Planning Your Fall Garden (Vegetable Gardening Live Monthly Questions & Answers E-62)

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Welcome to Garden Grounds. We’ll get started in 15 seconds. Can you please just let me know you can see my garden, hear my voice, and we’ll get started. And for your questions, this is my public Q&A that I do every second and fourth Thursday um of the month. If you have a question, please just type question in front of it so that in the chat I can pick it out. But go ahead and throw your garden questions out. Just popping out the chat here. One second. All right, so let’s get started. Feel free to put out whatever question you have about vegetable gardening. just put it out into the chat. As I was saying, today’s light subject is planning your fall garden. So, I’ll be talking about essentially planning out your next garden. We usually have in most gardens the spring garden, cool weather crops that can take a frost. Then we transition to the summer warm weather crops and then in many gardens you can grow your kind of your third season of cool weather crops. Again, the plants that can take a frost. You do it a little bit differently going from summer into fall. We’ll talk about that. But let’s get started with some of the questions. And I am just looking for just a confirmation that you can see me and hear me. You want to double check everything uh before I start talking. Then I realize, hey, this isn’t working. Hold on. Quick check. All right. Things look good from my end. So hopefully things are rolling. All right, so first question. Uh, well, I see Donna’s question. She was the first person there. But again, make sure you put question in front. Hi, Gary. Enjoy your channel. I’ve been noticing grasshoppers in my garden yet, uh, no damage. Should I be concerned or is this a beneficial? Grasshoppers aren’t really beneficial. They eat your plants. some insects, some grasshoppers, not really a big deal. If a garden is kind of all set up and working pretty well, you’re going to get pests, but then other insects manage those pests. The only time for real concern is if you notice it getting to more the grasshoppers getting more to an infestation where they’re really damaging the crops. That’s when I typically spray or do something about them. But if I just see some insects, I kind of just let it go and I just start monitoring a little bit more. If the grasshopper population increases, you may have to do something, but it all it’s all going to depend on how much damage they do to your plants. All right. Uh, question girl foliage. What is the maximum number of baby butternut squash to be grown on one plant? So far, I have at least five on it. There’s not really a maximum. You know, the butternut squash usually continue to grow the vines and you can take as many plant as many butternuts fruits growing on there as you really want. Um, especially if they’re a smaller size, I feel like you could get a lot on there. The whole key is really keeping up the moisture, watering, and fertilizing. If they have plenty of compost, good organic matter, the waterings regularly, just let the vines, you know, grow and do what what what they’re meant to do. Uh, Knox Runner, very good question. Should I change my red raised bed soil next season after leaf spot? Absolutely not. Diseases, fungal issues come to your garden no matter what. Like, just think about it. When you first maybe opened up that space, there wasn’t any fungal issues. It showed up. Diseases overwinter on host plants around your garden. They have spores that float in the air. They’re not coming from your soil. Yes, they can overwinter in the soil. My point being is that even if you changed all the soil, it’s really expensive. Where are you going to put it? So, you throw it away or you move it. Fungus is going to float in again and infect your plant. So, it’s not about changing the soil. Let the soil be. And you want to set up a prevention plan to really manage it. So, if you notice leaf spot, let’s just say showed up July 15th, you want to start spraying your antifungal about two weeks early around July 1st. You never really cure or get rid of issues in your garden. You just manage the problems down. But I have never thrown my soil away. I get leaf spot, early blight, and I’ve really been able to manage it depending on how well I keep up on the sprays. So, it kind of falls to that. If a zucchini plant gets partially pulled out, what is the best way to reme uh remedy this without disturbing the roots? So, just lightly push it back down. The zucchini plant will actually grow some roots from the vine. So, just mound soil up around where it got tore out, torn out, and just mound it a little bit, water it in, and just let it go and it should be perfectly fine. You’ll notice some people have circles and stars next to their name. They’re perk members. I do this format um five times a month under perk memberships for $3.99 a month. It’s a smaller group. If I stay on for an hour, we have light subjects on gardening, but more importantly, I answer all your gardening questions and kind of function like a mentor through the season if that’s something you enjoy. If not, I do this every second and for Thursday, 11:00 a.m. It’s a public Q&A. It just kind of gets busy. I stay on for about 45 minutes. Um, I try to get to many as many questions as I can. When do I stop fertilizing container carrots? Um, well, I mean, it’s a really tough question because I never know how well your soil is prepared. If you put in compost, organic granular fertilizer, maybe you’ve been feeding them every week, that’s probably too much. Maybe you’re feeding every month, that’s probably pretty good. Um, I don’t have an answer for that. You mean you never really stop fertilizing. you I I would say you you don’t really need to be fertilizing them every two weeks or three weeks. You know, if they’re nice green growth, you can touch the top right where the soil is, feel the carrot, maybe feed them once a month, but they’re they’re pretty close. Just looking for more questions and then we’ll talk about starting your fall garden. Cooking with rod. I have blight on my cherry tomatoes. So do I. Is there anything I can do to stop it spreading? I’m pruning leaves that are infected. It has almost consumed one plant. So I actually don’t remove my leaves. The leaves that are infected and yellowing, they’re dying off anyway. The fungal spores have already spread to the rest of the plant. You can remove them, but removing more doesn’t slow the disease down in my opinion because they’ve already made it to the other green leaves. They just haven’t started doing their thing. You know you have a fungal issue when you have a little brown spot with a yellow halo around it. That’s an active fungus. So, I would again, similar to what I said earlier, notice when the fungal issue showed up two weeks before you want to be spraying. So, what you want to do for these plants, check out my videos on hydrogen peroxide spray. That cleans the leaves. That will kill off the fungus on the plant. Goes away in like 24 hours, let’s say. And then maybe hit it with an antifungal once a week with like um baking soda spray. Essentially, you want to get an antifungal onto the plant to control the fungus. You can remove the leaves if you want. I just let them dry and go away. As I was saying before, the fungus float through your garden. and they’re all over the place. It’s the spraying that will control fungal issues in your garden. All right, one more question and then we’ll talk about the fall gardening. Uh, Iggllet, is it normal for heirloom tomatoes to grown in the ground to have yellow leaves with no spots? Fertilize with Miracle Grow. It’s possible the bottom leaves if they just kind of turn a pale yellow and fade, the plant is taking nutrients from the lower part of the plant, sending it upward. If you have a lot of leaves and there’s leaves inside the plant canopy and they’re not getting a lot of sun, they may turn yellow and die out. But if they’re just fading to yellow and going away, that’s not really anything to worry about. If you’ve been feeding regularly, you know, I would just stick with it. Temperatures can matter. Heat can matter. Lots of rain can matter. Too much rain can sometimes impact the roots. Lower leaves die, but nothing specific you can really really change. Eddie, how long will potatoes last in the ground? Well, it varies. Um, they can last through the summer. You know, some of them can, you know, rot. Most of them will start to regrow. So, like I had potatoes that were really ready, I don’t know, probably July 1st. I just harvested them two or three days ago. That’s 3 weeks past harvesting time. They probably could go easily into August. So, you do have time for them. All right. So, for fall gardening, what I wanted to um say, couple basic things. Right now in your garden, you may have a lot going on. Clear a space now. you know, over the next couple of weeks where you can plant your fall garden. Now, not the actual where your plants are going to stay, but you can use a garden space to put in like your transplants. Put in seeds for kale, collards, maybe Brussels, broccoli, cauliflower. Grow them in one space, space them out, you know, a good foot apart. And when those plants get to, you know, a certain size, maybe four weeks past germination, big shovel, dig them out, move them to the rest of your garden. Why you might do that is because your garden’s full right now. And rather than seeding the plants all over the garden, which makes it harder to really water and take care of them, try and figure out a space where you can kind of grow in the earth potential transplants. If you have plenty of space for your fall garden, then you’re going to just leave them there. If you’re going to grow transplants, you want to grow them in larger containers and from germination. You want them to get into your garden space or your containers about four to six weeks after they’re growing. Do not let those transplants bake in the sun. They will um sometimes bolt, die off. It’s just too hot. So you if you’re doing transplants, you want to do them where you’re getting some shade throughout the day, especially from that 12:00 pm to 5:00 pm hour. That can get you started with the transplants. Generally speaking, I want to get them in the garden. And it this is really hard to do because we all have different growing seasons. Like I can grow my cool crops really through the end of November. Maybe you can only grow until October. But when the temperatures of your summer are getting, you know, above 90 degrees uh Fahrenheit, 32 degrees Celsius, it’s really too hot for the seeds to go underground. But when you have about four weeks left of that temperature and then the cool temperatures are coming, temperatures are dropping into the low 80s, the 70s. Don’t know what that is for Celsius, but they’re going down from 32 Celsius and cooling off. That four-week period is the time to put in your cool crops. You can put in kale, collards, um cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels, direct seed them. They will get growing because it’s so warm. The soil is really warm. These seeds are going to really germinate quickly, establish, and take off. The issue is the heat. the sun baking down when it’s 90 plus 32 plus Celsius 35 Celsius 95 degrees Fahrenheit the soil can heat up sometimes the seeds don’t want to germinate because it’s too warm and that’s a thing too seeds won’t germinate when it’s too cold some seeds won’t germinate when it’s too warm over your space where you’re growing your cool crops now in August you can put shade cloth and that will help um cool the soil and get your cool crops established other cool crops, carrots, um, radishes, lettuce, spinach, they’re going to go in at different times. The crops that I gave you first, the brascas mostly, they need a bit of a longer growing period. So, that that’s the first wave that goes in. Ask me questions about the fall garden. Um, and I’ll talk more about that shortly. All right, Janet, what can I do to avoid tomato cracking due to constant rain? I’m in Maryland zone 8 and has been raining almost every day. You won’t like my answer, but there is nothing that you can do. You can plant crack resistant varieties which have a thicker skin next year, but my, you know, sunolds are splitting like crazy. Some of my other cherries are splitting. You can’t do anything about it. It’s just a matter of a lot of rain coming in. The plant is pulling in the moisture. It’s going to the tomatoes. They actually, you know, want to produce seed and then crack and rot and drop seed. So that they’re doing what they’re they’re meant to do. But when they pull in that water really quickly, thin skinned tomatoes, the cherry types, often crack. And you know, you you sort of I mean, sadly, you have to deal with there’s nothing you’re doing wrong. There’s nothing you can do to fix that. I mean, I guess theoretically you could put plastic down on a slant around your tomato roots wide, like by a good four feet, five feet around them and have the rains hit the plastic and run off. But that would that would be a lot of work. I’m you know, so back to my first answer. There’s not a whole lot you can do. Uh, Delta, um, see your question again. Please put question in front so I can pick it out. I’ll probably miss it. If I do miss your question, put it back out there. What organic methods are there to eliminate aphids eating my vegetable plants? Just did a video on that if you want to go look at it. It’s a stronger mix of oil and soap sprayed on my kale brassacas. It controls white flies. If you’ve not used sprays before or a new spray to your garden, test spray. Wait 48 hours. to make sure it does no damage to the plants. In this video, I think it was like I don’t know, let’s just say 2 tablespoons of oil, one tablespoon of of soap in a gallon of water or 3.7 L. If you’re not spraying the brassacas, use that at half strength. But I have a lot of videos on ways to control aphids on my channel. Fay, I think I have some kind of bacterial wilt going on with one of my um Kentucky tomatoes. What treatment should I do with the soil after I put the plant in the trash? You can’t really do anything. Um you can not plant tomatoes there for a year or something like that. You know, theoretically you could put clear plastic over it, solarize it, but you want to make sure you have, you know, what the issue was and that it’s a soilborn disease issue, you know, but it’s really hard to treat. There’s viral issues that get in the plant and you can’t really control them with an antifungal spray. There’s bacterial issues which I suppose can get inside the plant too from the root system but there’s bacteria that sits on the leaves you can manage that with an antifungal very often. Um you know but ultimately if you’re sure it’s a issue in the soil and you’re worried that it’s going to overwinter you would not plant your crop there that was damaged by it. Um, other potential things you can do, which I’ve done in the past. I’ve done um a hydrogen peroxide soaking of my soil for certain things, but I’m not sure exactly how you would do that for wilt and how effective it would be. You know, if you want to research that, you could. Cat. Um, question. Always struggle to do fall crops and and and cover crop. Not sure how beneficial cover crop is for the spring. Seems to loosen my soil, but always torn between fall crop and cover crop. I don’t think cover crops in your um home garden have a lot of value. And here’s why. Because it’s a smaller garden and maybe you’re doing compost. Um you’re putting your leaves away or whatever. You can add all the organic matter in as compost in the late fall or spring. Or you can drop leaves, cut grass in your beds, you know, late fall, let the worms and stuff break it down. That’s going to pro provide plenty of nutrition for your garden. The cover crops, you know, I consider cutting my clover that’s all over my lawn as a cover crop. I’m just cutting it and then I’m composting it. If you have beds that you’re not going to use and you don’t want to use that, then the cover crop is great for erosion. Helps bring in, you know, the organic matter. You you chop it up, you turn it over, whatever you want to do, it’s there, but there’s no real need for it. Cover crops are more effective for small-cale farming, bigger areas, places that um, you know, have acreage and you want to drop in clover, you know, an annual clover or annual, you know, cover crop. That helps greatly because you’re not spreading compost over, you know, 100 acres. You’re just growing the cover crop. In a smaller garden, it’s just easier to add that stuff in without the cover crop. Ari My lettuce leaves are pale, whitish, and kind of wilty. Edges are brown in places. Only thing I finally saw were teeny tiny whitish bugs all around the soil. I mean, they can be a light a small bug sapping the um well, taking the sap, taking the moisture out of your plant. I’m not sure where you’re growing. Here in Maryland, my lettuce would get beat up and bolt and it’s just not going to do good. it’s way too hot. So, that can also be a factor that’s impacting your plants. Now, lettuce is a cool weather crop and maybe we’ll talk more about the fall gardening. So, for the leafy greens, like around August 15th, I drop in spinach seeds. They like cooler temperatures. Lettuce seeds. Um, you still have time to put in some kale, but it’s really the lettuce and the spinach I do about mid August here. Around September 1st, I will put in some arugula, some other leafy greens, and the cooling temperatures really help those plants thrive. It’s kind of tough to put sprays on lettuce because the leaves are so thin and fragile. So, I don’t really have a recommendation for that, unfortunately. Um, I might plant more lettuce somewhere else. Janet, do it yourself fertilizer for Phoenix. There’s do-it-yourself fertilizer for Yeah. for fruing cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers. Um I I don’t I don’t really like taking leaves of something comfrey or whatever, nettles, putting in water, soaking it, and then pouring it onto the plant. That’s sometimes the the fertilizer people talk about. The best DIY fertilizer is compost. You know, if you have the space and you have, you know, space for a 4 foot circle pen or something, fill it with leaves, fill it with your grass clippings, fill it with whatever. That compost is the best DIY fertilizer. My best tomatoes and best beans literally grow out of the compost pile. I don’t care for them. I don’t water them. I don’t treat them with sprays. They’re strong and superior. So, compost is the number one DIY fertilizer. Your plants need organic matter. If you’re talking more about a water soluble fertilizer, I mean, you can soak compost, you can do different things. It’s just a lot of work and it’s not that much NPNK. I would rather just use a water-soluble organic base fertilizer. I’m affiliated with Agrothrive. That’s a great one. Fish emulsion works. You can use it at a at a diluted rate. It’s going to be like any DYI fertilizer you do. Um, you know, over time I just moved away from that. I used to like to do it. It was fun, but as my garden got bigger, it it just wasn’t really practical. Question. One planting of my sugar baby watermelons took a while to take off. Do smaller leaves mean less fruit production overall? It can be. I mean, sometimes the the pumpkins, the watermelons, melons take time to get started, but once they get growing, they really grow quickly. And sometimes pumpkins and melons establish anchor roots at different points of the plant, and the plants just take off. But generally speaking, a plant that has been sort of bonsaied and small is going to produce less and you might see like a pump or a watermelon forming not a lot of leaves and it will impact the growth. It just depends on how things turn out kind of going forward. Uh Blasterman again everybody put question in front of your question. I Googled lens sweet potato leaves and it said feathery model virus. What should I do? I I don’t know. You want to make sure that’s what it is. If it is a virus, a virus impacts the plant internally. You can’t change that. Sometimes the virus depending on what it does may impact the leaves. Yet the sweet potato will still form. You can give it some water soluble fertilizer higher in nitrogen. Keeps the leaves going. Sometimes the plant works it out, but if your plants have a virus, you can’t get rid of it. All right. So, now it’s kind of getting busy. If you want to do a super chat, um, I will answer that with priority. And again, if you like this format, you see the people with the stars. I’m looking for questions now. If you see people with the circle and stars, they are perk members. You can join perk membership. Here is my YouTube page. Um, you go to my YouTube page, you’ll see my video playing, my intro video, and right before that, you’ll see a long bar. It says memberships. And all the way at the end on the right side is the join button. That’s how you join perk memberships. All right. So, when it gets busy, the chat really moves. Oh my goodness, there’s a lot of questions. All right, Becky, how do you water deeply? Is recommended for a good root system without tomatoes cracking. As soon as they feel dry, I water deeply than my fruit crack. You can’t fix that. Certain varieties of tomatoes crack more. That’s just the way it is. If you don’t like those tomatoes, replace them. A deep watering is kind of that thing you hear deep water once or twice a month or once or twice a week. Well, nobody knows what that is. So, if you’re flooding the area with lots of water to get down 12 in, that’s just going to be a lot of water and all the surface roots are going to quickly pull it in. You can skip the deep watering. You don’t necessarily need a deep watering. They send out tons of surface roots. Water naturally goes down. And with compost or mulch over your soil, it stays moist. So you could water maybe, and this all depends on how much rain you get and how hot your temperatures are, but let’s say three times a week with just a soaking of the top four in that might slow cracking down, give the plants enough moisture. But there’s no specific technique like you’re not doing anything wrong. There’s not something you don’t know. It’s just the nature of tomatoes. Rabbits have eaten all my sweet potato leaves. Will my tubers still grow? What should I use to manage my sweet potatoes? You’ll have to put chicken wire around them. The leaves will grow back quickly. And yes, sweet potatoes will come. But for rabbits, um I have deer that get in and eat them. They have to be protected. Nancy, I always appreciate the plug for perk memberships. She’s a perk member. So is Caroline. So is Golden Sparrow. Can you please do a video on the sauce you make with the tomatoes? I have one. If you look up rustic tomato sauce, you’ll find the videos on how I make it. I might do one again, but um there’s definitely one on there. Question. Vazzle. I planted beans last week week. Is it too late? No. So, I mean, we’re talking about the fall garden today and kind of getting plans and getting the crop started. There’s still time to plant cucumbers, zucchini, squash, bush beans, and probably even pole beans and other plants for the summer in the Maryland garden, in my garden. So, you have plenty of time for that. So, going back to um the fall garden, you’re thinking about plants that can take the frost. So, you want to know your last frost date or your first frost date, sorry, first frost date. Mine’s around the end of October. You want to look at the seed pack and it might say 75 days to maturity and then you want to add 15 days to that. So if for instance the pea plants you put them in now they take 70 days to produce you want to add 15 days so that the frost doesn’t come because peas are one cool weather crop where the leaves can be impacted by frost and be okay but the pods can’t. But you’re also harvesting over a longer period of time. So, say the pea plants take 70 days to mature and begin harvesting. Your frost day is October 1st. You’d want to count back September, August, July. That’s 90 days. You probably missed the window. If the frost isn’t coming till November 1st, you have October, September, August. You could get your peas in now. Cover them over with shade cloth because the heat will kind of mess up the growth. Keep the soil cooler. Shade cloth is a great tool to cool an area where you want to plant the cool weather crops. So, the point being is you’d want to get your peas started now. You want to get the brassasica started around August 1st, moving into that cool season. Leafy greens like spinach and lettuce about August 15th to really September 15th. I mean, you have a span. I’m just giving you kind of the start dates for things. Radishes will bolt. So, I won’t be planting radishes till the end of August. Also, with your fall garden, you can keep planting. So, like I can do radishes just say August 15th and then I can put more radishes in September 7th and then probably more radishes in September 21st. So, you can put these cool crops in in waves so that you want you can experiment and see what works best. Maybe you put radishes in August 1st. They just grow leaves. They bolt. They’re messed up. But these August 21st radishes you put in are perfect. They develop really nicely. So, you’re going to have to experiment when you put in these cool crops into the warmer warmer temperatures. Being able to take a frost, not a heavy freeze, but a frost. Most of these crops can just keep growing pretty well into like maybe say October 31st is your first frost date, but you don’t really get heavy freezes of the ground until the end of November. So, you have a longer span to grow a lot of these cool weather crops. My spinach over winters here in Maryland. It can freeze solid and it continues to grow. Other plants that you can put in now, definitely you can direct seed carrots, beets, turnipss. They’ll all do well in the cool weather. Um I’m putting carrots now, you know, in they’re in a shadier part where sunflowers shade that area. So they’re doing pretty good. Um so you get the idea that the fall garden is totally doable for all of us. the date of when to put the seeds in. I can’t exactly tell you unless you live in Maryland. Um, but you have a wide range. So, experiment and get those crops in. And as your summer garden gets beat up and we’re beat up ourselves, you’re going to have all these beautiful cool crops, you know, growing and really starting to thrive in September, October. Shirley, have you ever seen a tomato plant stem that has brown lines across the stem? Well, you blight will cause brown lines up and down on the stem. If the all the leaves are green and it’s just on the stem, it’s probably nothing to worry about, but if you have issues on the leaves and the stem, it could be a blight. I would just spray an antifungal. But on a healthy plant growing, I’ve not just seen it there for for no reason. A squirrel is eating all my figs. Have you had any luck battling squirrels? Yes, you have to trap and release them. Squirrels are territorial. That squirrel will keep coming back. You know, it’s up to you. Humane trap. You trap them, you release them. Squirrel problems gone. But there’s nothing you you sprays aren’t going to really work. And that that’s really the only way to get them. I mean, I suppose you could shoot them if you want, but I have to relocate animals at times. All right, Elizabeth, I live in zone 8A. When should I start Brussels and cauliflower and all that? Well, generally speaking, and it’s I can’t give you a date, but if the temperature is staying 90 above, you know, 90 plus Fahrenheit, 32 plus Celsius, it’s just too warm. You’re kind of looking for maybe four weeks left of those temperatures and then the temperatures to start coming down. So whatever that matches in 8A about four weeks before the temperatures dropping into the 80s into the upper 70s I would plant the cauliflower like Brussels sprouts. It’s a timing thing. I mean there’s nothing wrong with like planting some seeds now and then planting some seeds in a month and just seeing how things go. What would you feed cucumbers with? I’ve already got too high phosphorus in my soil. Um, in that case, you know, Alaska brand fish emulsion is five nitrogen, one phosphorus, one potassium. So, that’s pretty low. I would go with that. Um, you can just put down compost. Uh, I’m just thinking I don’t, you know, it depends on what your cucumbers need, but you know, 511 NPNK from Fish Emotion is pretty good. Question. My super sweet 100 tomatoes show yellow leaves with outbrunning on top and wilting. What should I do? There’s nothing you can really do. Anytime you have a plant that’s struggling, you’re not sure what’s going on, give it a water-soluble fertilizer with nitrogen. You know that it has what it needs to grow and then it’s just usually a function of letting the plant adjust to temperatures, maybe heavy rains. If there’s a chance you’re woefully underwatering it, certainly water the plant. But like many areas right now, there’s a heat dome, there’s lots of rain. It’s probably more due to that. And there’s not a whole lot you can do. If the area is getting pounded by the sun, you can put up a shade cloth, cool the area down. That helps a tomato plant survive. Serena, also a perk member. If potatoes are growing on top of the soil, yes, cover them up. If a potato is popping out of the soil, it’s going to green and that green can be toxic to us. Not It’s not going to kill us, but it’s going to make you not feel good. Cover it over. Keep it from turning green. Anything will work. Soil, compost, a cloth. Karen perk member, I do. I still have time for more red beets. Yeah, I’m going to be planting some beets um this week. Urban Chicken Mama also a perk member along with Nenah questions. Some of my brasas didn’t flower or bolt. Should I let them be and see if they produce in the cool weather? Um, I would, you know, if they’re not taking up space, let them go. Like your brassacas of kale typically don’t bolt. Collards typically bolt. Cauliflower, broccoli typically bolt. All the leaves are edible. So worst cases, you’re going to get really nice leaves and you can use them, you know, like kale. JT is a perk member. Well, I’m glad you all turned out. I’m planting my problematic tomato and peppers. I’m replanting my problematic tomatoes and peppers. How big around the plants to minimize the root damage. So, you’re taking your tomatoes and peppers from a problematic pot. I think or soil or wherever moving them. And the answer is as big as you can. They send out surface roots wider than my arms and deep. So, you’re not going to get them all. So, you just want to get as big of a ball as you can and move them to another place. All right. Where are we at? Oh, we’re at 11:36 already. So, about got about another seven minutes or eight minutes. All right. So, the fall garden can really start being planned out now. And you’re looking to grow them in a warmer soil, you know, to get them growing into size and to germinate. Use a shade cloth if you need to. You’re going to have to experiment with the timing for when to put the seeds in the ground, and that can be from really today all the way towards the end of August for the crops vary. But you’re going to have a nice growing season and they’re going to germinate and grow really quickly because the soil is warm. It’s not like this spring where we’re doing transplants indoors because the ground is too golden and we’re growing plants six or eight weeks. They’re going to really take off now. So, I would experiment. You know, just about anything cool weather related can be put into the ground over the next four weeks depending on where your garden is and then pass that too for certain crops. So you have a lot of time. Cheers to Ontario. I have a small trellus with about nine green bean plants. It’s overcrowded for sure. Will that prevent the beans from sprouting? I haven’t gotten one be yet. Bean yet. Lots of green growth. I mean, it can. I don’t know. I mean, if you’re in the ground, you’re probably fine. I mean, you can thin them if you want, but they should still produce. That’s the goal of the plant. You know, keep up on the feeding and watering, even though beans can fix their own nitrogen, but they should be okay. My tomatoes get blossom and rot when they start to turn red. no rot before they have color. Should I pick earlier or can I do something else? So, Roma type tomatoes tend to get blossom and rot pretty easily. If you’re growing in a container, blossom and rot happens more often and it’s usually a function of not consistent watering. You still add in lime and there’s, you know, blossom nrot videos I have of where you make a lime slurry, put it into your around your your tomatoes. That ensures that calcium is there. That’s what causes the blossom in rot. But it’s usually not that there’s no calcium. It’s that there’s a watering issue and the root systems can’t pull the calcium in. So you want consistent watering to make sure the plant is pulling in the nutrients it needs. So what it does is it’s not getting enough calcium. It takes calcium from that tomato, sends it to the upper growth of the plant. You get blossom and rot. You can cut it off and still eat the tomato. Um, but it’s typically a watering issue and certain varieties of tomatoes are more prone to it and you see it more often in the Roma types and you see it more often in containers. And for instance, if you miss watering just once, like a 3-day period goes when it’s 90 plus Fahrenheit, 32 plus Celsius, the root system dries out in your container, most likely you’re going to see blossom and rot because the roots are not damaged. They’re not pulling in nutrients. They have to regrow. So, it really becomes an issue. Um, Van, I think I answered it, but it is not too late for beans. You got plenty of time or Vazzle. My butternut squash have green lines at the top of the stem. Does that mean it’s not ready yet? It depends on the variety, but usually butternut squash get to a nice creamy darker tan color. So, it sounds like it’s too early for them. All right, let’s see where we at. All right, we’re going to wrap up in five minutes. So again, I do the live um public Q&A’s garden grounds, what we’re doing today, every second and fourth Thursday at 11:00 a.m. Stay on for about 45 minutes, light subject, and I will try and answer as many questions as I can. If you like this format, I have perk memberships, $3.99 a month. I do this format, I’m going to put it into the chat. Um I do this format about five times a month, plus some other things. you know, there’s higher level tiers if you’re interested in those with some shop discounts, but I do this format five times a month. It’s a smaller group. It’s a wonderful group of people. It’s all the people you see with circles and stars in their names right now. Um, the group helps each other out. You can kind of match up with people in your similar zone, but we really just talk about what’s going on in the garden and, you know, keep each other on track for for the season. So, if you go to the link that I just dropped, that’s my YouTube channel. You’ll see my video playing and then right below that, I think it says maybe memberships or something. It’s a long line. And all the way to the right, you see a join button that gets you to perk memberships. All right, let me find out here where I left off. Jay Dixon, just I see you strengthen my blossom and rock question. Answer. All right, Jay, I’ll take your name down. I’m not sure if I’m going to do a moderator yet, but I will put your name down. Um, and if you actually email me at the rust um the [email protected], we can talk. Is it too late to direct sew pumpkin seeds? I don’t think so. Um, I would look for a variety that matures a little bit more quickly. I just mine are like 3 weeks old. Um, but I wanted July, August, September, and I wanted them forming in October. But I think you have time for pumpkins. I have rust on my 4year-old Saskatoon berry bush from a nearby juniper. Never get vile viable berries. Do I need to move it? I don’t think you’re going to be able to move it far enough because again the fungus moves and floats in the air. Um you could certainly try and move it. Um, I’m not familiar with that berry bush, but you might want to try antifungal sprays, uh, organic type stuff that won’t impact the berry and spray regularly. That can help. But moving it, it it will be you’d really have to move it far. And I don’t know if you have that space. Question from Steve. My honey bed is bulbing but rapidly is overtaken by barnyard or Johnson grass. When I pull it, the bulbs get pulled up. Do you advise waiting until harvest to remove the invasive grass? Yeah, I mean if it’s messing your bulbs up, you know, I mean, you can let it be there. I’m not familiar with that grass, but if it’s it’s the grass that sends the wire roots everywhere and just spreads, that can be a problem. So, you do want to get rid of that. If it’s just more of an annual grass that just spreads across the surface, you can wait. You can trim the grass down and just make sure the greenery of the onions stay above it. I mean, it’s good to take nutrients from the area, but it I understand what you’re saying because I was just weeding some stuff and it pulled up some larger onions. My bell peppers look great and have many peppers on the plant. Should I fertilize them now to help them grow bigger? I mean, if you think your soil is good, you really don’t have to feed them. Um, but if they’re looking great, they’re looking good, you haven’t fed them for a while, giving them a water soluble won’t hurt them. It’s not going to wreck anything. um putting down compost across the top, you know, letting the water the rain wash stuff in there, the the waterings wash nutrients into the soil. That’s all great to to do. So, I would give them something. I always hesitate sometimes because it just depends on how well prepared your soil is. There might be plenty of nutrients in there. Derek, also a perk member. I’m a little late, but can you give me a synopsis on what to start once we pull all the dead dying plants? So, I mean, it’s a lot and I’ve been talking about it before and in, you know, the next perk, um, memberships. I’ll talk about it, but it’s really all your brasacas. I mean, I can do a recap. kale, collards, cauliflower, Brussels, um cabbage, broccoli can all kind of be seated like around August 1. You know, two weeks into August, I might do my spinach and lettuce, arugula around the end of August. But you can also put in carrots now, beets, turnups. There’s just so much that you can do that me just throwing the list out to you isn’t going to help that much. Um, I have videos on it. You can check those out. We can talk at the next perk membership, but now it’s really about figuring out the timing because you want the temperatures to being, you know, going towards the cooler end. So, you want like four more weeks of 90 plus degree temperatures, um, 32 plus degrees Celsius, about a four-week window of those temperatures, and then they start cooling off and that’s when you can start planting the cool weather crops. Let them grow for that four weeks, but then they’re going to be hit by cool weather. And that’s just generally speaking because all gardens are going to vary. Karen, how do I know if my tomatoes are lacking calcium? Can I hurt to give them calcium? No. A bag of garden lime. Anyone really? It doesn’t matter. Lightly sprinkling it across your garden beds, watering it in, your plants have enough calcium. Where are we at? Oh, 11:47. All right. I’m gonna have to wrap up. I’m gonna just buzz real quickly. Terry, I’m confused about spraying for pests. I don’t have any infestations. But if I find a single bug almost every day and some eggs, which I destroy, anything I can spray to repel the bugs. Um, yeah. I mean, you’re going to have to use something that kills them. It could be neem oil for chewing insects. Um, soapy water spray with oil for softbodied insects. You can use spinad organic um dusts. I mean, there’s a lot you can use if you’re managing them. Okay. You know, there may not be a whole lot more you can do, but there’s nothing you can spray that just gets rid of everything. And then you don’t worry about it. You have to do what you’re doing. I planted watermelon seeds early this spring. How long does it take for them to produce fruit? Um, it could be anywhere from like 70 to 110 days, but they should start producing, you know, you should start seeing watermelon about four to six weeks after they germinated. Is it too late to direct sew pumpkin seeds? No, I think you have time. All right, so we’re gonna end there. perk memberships. I will have the August schedule up. You can just go to memberships on my channel, see what’s going on, or check the posts. That will be up within that first couple of days of August. It’ll be all the events. And then this was the fourth uh Thursday of July. So, every second and fourth Thursday of the month, I do this public live Q&A. So, I will be doing two in August. again. Second Thursday, 4th Thursday, 11:00 a.m. All right, I will see you guys next time. Good luck in your garden. Stay protected from the heat dome or whatever. I’ve read, you know, the temperatures are crazy. Shade cloth will help your summer garden.