AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Short Course: Gardening 101

Stephen Meyer

Gardening 101- Part 1

We're glad for each 1 that's been able to come to our gardening class 101.

I'm Joel Meyer from Monument Valley, Utah, and I'm excited about being able to share the joys of gardening.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that you love us and that you have given us the privilege of cooperating with the divine, creative elements that you have placed around us in nature.

We pray that as we consider the laws that govern growth and development, that you will be here with us and that you will bless us with your spirit.

So we're in the southern part of Utah on the Navajo Reservation where we have Monument Valley Mission and Denae Health and Healing Center.

First of all we're going to be looking at site selection and some of the things to consider when we're looking for the right spot is full sun with a southern slightly sloped area.

Sometimes these considerations you can't plan around them You already have the place where you are going to need to have your garden, but if you have the opportunity, these are good things to Here is an area actually near in West Virginia and as you look at just by observation some areas it's easy to make evaluations by the kind of plants that are growing and how they're growing.

And here you can see the broom grass that's growing which shows you that your soil is a little acidic which can be corrected with the application of lime.

And here it's slightly sloping and then it becomes steeper and some of those steeper areas you can use for more permanent things like raspberries, grapes, or fruit trees.

And the less sloped where you would have a problem with erosion if it was too steep or where you'll want to plan the garden.

And then just by observing the soil you can evaluate some things.

How deep that topsoil is and sometimes within a fairly close proximity the soil characteristics can change.

So we're looking for the ideal soil would be a sandy loam which will have good drainage.

We Plants don't like to have wet feet so you don't want to choose a place that is going to be marshy or damp and clay soil is good at retaining nutrients and water but it can be hard to work especially when it's wet.

So, and here is just a picture that shows a damp spot you want to avoid where it's going to be continually wet.

Now I stuck this slide in because it's out in the desert there where we live.

A group of young people who were taking a summer program, they wanted a day focusing on agriculture, which is very much needed in our area.

There's not very much food produced and people don't think about producing their own food very much.

So I was happy to take this opportunity and the place that they had for us to put in the garden was, had no preparation at all.

And so we were needing to try to make it successful.

And so I took a number of alfalfa hay bales along with me and this was just pure sand but it was hard and packed.

And we moistened it up, we incorporated a bunch of alfalfa hay which would give it nutrients and then we planted it that day and it was by someone's house they were going to maintain it but the point that I would like to make is that any soil can be improved.

So you know if it's heavy clay, if it's just pure sand like we have there where we are, any soil can be improved and it can be improved quite quickly if the right steps are taken and Steve will be sharing that later on, steps to productive soil.

Here we have an example of what you might look at as the ideal setting.

It's sloped slightly, it's a little bit to the south facing.

It's nice rich loamy soil, but you don't always have that kind of an option.

Not far from this spot, we had a plot that was right by the elementary school and I wanted to have the school garden right outside the school But there was a granite gravel shelf underneath with only about 8 inches of soil on top and the alfalfa never grew very well there but I really wanted to have the garden there.

And so in the fall I took a whole bunch of old alfalfa hay bales and took about 1 compression of the baler thick and put it all over the top and tilled it in with the rotavator in the fall.

And then in the spring we planted the school garden and I don't have a photo of it but it turned out just beautiful.

Patches of lettuce and carrots and spinach and it just showed me how quickly deficient soil can be improved.

Here you can see the rows are placed along the hillside so that soil will not be allowed to erode as easily.

So on a slope like this you'll want to run your rows along the hillside rather than up and down.

You'll want to measure your garden plot and lay it out to scale.

You can use some graph paper, but having a plan ahead of time is really important so that you can think it through carefully and know what you're going to do because timing is very important with agriculture and when it's time to begin the early things you don't want to be trying to figure out then what you're going to do.

So when the snow is flying and it's a cold winter days, it's a great time to get out the seed catalogs but to make your garden plan there by the fireplace and be able to have it all laid out ahead of time.

And I think that it's important when a person is getting started to not try to make it too big especially if you're having to make significant improvement to the soil.

It's better to improve very well a small area and intensively utilize it than to be trying to keep up with a large area and not be able to do a very good job of it.

And it will save you a lot of work to just focus on a smaller area and enable it to do very well than to make a too large, to try to undertake too large of an area.

And then we want to group together the perennials like asparagus or strawberries and I usually put them to the side and any fruit trees you can put those along the sides so that they're out of the way of your regular annual plants.

Okay, then it's important to have a standard row spacing that will take into consideration your means of cultivating it.

So if you're using a Troy-built, then you'll want to make your spacing so that you can get the tiller in between your rows.

If you're doing a smaller garden and you're just doing it all by hand with the hoe, then you can have your spacing closer together and do it more intensively.

And then to keep in mind the need if you have little critters you need to keep out and where your source of water supply is.

So here you can see the, these are apricot trees to the right and then the bed of carrots and so you can plan to put some things that do nicely in beds.

We can put them in the beds and other things in the row spacing.

Here we can see some of the things that that work well in in beds like radishes, spinach, and lettuce, carrots, beets, and and lettuce, carrots, beets, and a typical spacing for the radish or spinach would be just 4 inches.

And then For the carrots on a bed, we'll usually place them at 10 to 12 inch spacing.

Okay, the question is about strawberries.

I still place them off to the side so that they are out of the way for my main cultivation but it's really up to you what works best for you.

The crop rotation that we're going to talk about, look at here, is focusing on rotating the main annual plants but the perennials you still could look at rotating them say from side to side of your garden.

And then for row spacing, for things like corn and beans and cabbage, to have 30 inch rows, and to have your things grouped together especially like for corn where it needs to have proper pollination So you want to have them in a block so that the wind will enable the pollination to take place nicely.

For things like asparagus, your tall peas, and for the squash, that would be the summer squash, a 60 inch row spacing works real nice.

And then for your vining things like the winter squash and watermelon, those things, a wider spacing of like 160 inches works out real nicely.

So here are The corn is grouped together.

Sweet potatoes is a really nice storage crop and they're easy to grow.

And they're just a really nice thing to be able to have in the wintertime to get lots of vitamin A.

Here you can see also in planning your spot, it's nice to have it where it's it's easily accessible to the house where you can just step out the back door if possible where it's nearby.

Okay, crop rotation is the practice of changing the location of crops in the garden from year to year.

This is really important on the long haul for disease prevention and also to maintain nutrient, building up the nutrients of the soil.

So here are some things that we want to keep in mind as we're looking at crop rotation, what are the soil and nutrient demands, we want to look at the botanical families, the insect and disease problems, and cultural practices.

And here you can see the Brassica family plants are grouped together.

Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and so forth.

By utilizing crop rotation we're maintaining diversity.

Diversity botanically with the nutrient needs and the pest and disease problems.

We're alternating legumes with non legumes and long rotations are better than short rotations.

Rotation is planting a different crop in a given place on a different year.

And so by having a rotation that is say like a three-year rotation, it's 3 years before you come back to the same crop again or you have a five-year or six-year rotation would be 6 years before you come back to the same crop.

Okay, Some plants are particularly susceptible to disease, say like tomatoes, and if you plant tomatoes in the same place year after year you'll very quickly have multiple problems whereas by rotating the plants and having other plants that are diverse that don't have the same disease problems grown in that area, it will help to minimize your disease problems.

And then having a period of rest, a rest year, say a year when you just grow a cover crop that can be building the soil and then that cover crop be turned in to improve the organic matter to improve the nutrient base in the soil.

Yes, there are several things that are, the question was about how to deal with disease in tomatoes in the greenhouse.

And there are several things that are done to address that.

1 is they sometimes put hoop houses on rollers so that you actually move it to another spot.

The other thing that is often done is to on the off season to solarize the soil by putting down a black tarp to help fry the disease organisms.

That will be built into your overall plan.

And we potentially want to have the rotation so that the as long as possible.

So in other words say like a six-year rotation with the seventh year being a rest year.

That way we are incorporating a longer time between the same plant being grown in the same space and your handout helps to highlight that.

Okay some of the factors that we need to take into consideration when we're thinking of crop rotation is the hardiness of the plant And I would encourage all of you that are just getting started to find someone in your area that is an experienced gardener and develop a friendship with them.

There's so much that you can learn and just the little questions that you have as you go along, you can bounce off of them.

But 1 of the things that's really important is if you're just moving to a new area is to find out when is the last frost in the spring and approximately when is your first frost in the fall.

Now weather patterns are changing some and so and there's some variation year to year but having an approximation so that you have a point of reference for planting all of your spring crops in reference to that last frost is really important.

So here we're looking at the hardiness of the plants and so the ones that can be planted that can take some freezing weather are carrots, lettuce, onions, are carrots, lettuce, onions, parsley, peas, radishes, and spinach.

And then the semi-hardy that can take frost but not a hard freeze would be beets, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, potatoes, and Swiss chard.

This would be in this either way but this would be in the spring like for your spring planting.

So if you're starting these semi-hardy ones that we just described, if you're starting them indoors then we generally can look at having them ready to set out approximately 4 weeks before the last frost because they can take some light freezes.

Gardening 101- Part 2

This section we're going to be covering ordering seeds and beginning transplants.

And then we're going to look at some tillage tools also.

1 of the handy resources is your Johnny's seed catalog.

We gave each of you a copy and if you just open it up to any page, you'll see a block that's green that has culture, growing information and this Johnny's seed catalog is like a gardener's Encyclopedia.

It tells you the kind of temperatures that you need to germinate the seed at.

It tells you what kind of pest problems you might have.

What kind of disease problems you might need to anticipate.

It tells you the approximate days to maturity and it just has a lot of really helpful information in it.

So you can use this as a real handy resource and on page 103 there's a chart to guide you in direct seeded vegetable crops.

So we'll begin with the direct seeded ones or you know if you're direct seeding them.

This gives you The average number of seeds that you're going to need per hundred feet of row and if this happens to be way beyond the size of your garden you can just cut it accordingly.

And then it also gives you the approximate yield that you might anticipate from a hundred feet of row.

So this is very helpful to evaluate what you need for your family and what you might be able to expect from a given space of ground.

Now I wanted to just cover a few things on when you are, you've made out your garden plan, you have that charted on paper, a graph paper or other paper and so you know how many feet of row or you figured out how many feet of row of carrots bed you're going to have.

And then you can determine how much seed you're going to need for that area.

And I like to just write that right into my garden plan.

The ounces or the packet that I'm going to need in order to plant that amount of area and it's always good to have a little bit more than what you're going to need.

And The seeds can be kept in a cool dry place or even in the freezer and they will keep well.

And most varieties, most types can be kept for several years without their significantly dropping in the germination rate.

You also want to do this well in advance so that you are sure to have the seeds on hand plenty in advance so that when it's time you'll be sure to have them and you won't have to be trying to get them together.

And this will be especially important for the things that you're going, the plants that you're going to start yourself indoors because some of them you'll need to be starting 8 weeks before your last frost.

Another thing that you want to keep in mind when you're looking at the varieties that you order is disease resistance, especially in plants like tomatoes and if you'll turn to your, it's alphabetically organized, if you'll turn to the section on tomatoes you'll see an example of how they give you feedback on all the different varieties that they have on that page as far as their quality of the fruit, the size of the fruit, the days to maturity and the disease resistance.

So it has the, it has abbreviations for some of the most common tomato diseases like F for Fusarium wilt and so forth.

So you can evaluate whether and plan to get varieties especially if you're in an area where it's hot and humid where the fungal diseases are easily proliferated.

And you know personally I really like big beef and as you can see on page 120 it has really good resistance.

A lot of times the cherry tomatoes are a little more resistant to diseases also.

Another thing that I like to do is there are some old standard varieties that have been used for a long time and then they're always developing some new ones.

The Old standard varieties also are most of the time more economical and also when you are looking at seeds there are the heirloom seeds, the ones that are non-hybrid.

Of course we want to stay away from GMO but you're not going to have those in the Johnny's catalog or in the other good basic catalogs.

But there are in this catalog there are ones that are hybrid and then there's ones that are non-hybrid and it will indicate that.

And so by having ones that are non-hybrid you can save your own seed.

And we'll touch on that, ways that you can save your own seed.

Okay, the question is, can you save seed from hybrid plants?

They will not be the what as the 1 before but it you'll still get something it just won't be exactly the same as what was there before.

And we have planted again and again some things like hybrid sweet corn and it stabilized out very well and have been able to continue to use the seed.

Another thing that you want to keep in mind when you're ordering your seed is not just 1 planting of it but successive plantings.

So they mentioned before about successive plantings.

So the things that you would especially consider that for would be like peas.

You can plant them in the spring and then you can plant them in the fall.

They don't do well in the hot season, especially if you're in the south.

And so you can have your, when you're ordering, you'll want to plan quantities for successive plantings.

And you would consider that also with things like lettuce, beets, carrots, spinach, would be, and green beans, especially in some parts of the country, Because of disease, they get wiped out before the whole season is finished.

Where we are, they just keep producing and it's very dry climate, so they do real well.

But in Alabama, they were wiped out after about 1 and a half pickings and that was it.

Summer squash, if you want it to go, if you live where it's a long season a lot of times if it's very humid it will also get wiped out with powdery mildew.

And it's just easier to do several plantings and then you can deal with that.

Okay, so order well ahead of time, order plenty to take into account the successive plantings and consider disease resistance.

And then when you actually are planting if especially if you're in a area that the soil is sandy and you have a climate where it's hot and windy, it's important to cover it after you've planted, especially the fine seeds like carrots, spinach, things that you don't plant very deep but if you're in a sandy dry area then you'll want to plant on the deeper end of what the recommendation is.

So rather than adjusting on the shallower side.

And generally we'll plant at a depth of about 3 to 4 times the diameter of the seed will be the depth at which we plant.

So for the finer seeds, we'll plant at quarter to half an inch and so forth.

If we're in a very damp clay type soil, then we don't want the seed to rot by planting it too deep.

But if we're in a sandy type soil and it's, then we'll plant them a little, little shallower and protect it while it's germinating.

Watch it carefully so that as soon as the seedlings appear you can remove the cover so that it'll have plenty of light.

Heirloom tomatoes, a great thing to have in your garden.

Here are some beds of beets and carrots with apricot trees on the side.

This is out behind our lifestyle center And it's a great place for those that are stressed to be able to get out in the garden.

It's really nice to have some flowers in the garden, to be reminded of how much God loves us.

So, and my favorite is, It's an old variety that's been around for a long time, but they haven't been able to come up with a better 1 is my opinion.

They hold their, They don't go over the hill as fast as some of the others.

And like Sugar Baby, they're kind of somewhat popular, but they become overripe too quickly.

They don't maintain their peak very long whereas the crimson sweet can hold over much better.

And I usually plant my melons in in rows and shoot for 1 plant every foot.

So if I'm direct seeding them, I'll plant several seeds every foot so that I will come out with 1 plant every foot in that long row.

The other way that you can do it is to put them in hills and improve that little patch of ground where your hill is and then have several seeds planted in a hill, about the hill being about the diameter of a bushel basket and then having about 4 plants or 5 plants that ultimately you keep, but you can plant twice that many to make sure you get a good stand.

And here you can see that there are some peach trees that we started several years ago.

And this is garden that we have between those while they're gaining size.

So that works very nicely to be trying to get fruit trees started.

It's a great a great crop and it stores nicely And we really enjoy them throughout the winter.

Do you grow sweet potatoes about the same way as the potatoes?

You can order the sweet potato plants online.

We get them from a place called steels out of Tennessee, I believe.

You have to start them several weeks ahead of time, like 6 or 8 weeks.

And you put them in a rich bed that has some horse manure in the bottom to generate heat.

And then at the upper part, we'll have some lighter soil, even can be mixed with some sawdust or some alfalfa hay.

Gardening 101- Part 3

I would agree with Joel that, you know, after all, trying all different kinds of hybrid watermelons and you just come back, that crimson sweet flavor is just...

No, not necessarily, but they just...actually, yeah, some of those long ones, if the soil isn't just right, they'll just shrivel on the 1 end, or if it's dry weather, whereas crimson sweet will just kind of shrink down like this.

Okay, I think we're going to start, so we'll be on time here.

Okay, this afternoon we're going to be talking about how to grow...what?

Okay, this afternoon we're going to be talking about how to grow and eat salads all winter.

Out of a cold frame or unheated greenhouse.

And also we're going to talk some about season extension just in general in the garden how to extend the season but we're going to start with eating out of your cold frame all winter and then we'll kind of back into season extension.

And if you want a resource that covers this very well, plus it's a general gardening book that's kind of the cutting edge of gardening technique.

My dad and I, we camped there in his garden.

Some people, when you go to their garden, it doesn't look as good as it does in the pictures.

This 1, I must say, is just the way it is in the pictures and sounds.

It's really he's a consummate Gardener and and what's in here really works because I've been doing it on a home gardening scale For the past 10 12 years.

I spent a good share of my life in market gardening, but now we're just doing a home garden in West Virginia.

And so, if I can do it there, you can do it down here in Texas.

It's easier here in Texas, because you have a little bit milder winter.

And of course, I assume I'm talking also to people that come from further north or whatever.

And so I have visited people and talked to people in Michigan, Northern Iowa and so forth that have done this same thing.

It just takes, the further north you go, the more effort it takes.

But it's still, Elliot Coleman lives in Maine, so if he can do it in Maine, then he can do it most places in the United States.

And this handout you have here is just basically a 1 small chapter from our book we have back there, our syllabus.

So if you're interested in that, we have those.

Okay, like I said, you can do this just about anywhere in the United States if you have the right plan, okay, the right timing of planting the crops as you head into the winter and the right seeds and maybe last but not least or most important is the right little structure.

Unfortunately the cold frame that I did for several years.

I don't have pictures of it, but I have a cold frame in here later on.

But this is the little unheated greenhouse.

It's like a sunroom under the deck built on the south side of our house there and it has a double layer of greenhouse plastic which you know can take the UV light so it's not just any old plastic but it's a 2 by twos going vertically and then plastic on the inside of the 2 by twos and on the outside and then just a double paned sliding glass door.

You know, most sliding doors are a double glass and then it has a vent on the back side that you can't see that opens like a door, but it's a window.

And it has an automatic opener on it, which I'll show you.

That's my little structure that I've been using for the last several years.

You can see it can be just like that, you know, just crisp and cold and down in the teens at night and you can pick salads out of there any day of the year except in our area every other winter it will freeze up for maybe 2 weeks, just be so cloudy and just frozen that you really can't maybe even open the sliding glass door frozen shut.

But otherwise, you know, any day that the sun's shining and it all thaws out in there, you can't believe that what looked like just frozen stiff can just melt out to beautiful, beautiful salads.

And it only cost me, you know, a few pennies, you might say, a few dollars for those pressure treated 2x2s.

He brought home that sliding glass door he pulled out of some place.

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Short Course: Gardening 101

Gardening 101- Part 3

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