Plant Garlic & Last Minute Fall Crops (Vegetable Gardening Live Monthly Questions & Answers E-63)

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grounds. We’ll get started in about 30 seconds. Please let me know if you can see my garden, hear my voice, and like I said, we’ll get started uh shortly. If you have any questions about vegetable gardening, that’s what gardening grounds is all about. This is my public mentoring Q&A that I do every second and fourth Thursday of the month at 11:00 a.m. Just drop your question into the chat, but put question before your question so that I can easily pick it out. and just give me two seconds. Just set some some things up here. All right, we should be good to go. Again, I’m just looking for quick confirmation that you guys can see the video, hear my voice. We’ve had problems in the past. Let me pull up the chat here. See if there’s any questions. Thank you, Nancy. And if you do, if you have any questions, please throw them out there. Today’s light subject is going to be on uh garlic and some of the cool weather crops you can plant if you, you know, are planting them last minute. They grow really well in the cool weather. Don’t mind the frost. We’ll be talking about that. Um David has a question. Do you have any advice on growing garlic in an earth box? You We’ll start with that. We’ll get to the garlic and the light subjects in a second. in an earth box or a container, you know, as long as you have about eight inches of depth, 20 cm, you just don’t want it to freeze through. So, number one, if you’re in an area that doesn’t get really deep freezing winters, you’re going to be fine. But, you want a little bit of size to it. Um, you’re always going to plant your garlic 2 to 4 inches deep. I’ll be talking about that shortly, but nothing really special. You do want to make sure you hit your earth boxes. Um, and I’m, you know, let me know if I don’t quite have the idea right on your earth box, but I’m considering it more of a container. You do want to hit it with a water-soluble fertilizer when you plant the garlic and in the spring, make sure you have nutrients in there, but there’s nothing really special, you know, when it comes to growing garlic. Eaglet, have you found overwin overwintering pepper plants like jalapenños to be worth it for next season versus starting from seed zone 7B? Excellent question. I have done it twice. I find it not worth it at all. Um, reason being in Maryland zone seven areas, we do have a longer growing season. I And first of all, bringing a plant inside, you got to prep it well. If you bring a plant in from outdoors, you’re going to be bringing in insect eggs, insects, all kinds of stuff that hatches because your house is warm and it gets all over the place. So, that’s one issue. You can fix that by putting sand in the top and doing some things. But then I lost half of the plants both times. The ones that survived, they didn’t get particularly bigger. You know, what I found was seed starts work well. Start your peppers a little bit earlier. Start them in larger containers. Get a nice big root ball basically growing. Don’t worry about how big the upper canopy growth is for your seed starts. you get a big root system out into your garden as a transplant, you’re going to have awesome peppers. I don’t see the benefit for doing that. If you have a short growing season, not like unlike Maryland, if you have a short growing season, maybe you do want to overwinter peppers. All right. Do I use the bricks refractor? Is is that for measuring sugar sweetness of tomatoes? Um I don’t use it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it used, you know, but I don’t use it. And then a water filter, a water filter on your faucet um for city water life. That’s a myth. That doesn’t really cause an issue. Remember, microbes are built to multiply and there’s billions in your soil. And let’s just say city water kills some of them. They multiply at a exponential rate that is just crazy. So your city water is not going to wipe out your soil life. There’s no need to filter it. If you believe, you know, there’s a reason to it. It’s just extra work. Um, as I get older and I get busier in the garden, I want to cut things down. Filtering my water would be something I’ve never done, but it’s not necessary. I just moved to this property that I’m at um in 2019. So, it’s it’s been almost it has been actually six years. Prior to that, I gardened off of city water, straight water, 15 years or so. Plants are perfectly fine. So, and make sure you guys put um question mark or put a question or several question marks before your question so I can pick it out. Things are moving slowly so I can read them. Um, any special instructions on growing elephant garlic? I’m in South Texas, so no problem with the cold weather. Um, no. I mean, elephant garlic, I don’t think it’s technically garlic, but it looks similar. You would grow it the same way. Um, all I would say is too much heat can be an issue. So, you always want to check when you’re growing stuff in Texas. You know, in your cooler parts of the season, sometimes that’s better. or growing through the coldest part and then harvesting before it gets really hot. Let’s just talk about garlic now. So, the the basic setup and this will and this would be the same thing I would do for elephant garlic. And I’m going to go right over the basics as if you’ve never grown garlic before. So, this is a garlic bulb. That’s the bottom. That’s the roots. And up top is the point. That’s where the green growth comes out. And this is what we’re going for. You know, we’re trying to get a really nice garlic bulb. And if you break this off, you end up with a garlic clove. The point is where the green growth grows. Here’s an example. You can see that’s where the greenery is going to come from. The bottom are the roots just like this. You don’t have This is peeled. You don’t have to peel off the paper on your garlic to plant it. You always want to put it root side down, point side up. If you can’t figure it out, just plant it on its side. The plant will figure it out. No worries, no issues. When you’re planting garlic, you want to go down 2 to 4 in uh 5 to 10 cm. And you want to get it to a depth that your ground doesn’t freeze. And in Maryland, 2 to 4 inches is fine. Our ground doesn’t freeze like that. You never want your garlic freezing all the way through. If you’re in an area that gets, you know, really cold winter temperatures for prolonged periods, you could go down maybe to six inches. I wouldn’t go too deep, but what you do is you plant it around 4 in deep. You put on a layer of mulch. 4 in, 6 in, 8 in, doesn’t matter. Put it on when the cold starts rolling in. You know, you don’t have to do it right away. That will help insulate the garlic, keeps the heat around there from the earth, the heat that comes up from the earth, and you’re going to be fine. We’ll talk about soil prep in a second, but generally speaking, 2 to 4 in deep, you let it go. We’ll talk about soft neck garlic and hard neck garlic, too. All right, questions. Small garlic cloves can grow big bulbs. Last season garlic wasn’t great and smaller bulbs than normal. Don’t have any big bulbs saved for replanting. Yeah. So, a smaller clove. I don’t know if we have any on here. You know, I mean, generally speaking, I like, you know, the cloves to be about this to be about this size for planting. However, smaller cloves I don’t know if I have any in here. You know, I mean, these Here we go. That was several. Some of them are going to be smaller, you know. They’re going to look like this. Let me get it a little bit closer. Here we go. They’re still going to produce. You can get smaller than that. What I do is I take a lot of the smaller ones and I just plant them in a hole together and I get smaller bulbs. Um, but it’s just a way to use the smaller cloves. But see, in theory, wellfed, taking care of them, they should form bulbs for you. Zone uh 8A, will next week be too late to plant garlic and onions? It’s raining here most of the weekend. You have plenty of time for garlic. So, garlic planting here in Maryland, you just have to get it into the ground before the ground freezes and you’re good. So that’s fine. Onions, if you’re putting in seeds or you’re putting them in to overwinter, you still have time for that. I just I don’t plant onion seeds now because I just find they don’t overwinter well in my garden, but you do have time for that. Serena has had her garlic in um the refrigerator for four weeks. You can plant your garlic anytime in October. Really, there’s no rush. Anytime in October. All right. So, let’s just talk about the two types of garlic. There’s the soft neck garlic where coming up, you know, basically, well, it’s really the bulb. So, when the bulb forms, it sends up the the greenery up here. Soft neck means you could bend it right here, and you don’t feel any resistance there. it. It’s just floppy. You can flop it over. That’s soft neck garlic. Hard neck garlic, you feel a stem in there and when it actually dries, it’s hard. It’s like a stick. That’s the difference. When you’re buying it, you know, online, it’s going to say hard neck garlic. It’s going to say soft neck garlic. Hard neck garlic needs a cold period. That’s why um Serena probably had hers in the refrigerator. You don’t have to put it in the refrigerator. You can just put it in the ground. If your temperatures are falling below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, you know, you basically if you get freezing winters, you end up uh just needing a period of cold for the garlic to say, “Hey, I’m new. Next year, I’m going to grow really fast and I’m going to produce bulbs.” So, the cold period gives the hard neck garlic the signal that winter has come, spring is going to be showing up. I’m going to grow. So the hard neck garlic, I just want to be clear, needs that cold period. Soft neck garlic doesn’t need a cold period. You can plant that just fine here in Maryland, October, November, and then it does fine. It handles it, but it doesn’t need the cold. So if you miss growing garlic, you can buy soft neck garlic, and that’s usually the white garlic you get at the grocery stores. That’s California soft neck garlic. There’s no sprays on there. That’s a myth that there’s inhibitors on there to keep it from growing or whatever. You can buy the soft neck garlic, get it into the ground about 2 in deep. You don’t have to go much further than that. In March or when your soil can be worked, February when it’s not frozen, and that soft neck garlic will take off. Sometimes the spring planted soft neck garlic doesn’t get as big as bulbs as the hard neck, you know, but you’re still going to get garlic. So hard neck needs the cold period of winter. Soft neck doesn’t really need it. Those are your options. Soil setup. Um and then we’ll also get to the, you know, light subject on what you can plant now in your fall garden. You don’t need tons of fertilizer. Um I used to talk about bone meal. Get in bone meal. It’s good for the root system. This is like 12 bucks a bag. It’s three pounds. Commercial gardening has kind of ripped us off by, you know, taking products, jacking up the price, saying it’s organic. It is. Bone meal takes years to break down. So, if you put bone meal into your soil now for garlic, it’s not going to really break down and give much to the garlic. It will next year and a year after, all your plants actually need compost. Doesn’t need, you know, high amounts of phosphorus or anything like that. Just having NPNK, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium there is what your garlic needs. So I would mix in some compost 4 6 in deep, 10, 15 cm deep. Loosen the soil up a little bit. Nothing fancy. Put the garlic in 2 to 4 in deep. Water it in with a water soluble fertilizer. The NPNK will stay there. You know, it will use it over the winter as it’s developing a root system. Come spring, hit it with a water-soluble fertilizer. You’re good to go. You really don’t need anything fancy. Same thing for containers. Some compost, loosen it up. Water-soluble fertilizer, you know, let it go. It It’s really easy to grow. Let me clear this out. And hold on. Had garlic in my keyboard. All right. So, that’s the basic setup for planting the garlic. Garlic you want to plant maybe four, six inches apart, up to eight inches apart. You can experiment with how closely you put it together. Closer you put stuff together, the more they compete for fruit for fertilizer and food nutrients. So just maybe give them some extra water soluble fertilizer. Sweet potato vines are finally starting to bloom. Is this my sign they’re about ready for harvest? Sweet potatoes just take a long time to grow. So you want 110 100 plus days. I usually harvest mine and sometimes they don’t flower and sometimes they do. I usually harvest mine when the first frost comes, hits the leaves and then I harvest my sweet potatoes. So you’re really looking more at length of time and it’s probably like 110 days, something like that. All right. So again, if you guys have questions, please go and um just put question or question marks in front of your question. I will answer any question related to vegetable gardening. So garlic again, basic 2 to 4 in deep. If you’re in a really cold area, six inches of mulch on top of that as the freezes are coming. You don’t have to mulch it right away. The thing to keep in mind and a question I get a lot is when you put your garlic in, depending on your weather, you’re excuse me, you’re going to get growth from the garlic. You may see two, four, six inches of green growth. Don’t worry about it. It’s going to get beat up. It might turn yellow. It could die off. All you want your garlic to do from October, November, and again, you’re planting this before the ground freezes, whatever works in your zone. All you want it to do over the winter, is develop a really nice root system. Don’t worry about the upper growth. Come spring, as the ground begins to thaw, you hit it with a water-soluble fertilizer, has a great root system. It’s established, it went through its cold period, it’s going to grow, and it’s going to bulb up for you. And then you know it’s ready once the greenery is nice and tall, begins to yellow and it just flops over a little bit. That’s usually for me end of June, you know, for garlic. All right, any last question? Well, not last questions. We’ll go until about quarter of 12. Does spacing affect yield with different varieties of pepper? I grow New Mexico, green chilies in New York, 18 in apart. All plants the same size. Some have zero peppers, some 20. No. Well, yeah. I mean, you put stuff really close together, but I grow my peppers two per container like this. So, in one planting hole, I have two pepper plants. The plants are sometimes a little bit smaller, but the yield is much bigger. All right. I just every once I’m in an area where the internet’s not the best. So if this event ever freezes up um I will try and fix it and if there is a good amount of time left I’m going to launch another you know link for the garden grounds. Um, so always go to my YouTube page, click the live tab. That will tell you what live events I have coming up. And if this gets disrupted, if you do that and you go to the live, you’ll see that the new link is there just in case. I just got a message. So, I plant my peppers two per hole. Sometimes the plants are a little bit smaller, but it doesn’t affect the yield. At 18 in, your plant should be doing really well. That’s plenty enough space. You could even go to 12 in if you want to pack more in there. But why some have zero peppers and some have 20, it is not related to the spacing. And I would imagine you’re taking care of them the same way. You know, if one plant has a lot of flowers on it and no peppers, maybe they’re coming. Um, but the spacing for the distance you have should not affect it. Linda, it’s still in the 70s and 80s here. Should I tuck in some herbs and chard and cool season crops in with the with the zucchini cuces and tomatoes or wait till I pull up summer vegges and prep my soil? You don’t have to overly prep the soil. You can just use water- soluble fertilizer for your fall crops really. So, you know, it’s up to you what you want to do. Um there’s no rush. If you have space that you can tuck things around that maybe are slower growers like Swiss chard, you know, maybe tuck that in. Um radishes, some lettucees, different things can probably just be seated after you pull up your crops. But you could do either of them. So to clarify, growing grocery growing grocery store garlic is an option 100%. You can grow grocery store garlic. It does not have inhibitors sprayed on it. That’s just a a myth. It took over the internet um decades ago. I guess you can go to organic stores if you want if you’re not comfortable with whatever non-organic grocery stores. Sometimes they have different selections of veget of uh garlic there. So, you can grow different things. Garlic doesn’t need full sun. I mean, it’s going to need a good six hours, you know, maybe eight hours. It can have some shade. Shade can, you know, drift over it. But generally speaking, you know, it’s not a shade vegetable. And shade’s always a difficult question to ask because some people think six hours is enough. They consider that full sun. And you say shade, they’re talking about four. Some people think a shady area is just eight hours when your garden, you know, otherwise gets 10 hours. Eight hours is a little bit of shade, but it can handle some. to answer that question poorly. Does garlic need a continuous fertilizer schedule during the winter months? Nope. Once you have your garlic in the ground, in the containers, you know, and I was saying, you know, maybe mix and compost if you have it. If you want to put it in some organic granular stuff, go ahead. Um, plant it. Hit it with a water soluble. Make sure the soil is moist. You don’t need to really water it. Usually in the winter, um, fall, it rains enough, stuff is damp. you know, garlic. I don’t know if I can find it now. Oh, yeah. This one just sprouted in my refrigerator like garlic does. It’s going to live off of this for a while. So, it doesn’t really need a lot of care. So, you’re not feeding it, you’re not watering it. Come spring, maybe when you see some green growth perking up or it’s getting warm, your ground’s no longer frozen, that’s when you hit it with a water-soluble fertilizer. mid growth which would be around May I guess for me I will hit it again with a water-soluble fertilizer. All right. So again throw your questions up with question in front so that I can pick them out. We have a good number of people watching so sometimes the chat thread goes pretty quickly. So, every second and fourth Thursday, 11:00 a.m., I do garden grounds with a light subject and I will answer any questions that you have, you know, related to vegetable gardening, maybe some other questions if you want to throw them out there. I also have perk memberships, $3.99 a month. There’s some other tiers, but the 3.99 a month gets you five of these events every month for an hour. The group is very knowledgeable from across the US mostly. you can find people in your garden zone and really five times a month for an hour we get on and you know answer questions and help people along sometimes you know now that it’s winter or fall there’s not a lot going on but we really talk about stuff that is happening in our garden as it happens so it’s a great place for mentoring and you just go to any of my videos you’ll see perk membership you click that link and you can join So bone meal, I was just talking about bone meal. I’ll pull it back out again. Does bone meal good for planting? It’s not bad for planting, it’s just not necessary. The longer that I do this, and I used to recommend bone meal, blood meal, all that all the time. And it works. It’s just pricey. 12 bucks for three pounds of bone meal is just a lot. And this, just so you know, is steamed. um usually cattle bones that’s just crushed and pulverized. So, it’s just shredded bones and you put it in a garden in your beds. Microbes have to break it down. This takes a while to be broken down. So, it doesn’t do a whole lot for the garlic you’re planting this year. Next year, if your garlic is going into that bed, you’re going to have more phosphorus from the bone meal. But, you really only need compost. I mean, I’ll be doing, you know, Q&As’s on that with composting is a light subject. Um, you just need compost. Compost is well below a 111 NPNK. Everything on the earth loves compost. Grows well in compost. My best plants are seeds that just germinate my compost pile. They do really well. So, bone meal isn’t going to give an immediate benefit to your garlic bed. it will in the future, but again, compost and water-soluble fertilizers really all you need in in my opinion. I don’t have a seed company that I’d like to buy garlic from. I just sometimes look on Etsy. I look around. I look for a price and I just buy it that way. How often does garlic need watering to grow to at least the same bulb size as the original bulb if it’s dry? Not sure what the last part means, but you’re going to be watering, you know, come spring at least once or twice a week initially for the cooler part of spring and then you’re watering two or three times after that. They do need a good amount of water. Without water and enough moisture, your plants can’t pull in nutrients. So, yeah, the garlic can survive. It’s going to survive off of what it creates if it doesn’t have enough moisture. But that’s a hard question for me to answer because everybody’s area is different, you know, and and we get different rain. Welcome Yellow 75 1975. Thank you for joining. Hi Gary, I’m a first year grower. Some type of worm is eating my sweet potato leaves. I have another month of growing. Also, should I add fertilizer? If you have a good month of growing, I would hit your sweet potatoes with a water soluble fertilizer. Water soluble always means the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, other nutrients can be um absorbed right away by the plant. So, you know, hit them with the water soluble. Now, if you’ve identified or you’ve seen the worm eating the leaves, I would use any insect dust. Seven is not organic. Spinad as a main ingredient is organic, but I would just hit them with the dust just to kill them off. At this point, you know, you probably have enough leaves and they can take the damage and they’re going to be okay. But, you know, if you want to get rid of them, I think insect dust is the best. 5B New York. Can I plant lettuce and spinach together in a fivegallon fabric pot that already has a pepper that’s on its way out? So five gallon pot is not big. The pepper is dying. I would just number one I would just cut the pepper off when it’s dead and break it off. Leave the earth. You could put, you know, I’m just trying to think, three gallons, I mean five gallons, maybe three lettuce plants or three spinach plants. Depends on how big you want it to grow. But yes, you could do that. I just wouldn’t over pack it with spinach and lettuce because the spinach sometimes will overgrow the lettuce and shade it out. So just, you know, plant wisely, but you can definitely do that. Rod, when you say wateroluble fertilizer, is that like high NPK? No. Um, it’s like fish emulsion. The number, so the number on a packet like this one is a 460, four nitrogen, six phosphorus. um zero potassium. That number is just telling you how much NPNK is in the product, usually by weight or something like that. Water soluble is Alaska fish emulsion 511. Nothing to do with the numbers. Water soluble means you usually mix that product in water. Whatever nitrogen, phos, or some potassium is in there, when you pour it onto the plant, it’s in a form that the plant can absorb right away into the roots and use. A lot of your 2020s, 1010s, whatever. Um, sometimes they’re usually chemical anyway, but if it’s an organic fertilizer, the microbes have to break down and digest the particles and turn it into a form of NPNK. So you have your slowrelease fertilizers that break down slowly over time and then you have your water soluble that feeds immediately. Garlic scapes only grow from my understanding on hard neck garlic, you know, so that’s one of the benefits. Scapes will grow towards the end of the season when they’re about ready to be harvest. You can pop them off. You can cook with them. They’re a delicacy. If you don’t really want them, break them off so that the energy doesn’t go into thecape development, but goes into the bulb development. But garden scapes are really tasty. All right, so now that and I’ll stay on for another 15 minutes. Um, now that we’re rolling, in some areas it’s getting really cold and the freeze is showing up. Some areas it’s just cooling off. if you were late to getting your fall garden st start started and the cold is really rolling in. Um seeds that you can direct seed now. There’s just five that I recommend. Definitely recommend radishes. They grow really well and when the warm days come, hits the top of the soil, they’re going to germinate quickly. I might have more than five. So, we have radishes. Uh purple top turnipss, great root crops. Uh spinach does nicely because it can take harder freezes. And then you have mustard greens. Mustard green, big leaf is a mustard green. Mizuna, same family. It has the jagged leaves. Mazuna or mustard greens. Bak choy or pac choy. Chinese cabbage loves the cold. If it’s too warm, it bolts and sends up a flower. So, we’ve got radishes, turnipss, spinach, mustard greens. What was the other one? Pak choy. arugula, endive, and those would be the main ones. And you could do some lettuce, too. Of course, there’s no reason. Sometimes lettuce takes a little bit longer to germinate. And lettuce. Those would be the eight main ones that I would grow. Reason being is they’re going to germinate nicely. They can take the frost, heavier freezes, and manage. And you’re going to get a nice production out of those seven crops. When you want to try and put in broccoli or cabbage or cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, they’re just not going to have enough and peas, they’re just going to not have enough time to fully mature and produce what you want. You can plant them, but don’t be disappointed if you don’t get what you want from them. However, you can eat the leaves of all those brassacas. So, you can eat them in salads and stuff like that. Peas are going to germinate. Peas are good to grow, but a hard freeze messes up the pea pod in the flower. So, you can eat the pea tendrils, but those seven would be what I would recommend. All right, if I missed your question, please put it out there. Gonna stay on for another um 13 minutes. just did a video on how to keep deer out of your garden. Um, I have a fence. Fence is always good. Sometimes I leave the gate open. One of the of the deer that came on my property this year figured out how to jump over the gate. I’ve fixed that. But just did a video on just taking metal fencing and creating domes, putting it over your lettuce, putting it in the garden beds. I like it because it’s hard to see with your eyes. So, you can still see all your beautiful plants growing. You don’t have to put, you know, egg fabric over it or any kind of fabric or white cloth. I just don’t like the way that looks. So, I don’t protect my plants that way. But using these simple rainbow cages is a game changer. You know, the deer will not get through that. I’m going to be building a um garden outside of my fence by my other garden and I’m just going to use that as protection and grow leafy greens under there. It’s going to give me a whole lot more growing space and I know the deer can’t get into that. Let me throw that into the chat. So, if you want to check out that video, it’s a really simple build, too. And thank you constants for joining garden mentoring. So I do have the perk memberships $3.99 a month for the first tier. I do this five times and it’s for an hour. The group is smaller usually like really 15 to 25 people. I do this at different times throughout the you know the month. In the beginning of each month in the post section of my YouTube channel if you go to the main page hit posts you’ll see the scheduled events and also there is a live tab. Once I put in the events into the calendar, you can click live on my YouTube page and it will show you all my live events for that month. So, that’s how you find out what’s going on. All right, just trying to figure out where I left off here. Um, all right. Rod question. Any tips for Brussels prune, heavy fertilizer, patience. I would go in the order of patience. They take a while. You can eat the leaves. Keep an eye out for white flies. All your brasacas. I have white flies in my garden now. I’m taking care of those. Are going to attract white flies if they’re in your area. So, keep an eye on that. Fertilize them nicely in the beginning with compost. Always you can throw an organic fertilizer if you want. Compost again is all you really need and hit them mid growth with a water soluble. That should give them enough nutrients. Pruning I found it’s more based on the variety. There’s like the jade cross variety does really nicely of creating the Brussels, the little sprouts. Other crops I’ve grown, they got really tall. I did prune the top of them and it did help with the Brussels sprouts basically forming, but I’ve not found a shorefire timing of when to prune and what variety to prune. So, I mean, you can top it at some point. They can take good cold weather, you know, pretty heavy frost. They can’t take prolonged freezes. It damages them, but you have time with it. Um, I wish I could answer it better, but Brussels are are a little bit tricky. Tastes best now going from summer into the cool weather. When I’ve grown them from spring into the summer, they get a little bit kind of spicy, like, you know, overly hot radish. And I I just don’t like the taste. To grow garlic in a hot climate, you’re going to probably have to grow soft neck garlic because it doesn’t need a cold period. However, I would buy your soft neck garlic, put it in your refrigerator for a couple of weeks, just give it a cold period, plant your soft neck garlic. If you want to try hard neck garlic, I would order it, plant it in the coolest part of your cl of your of your year, but put it in the refrigerator for a good eight weeks because it needs a cold period to kind of set itself up to create bulbs. That being said, I would grow it in the cooler part of your year and you might need to put up some shade cloth to keep the ground cool. You know, um I don’t grow in the hot climate, so I can’t give you an exact way, but definitely use of the refrigerator and some shade cloth if needed. Squash bugs on my cucumber plants here in Florida, I’m guilty of I use seven at times, you know, and for me, you know, I’m like 90% organic. I mostly use compost. Um, I’ll use neem oil, baking soda spray, peppermint oil spray. But if I have an infestation, I will go to something stronger if the organic ways don’t work. You just have to use it strategically and understand what you’re using. What I would say for squash bugs though, you don’t have to use a spray. That’s not the best. I And it’s good you take the flowers off. What I would do for squash is at the base where it comes out of the ground 6 in, 8 in, 10 inches, you can remove those flowers because it’s going to kind of crawl on the ground. Just dust the stem and around the base. That’s where they hang out and that’s going to work for you. The dust lasts longer and you can use it that way. You could try spinad, which is organic. That’s also a dust. I just have found it not to be that effective. All right. Any preference of what to plant in a raised bed uh after harvesting garlic? Nope. You can plant anything. Um I actually grow my garlic outside of my fence because deer leave it alone alone along with onions. So I don’t really add anything to that. I mean they just kind of stay vacant. But you could certainly plant anything that you want. If you have compost, you want to refresh the soil. Um, you know, you don’t have to do anything special to it. And then you can really plant whatever you want in there. Question. After 48 pints and 12 quarts of pickles, my one cucumber plant is coming out today. Congrats on on the on the harvesting. Can I immediately plant my garlic in its space? Sad to pull the plant, but I’m out of cucumber ideas. And you have a lot. um you can pretty much immediately plant the garlic, you know, to the depth that I was talking about. Um if you have other questions, we can talk, you know, at the perk membership events. Um anybody with a circle and a star is a perk member. By the way, you you know, if you can get some compost in there, loosen up the soil, plant whatever you want. Most of your leafy greens and radishes and stuff don’t need a ton of fertilizer. So, there’s plenty of fertilizer already in your garden from the summer. So, plant what you want. Is planting garlic in ground preferable to containers? Not really. I mean, you don’t want a really small container, but if you have a decent sized container, um, you know, I’ve grown in 10 g I’ve grown in five gallon containers, but 10 gallon and right around the edge, like, let me just do it visually. One, two, three. I usually put in six garlic cloves in a 10 gallon pot, maybe up to eight. And they do really well. You do have to stay up on the watering. You do have to feed them a little more, but you know, the container can be very effective. Is it better to use seven dust? If you’re going to use se if seven, just plead it in the outer edges of the leaves at sunset and wash it off so beneficials don’t get insect. Yeah, that’s kind of what I talk about. If you ever have to use any insect dust, first of all, if it’s organic, not organic, whatever you’re using will kill good and bad insects. And in the case what Serena is talking about, when I have cucumber beetles, um I will use the spinad or the seven or any dust just on the outer leaves away from the flower so that dust doesn’t get to the good insects. Cucumber beetles are really uh active at night. They’re going to run through it. It’s going to kill them off. And then I do rinse it off in the morning. Um, so you can have strategies around insect dust, organic or not, because dust laying around on the leaves will impact good and bad insects. It is not, you’re in New York, I don’t think it’s too late to plant kale. It’s going to be close because as it gets colder, it’s going to slow down and growing. Uh, slow down and grow. If you can get transplants, that’s probably best. Um, but depending on what part of New York you’re in, it’s close. My honeydew melons are are 50 the normal size. I’m not I don’t know how to read that. Leaves are dying off. Will they continue to grow or not? Will they ripen after pick a little bigger than softball size? Eastern Long Island. So, if they’re to the close to the size that they’re supposed to be, the dying leaves usually just comes with the cold and stuff like that. It’s not going to get much more from the plant. Anything that the plant has now, it’s going to the melons. You could pick them, let them ripen um inside. If you want, you can leave them till the leaves are mostly gone and pick them. But you’re really at the point now where the plant is giving the melons everything it can and it sounds like it’s out of stuff to give the melons. So it’s really up to you. Let them sit on there for another week or so. Bring them inside. Keep an eye on them though because sometimes they go soft because the whole goal is for it the seeds to develop inside the melon. not the size of the melon, but for the seeds to fully mature and then the plant rots or it smells sweet. Animals come take the seeds, spread them around and the plant, you know, propagates. Is it okay to add some chicken manure to my tall raised beds that have established summer crops? Will it burn my plants? So chicken manure or any manurses except for goat manure because they have like four chambers and um their droppings are like almost totally composted. Anyway, most of your manurs you’re going to want to wait several months before you use it so that it decomposes and breaks down. I don’t think it would necessarily burn your plants because you could just scatter it around thin layer. it’ll get worked into the soil by microbes and rain and you’ll be okay. But generally speaking, you want your manurses to compost down and break down. Can I still plant leafy greens and cabbages in zone 8a? Uh, you can. You have time. I always forget. I’m in seven, so eight is a little bit warmer. You have time to plant just about anything really. Question from Michelle who is a perk member. My strawberries keep getting brown sunken spots. What would you use on them? Strawberry leaves get a fungus at at times and they get my strawberries keep getting brown sunken. All right, so your strawberries. So if it’s a leaf fungus, baking soda spray, any kind of antifungal, but I don’t like spraying anything on forming strawberries because they’re they’re hard to clean. If I had to pick something, I would go with a baking soda spray because I don’t mind eating baking soda. You know, I don’t really need to wash it off like neem oil and other things. Even though it’s organic, I don’t necessarily want to be eating it even though it’s safe. Um, I would try baking soda spray, but I would try and figure out what’s causing the brown sunken spots on the strawberry. I’m just not sure if that’s a fungal issue. Um, could be bacteria. I I I don’t know exactly what it is. All right. 50% the normal size. The leaves are Yeah. I mean, you can have a small melon that still tastes good. In the case that if they’re 50% of the size, you know, I might leave them out there another week until the plant’s totally dried and not doing anything. Bring them inside. But if you have multiple melons, the only way you really know is cut one in half and see what you have. You know, they do continue to ripen. I just don’t know how well they formed inside. Sometimes, you know, they don’t they’re smaller and they just don’t have a nice edible flesh inside. So, you have to kind of check that out. All right, we are at 11:45. So the next um so well garden grounds the public Q&A I do every second and fourth Thursday 11:00 a.m. with a light subject. If you go to my YouTube channel, you click the live tab, you’ll be able to see all the live events that I’m doing. When I put in October’s Garden Ground events, you’ll be able to see them, you know. So check frequently. Um and then, you know, join if you wish. If you like this format, I do perk memberships 3.99 a month. I do this format five times a month for an hour. I put out the list of perk membership events at the beginning of the month under the post tab of my YouTube channel. And then when I enter in the events, you can also find them on my live um live tab on my channel. All right, let me just see if any question popped up while I was talking. All right. All right. You guys have a great week. I will see you all next time. And the Tuesday or the next events for garden grounds will be put out um usually in that first five days of October. And then hopefully I see you all then. Have a great time in your garden and enjoy your fall garden. Garlic is really easy to grow. You shouldn’t have any issue. If you’re in doubt, give it a, you know, a test run. put it in some different places, let it go. Uh, garlic is pretty hardy.