Planting Your Fall Salad Garden (Vegetable Gardening Live Monthly Questions & Answers E-63)

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Welcome to Garden Grounds, my live um mentoring Q&A. We’ll get started in about 15 seconds. Please let me know if you can see my garden, hear my voice, and again, we’ll get started in 10 seconds. All right. Good morning, everybody. So, every second and uh second and fourth Thursday 11:00 a.m. I do a mentoring Q&A garden question and answer public. 2nd fourth Thursday 11:00 a.m. And feel free to ask any question you have related to uh vegetable gardening. And please, a lot of people come through the chat. Just put question before your question so that I can pick it out of the chat. If I end up missing it, feel free to put it back out there. Um, a lot of people do show up and it sometimes, you know, just goes really quickly and I can’t keep up with the questions. Light subject for today is growing a fall salad garden. You know, lettucees and and such. And I’ll talk about, you know, some of the crops you can grow now. You can grow them in containers, in the ground, however you want. Real easy to grow. These crops can take a light frost, a medium frost, even sometimes a harder freeze, and we can have, you know, plenty of salads throughout the fall. And I’ll talk a little bit about soil prep, the plants, and all that. Let me just set up the chat or set up, yeah, pop out the chat here so I can see what’s going on. And we’ll start with some questions. So, and also I have perk memberships if you’re interested and like this format. Um, you can go to any of my videos. Just find a per uh per. Yeah, that’s dangerous. The perk membership link. Um, and you can join $3.99 a month. I do this format five times plus some other things. And it’s a really great group. Anybody who has a circle with a star in it is a perk member. and you can really learn from the people there. Um, I’m glad to answer all your questions and again I do this five times throughout the month. So, it’s like having somebody with you as you’re growing for the season. So, first question is from Serena. She is a perk member. What was that lying on the ground to the right of your newly sprouted spinach? And I think you’re talking about a video that I just did and I don’t know off the top of my head. I would have to watch the video. Sorry. Eaglet for next year. Have you found growing blight resistant tomatoes helpful com combined with a weekly antifungal spraying? So two parts to that. If you buy hybrid tomatoes and those are tomatoes that are crossed, you know, one variety tomato pollen’s crossed to another variety of tomato. Just FYI, it’s not GMO, it’s not fake, it’s not artificial. It’s people with passion creating these hybrid tomatoes. Yes, some of these blight resistant tomatoes fend off blight better, but there is no hybrid that prevents it. So, you’re going to get it. So, the second part of your question is really more important. If you know that certain fungal issues come into your garden for any plant really, but in this case tomatoes, you want to write it down as best as you can recall. Get the date two weeks before it tends to show up in your garden. You want to spray any antifungal spray. You can spray whatever you want. It’s more important that you pick an antifungal and spray regularly than to pick a certain brand or a certain type. So, to really prevent the issues that show up on your tomatoes, because if they show up one year, they’re going to show up again the next year and the year after, is to spray early with your antifungal on your tomato plants. Try blight resistant or, you know, disease resistant tomatoes. And then keep up regularly spraying with that spray and you can really manage down the damage the fungi do to your tomatoes. I do recommend check out my channel and using hydrogen peroxide and on tomato plants. Hydrogen peroxide on tomato plants. Hydrogen peroxide cleans the leaf. It’s not an antifungal. antifungals sit on the leaf and prevent the infection from coming and starting or the fungus from growing. But you can use hydrogen peroxide, clean the leaves and an antifungal and that will really help the tomatoes make it through the entire season. The audio I don’t know what the issue is with the audio. It is up as loud as I can put it on my side. Give me six seconds exactly. I will just double check it. Yeah, it’s up as high as it can. I apologize for that, but I will, you know, try and talk a little bit closer to the microphone, but it is up as high as it can be. Susie, why do my tomato plants go limp when the sun hits them on a 80 degree Fahrenheit morning but spring back in the afternoon in the shade back in the afternoon shade when it’s 100° Fahrenheit? The plants are 18 in tall. Let me just reread that second part. So, I mean, it’s really related to the heat and to the moisture. I’m not sure exactly why, but when sun is hitting the root system, if they don’t have enough water or it’s particularly hot, the leaves go limp and that’s a way that they conserve water. Soon as the so temperatures get to the right temperature or they do like the shade or the temperature drops, the moisture goes back into the leaves. Um I believe it’s called like tur turoid pressure and they inflate and they’re strong and they look like normal tomato leaves. But the dropping of the leaves, the the limping of the leaves is a normal process and it’s all related to to heat and temperature. I just planted my beet seed tape last night. Day temperatures are about 90, night 68, first frost November. Can beets stay in the ground over the winter? Beets can stay in the ground over the winter if and you know let me actually talk a little bit about the salad garden first related to this question. So we’re growing you know late summer early fall into the winter. Frost shows up in most of our gardens. Generally speaking you have a light frost and that’s just a frost that doesn’t really last maybe an hour at night. Air gets cold. Leaves of these cool weather crops for the salad garden freeze. They don’t get disrupted and damaged like your warm crops. They can freeze and then it warms up and the leaves are perfectly fine. That’s a light frost. Medium frost, generally speaking, the air of course gets cold and then you get a little bit of frost on the ground. It’s a little bit heavier, longer, maybe colder. Plants, cold weather crops can survive that perfectly fine. And beets are one of the crops I’ll be talking about. A heavy freeze or a heavy frost is when the ground freezes. that top inch 2 and a half centimeters or you have a long a prolonged cold you know four six eight hours freezing that can damage where the basically how do I want to do this if this is the ground right here the plant comes up the roots are below if this area freezes for a prolonged period often that kills the plant off or slows growth down so today we’re really talking about light frost, medium frost, these plants can survive that. Beets are in that category. They can overwinter, but if your freezes get to the point where the beet itself that is forming freezes, that beat becomes soft and you can’t really eat it. The plant tends to survive because it just has to have enough beet alive to keep the greens going. and the greens will come back, but the beet itself you’re not going to be able to eat next year if you have a hard freeze. Good news, and let me just talk about that now. So, for your salad gardens, and if you’re just getting started, you can grow these in the ground, you can grow them in containers, it really doesn’t matter. But what I recommend, number one, bunching spring onions. I’ll go over how to plant these in a little bit. Radishes, a loose leaf lettuce. Bib lettuce is a great loose leaf lettuce. With the loose leaf lettuce, I do recommend any kind of red lettuce. Snails and slugs tend to like them less. They will still eat them, but they tend to go other places. Uh spinach, arugula, and beets. Those would be the six crops just, you know, if you don’t want to overwhelm yourself or you want to just get started. bunching onions, radishes, loose leaf lettuce, spinach, arugula, and beets. The beets may form depending on where you’re growing and you’ll have, you know, beets you can cut up, put in your salad, but they grow great greens and they’re nutritious. So, you can add the beet greens to your salad. Those would be the first six that I just recommend you get started with. Um, in addition to that, let’s round it off to 10. Mustard greens, a little bit spicy. They’re great in salads. Peas. Now, peas, you may have missed the window because if that medium frost comes and the pea pod freezes, the pea pod is damaged. However, you can grow peas now and you can pick the tendrils. Yeah, you can pick the tendrils that are forming and they taste like peas and you can mix them into your salad. Asian cabbage, bok choy that matures quickly, can really take the heavier freezes, the frosts, and then a red cabbage. So you’d have mustard greens, peas for tendrils, Asian cabbage like bok choy, and red cabbage. And those would be the 10 crops that I think make for a nice salad. We’ll talk about planting a little bit. If you want to check out the video that I just put in my um on my YouTube channel yesterday, it goes over most of these plants that I talked about. shows you germination examples and shows you and I put up the spacing this uh spacing of the seeds and the rows general guidelines that will get you started. All right, back to the questions. Give me a second just to find where I left off here. Cheryl, can you tell us more about your watering methods? any drips or soers planning to change irrigation for the next 10 years. So, I don’t have any drips or soers in my garden yet. I do it all by hand. I use that time to really inspect the plants and I actually weed around the base and stuff like that. However, mid July to mid August, it becomes a little bit overwhelming. In Maryland, we used to have so much rain, it wasn’t an issue. less rain now for whatever reason and I’m getting older. So, I’m changing my garden over to higher raised beds. And again, if you want to follow me, I’ll be I’ve already built beds or some videos on that, but I’ll be changing the garden over later this um fall, early winter, and in the spring. And I will be bringing in some drip irrigation, but I don’t have anything set up for it yet. I want to, you know, and I’m kind of like the gardener who says you shouldn’t be one or the other. Like I’m like and it’s important for things. I’m not going to get on my soap box about chemicals and all that stuff, but I was thinking I need to set this up completely for drip irrigation and it’s not practical in my garden. So, I can go in the middle. I’m going to be able to set up some nice sections of my garden with drip irrigation that will reduce the watering and it just made it easier in my brain rather than thinking, oh, you know, just don’t do it. It’s too much of a problem. just let it be or you got to do all of it. And if you’re not going to do it all of it, don’t do it all. I’m going to be able to put drip irrigation in to maybe a third to maybe twothirds of my garden. That’s going to greatly reduce my time commitment and make things a lot easier um on me. And then generally speaking, watering it’s a good segue to the next thing I want to talk about for your salad garden. We tend to underwater. So, watering more, I’ve talked about this before, will get you a bigger and more thriving producing garden. You know, that’ll be a future um garden grounds, you know, Q&A. When you’re planting seeds now, some of the day temperatures get up to 85 degrees Fahrenheit still here. So, that top inch of soil is getting pounded by the sun. It dries out real quickly. So, all everything that I mentioned to you can be direct seeded. So, if you’re seeding your garden, you’re putting in the seeds, make sure you water every day or every other day for a good 10 to 14 days. You really want that root system to establish. And the underwatering is what really leads to a lot of germination failures. You know, keep the watering there. when you go to put in a transplant, maybe you grew lettuce transplants or you’re buying them, remember they only have a little root system in that little cell that you pull out. So, if you pop it into a big container and it’s rained and that container is soaked and you’ve watered it and the soil is soaked, it still only has that tiny root ball. So the next day if it gets up to 85 degrees, sun is beating down on the leaves, it’s going to pull all the water out from around the root ball and there’s no roots to get to the other water in that container. So that plant will become stunted. It can even die off. It can can become limp um dry out. It’s a bad experience. So when you put in transplants, again, you want to water every day or every other day for 10 to 14 days. Make sure your salad garden, your fall garden gets off to a great start. Any tips? And no co is a perk member. Any tips on relocating my blackberry from a planter into a raised bed? Should I wait until next year to move it or go ahead and move it now? Thanks. Love your channel. Well, appreciate it. Now is a great time to plant fruit trees, move plants, and that would include blackberry plants. They’re going to be going dormant. So, you want to, and it’s in a planter, so you want to just take out the whole, you know, planter ball, the root ball of the blackberry. Drop it wherever you want. Water it in really well. Keep an eye on the watering. You don’t have to do it every day or every other day. The root system will establish. It will still creep around under there. will still use the temperatures you have now to grow and expand and next year it’ll really take off come the spring. So, I would definitely do it now. All right, hold on. A lot is buzzing through. So, if I did miss your question, you know, please put it back out there. Also, if you do the super chat, that will pop up and I will answer your question right away. I will stay on till about 11:45. Question: Is it better to succession plant determinant and semi semi-determinant tomatoes or co-plant with indeterminate or do both? Extra-large garden unlimited space. So, determinate tomatoes, so that you guys know, get to a set height, they flower, they produce, then they die back. And they will come back, but you’re better off just replanting. Semi-eterminate is somewhere between a determinant tomato that gets to a set height and then you’re here comes my dog, by the way, and an indeterminate tomato that will just grow and grow and grow and grow. The semi-eter determinant is somewhere in between. It’s really up to you. Um, I like growing more of the indeterminate tomatoes and I keep them in a section. Another section I have some determinants. Um, I just don’t really need the determinant tomatoes. They tend to produce a lot of tomatoes at once and I just don’t need all that. So, I grow semi-eterminate. U, an example of the semi-determinant is the homestead. It’s to me it still looks like an indeterminate, but it grows slower, gets bigger, and I like that. So I do mingle semi-determinant and indeterminants together, you know, but you can really do whatever you want. Crafty also perk member, what root vegetables can you plant in the same bed? I’m thinking of doing carrots and beets together. You can you can really put them all together. There’s nothing that I know of that you can’t plant root cropwise. And root crops would be beets, carrots, turnipss, radishes. I don’t like parsnips. I don’t grow parsnips anymore. They take forever to grow. They’re not a good fall crop. Well, they could be, you know, because they can take a a heavier freeze and stuff like that, but you can plant really any of the root crops together. Um, I just saw this randomly. You can use slug magic to keep slugs away. And that was the other thing that I wanted to mention too for your salad garden. Now, because you have so many insects out and about, the soil is warm, everything is alive, you’re going to have a lot of snail and slug pressure, and they tend to go after your leafy greens, what you’re growing for for your salad. Slug baits that either have sulfur in them or iron phosphate in them, and it could be slug magic like recommended here. Um, I think Cory’s is what I use. Doesn’t matter. You want the bait to be either a sulfur bait or an iron phosphate bait. Less toxic to the rest of the world. Scatter them down. Don’t pile it throughout your garden now before you get your seeds and your plants going. Every 3 weeks or four weeks, put out some more of that. It really works to control snails and slugs and it will greatly reduce the damage that you get to your leafy greens and your salad garden. Sweet potatoes. And again for everybody throw question in front. Sometimes I catch them without it. Sweet potatoes take a good 100 to 130 days to mature. Now you’re in Florida so you’re not going to get the cold. So I usually plant in May here in Maryland. And then I harvest somewhere I don’t know midocctober or something like that. And that’s a long enough period to grow. But you can kind of dig into the soil check to see how the sweet potatoes are doing. You’re not going to be able to get down really deep, but they are a good 100 plus day crop. Crafty, if the peas are planted in an elevated raised bed with a frost cover, would that help? That will help protect them. The peas themselves and the flowers get damaged by a frost, even a light frost sometimes. Do air temperatures influence the heat level in the taste of radishes? Let me just find out. Hold on. Um, they do not so much the air temperature. You can get a hot day and it’s fine. It’s when that soil temperature warms up consistently and that top two 4 in stays warm. Warm roots make the plant want to flower and produce seed and then that changes the pathiness. The radish becomes woody. The spiciness comes. So, cooler soil temperature helps the radishes not get that spiciness to it. Uh JK, what fertilizer is best to use initially for new transplants? Any water-soluble fertilizer. So, that’s the next thing here for um the salad garden. So, anytime you put a transplant in, it’s great if you can have compost in your garden, organic granular, and it’s all sitting there and good to go. Compost is ready to be used, meaning the plant can use the nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, all the nutrients in there. Organic granular that you sprinkle down takes a while to break down. But any water-soluble fertilizer has the NPNK immediately available to the plant. Remember that when you put in a transplant, it only has that tiny root ball. So, you don’t even have to water your water soluble all around. Just pour it right onto the root ball of the plant and it’ll concentrate NPK. It’ll absorb it. It can use it right away. Get your plants off to a great start. When you’re planting your fall garden, you can pretty much rely on all the amendments from the summer. Even if you had real heavy feeder plants, there’s enough nutrients in there. So weed it, loosen it up, you’re good to go. Of course, if you have compost, add the compost to the soil, couple inches, mix it in, you know, it’s fine. But you can just go with planting your seeds or putting in your transplants and just hitting it with the water soluble fertilizer either at planting or wait till the plants are about 2 to 4 in tall um if you’re doing seeds and then just water them in once with the water soluble. If you feel like they need more somewhere between mid-growth, hit them again with the water soluble. But that’s all you need for growing in containers, the earth beds, your vertical towers, water-soluble fertilizer. I do recommend Agro Thrive. That’s in any of my videos in the video description. It’s a wonderful organic fertilizer. So, um, Bquel, I see your question again. Make sure you put um question in front. I’m growing celebrity tomatoes. One plant has a bunch of tomatoes, but they aren’t ripening and then the others have had flowers but no tomatoes set. What’s going on? So, I mean, that’s a big question. I don’t know. Tomatoes are sensitive to temperature. So, if it’s getting really hot there or the root system is has sun baking down and hitting it, sometimes flowers get produced, but they don’t set the fruit and they do that for protection. They’re waiting for the right soil temperature and cooler days. In that case, I have lots of videos on putting up shade cloth, dealing with high heat. If you’re not really having high heat, you know, I would just stick with consistent watering. Um, it’s not really a nutritional issue. ripening tomatoes, that’s nothing you can speed up. That’s just nature. So, it’s whatever is going on temperature- wise, you know, uh just the climate of your garden. There’s nothing you can do to really change that. All right, so we got the fertilizer, water soluble. Michelle, also a perk member, a brand new perk member. Um, I’m growing Kentucky Wonder Garden beans. Doing great in 6B. First expected frost is October. Will they do well for a while? They should continue to do well um until a heavier frost comes. Beans are frost sensitive, but depending on how long it is and how cold it is, they may make it through that first couple of frosts, but then after that, they’re going to slow down. Mary, please. How how long for parsnips to sprout and break the surface? All the carrots, beet, breakfast radishes, and turnipss. Turnups are up. Not the parsnips. Um, well, my parsnips, I grew them once and they were up within, this was in the spring, too, so the ground’s colder, so it took a little bit longer. Um, but it took them I want to say between like I mean almost two weeks, maybe a little bit longer. So they took a while. So just keep them watered in the warm ground. Sometimes certain seeds don’t like the warm, so they do wait for the cold. I don’t know about parsnips, but they do take a little bit longer. All right, so real quick, generally speaking, the planting guidelines for these plants, again, check out my video. I just did it. I just launched it I think yesterday. We’ll cover most of what I’m talking about and you can see germination examples and if I was prepared I would be able to throw the link out to you. So bunching onions are spring onions. They do really well in the cold and the freeze. I just do a trench with my hand, sprinkle them, you know, down the line they might fall every half an inch, cover them over, water them in, and I just let them grow. I use the greens in the salad when they’re bigger. You know, the the bunching onion itself is about thumb size, you know, or finger size. I will pull out every other one. Give the remaining plants more space. They get larger. Excellent for salads. Radishes every inch, 2 and 1 half centimeters, rows, every two inches, maybe 5 cm. And I do one or two seeds per hole. And radishes grow really well. They can be mature, can mature in 30 days. So, one more quick thing, too. Because the ground is warm, the air temperature is warm, these seeds are going to germinate really quickly. Everything on here in my garden I planted on September 1st. They’ve already germinated, you know, so it’s a quick germination and then I lost my train of thought. So, oh yeah, so for the radishes, so you don’t want to do like 200 radishes at once because they’re all going to mature and you’re going to have too many. So, do like 50. After they germinate, wait a couple of weeks, put in some more radishes, and then you’ll have a succession planting. Same thing for lettucees and other crops. You don’t want to put everything in at once. Then you have too much to eat within that week. So, if you plant stuff every two weeks after germination, you get a longer haul, a longer harvest of those vegetables. loose leaf lenn uh loose leaf lettuce, spinach. I do about every four to eight inches depending on how big I want the plants to be and about 8 in to 12 in between the rows. The difference being is if you’re just growing these leafy lettucees to get about this high, you can plant them much more closely together. If you want them to get to a full head, you know, you have to use your imagination. Some of the loose leaf lettucees get like that big. So you’re gonna have to do eight inch spacing and then maybe a foot to even 18 inches depending on what you’re growing between rows. And that’s if you want to grow the fulls size heads. Arugula will get big. It can get to be like a two foot tall plant. You can do it in a rows like the bunching onions and you harvest it when it’s this big. Like don’t let it grow. Or if you want a bigger plant every 6 to 8 in spacing in a row and then make the rows I don’t know 8 to 12 inches apart. And then beets I like to do every two to three inches apart and then the rows maybe six to eight inches. Beets will get you wonderful beet greens. They germinated really well for me this round um within six days. So that’s a great way to get your garden started with a bunching onions, radishes, loose leaf lettuce, spinach, arugula, and beets. And don’t you don’t need to write down everything I’m saying. Go to, you know, to the video. I put that up in the video description. the spacing. Um, you’re going to see it’s a little bit different than what I said because spacing there’s a wide gap of how you can space these plants based on to based on the size that you’re going to be growing them. But bunching onions, radishes, loose leaf lettuce, spinach, arugula, and beets. Six perfect crops for your first salad garden. Then I’ll talk about the rest after I ask answer a few more questions. Bella, I tried growing golden boy beets in three different areas and they never got past germination. I tried soaking them as well. I’ve had a couple germinate but then they die. What can I do? So, I’m not familiar with Golden Boy beets. If you bought one pack and they’re not germinating well, you may have to buy another pack. Sometimes seeds can be bad. If you tried three different times and maybe they germinated then died off. I don’t want you to go crazy thinking it could be your soil, but there could be, you know, a soil pH value that the beets don’t like. Um, a critter could come in and get them. Or maybe you’re trying them at a time when it’s just too hot. They germinate, they die off. But there’s no specific trick. Anytime that you’re planting seeds, you’re really figuring out when is the best time to go into my garden? Spring, summer, fall, winter in some places. When do they germinate best? Cooler temperatures or warmer temperatures? And how much does like an 85 degree day impact these seedlings that come up? Because if it gets up to 85 90 definitely mid 90s that soil temperature in that top 2 4 in can really bake and get up to 110 120 degrees especially dark soil um put up something black outside on a sunny day you feel how much it heats up. Same thing happens to the soil. So they can be dried out when um they germinate and maybe the temperatures, you know, cause an issue, but it’s hard to say that way. It’s hard to say without me kind of seeing the whole process. Green love fertilizing root veggies. Any difference between say radish and beets? I hear beets need more nitrogen. So I don’t overfertilize my radishes. Radishes are really easy if you give them too much nitrogen. Sometimes they grow a lot of greenery. They don’t need a lot of nutrition. Either do beets. They just have to have it present in the soil. So, I might because you’re growing beets longer, you want a larger, you know, beetroot. Hit them with a water-soluble fertilizer. But I actually don’t put wateroluble fertilizer on my radishes. Radishes mature in like 30 days to 45 days. They can take what they need from the soil pretty well. Polite. I now have strawberries in towers. What do I need to do for the winter zone 8b? So, you are warmer than Maryland. I leave my strawberries in my towers 247. So, I don’t think there’s anything you really need to do. Um, dogs. And that means that we’re getting a package from somewhere. Um, if they don’t go dormant completely and they kind of stay alive and and are kicking, I would hit them with a water-soluble fertilizer, let them go to sleep, and let them be. Cheryl, for metal raised beds, pros or cons? Filling with soil to the top or a few inches from the top? Love mine, they’re 31 inches tall. Adding a few more, only 15 feet tall. So, metal beds, I like them. Just FYI, I’m affiliated with Vega. Veg Ga. If you go to my videos, uh, any video in the video description, you can get a discount. If they’re on sale already, you can’t stack the discount, but if they’re not on sale, you know, go ahead and use that. I like the metal raised beds. Uh, filling with soil to the top. I like to leave a few inches, you know, probably. I don’t know what is that two or three inches. Fill the soil up, put in the plants. I use that space for mulching. Like depending on what I’m growing. If I’m doing direct seeding, you don’t want to mulch. But if I’m putting in my transplants, peppers, other plants, I then like to add in another inch or two of mulch. That helps keep the moisture in a raised bed. So that extra space is used for that. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t want to mulch. You can take it high as low as you want. You know, if you take it too high, sometimes watering everything splashes out all over the place. But, you know, you really can’t go wrong with the metal beds. Amanda, I’m a new gardener this year. How long can I continue to grow cucumbers and long beans into the fall in zone B? So, soon as a frost comes, that’s a couple of hours, it’s going to kill off your cucumbers. Beans sometimes can get through that first frost, but soon as the frost start showing up, those plants are going to stop producing. So, Pella, if it is heat, um, and again, it’s hard for me sometimes to answer the questions because I don’t know where you guys are, and I do like to see the process. A 50% shade cloth over that space will greatly cool everything, and you can plant now. question. My dill plant keeps drying out even with regular waterings and it’s in full sun. Not sure why. Sometimes a dill plant even with watering in a very hot day in hot days does dry out. You can try putting mulch in the soil. That will keep the roots cooler, cools the plant down. That can help. Um but sometimes they do a little bit better in getting some shade. All right. So, if I missed your question, please throw it out there. Um, I’ve gone down the whole list. We are at 11:35. And I just want to cover real quick um for the planting. So, mustard greens are the uh well, these are the seventh, 8th, 9th, and 10th plants that I would recommend for your salad garden. Mustard greens, they get huge. So, you really want a good 8 to 12 inches between the seeds and a good 12 to 18 inches between the plants. They’re kind of spicy. Different varieties have different um mustard burn to them, so to speak. If you actually sauté them, that’s not a salad garden. That spiciness goes away. So, they’re great in in stir fries. Peas, again, you may not have enough time to get full pea pods, but you can eat the tendrils. Peas I just plant really I don’t know why my voice keeps cracking. um every 1 inch, you know, in a row. Keep the rows maybe two inches apart. They need trellising, but peas grow really well. And if you’re growing for the tend tendrils, just overseed them in a space, you know, in a container like that’s maybe nice and round. I would just do every inch all the way around. Drop in a tomato cage. Give them something to trellis on. You can eat the tendrils. Asian cabbage, um, six to eight inches between plants, 8 to 12 inches between rows. They get to a nice size. Pak choy, bok choy are Chinese cabbages. There’s other Asian cabbages that get bigger. They’re just great to add in salads. They just add a nice crunch. And then red cabbage. You may not have enough time for the cabbage to fully form. I like the red cabbage. I actually find snails and slugs tend to leave the red vegetables alone more. they will go there if they have no other food source. You don’t have to wait for that red cabbage to fully form. You can just break off leaves and then I just cut them into strips and put them into my salad. So, just a recap of the 10 plants that I recommend. bunching onions, radishes, loose leaf lettuce, also a red lettuce, spinach, arugula, beets, mustard greens, peas for the tendrils if you can’t get the pods, Asian greens, and red cabbage make a great start for a salad garden. And again, they like the cooler weather. They can handle the frost. They’re going to be okay. Cheryl, any hints for placement of new green stock? finding a true level area. Even a patio has a minor slant for watering and drainage. Thanks again. So, you do anytime you’re Greentock, I’m affiliated with Greentock Garden. Um, it’s a wonderful vertical planting system. Check out my video description. I highly recommend them. The ones that you see in my garden have been outside 24/7 and one of them is at least eight years old outside and it has not cracked. I think it might be 10, but I’d have to figure out when I started with them. Great system. You do want it to be in a flat area. You can buy a spinner base so that the the tower goes on the spinner base and then you can rotate it around. So, if you’re in an area that doesn’t have a lot of um if you’re in an area and you have the sun coming down, you can rotate the tower and then get sun on all the sides. That’s nice. the flat base of the spinner. You can put shims, pieces of wood under it, and that helps level it off. If you’re not even using the spinner base and you drop the tower down to answer your question, you can get pieces of wood, just thin pieces of wood, and stick them under the feet until the the tower is level. Watering, you can water from the top of your green garden vertical planting system. That’s a mouthful. And when it’s level, it just helps with the water. I also just spray into the pockets when the plants are bigger, you know, but you want it to be mostly level if that was your main question. Um, but anytime that you have a slant, if I go into my garden, I have some in my garden, I put bricks down and I level them off and then I put the towers on top of there. But anytime you have a vertical tower, you can just put wood shims under the legs, the feet, and just adjust the tower that way. And I will be planting up my green stock towers with leafy greens this week. Crafty, for a 48 inch, 24in raised bed, how many turnip greens or collard greens can I plant? So, I’m going to leave that up to you, but I want to stress this point. Only plant what you can eat. You know, if that’s 4T by 2 feet, assuming you’re not saying 48 feet by 24 feet, but 4T by 2 feet, I’m guessing you did inches. Um, if you are saying 48 by 24, that’s huge. You can do whatever you want, but 4t by two feet. If you put in a collard, say, and you really want collards 18 inches apart, but say you put them one foot apart, you put four plants in there, and you can’t eat them all, the leaves just sit there and they become a beacon for like white flies and insects. So, you want to figure out how many plants you can consume regularly, not, you know, take to the ground, but you’re constantly removing leaves and you’re not letting the bugs get on there. So, you know, for a family of two, two or three plants is usually plenty. As for the beets, I would do, you know, every every 3 to four inches between the beets and then make the rows maybe six inches so you have a little bit more spacing and birds can get in there and walk around and eat insects and stuff like that, you know, but I I would go based off of that those measures. Yeah, cauliflower will grow. Just don’t put a bunch of cauliflower on one tier of your green stock because the root systems get pretty big. Any other questions? We are just about done in four minutes. So, for the perk, I have perk membership. Anybody you see with a a a circle and a star, they’re perk members. 3.99 a month. I do this format five times a month. The groups are much smaller. The group is a very smart group. You get answers from people there. I will help you along, but we do this format five times. And it’s a way to just have a garden mentor and a group through the season, you know, and sometimes people just come on for the summer, then they go away and they come back, you know, you can do whatever you want. Every second and fourth Thursday, 11:00 a.m. I do this public Q&A. You don’t have to pay for this. It’s not a perk membership. And you can answer your questions. I have a light subject. And today’s light subject was a salad garden. Um, Tuni, uh, I think that’s a question again. Throw if I missed your question, you know, put it back out here or put question in front of it. Um, or Tony, sorry. I have both raised beds and inground beds. I I I let the inground beds get overgrown. compost. I think about covering with chopped leaves and straw, then covering them with a heavy black tarp. Is this okay? Yeah. So, there’s a lot of ways that you can put your beds to rest. You can put down compost. You can put down chop leaves. You can put down grass, you know, lawn cutings right now. Let them dry a little bit. Um, if the wind’s not going to blow them away, you can just leave them untarped. If you put a tarp down, make sure everything is moist. cover it over. Microbes, worms, everything will break that down. Your beds are going to be in great shape. It also keeps the tarp will keep weeds from forming and all that kind of stuff. But you can do either one. They are um there are just many ways that you can put the beds to rest. The bottom line is is you’re putting down chopped leaves and straw, compost, um, all that good organic matter is what I recommend for all of us to do to our beds in some capacity. And then whether or not you cover it, some people cover it with burlap so that the rain gets through. If you do a tarp, you just have to make sure it stays moist. Also, if you do a tarp, sometimes mice and moles and bowls and stuff get in there and they set up nests. So, you do want to kind of lift it, you know, at least maybe once every two weeks just to to uh to uh disturb the space. If you planted three cauliflower on one level, you’re just going to have to make sure you stay up on the watering and the feeding. Kabi is fine. Question: Have you grown lettuce inside through the winter? If so, did it do well? So, inside I have videos on it. I think I’ve grown spinach, um, loose leaf lettuce, and radishes and tiny Tim tomatoes, and they grew perfectly fine with the, um, shop lights that I recommend. Um, for garlic, when do you plant in Maryland? Garlic you can really put in here now in Maryland. I mean, you could put it in in later October, but it’s going to sprout a whole lot, but it’ll be okay. I really think, you know, middle of November works well. So, Mary, I just saw this. After 5 years, I beat the deer affordably. Double fence with Tposts every 12 feet, string wire across the tops, and hang aluminum pie pans on the fence with uh the plastic fence on the inside. I I think that’s wonderful. You don’t need a massive fence to stop deer, but you do need something like you sit up set up. And you know, I know that setup is more affordable than a, you know, tall fence going all the way around. All right, I think we’re at our last question. Okay, there’s two. Here’s the I’ll answer these two and then we’re done for today. In the past, I’ve seen you put down alpha alpha pellets at this time of year. Was that to put your beds to bed, to rest? Yeah. So, like I was saying, it could be leaves. It could be grass from your lawn or cutings from your lawn. It could be straw. Could be compost. Alpha pellets are like 25 bucks now, maybe for a 40 lb bag. They are great to sprinkle across your bed, water them in, let them expand. They turn into these little flakes. They will be digested by worms and microbes, and they are good for your garden. You don’t have to do that. You know, if you have plenty of compost and other organic matter, you can save yourself money. But alalfa pellets are do provide NPK and it’s just, you know, 40 lb bag for 20 $25 is inexpensive compared to buying a 4B bag for 12 bucks of of other fertilizer. I had butternut and traumasino cross-pollinate this year first time. any way to prevent that? Could it be that they were too close? Ironweed, a huge be attractor. So, if you have a butternut growing here and another type of squash growing here and a crosspollinate, now you don’t see the cross until you take the seeds. So the butternut’s going to be a butternut. The tromboscino is going to be a tropicino. When you take the seeds of a variety that cross that next year, they show. So I’m not sure if that happened or what you’re describing, but it’s like if you put a sweet pepper in the ground and a hot pepper next to each other and they cross-pollinate. The sweet peppers you harvest this year are not spicy, but the seeds h hold that cross-pollination. And when you plant them there, you get a new variety. Um, all right. Michelle’s a perk member. Container lettuce, too. Just went limp. Possible reasons. If it’s a really hot day, your lettuce can go limp. It should come back. You could put some shade cloth over it. I’m assuming you’re watering it pretty regularly. If it was a seed that grew, it should have a nice big root system. So, it’s not usually moisture, but hot sun can impact the growing of all of your cool crops. All right, so let’s call it a day. The next um well, this public Q&A every second and fourth Thursday at 11:00 a.m. And if you’re interested in this format, you want to join perk memberships. I do this format five times a month in addition to these two. All right, you guys. Good luck in your garden. I hope you give uh growing in the fall a chance. And a salad garden is is really just a great way to get started. All right, everyone. Take care.