AdAgrA 2023: Digging Deeper

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Home Gardening

Cherie Duffield

Angela Ford

Intro to the Home Garden & Planning

Soil Preparation & Weed Management

Seeds

Getting Your Garden in the Ground

Irrigation

Tips for Staple Crops

A Holistic Approach to Pest Pressure & Plant Diseases

Bringing in the Harvest

Extending the Season

Props and more you are the 1 who designed all these amazing things and we just ask that you'll give us skill and understanding to grow in what you're with and even what we're not and how to be cooperating with you in the garden we thank you in Jesus name amen Jeremiah 17 7 to 8 but I will bless the person who puts his trust in me he is like a tree growing near a stream and sending out roots to the water.

It is not afraid when hot weather comes because its leaves stay green.

What kinds of staple foods do you use and what do you think of when you think of staple crops?

The things that we use most often, right?

So, I mean, weeds, corn, legumes, your grains, your beans, your legumes, and even some of the other foods that we are learning to use more greens and that sort of thing too.

But National Geographic said, a staple food is a food that is eaten regularly and supplies a major proportion of a person's energy and nutritional needs.

Cereal grains and tubers, legumes such as beans, lentils, and chickpeas are staple foods.

And in countries where you don't get the right combination of a grain and a legume, you end up with malnutrition.

So it's good to think through, you know, if you're gonna work towards preparedness, how would you learn to grow some of these staple crops?

So in this session we're gonna cover basic staple crops, tips for growing and storing these crops, along with resources where you can find key growing information when you need it most.

So yeah, where do we, where can I get information?

When you're seeking information, compare sources.

You know sometimes if you're searching online, oh there's this or there's that, But look, try to make some comparisons because once in a while, someone's just tried something in their experience, but maybe they haven't had an established practice in what they're sharing.

Johnny's Seeds it's the title is Johnny's Select Seeds but online it's johnnyseeds1s.com They have a wonderful growers library where you can access, there's videos, there's key growing information for specific crops, like when you started, how you germination and planting and harvest and all of that is usually a nice...

So Johnny's seed has a good Library online for growers, and it's it's for market gardeners, but also home growers you can find a lot of useful information there And so you'll find time-tested information there because they kind of work as a research and development in gardening.

Also Melissa Norris at MelissaNorris.com shares many practical gardening resources and I think Angela mentioned this earlier.

She's the 1 that has the charts, so like your spacing charts and different things there that are very helpful.

Now we've kind of been coming over that question for a little while and I think 1 of the easiest things is to calculate backwards.

So earlier this morning we talked a little bit about your zone.

What is your first and your last frost date?

So from the first frost date, your last frost date in this in the spring, you will count backwards.

And you know sometimes that varies, but generally you want to think about planting your seeds in your little pots or in your soil blocks about 4 to 8 weeks before frost and that will just depend on the seed.

Some things like tomatoes take a little longer, 4 to 6 weeks.

Like we said squash and that sort of thing you don't...

I planted them like 4 to 5 weeks, they get leggy.

I think 3 is probably max, maybe a little bit.

You just want to give them a jump start so when you put them in they can put their feet down and and make roots all they want.

So determine when the number of weeks your seed needs to be indoors before planting them in the garden and plant your seed indoors based on the number of weeks for that crop and then just work towards that frost date.

Now some seeds are really small and like she was saying you know if you with the little discs you can put saliva in there and a toothpick and you know plant them but generally the rule of thumb is 2 times their width or diameter.

Now some seeds that are a little bigger like beans, they pretty much have to be about a full inch in the soil.

So It's good to kind of get an idea even on your hand, you know, what's an inch?

Because then you can just use your finger to plant the larger beans.

But the little ones, you do want to be cautious because they get too deep.

Some of them need a little bit of light close to the surface to germinate.

For tiny seeds, you can place them on the surface of the soil and then barely cover them with soil or vermiculite.

And you can get now vermiculite is the white little pieces that were in the potting soil, you can get fine vermiculite so you just just over the top and that keeps the moisture there with the seeds.

And then don't compress the soil, you can you can pat it but you don't want to compact it so just gently.

All right then I want to go through different crops kind of based on what you can put in earlier in the season and then mid-season and late.

So in the early season, we can put in the greens and the brassicas, so your cabbage and your kales and those kinds of things.

They can be started 3 to 6 weeks before transplanting.

Most greens and brassicas prefer cooler growing temperatures, so they just have a little easier time.

And then you can apply row covers at the time of planting to exclude pests from the crop.

Control cabbage rooms, worms with loop and loopers with, okay if I can say this, the BT.

I'm not sure how you say that whole thing, but that will help to control those.

Then things like root crops such as carrots and beets may be planted in the early spring.

I haven't grown down here in Texas, So I don't know what your early dates are, but some of you are probably close to being able to put those things in or soon.

Carrots, you can sow carrots from early spring to mid-summer.

Mist the soil surface to keep them moist and do not allow the soil to crust before the emergence of seedlings, which takes 1 to 3 weeks depending on temperature and moisture.

To prevent the tops from greening if you've ever gotten green carrots you know that green part is a little bitter, You can mulch over that if they start to their shoulders start to come out of the ground mulch them a little bit And then in session 5 I mentioned that if you mix your carrot seed with potting soil that you don't have to thin them or you don't have to thin them as much.

And I believe I told you a packet of seeds to 1 gallon of mix.

That's probably, most seed packets are what, 1200 seeds?

You probably don't want that many carrots all at once.

But you could succession plant them and you could do a portion of those seeds in with the portion of that potting soil.

I've also used sand for this and then you just put it in your trough, 1 inch trough, and you just sprinkle it as you go slowly, but you don't want to go, oh, I need to go back.

Well, if you do that, you're going to end up with more seeds coming up.

It just simplifies the thinning process a little bit.

And then in session 11 we're going to talk about extending the season and actually a couple weeks ago Bethany just dug some of our carrots and we had snow, we had freezing temperatures that got down to like negative 6, which I know isn't super cold, but I would have thought they would have gone bad, but they were crisp and they were sweet, they were so good.

So We'll cover a little bit more of those in session 11 I Know this is a lot of information I just kind of tried to highlight so you can get a picture of What kinds of crops you can do when but if you want more detailed information again is you can so don't feel like you have to take all the notes.

Beets you can sow in a cold frame or indoors in early spring about 5 to 6 weeks before planting, before transplanting out but only after heavy frost become infrequent.

So you may not have to wait to your late frost but your heavy frost you can plant them in.

Direct seed them early sowings when the soil has warmed to 45 degrees and thin to thin your plants to about 3 inches apart or you can just plant them 3 inches apart if you you know they get big so they need that space around each other and for a continuous supply of greens and smaller tender beets so at 2 week intervals until 8 weeks before your regular heavy frosts are expected so that would be like succession planting up until the fall.

Perennial herbs such as oregano, thyme, sage, chives, lavender are best established in their own bed.

So when you think about herbs, think about is this something that is going to come back next year?

And some of those are perennials and it's nice to have 1 area.

Annual herbs or semi-annual are like basil, cilantro, dill, parsley, and they usually I think parsley can come back the next year but it's usually going to try to go to seed.

Those kinds of things you want to plant each year and set them out after transplanting frost.

Okay this is like early spring and here I have some we have lettuce and flowers like under the shade cloth.

And then that would be our tomatoes and the bean lattice that went in, the trellis for the beans.

And we had a lot of sunflowers over there.

It's a little maybe hard to see, but these ones I think actually wintered over.

And you can see they're not really big leaves, but they're coming back up and Those wintered over and we were able to dig them and eat them again That was a summer that would be a summer Picking and You know it takes a while to clean beats, so you want to clean them off This is actually a chard.

It's Rainbow chard, it's not pretty the yellow in it.

Series

Home Gardening

Tips for Staple Crops

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

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