Join JCLS and presenters Susan Koenig and Marsha Waite from the Jackson County Master Gardeners to learn about tips and tricks for gardening success! This dynamic duo will share advice for creating a healthy garden, making the most of your garden harvest, and how to handle common problems and pests. After many years as veteran Master Gardeners, by these will share with you you what they have tried and what has worked for them.
Susan Koenig is a life-long gardener who became a Master Gardener in 2016. She teaches in the Master Gardener Practicum and is a mentor to new MG students as well as teaching Vegetable Gardening and Ornamental Gardening for the Osher Lifelong Leaning Institute. She is also one for the three co-chairs for Winter Dreams, Summer Gardens Symposium and a past President of JCMGA .
Marsha Waite, a Master Gardener since 1995, has been a Plant Clinic Specialist and an Entomology and Integrated Pest Management instructor for the past 29 years. She has given many classes to garden clubs in Oregon and written articles for the Mail Tribune and Garden Beet, She was given the Jackson Co. Master Gardener award in 2000, Oregon State Master Gardener award in 2007, and was the State Behind the Scenes award recipient in 2016.
To see upcoming events at JCLS visit: https://bit.ly/jclscalendar
Follow us:
Facebook: http://bit.ly/jclsfb
Instagram: http://bit.ly/jclsinsta
Threads: https://bit.ly/jclsthreads
hello and welcome to Gardening Tips and Tricks uh presented by Jackson County Library Services and the Jackson County Master Gardeners my name is Spencer i’m an adult services librarian here at the Medford Branch Library of Jackson County uh Library Services want to remind everybody to keep your microphone muted uh to avoid distractions for the presenters feel free to type questions in the chat as we go along or you can raise your hand if that is easier um at the end or when there is good uh natural pauses maybe between our two presenters we can share any questions we have uh for Susan and Marca to respond to before we get started I do want to share our land acknowledgement which is the Jackson County Library Services acknowledges that its libraries are located within the traditional lands of the Cal Creek Band of Ukra tribe of Indians and the Modoc Nation as well as the Shasta Tacoma and Lagawa people whose descendants are now identified as members of the Confederated Confederated Tribes of Select Indians and the Confederated Tribes of Grand Rond we take this moment to recognize the indigenous people whose traditional lands are where residents of Jackson County live today jcls is committed to fostering understanding deep respect and honor for indigenous people and we encourage you to learn about the land you reside on for more information go to jcls.org/land lastly I do want to share that the views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Jackson County Library Services so with that I’m going to turn it over to our presenters starting with Susan i’m going to uh unpin myself so everybody can see you and feel free to get started hi everybody um nice to see some people coming out on a Saturday it’s supposed to rain today but it it hasn’t here i don’t know about where you are anyway uh I’m gonna start out I’m only going to do a couple of topics two or three topics and then Marsha’s going to do most of it um she’s got a lot of good things to say but I’m going to start out with um how to get perfect apples from your apple tree um I hope some of you who are listening to this actually have apple trees and want to use your apples anyway um one of the uh the worst pests for apple trees um is uh the um I’m going to forget the coddling moth yes exactly and if you want good apples you do need to protect your tree from it now there are two ways to do that one is you can spray but you’re going to spray several times during the summer and you have to suit up and you have to use a fairly expensive spray so it’s 105° outside you got to put on this suit you got to put on the mask you’re using this wand that’s spraying this pesticide you can do that if you want to but I’m not the one to tell you about it because I don’t do it that way i do it what I consider the easier way now um the coddling moth will light on an apple when it’s very small when it’s very immature um I have a um a whirl or a cluster of apple apples these were all blossoms that were pollinated and the codling mock lights on it and lays an egg on it which turns into a worm and the worm burrows into this um immature apple and as the apple grows the worm eats its way through the apple okay that’s why you see all those brown tunnels through the apple and it kind of ruins the apple um because all that brown stuff is grass or poop worm poop okay and that’s what that is so if you’re like me you don’t want to eat that and you don’t want your apples to have that so um what you have to do in order um to protect your apples the easy way is first of all you find the apple that you’re going to protect on this cluster because you don’t want to protect every single one of these okay you the apple tree will set many more apples than it can ripen it’s too much for the tree it takes a lot of energy for the tree to ripen an apple there are maybe hundreds and hundreds of little apples on the tree depending upon how old or how big your tree is um I have some trees that do have literally maybe even thousands i’m not sure but um they’re just covered with apples and the tree simply cannot ripen um that many apples so the first thing you do is you figure out where the king apple is the king apple is the one in the middle see this one right here you’ve got all of these around the edge this is the king apple this is the one that you want to protect with a bag and you’re going to slip a little bag over it that’s meant for this purpose in particular well let me show you what um two different types of bags this is one that I got online it’s um I think kind of an organza which as you see is kind of a mesh fabric and it’s got a little drawstring on it and you can can you see the little tiny apple in there i don’t know if you really can okay I’m going to pull it out let me get this open you can buy these online i got this on Amazon they are $15 for a hundred of them okay so they’re very inexpensive and they’re reusable you know um the the spray that you use is extremely expensive and it’s not reusable of course but these little bags are so the way you use them is that you slip this over so you’re going to like pull the drawstring until you have just a little hole here and you’re going to take you’re going to take the little apple and you’re going to stick it in that hole right there and you’re going to pull the drawstring around it and then I think you need to tie it again um maybe put a bow or something like that in it so that you can easily pull it off but so that it doesn’t come off too easily but what you’re going to do is take some little scissors and you’re going to cut off all of the rest of these apples because the tree cannot ripen all of those the first year I was doing this i thought I want to lose all those apples oh my gosh I’m losing four fistifoo so I didn’t cut off all of them i cut a I mean I bagged maybe like three of them out of a a whirl like this they interfere with each other the bigger the apple gets the more they interfere with each other and you have apples dropping off the tree because they can’t develop into their normal into their the size they should be so you really have a better uh result if you do cut off uh the apples it’s also good for your tree because they can’t ripen all of the apples you’re not asking them to and you’re going to get a bigger nicer better quality apple from this king apple now one of the things you want to do right away is when you’re picking out the apple you’re going to bag is you want to look to see that it hasn’t already been infected with a little worm going into it and the way you can tell that it’ll look kind of in one of two ways and I’m not sure whether you can actually see this or not but I’m going to show it to you can you see that little black spot right there okay that is where the worm entered this little immature apple okay that’s one way that it looks you’ll see a kind of a hole if the apple you were going to bag has this on it you don’t want to bag it you want to cut it off okay the other way is and this is a really might be difficult to see but see right here do you see it’s kind of like a little indentation it’s like a little pin prick sometimes the little hole that the worm makes um kind of closes up and it’s a little brown scab or just a little indentation like this you see that the apple has already been infected and you want to choose another one okay so here is another kind of bag before I found these on before I found these um and I think those are very easy and I think those are going to be a good one to use i made some of my own like this out of scraps of fabric that I had and I put a little zipper in the top now you may think I’m Oh my goodness she’s so obsessive well I guess I am because I really like um I really like perfect apples and that’s what this gave me so you stick the apple in the corner here in the corner of the bag and you just zip it up it’s very easy and these bags last for a long time so if you’re so inclined and you have some extra scrap material and and some zippers you could do this now the one thing that is not so good about this is that it’s opaque and the sun doesn’t really get through it so at the end of the season um after all the coddling moths have flown through which is the end of August you want to take that bag off so that the apple can get some sun and it can ripen when you take it off it’s going to look pretty green let’s say it’s a red apple it’s going to look kind of green or yellowish uh it won’t be its normal color so you need to give it about a month now I don’t I have two trees that are fall trees and I don’t um actually harvest them until after the first frost because that’s when they get sweet so I take this off at the end of August and by the time I’m ready to harvest them then they’re nice and uh red and they’re lovely the thing that might be good about this one and I think it’s going to be is that the sun does get through this so I think it’ll be red um to begin with okay uh so I think that might be an advantage for this one okay now every once in a while you will find that with one of your bagged apples that the common moth lights on it and gets confused thinks it’s on an apple and actually it lays a little egg and the egg hatches and I don’t know if you can see this how well you can see this but do you see that little brown thing right there that is a worm that Hold it higher can you see it now uh see the little brown and you see there’s kind of like a little um webbing around it or something like that but oh I think the worm dropped off anyway that’s what’ll happen sometimes occasionally you’re going to find a little worm on the outside of your bag and you know it worked because it didn’t get into your apple and what you will get is bigger nicer juicier testfree apples so um think about how expensive apples are uh I haven’t looked at the price recently but um a small to mediumsiz apple is about half a pound is up to half a pound and a big apple’s like threequarters of a pound and a gigantic apple is like a pound um apples can get to be two to three dollars a pound if you want to send an apple with your kids to to school in their lunch every day that’s going to be an expensive undertaking this will you know help you with your grocery bill quite a bit okay now just a couple more things that um I want to do i used to use um like a regular Sharpie in order to you know those little white tags that you have that you um put the name of the plant on and you stick it out by the plant so you remember what variety you used well by the middle of the summer they were white again they the writing was all gone because it bleached out with the sun so I asked Marca one time Marcia what do you do about this and she said “Ah there is an answer to that and it’s this it’s this kind of pen it’s the kind of pen that ranchers use to mark the ears of their cattle this is really a permanent marker so if you use something like this this one is tag ink marker it’s called and it’s a Yex i’ve used this and you can use it from year to year to year i use it on my tomatoes as a matter of fact I have cages for the tomatoes and then I and I take a piece of um duct tape and I fold it over the um the cage or I put it on a steak and I write with this marker on it what the name of the tomato is and every year I can use the same one over and over again because this does not wash out now I’ve also had some pretty good luck with um with a Statatler pen you can get these online as well this is reasonably permanent and it also has a thinner nib easier to write with so these two things are are really good to know about one more um one more thing I have does anybody know what this is this is actually a Velcro it’s gardener’s Velcro so if you need to tie up your tomatoes to a steak or you need to tie your roses to a lattice or something like that the canes on the roses this is a great thing because it sticks to itself now of course I didn’t bring a I didn’t bring a piece of it but it’s it sticks to itself and it it actually is very well it’s going to stick to it you see that how it sticks to itself it’s very strong extremely strong it lasts a long time and at the end of let’s say the season if you’re using it in your garden in your vegetable garden at the end of the season you can actually pick these up and you can save them for next year and you can use them again you can use them year after year after year and eventually they’ll probably wear out but I have like a little yogurt container that I keep my pieces in okay so those are all my tips i have a question yes okay so um are you going to mention the the surprise that you got on your apples and how lovely it is well I don’t know if I could describe it so well but um I can try um some of the um some of the um cloth bags that I have are fabric that has a pattern on it and that pattern some of it lets the light through um and so the the apples turn red in those places and some of it blocks the light and those stay kind of yellow or green so when you take the bag off sometimes you have a pattern that looks exactly like your bag on the apple of course it goes away once the the whole apple gets exposed to uh sunlight but uh it’s it was kind of fun and I don’t have an example of it because of course I’ve eaten all the apples but anyway all right well um I was thinking that you know someone some industrious person might be able to start a a real fad with that idea because that they were beautiful i saw them yes they were and I wish I had one to show you maybe next year okay well this is the right time to be bagging your apples by the way I was doing it on Thursday and Friday this week because that’s that’s the size they are okay oh one more thing I want to tell you is if you don’t all the apples that you don’t bag the ones that are left over you must cut them off the tree okay so let’s say you only want 50 apples so you only bag 50 apples you must cut the rest of them off because the coddling moth will get in there and year after year after year you they’ll keep coming back so uh you need to cut those off so and it’s good for the tree because it limits the amount of energy they have to put into ripening their fruit okay all righty marca is up next susan before you run away we had a question that I think might be specific to you well good afternoon it’s a good day to stay indoors and learn about some tips and tricks for your gardening so when you go out you’ll be all set getting rid of any pests and diseases on your plants um the best gardening practices follow the strategy of integrated pest management or IPM for short it’s recognized throughout the world and it uses environmentally um safe methods to control different insects and diseases and weeds um so that you’re not targeting pests or any insects or things you that are nice that you want in your environment they won’t get damaged you’re just trying to target the pest insect so that you’re not using something really toxic to like spray like that will kill every insect or um different plants that you spray you want to keep those safe for the environment and just target your pest and it’s not always killing every every single pest in your garden because you’re you most people want to you know use the the worst toxic chemical there is and they’re not only take taking out their the pest that they don’t want they’re also killing a lot of beneficial insects only 1% or so of um the insects like in the world are are doing damage to crops okay so IPM involves uh first uh prevention and that is to choose disease um and uh fungal or disease uh resistant plants that way you never have the problem in the first place so do a little research before you buy things and see if you have powdery mildo in your yard every year um don’t plant cucumbers that are noted for having um powdery mildew so you don’t have to go out and buy expensive sprays to try to get that under control every single year so there are a lot of good varieties that are resistant you can look on some of the university sites online and they will give you a list of various ones that are um insect and disease resistant um another thing we that IPM does is use um um control um cultural controls and those are like um doing correct watering or and pruning pH adjustment of soils or improving drainage things like that physical controls barriers traps uh weeding tools and biological controls are like getting beneficial insects attracted to your garden by planting different plant uh flowers that will attract them and also using botanical compounds and then last of all is the chemical controls organic and inorganic so we’re always going from the least toxic thing to going up higher and higher until the pest that you want controlled uh is controlled the first thing you want to do is to identify your your host of your insect or disease or the weed because you need the correct um method of getting rid of it a lot of people will buy a pesticide thinking will take care of their insect they just call it a bug and then they will spray something that doesn’t even affect it so it’s really important to identify the host first and then um after that then you’re all set to figure out what to do and I’m going to show you some little tricks one of the least uh invasive things is actually making a barrier from your plant to the the the pest and I’m going to show you some things here first of all in the in the spring I will put some plants out and I always put a a cover over them using different fabrics i I got like 20 cats in the neighborhood they love my yard they think every one of my raised beds is their sandbox and so what I do is I get some first of all I got re and this is a a cover cloth that will let light in and moisture but sometimes it’s not real strong see how it tears really easy and when you’re putting that over your hoops like this sometimes when the wing comes up we have this 5:00 like uh wind tunnel coming through the rogue valley and so many of the my rem um torn from flapping around because they weren’t hooked down well uh so I went to some stronger u materials first of all I tried some tulle because I thought “Oh that’s nice and it will keep some insects out and it let light in and water in.” But again when I was out and I had it over some stakes I clipped it on some stakes can you see how that pokes like that that can tear a hole in that and then your the tool just falls down on your plants i like to have a lot of air circulation on my plants because that will stop some of the fungal growth and that you just you don’t want to have all that moisture trapped down there so I kind of did away with uh using that and next I had some nylon jersey that you see sometimes you in the inner sides of shorts and stuff trunks and this worked really good it’s real strong it’s made out of nylon one of the material stores was going out of business and so they had a bolt of it and so it was really inexpensive so I’ve been using that and it lasts maybe three years or so the sun kind of rots nylon after a while but it it lasted quite well so if you have some of that around that works good and then I thought instead of paying maybe $50 for some uh insect barrier that I thought what about sheer curtains nylon curtains look how tough they are and I found these over at the Goodwill on L Street in Medford it’s at the distribution center most people don’t know they can go in there and when they go in there it’s a real trip um there’s just a ton of these tables with sides on and when people give a donation they just throw all the stuff right on those tables and sometimes it’s piled really high they do try to section it off so they have a a place where they have like blankets and curtains and tablecloths and stuff like that well I thought well these are quite large and this would fit my whole a one row of crops in my garden and um it even is sewn really nice on the edges and you can put you can put a string through there to hold it up and tie it on stakes and this this problem it’s so light um at the Lars Goodwill they charge you by the weight well this thing right it doesn’t even maybe 50 grams or less and so it probably cost me a nickel for this what a savings hey and then I looked at some more i mean they have those quite often there then I got one that has a little bit more texture to it but it lets a lot of light in it’s strong and again probably 5 cents for that and then I thought well gee why not decorate my garden as I go so I got there was one of these sheer curtains with all these wonderful little flowers on and I thought “Oh wouldn’t that be pretty making having that over your hoops in your garden?” And so again really light maybe this one cost maybe a dime to a quarter instead of $50 for some um insect inset cloth okay so this is insect cloth it’s a little stiffer than the curtains but actually it’s got the same size holes it might last a little longer because it is a little bit thicker very strong so if you if you’re you have a lot of money you can go with that if you’re living on a fig fixed income like me the Lars Goodwill is a good place to shop so hopefully um that little trick will uh save you some from spraying your your crops so I I put that over some hoops now I found this is a child’s toy it says Brava Soccer and this was over there were six of them and I thought “Oh those would make nice little hoops for the garden to put the the curtains on.” And so I put these in after my cat dug up all the onions I planted in a row and I was so angry at them and I thought I got to find something that’s really good that can keep them out and I put this up and to make it even longer there was another’s child’s toy and it had these stakes with it and it had holes in right here and the holes of of this hoop fit in there and then I made it huge so you can do a different length you could even cut these and make them however long you want and then um there was these balls thought what the heck is this it wasn’t some kind of child’s building toy and it came with these green or turquoise stakes which fit into these holes and I thought “Oh I have some um of those of the steaks you know that you get like over at the Graange or Co or Lowe’s and they’re they’re really expensive.” And I thought “Well I could use that and fit those in there.” And sure enough they fit in there and then I’ve got some bigger stakes and I thought well how can I make that use that i just took a drill bit the size of my steak and I drilled out one hole so I can use this for my larger stakes and for the smaller ones and this is smooth and so when you put your cloth over it it’s not going to poke and and make a hole in it and I thought “Oh that’s really cool also over at Lars I found some actual hoops so it’s just random what you’re going to get over there so the experience is worth it and these these only cost me a few dollars and I have a whole roll then that I can put uh my cover cloth on also on these kind of hoops I found some clips over at the dollar store i don’t recommend them because they look at they rusted and then the wire inside rusted and worst of all is they’re coated with a plastic on the tips here and on the on the the ends and that that melted in the heat here and so you had a little gummy mess every time you touched them so stay away from them they look like they would do a good job because they’re made out of aluminum for the most part but they got a little bit of something in there that makes it rust so stay away from those also I uh went online and got some that said that stainless steel and they had these and then I went out to try them they don’t hook on and there’s such a tiny little bit where they touch each other like that that they snap right off here and again the outside is stainless steel but the inside look it’s all rusted so you had to be careful with that then I thought well I’m going to get one that where I looked at all the comments and the people said this one didn’t they didn’t it didn’t rust on them and it’s a cute little one with a little heart here stainless and then on the side you can see it has a little lip or gripping there’s no plastic that’s going to melt or get brittle and when you put it on everything stays it’s not going to snap off so I thought “Oh I finally lucked out after I wasted some money on these other clips.” Okay and most people use half inch PVC pipe you can also get these clips but oh they’re so hard to get on and off you’d think it would rip your material almost you can see how hard that is to kind of slip on but the that’s also available but my gosh I you know for cheap you can do something better than this okay so hopefully that um that helped also at the dollar store I saw these waste baskets there okay mother i used to use u um styrofoam smooth balls for to put on top of my steak so the material wouldn’t tear but those little plastic balls are going to work great so I got these because I get have terrible snails and they can’t get through here so when I put my cabbage out and uh different flowers first thing I will put this over it and protect it it does a great job the snails never get in there i um use these little clips to go right through and hook them down into the soil so that when the wind comes up the basket’s not going to go anywhere and along with that if you if you do have um certain cabbage family plants you put out early the aphids come in first thing and so of course they’re going to get through here so what I have here is one day I was over at Sherman Williams paint store and I saw these paint strainer bags and they’re fitted for a five gallallon bucket and they use it you know and they use their spray gun and that they have to have the no lumps in the in the paint so they strain with it and I thought these are really nice and strong and then they would fit right perfectly over my little ba my basket here and I I would tuck it in and this way the the aphids are none of the the bad insects leaf hopper whitefly or anything like that can get in and get my green crop my spinach the leaf miners can’t get in there and get those little trails the little call the little maggot that goes feeds through the the epidermis of the leaves and just makes your spinach all polluted well this is great for a barrier and I I think I only paid 99 cents for these and they probably uh are probably double that now with the inflation going on and these baskets are going to last longer than me and you can always respray them if with some Rustoleum or something if if anything gets uh rusted on that but so far I’ve been using those for like four years and they look like they’re brand new so I have no problem um with those um another thing to show you is dietimmacous earth this is really good for getting rid of ants um or any insects you don’t want crawling in your house a lot of the allnatural pest controls people they spray this all over the attics and in the under um under the floor of the crawl space and anything that that crawls over it will get like glass shards uh scraping them and then uh pierce their body and they’ll dry out these are uh actually prehistoric uh one- cellled like algae creatures diet called datoms and when they um since they’re made of pure silicon that’s like glass it the only drawback with this is you need to keep it dry for it to be effective if it does dry out it should uh remain some of its scratchability but you can keep it where um it’s not going to get water on it that that will be good usually they use it also for 3 in around the perimeter of a a house because that’ll keep anything from that crossing that and getting up on your house like carpenter ants and such and such and so what I use it for too is I feed the hummingbirds and make my own uh sauce for it no red dyes want to protect them um so I was getting a ton of ants coming up over the hook um let’s see here’s another one like a hook where I hang it up they were coming down and and they would get into the bird feeder or here here’s here’s a hummingbird feeder so they would just climb down and get into there so I found some of these really cool traps like this and that really really pretty and so all you have to do is put some dietmacous earth in there and the ants will not go down and cross that because they know they’ll they’ll get scratched to death let’s say uh sometimes you can use water in these but because we have like an average of 100 degrees all summer that the water evaporates too fast the dietmacous earth you put it in here once a year and it will stay there it’s not going to go anywhere so that works really good and if um dietmacous to earth is good for a lot of different things around your um the pet beds uh to deter um fleas and uh this one you want to make sure you get food grade because there’s one for like swimming pools and whatever you got to have uh for a home and garden But make sure it’s food grade even people take this and they feed it to their animals and gets rid of parasites and stuff so it’s a really good product i bought a 50 lb bag with it um 30 years ago and I still have it lasts forever okay so a lot of people have problems with um squash bucks so the one of the best tricks is to take some masking tape and you just wrap the sticky part outside your hand and you roll roll it around your hand and then tear it off and then when you see adults or nymphs or the eggs you can just slap them and it will they’ll stick i got all of these and these are last year’s and you can see the eggs and the little nymphs look like little spiders they even have got a a stripes cucumber beetle in there too so this is um a really good way but it’s time consuming if if you have a ton of um squash plants then it can be uh a little overpowering so sometimes what I’ll do is I will go out with my shop back and I do with my shop back let’s see i’ll be hidden under my cloth here well I’ll use a a vacuum or shop back and then I It’s right in front of my face okay so pretend this is the Wanda your vacuum i take a knee high stocking like this and I’ll shove down in it and bend this over and then I like to use these rubber bands that you get on some of the produce from the store because they’re so nice and thick and you can stretchy and they last long you you put it on really tight because you don’t want that to suck down into the uh the vacuum and then pretty soon you will get a sock of insects about that much and then your vacuum will start struggling a little then you know you can pull it out and you take your insects you can tie a knot in that and just douse it in some soapy water and that will kill the insects inside then you can uh throw them in the trash and then you can uh reuse your stockings you can also use organza i’ve done that with uh and with tulle and here’s my uh stash just from one squash it was pretty pretty bad that’s why I thought I’m not going to go pick them up with the with the tape this would go much faster so that’s that works really good okay and then another thing that you can use for certain insects like uh cucumber beetles because they come in and they eat on your all the curb family plants now reflective mulch is like aluminum and and sandwiched in on some uh a plastic coating on both sides well this stuff can be really expensive when you buy it the real stuff this is an emergency blanket only costs a couple dollars it will last a year and you can grow your plants in here you just stretch it out make a little X where you’re going to plant your like tomatoes or squash because this will repel both the striped and the spotted cucumber beetles and aphids white flies and leaf hoppers it It baffles them so they don’t know where to fly into the area and so they they stay away i tried this at the extension and it worked fabulous there was a um small farms had a crop of squash growing oh how many yards you would call it maybe 100 yards away and they were inundated with cucumber beetles and I didn’t have a single one and I thought this would make when the sun came out and the heat was or it was 95 or I thought “Oh my gosh this reflection is going to burn my plants.” But it didn’t it actually kept the soil cooler around the plants and they were much bigger and healthier the only drawback with this is you have to have a like a drip system underneath it to water your plants because you don’t want to be lifting it up and um moving it and also that when the squash plants grow really big a lot of the shininess that’s hidden and then later on they might come in but they’re not going to come in anywhere near as bad as when they do in the beginning there where they eat your um plants down to the ground and where you have nothing because that’s what happened with the small farms crop and it doesn’t cost much to to do it okay and then there’s there’s lots of different kinds of traps like if you have a bunch of um gnats in your home sticky traps work really good or in the greenhouse they also tell you when the um pest has arrived you want to monitor it the only drawback with this again you can’t be used as a control for your insect because this attracts a lot of beneficial insects and I checked on um ones outside with this uh where there was pests and I I think I got more beneficial insects trap than I did actual pest so um this works better in the home more in the greenhouse and then if you have like the spotted winged drosophila you can make little traps like this with just apple cider vinegar in there with a drop of dish soap it’s a surfactant so that when the the flies land on the on the um apple cider vinegar that it’ll break the surface tension and they’ll drown so that’s a really good one and and most of you know that you know you can use a little cottage sheath carton like that and and use a hole puncher at the top put like half um soy sauce and oil in a cup and then you bury it right below the holes here put the lid on so an animal doesn’t come along and get it and bury it down so they can just crawl in there and then you can uh trap a whole bunch and those don’t even cost anything even an inverted soda bottle with this is a those for snails and slugs but I didn’t get too many in here they like to uh they like my da leaves better so the best I could do with that is take some Sluggo Plus and then sprinkle it all around my dillies on in the soil there and then get them that way so some things they seem like they should work but they don’t always do okay now I want to show you a hack here when you go to the store and you buy stuff like insecticidal soap or tea or even spinosid things that are available to the home garden that are organic and um safer pesticides um really look at the prices cuz this insecticidal soap here it’s 24 oz and it’s $13 and got a nice spray bottle with it okay and this one is right next to it and it’s 12 oz and it’s the concentrate this makes six gallons and this is only a four of a gallon or less so this um the cost of the six gallons here was $15 and the cost of buying enough bottles which is 32 bottles of this will cost you $416 so this is not going to go very far if you have a just a row of something that has aphids on it you to really control the aphids you got to spray underneath those leaves and and smother their whole body with the soap it will dry their or break down the epidermis on top the waxy coating on it and then they will dry out but you’ve got to spray them totally with that gel to run off so this bottle can be wasted after one row and then you’d have to buy another one and then another probably and another and here and that would be costing you up to $50 just to get enough for your garden for maybe just a couple months where this is going to last you two to three years so save $400 and one cent or no 40041 uh $41 if you buy the concentrate and you can share it with friends and family you can charge them for one of these and and you can make money off of it but you won’t want to do that just uh share share the love okay now BT was even worse um the spray was $16.99 the concentrate was $15.99 a whole dollar less it was an 8 oz bottle of the concentrate and 32 oz or 1/4 of the spray again the concentrate made 12 gallons of the BT and so when you added up all the price um you’re saving $800 if you buy the concentrate and BT doesn’t last very long out it the sun and the heat degrade it really quickly it might last three days if you’re lucky sometimes your one’s 110 well forget that it could last an hour and you have to repeatedly spray it to keep killing the aphids and and things that um or not the aphids but worms that come in a ca the the cabbage butterfly is the first one to come in the spring and it’s always looking for the brassicagacy family plants like cabbages and things like that in your garden lay eggs and it’s all wormy and you got to keep spraying every few days so why would you buy a $17 spray with it that’s only going to last you maybe a couple weeks when you can have another one and save $800 of the concentrate and save $800 it It’s insane to me that they would charge prices like that it’s so different so like if you’re a commercial gardener that’s you know they’re really getting a good deal but if if you’re a home gardener only have a few plants everybody reaches for their readymade sprays and they’re really paying through the nose for them so next time um you go in there always check c uh price check so you don’t get ripped off okay um I want to show you a few tricks here okay a lot of people have these black pots and you know how hot it gets in the summer here i can’t grow things in pots very well if I just grow them in here it you put your hand on there boiling hot uh and you can imagine what the roots feel like inside that’s why a lot of the uh the soil dries out so quickly it just boils away and uh so a good trick is to double pot it get one big and one smaller and then you have an insulation like this is uh some a roll of insulation it’s it comes that long it’s for like uh packaging dishes and stuff when you’re moving and it’s condensed foam it’s stronger than bubble wrap it’s really uh it will hold up and it’s got little bubbles in it you can see and that those bubbles will uh keep that heat out just like a bubble wrap that kind of makes the insulation so you and it comes perforated so you can just kind of tear it off to what length or width you need so on here that’s all I do is make a like a little ring just stick it stick it in here and stretch it out you can even make two or three layers if you want if your pots outer pot is uh big enough compared to the pot you’re going to put your plant in i did put these out yesterday and I felt the outside of the pot when the sun was beating on it was very very warm and then I put my hand inside and it was cool so it was doing its job i put my hand inside actually the inside pot so this I put inside like this and down okay so you see that and then I’ll go around and I’ll just take a a marker and mark where to cut this so it’s right down flush with the bottom pot then you won’t see it out you can also use things like sawdust coconut core Pete moss and stuff like that and try to eek it down in in these but this is this is cheap enough and fast that and lasts really good it won’t condense like if Pete moss gets wet or coconut core you know they can sink down into the pot then it will still expose this this is not going to do that and it will stay insulated and then it will your plants will stay nice and cool and if you if you have a hole in your pot like that’s pretty big like this and you have critters and they will get into your pots like over at the extension some uh got into my dillies well I take an old chore girl or or stainless steel scrubby cut a little ball off like that stick it in the holes so the water can drain out and the in and the critters can’t get in they’re not going to be chewing through that stainless steel to get in there and all other like roly polies and other things are not going to go in there and probably not even earwigs are going to work their way if you you know really compress it well if you have a hole in the bottom of your pot where the drainage is you can take a couple layers of um coffee filters and you can put it down at the bottom and that will stop soil from eeking out and getting all over your walkways and uh that’s a cheap little trick to do that so hopefully that one happen also at at the some of the thrift stores um you can find these like strainers like grease strainers or whatever from cookers well I have a a soil sieve that I use to sift out all the millions of rocks that is in my central point soil and I do have one with a a wooden frame it’s really heavy and holding it like that over a wheelbarrow and you’re going like that and I I’m feeling as I’m getting older that I’m not as strong um so I will use this especially when I’m potting up stuff it this is good like I’ve gotten some happy frog uh potting soil and I was just transplanting some plants and I thought the bark was a little too big for the little pots I was putting in so I took this and I sked it out like this really easily and then I got this beautiful spoil coming out underneath and then I took the the bark pieces and I put them as a mulch for one under one of my bushes it worked really good and you can get these for like a dollar or something um and then they’re different size holes here’s one that’s round and it’s a little bigger this one gets out some of those big rocks for me and then I I’m not straining myself uh I don’t get the arthritis in the joints you know sometimes when you’re lifting something heavy like that you get like golf elbow or tennis elbow and this just keeps me from getting that very inexpensive i I haven’t seen that these really rust very badly um I’ve had them a couple years and I really you know they look you know pretty new actually also when those five gallon buckets have um their little see the top here this gets real brittle in the sunlight when you keep your buckets out your buckets almost fall apart too but these come off first and so they have these replacement handles that are nice and big and they don’t hurt your hand if you have something heavy that you’re carrying and they just snap together you can get them like on Amazon so it’s really easy to make a new handle on your buckets okay and then sometimes people buy um fruit trees in the spring and they plant them and they come into the plant clinic show us a picture of the trunk of their tree and on the southwest side there’s a big tanker you know like this kind of shape on that southwest side i call it the southwest blight because the sun beats high hardest there um it basically scorches the bark or in the winter time when the bark is frozen and the sun comes out and quickly makes the ice crystals under the bark expand you can see cracks and then you can get um fungal infections and stuff in there we tell them to clean it up real smooth and nice as long as it’s not over like half of the tree otherwise it’s a goner and then wrap it with tree wrap there’s this that kind of expands a little as the trees grown but you want to replace your uh this probably every six months um spring and fall so the tree um is never constricted you can also use that white plastic um kind of goes in a twirl like or use a 50% uh white latex paint with 50% water and that will also act as um to bounce off the heat and sunlight off of the bark so it’s not overheated okay and then we have my my last trick if you’re not getting very many fruit set on your tomato plants this mimics like bees when their wings vibrate and the pollen falls because uh usually the wind will blow the blossoms and then that drops it’s a different kind of flower so that it’s not like the bees come in and can get the pollen easily but people have used this you turn it on and then you just touch it on a leaf here i’ll do it I’ll do it on my rosemary here and you if there’s flowers you just touch it up against close to the flowers and that vibration is going to make that pollen fall if it’s ripe and then you’re going to get a ton more fruit set so hopefully that’ll help okay now I just want to show you my favorite tools i’ve used a lot i like kind of a look everywhere for them i use this one this is the cheaper version i’d suggest you get the one where it’s welded here so this isn’t going to be coming off and uh flying out somewhere on get on somebody but it’s welded on both sides and this whole thing is metal this is going to last a lifetime this I got over at the co They were only like $11.99 or something like that i said “Oh that’s really cheap.” So I got a whole bunch from my my people that work in the the garden with me because they were bringing these little danaline pickers and stuff to help me weed and I that’s not going to do it so I got these the thing is uh it comes with a little like shim that digs down into here and it can crack the the wood and the wood dries in the heat and then this comes loose and it went flying once when I was really hacking away and uh I couldn’t find one of those metal shims in here so I got a little elbowed uh hinge and then I beveled it down on the grinder to get it down into this area here and now it’s really sturdy but it’ll it’ll last uh probably a long time but if you can’t get the parts for it and that and it’s prone to fly off it doesn’t even have a hole here where you could actually screw it into the wood uh save just spend a little bit more money on that and go to Lars and and save get that saved money and buy a good tool another is watering most people’s plants have problems because of poor watering that’s the number one cause when they come into the plant clinic um use a moisture meter like inside plants are good on the outside you can use them too the thing is the so most of the potting soils pretty well the same so these pick pick up the electric or resistance through the soil has two little copper wires going from the shank all the way up a lot of people grab it like this like if they’re outside and they dig this down in the clay soil to see what the moisture is then they yank it up this whole head comes off because those two little wires are very fragile in there and if this gets it moved around and they get loose and your moisture meter is not going to work very well but these are a really good thing to have in uh mostly inside now outside when you’re watering a lot of people water by hand and they look and see that the water’s puddling on top and say “Oh that’s enough.” And then they go on to the next like tomato and then they come in the plant clinic and say “Oh look at this blossom and rot what can I do about it?” Well a lot of it’s inconsistent watering going from drought and then a lot of water back and forth inconsistent that way or they plant it in too cold of a soil or they overwater so that you get a little root rot and stuff because all of those things can inhibit the calcium from being brought up into the plant where it needs to be and sometimes there’s no or not enough calcium in the soil too and that can cause a blossom and rot it’s all about the calcium and the uptake of it so I had a friend in my garden and I gave her a present i got I gave her this and she looked at it in the weirdest way she had no idea what the heck it was and I told her it’s a soil probe says “You said that you’re that your all your tomatoes are getting blossom and rot and you said you watered for I don’t know how many minutes a day.” She did every day and um I says “How do you know how much you what you have in here?” All the soils are different sandy lom clay or uh um grrenidic soils they all will show different on these meters and so you really don’t know what’s going on how many times have you used one of these and and make sure when you do put it in the soil you hold on to the shank and not the head so that you don’t have that problem of it coming off but how many times have you put that in and you you felt like you didn’t get a good reading and I wondered why because you went to another bed that had a different kind of soil and it was it didn’t show the same and you said you watered the same this here will go down 12 in in the soil i like to what I like to do is go down and you go up to about here and you bring it up and you can see what’s going on for six whole inches here and most of the feeder roots on plants uh like your vegetables and that are up in the top six inches so then you can look at that and when my friend did a probe and and brought her soil up it was wet maybe that much and the rest was totally dry and she was absolutely shocked and she says um since she’s had this she’s hasn’t had any problem with the blossom end rot or watering you can use it in the lawn around trees and shrubs um if you want to go down 12 in for some shrubs and trees you go down six and then you look at that and then you pull it out and then you go down once more down in that same hole and that will be the 12 in and then you can get a really good look and feel of what’s going on in your soil and these are only like $15 or so on Amazon it’s stainless steel it’s never going to rust and oh my gosh it’s it’s such a game changer when it comes to trying to figure out how much water that your plants need how long to put the water on for um so much better than this because it’s outside you know I don’t trust it very much in the soils because I think something’s wet and it it totally doesn’t show it wet and then if that’s the case then people will overwater and then you get the blossom rod again so um I would totally recommend this this is a great tool for your beloved gardener friends okay um another tool I really like is this one this one has a a sharp point on it’s got a beveled side here it’s very sharp on the edges and oh does this get the weeds good i just dig go down and and that you can yank stuff out it’s very very uh strong i haven’t had any problems with it at all and it’s a good scraper you can take that and just the little seedlings like the little pers lane and the prostrate spurts that’s growing now and sprouting everywhere you just scrape it along there and it takes them out really quickly you can make furrows with it you can see that you just just go like that and um I I use that probably as much as I do the the one with the fork on the end okay i used to like this one a lot because it has a nice long edge and it’s thin hair but it’s not strong enough to get weeds that have a a a strong tap routt you can see it went crooked on me i had to put it in a vise and try to push it back and it’s still a little crooked so it’s got a weakness because of this long handle it’s not strong enough for the pressure you would put on the end so uh be cautious about this one you can probably get a better type of tool and another thing I use is a Hory Hory for dividing plants and digging down deep in the rocky old soil that I have it’s straight and uh sharp on one side and then it’s serrated on another and then it has measurement on there so if you’re digging holes for for bulbs and stuff it’s very handy and then tile cutter this is great for getting the the weeds out of cracks uh from bricks and like if you have a raised bed and you have gravel around and and the weeds are coming up right on the bottom uh this will slice them really good and you can see it’s very sharp and you can use a sharpener on each side of it and uh I just go down i’ll go slice this way slice that way in a crack and it will take everything out so those are the tips I have for you today except one last one if you don’t want to have cats in your yard you might want to invest in a little cayenne pepper so when you put your barriers around you can just kind of spray it or put this around even on the outside of your beds and that so that when they sniff around they won’t want to jump up and get in your bed maybe but uh you can get a whole bunch of cayenne for fairly cheap and uh see how that works so I’m going to be using that and see if I can train my kitty okay so does anybody have any questions we have two questions in the chat there may be more that are added while we’re answering these ones uh one is for you and the question was “How long excuse me how long do you keep the cloth cover over your plants?” I keep it um over until probably harvest uh harvest time actually because it’s so hot here and the sun is so intense it’s not like back east where they have the high humidity and so it kind of tempers the effect of that hot sun on flower or plants um I I even put a shade cloth i have the the big stakes and and I have my tomatoes like in handy panels um and then I have a shade cloth over that and it seems like they they do beautifully so on the on the cloth you might want to keep it until you harvest especially things where like leaf miner and that in case they lay eggs in there and then you’re eating them oh one last thing I just reminded me okay another thing over at Lara’s Goodwill is states you know what these are [Music] curtain [Music] rods and you get two stakes of course and you get the final on one end or both ends so you got two stakes and then uh here’s another variety and you can tie up your uh tall plants with these and they look so cute out up in the garden and they only cost a um probably a couple bucks each so very strong sturdy you could even put a rebar down and hold them even stronger if you need to oh I forgot to show you that okay there’s another question yes uh the other question was for Susan if she’s still around it was about I don’t see her around you might have the answer as well yeah the question was if pear trees are similar to apple trees in that um they make more than they need and you need to cut off the extras oh yeah definitely most fruit trees you got thin believe me I’ve lost uh peaches i’ve lost cherries i’ve lost um uh and pear trees split from splitting because they overbore and yeah you you really have to thin them down it’s really hard i mean it’s one of the hardest things to do to have to thin because you just think of all that good fruit going to waste but you you have to do it otherwise your tree will probably split and and then you’ll have cankers come in um and all and insects are attracted to cuts and wounds and the bark so yeah thin them that makes sense you can probably pick up that either call the extension or the look online and say how many pairs i think it was like two pairs per per stem or something like that that you want to you don’t want more than that because they get they can get really big and heavy and the more you thin them the the bigger the pairs that you keep are going to be that makes sense definitely kind of like thinning seedlings it’s always something you see it happen but you got to do it okay and we don’t have any other questions that have came in so I think we are ready to wrap up uh with that I will say thank you to everyone for attending thank you Marca and I know Susan’s not on camera but thank you to Susan as well [Music]
Comments are closed.