other's experience.

Speaker 1: 19:11

We're not in any of this stuff alone and so I think it's really important when we start thinking along some of these lines that I know people are thinking and I know several of you that are listening to me right now are thinking about this like, oh, I gotta grow a little more food. Food's gonna get expensive. Food may be scarce for a lot of different sociopolitical reasons and economic reasons. Build community. In my estimation, there is nothing more radical, there is nothing more important and powerful than to get to know the people around you, to get to know your neighbors, to get to know the people that live in your city, in your town, in your community. Build strong communities and we can weather a lot of storms.

Speaker 1: 19:57

Okay, I think those are great choices. I think those are things we should be trying to do all the time, not just when things are bad, but when things are good. You can rely on each other when times are tough and you can celebrate together when they're not. It's never bad to have more friends, whether they're in the garden space Maybe someone doesn't like gardening, they don't like getting their hands dirty in the soil, but they are really good at canning and they're really good at preserving things. Well, okay, you make a great team now. You grow the stuff. You take it to your neighbor Susan I don't know why they're named Susan and then they help preserve it. They can. It makes salsa for you. They do all of these different things. So so communities are going to be so important going into the future.

Speaker 1: 20:39

Okay, so we've gotten through our first two steps. We've set really good goals and expectations. We know what we want out of our garden. We have met our neighbors. We know where we fit into this sort of plan. We know who's going to grow the what right. We know who is going to be our tomato guy. We know who the lettuce person is. We know where our bread and our bacon is coming from. And we're at the step where it's like you know what, I'm ready, I'm going to plant a garden. I'm a first-time gardener and I am ready to jump into this with both feet. Let's talk about that. I've got a few steps, and I don't know how many this is going to end up being. I'm going to throw them out there until I run out of them.

Speaker 1: 21:26

But there's a few steps that I think we should take to be successful in the garden. The first one is start small. Think about starting small. Part of managing expectations is managing our efforts. There's nothing more demoralizing to be like I am going to grow the biggest darn garden in the world and tear up your whole backyard and get seven tomatoes out of it because you've put a ton of time and effort and sweat and tears. Because I have gardened before too, I know how this works Indicating two tomatoes. So maybe you start with that pot on your patio. Maybe you start with a couple of raised beds in your backyard, or you pick one bed that's sort of out of the way. It's by your fence. It still gets some good sunlight, it's easy to water, but you don't really know what to do with it. Awesome, that's your first garden. It could be 10 square feet, it could be 100 square feet, it doesn't matter. Think of projects that you can start and finish and do those from a psychological perspective starting and finishing things, crossing those off your list go so far, okay. So this is advice I give a lot of times with school gardens and community garden projects is, it's really easy to get super excited and overextend ourselves. Instead, let's pick things that each step of the process can be finished in a couple of hours.

Speaker 1: 22:36

So one Saturday, you go out and you do your bed prep. You take out the grass, you till up the soil or whatever you're going to do right? That's maybe not always the best idea. We'll talk about that in future episodes of how to prep a bed appropriately. I'm just trying to give an overview right now. And then you're done for the day. You've done your bed prep. You've finished and accomplished your mission for the day. That is awesome.

Speaker 1: 22:57

You go to work for the week. You do all kinds of things. You maybe go out and check on it, piddle around a little bit. But then the second Saturday that you're into it okay, I am going to make sure that I've got the seedlings I want. I'm going to go out and plan out where everything's going to go in this bed Awesome. Spend a couple hours doing it. You've accomplished it. Start some seeds indoors, get your plants growing Great. You're done. Piddle around for the week. Third Saturday, you take another couple of hours and you get your tomatoes in the ground and you've accomplished that. Take a picture of it. You post it on Instagram and you feel good about yourself. You feel good, you feel hopeful and encouraged and, before you know it, taking little bites out of your garden project, you'll find that you're done. Something I've always found in this green space I landscaped for a while, I've done a lot of things is it feels a lot of times like we spin our wheels forever and ever and ever, and then we're done. Just it sneaks up on you. So plan out bite-sized pieces of your project and do them one at a time. Take your time and do it in a way that you enjoy it, so you don't burn yourself out, and that is manageable and achievable.

Speaker 1: 24:06

Some technical things to think about. You need to know what climate zone you're in. What's your weather like, what's the climate in your area like. How is it changing? So again, I live in a zone 7b, which means that our average annual coldest temperature of the year the very, very coldest that it gets is usually between 5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit. We've already hit that this season. That tells us some great information. There's some things. It doesn't tell us how long it's going to be that cold, how often. All that says is over 30 years, we're going to hit this coldest temperature once 7b great.

Speaker 1: 24:39

Well, you can then go to the garden center. You can get online and look at different resources and say these are plants and seeds that are appropriate for zone 7b. These are some things that can take the incredible heat in your area. These things work well with the rainfall and the water quality you have or the soil quality. So, knowing what your soil does and what it's like, you can get a soil test. Most states, and actually a lot of bigger cities, have soil testing labs and I can post some stuff on the show notes of this that kind of give you more information about that. It can maybe be helpful in some ways.

Speaker 1: 25:16

I think knowing the soil, the rainfall amounts and timings when does it rain Not just does it rain 30 inches a year, but during which months, when it's hot, when it's cold, when do you get your rain, knowing how much sunlight you get, knowing the humidity, knowing everything you can about your climate will make you a lot more successful in making good plant choices, picking the right things okay, speaking of picking the right things, I think something of picking the right things. I think something that's really important is to grow things you like. I don't know why people get so hung up on I have to grow X, y or Z. I do know why. It's because it's what gets promoted a lot. Everyone needs a salsa garden and onions and tomatoes and garlic, and I think those are great things.

Speaker 1: 26:02

But maybe you don't like any of those things, maybe you are not going to eat any of those things. Maybe your neighbors have gotten all of those things from you and they won't answer the door anymore because you've given them too many. That's not sustainable, that's not efficient and it turns out that we have a big problem with food waste here in the United States. Something like 40% of the food produced in the US gets wasted. That also includes your backyard. We don't put ourselves in these pictures. We're thinking big food systems, but if you grow something and you don't eat it and you throw it away, that's food waste and I think that is so important to understand.

Speaker 1: 26:38

So grow things you are actually going to use or know where you're going to go with them, even if you don't like tomatoes. If you have a parent or a friend or a neighbor that does and you just want the experience of growing them, that's fine. Just know where it's going to go. Choose a great garden location. That's going to be super important. This is important for things like wind and sun and all of that. If you live in the Northern hemisphere, the sun sits southward in the sky, so your most intense sunlight is generally going to come from the south and the west. So if you're growing something that needs a little bit of shade, maybe you can plant it on the east side of a fence so we get sunlight till a little past noon, maybe two in the afternoon, and then the afternoon it gets shaded during the hottest and most intense parts of the day. Right, those are things we can think about. Also, think about convenience. How easy is it to water? How easy is that area to get to? They've done studies on which parts of the garden are most I don't know trafficked, best managed, and a lot of times it's the ones closest to your house. Right, you put the things farther back on your property that you don't really have to spend a lot of time messing with, but then you put the things that need more management with whether that's flowers or veggies or things like that up closer to your house so that every time you look at your kitchen window or whatever you're like, oh you know what I really need to go weed my tomato bed Instead of it being in the back part of your yard or around the corner or somewhere that is inaccessible or out of sight, out of mind, because you're not going to visit those as much, right, you're not going to be, as I don't know, engaged with that material as you could be if it's closer to you.

Speaker 1: 28:18

Get tools. You need right, basic gardening tools a water hose it doesn't have to be anything special a watering hose and a shovel and maybe a rake or a hoe or something so you can clean out areas. That will take you a long way. Don't spend a ton of money unless you have the money to spend or you want to. It turns out cheap tools. Even though they may not last as long as a starter, they'll get you pretty far down the road, and once you figure out if this is something you really want to do, then yeah, go buy some really nice equipment that will last you years and years and years.

Speaker 1: 28:47

One of the best tools I think you can have is a great pair of gloves. Get a good pair of gloves. I know, I know, I know we all get our hands dirty. There's something about feeling the soil. I do that too. However, depending on what you're working with, especially if you're having to clean out an area, depending on what you're working with, especially if you're having to clean out an area, you want gloves. And I can hear some of you thinking, oh, I'm tough, I don't need gloves. Man, that's fine, you do you right. But if you mess up your hands, if you cut yourself badly, if you get giant splinters, these are your most important tools, right? Your hands are your most important tools in the garden a lot of times, and so if you mess them up, if you hurt yourself, you're not going to be as efficient. Get a great pair of gloves okay, that is something that I will happily spend some money on is a nice pair of heavy-duty leather gloves, okay.

Speaker 1: 29:37

Test your soil. I mentioned that before. There's a lot of different places that do it. Extension services in your area probably do soil testing. Essentially, you take a sample, you put it in a bag, you send it off and they can tell you things like the pH of your soil, the salt content, the ratio of different fertilizers or nutrients in your soil, like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium which, by the way, are the three numbers on your bag of fertilizer and they'll make recommendations on how much of those things you need to add to be successful, based on what you're trying to grow. Usually, the samples will cost anywhere between like 15 and $25, sometimes a little bit more, depending on what you're having them test for. But it is so important it is good to know what's in your soil so that you can add things to it.

Speaker 1: 30:22

Soil is where the plants grow. It's where they get their nutrients, their support, so many other things, and if you don't know what's down there, it's really hard to manage them appropriately from a nutrient standpoint. Different things, okay. Another thing to think about again is bed space. How much space do you want? Prep your beds well, get any grasses or weeds out of there as much as possible. There's different ways to do this.

Speaker 1: 30:47

You can use herbicides, I think, as an occasional tool to solve specific problems. Herbicides are not necessarily a bad thing. You just use them sparingly. Use them according to the label and make sure you are on target with your application. If you don't want to do that, I get that. There's other things you can try. With a lot of our weeds, especially the warm season annual kind of weed. Shading them out is really effective. You can use black plastic. You can use something called lasagna mulching or lasagna gardening or sheet mulching to cover it up. You can physically remove things.

Speaker 1: 31:20

Just make sure you're getting as much of the seed bank out, as much of the underground growing portions especially if you're dealing with something like Bermuda grass as you can. But whatever you need to do, get your area clean and managed first. Again, I know it is really easy to get excited and go out and plant into something that is poorly prepared and then you fight grasses and you fight weeds in your garden forever. You don't need to do that. Make sure it's all cleaned up and then you can manage it pretty effectively and with low stress going forward. Once you've picked your seeds, you've got your climate location, you've gotten all these things, you need to decide how you're gonna put those seeds out. Are you going to directly seed them into your garden or are you going to start them indoors and then transplant them out? This is going to depend a lot on what you're trying to grow. Use the information on the back of the seed packet. I'll put out a couple of videos here in the next couple of weeks on reading a seed packet and the information it contains and how to use that information. You can find a lot of that online already. Get on Google or YouTube or whatever and watch some of that if you're chomping at the bit to get going but know whether it's better to direct seed A lot of times our grassy plants, things like corn especially if you're trying to grow sweet corn in your backyard or any kind of corn that's going to do much better direct seeding A lot of times.

Speaker 1: 32:38

Our peas and our beans really great to direct seed. A lot of our leafy greens. I prefer to direct seed Root crops. For sure the thing grows underground right. So if you're trying to grow beets and turnips and then you grow it out somewhere else and then transplant it, you can do that, but a lot of times they don't survive that super well. You end up damaging the root too much and you end up with some problems. So there are certain things that you want to direct seed, but then stuff like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, even melons some melons to a certain extent watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, things like that and any cucurbits, they actually transplant pretty well. I would again use your local resources, your extension service, a university near you, even just go talk to folks at a local garden center and you can get great recommendations on which things to start inside, which things to direct seed.

Speaker 1: 33:32

Pay attention, as you're doing that to seasons. When is your average annual last freeze? For us here in West Texas it's right around tax day. Anytime between April 10th and 15th is usually, historically, our last freeze date. I have seen it freeze on Cinco de Mayo. It was 25 degrees for like six hours. I have seen the last freeze come in February. It's a roving target, but those average dates can be really useful for you.

Speaker 1: 33:56

If your seed packet, say, plant after danger of frost has passed, you probably want to take that seriously. If you're really ready to get going, maybe plant them inside, get your seeds started. There's a lot of ways to do that. If you have a bright window, if you have a patio that's warm, if you have a garage with some grow lights, it's really pretty easy to start seeds. Now you can go out and buy a whole bunch of different things right.

Speaker 1: 34:18

There are these little seed plugs that have lots of little cells in them. Put seeds in there, you thin them down to one plant per cell and then, when you're ready to transplant, when that plant has four to six leaves on it we call that the four to six leaf stage. That's usually a great time to transplant. You don't want to get too big in those cells. It's easy to pop those out, put them in the ground. Maybe you don't want to go buy that, maybe you don't have room for it. You know it's a cheap way to do. It is to get a foil pan, foil cake pan or roasting pan with a plastic lid. Poke some holes in the bottom of the pan, fill it up with potting soil or potting media or whatever you have, plant your seeds down in it and then pop that top plastic top on there and you've got yourself a little seed starting. Greenhouse Helps retain moisture, helps retain heat in there, and then once those plants are too tall, you pull the lid off and you're probably getting pretty close to transplanting them out.

Speaker 1: 35:11

Anyway, usually with a lot of our warm season crops, we want to take our last freeze date or whenever we're planning to go out into our garden and back that off about six weeks. I think six to eight weeks is usually right in the sweet spot of how long you want to grow your seeds out indoors. You need to make sure they get adequate air movement so that you get stronger stems. You want to make sure that they are getting the water they need without staying too wet. You'll get a lot of diseases if you keep them too wet a lot of times and you want to make sure they're staying fertilized well and that they have enough light so that the stems don't get tall and leggy.

Speaker 1: 35:46

The other thing I would recommend is to harden them off, or what we call harden them off, or acclimate them to an outdoor environment for a week or two before you plant them. A lot of times if we're growing them indoors especially if they're in a greenhouse they have been in ideal, really great growing conditions before they go out in the garden. So if you take them straight from that and plop them outside, where they have to reestablish roots, where they're not getting watered as well, where the climate isn't as good, you're going to get a lot of dying off. So what you can do is take whatever you're growing them in and set them out on your patio for a day or two. Bring them in, put them back out for a couple of days If it's going to be cold, bring them in for sure and just slowly acclimate them to the new environment. Let them move around in the wind. Let them get some direct sunlight that's a little more intense. Let them get into a little bit of water, stress so they develop a stronger root system. If you take the time to do that, once you put them out in the ground they're going to be much happier. They will take and establish much better. Once you have your garden planted, make sure that the area stays well weeded, well watered.

Speaker 1: 36:52

The biggest thing you want to do is water consistently. It's hard for me to tell you you need to water this many inches a week or this many gallons a week, because it varies so much from location to location and crop to crop. The biggest thing is to figure out how much water your plant needs and give it to it consistently. That'll help with a lot of disease problems and physiological problems. If you get rain that week, it's probably okay to skip a watering. But just get back on schedule as soon as you can. Okay.

Speaker 1: 37:18

Think about how long that plant is going to go. Think if it's something you need to prune, plan for harvest. You know some crops will take 40 days from transplant before you'll get vegetables or whatever off them, fruits off of them. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter. So you need to know when that stuff is going to start coming off the plant so that you have somewhere to go with it Again, whether that's to eat it fresh, whether that is to preserve it in some way. Have somewhere to go with it Again, whether that's to eat it fresh, whether that is to preserve it in some way, or whatever else. Plan for harvest and post-harvest From a management standpoint.

Speaker 1: 37:51

Again, water is important, fertilizer is important, but also, like insect management, Make sure that you are keeping things as pest-free as you can, because they are competing with you for the thing that you're growing. Now, I'm not going to say, go out and nuke them with pesticides every time that you see an aphid. That's not my point. Especially if you're growing outside, a lot of times you'll have beneficial insects that are helping you do that job. But if you're about to be out of control, if you're about to be overrun by aphids or something else, it is probably a good idea to think about pest control, figure out what strategies are going to work for you and think about going about it from an integrated approach. Now, that was a lot of information.

Speaker 1: 38:32

I didn't have a mid-roll break in this one just because I wanted to get a lot into this 40, 45-minute episode, but this is a good starting point, right? This is by no means an exhaustive list of things you should be doing in the garden and the landscape. It's not even a full how-to guide. I am going to try to produce some more of that for y'all as we go through this spring and this summer and into the future, but hopefully this gets you started and gives you some things to think about. Again, I think the take-home points here are be reasonable with yourself on what you can realistically do. Supplement your food supply where you can I think that's excellent, but then have a plan too to round out the rest of your nutritional calorie needs.

Speaker 1: 39:12

Okay, build community. This is again one of the most important things you can do to get through a lot of things, but definitely in the gardening. World garden communities are really strong and they're really powerful and they're willing to help you. World garden communities are really strong and they're really powerful and they're willing to help you. And then follow some good procedures, some best management practices as you actually go out to get in the garden and plant things in the garden and you will do fine. You'll do fine, as always.

Speaker 1: 39:36

You can ask me questions. I'm happy to try to help where I can and point you to resources where there are people that do it way better than me, because they're out there and you should find them and follow them and be a part of what they do, and I'll start sharing some resources on other people that I think are great follows that you could learn a lot from. But thanks for being with me. Again, thanks for jumping back into planthropology. This episode actually was longer than I intended it to be, but it turns out there was a lot I wanted to say about gardening and my podcast, so I guess I can't right. So thanks to you for listening, thanks to the Texas Tech Department of Plant and Soil Science and the Davis College of Agricultural Science and Natural Resources for helping support the show and, let Me Do it, thanks to all the folks that have made this possible over the years. Thanks to Nick Scout, the incredible, award-winning composer for Athene music. Everything else is done and recorded and edited by me for now. Maybe that'll change in the future. I don't know.

Speaker 1: 40:34

If you want to support Planthropology, you can go to planthropologypodcastcom. See merch, listen to old episodes, do all those kinds of things. You can go to buymeacoffeecom slash plantthropology and for the price of a coffee you can literally just buy me a cup of coffee, because that's basically what I will do with it. Also pay hosting fees and things and blah blah blah, but mostly, mostly coffee. So y'all, thanks for listening, thanks for being cool. Plant people Be kind to one another. Build good communities. If you have not been doing those things, probably a good time to start. You know I love you, you know I am grateful for you and I cannot wait to talk to you again soon. More Plant Apology is coming at you real soon, thank you.