AdAgrA 2018: Something Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Intensive: Gardening 101

Joel Meyer

1. Gardening 101: Site Selection

Okay, so we want to look at some things about site selection.

When we're looking for a place, We don't always have a lot of choice, but it's nice to have it close to the garden, easy access to the house, where we can just care for it well.

If we need, or in an area where irrigation is especially necessary.

And we want to think about the amount of sunshine that the area gets.

Some of the fruiting crops, they all need full sun.

Some of the ones that are the greens, some of them can handle partial shade, but it's generally necessary to have an area that is full sun.

And then we wanna think about the fertility of the area if we have a choice and 1 of the things that I found is that any Soil can be improved It can be we worked in the southern part of Utah where we just had pure sand for 9 years.

And there We invested a lot in the soil and Steve will be dealing with Steps to productive soil, but what I found is that any soil can be improved We had an area in Colorado that was right in front of the elementary school and it had a granite shelf underneath it and granite gravel on top.

And that area, the alfalfa never grew very high, only about 6 inches.

But it was right in front of the elementary school and I wanted the kids to be able to look out and see their garden right there.

So in the fall I plastered it with sections of alfalfa bales, you know about 1 compression of the baler thick, tilled that in in the fall and in the spring we planted it and we had just a lush, fantastic garden.

Here you can see, just by observation, you can see some of that broom grass there, the yellowish grass.

So that gives you an indication that the soil is quite acidic there and it will need some lime in order to bring it up to a proper pH.

So, and here we can see just by observing the color of the soil, it can give you some indication.

I just got back from Colombia, South America, where the soil in the tropical cloud forest area, it was about 7, 000 feet, and the soil was very black, and just everywhere and it was beautiful.

We're living near Houston now and there they have black clay And it's very gummy and very hard to work when it's wet.

But here generally you'll have, if it is black, that'll be your topsoil.

And as you get down, you can see the clay is red.

Here is, we want to think about the slope also.

Is it going to be an area that is well drained?

This actually had a very nice loamy soil and we could grow some great crops there.

Chinese cabbage and other things like leeks that took a lot of oomph to keep them growing well.

If it's toward the south, that's preferable.

And that way you can get into the garden earlier in the spring.

If it's getting the sun as a south-facing slope, that will be ideal for early spring.

Doesn't show up too great here on the picture, but a marshy spot there.

Plants don't like wet feet, so you want to choose an area that has proper drainage or make provision to get the area drained.

Even if you needed to put in some drain tile, if you don't have too many choices in where you can move the garden to.

You can put in some perforated 4 inch drain down deeper than where your tiller will be and drain the area so that you can still use a given spot.

And I think, Did all of you get a Johnny's seed catalog Back on the table here.

They also have some other seed catalogs a high mowing The Seed Savers Exchange, and Territorial Seed Company, and 7 Springs Farm.

So, I really like the Johnny's seed catalog because it's kind of like a, in many ways, like a gardener's encyclopedia.

And if you open it up there, you'll see On any given page, you'll see in a green box the cultural factors for that crop.

So it will give you the kind of pH that the plant does well in, whether it likes the soil to be acid or alkaline.

It will give you the potential diseases that will be a problem with that plant.

It will give you the potential pests, so like, you know, if you're looking at the 1 on the cabbage family, you're going to have potential problem with the cabbage looper.

And so it will help you to realize that you need some dipel on hand to deal with that cabbage looper.

And then it will help you to know what your What kind of harvest you can expect to get?

And the average seed seeding rate and and also the temperature at which the seeds will germinate.

So how warm the soil has to be for the seed to germinate.

Anyway, there's a lot of really helpful information there.

So we'd like to encourage you, if you have a question, we really want to address your questions, but if you can hold those to the end, and we will get your questions, okay?

And The time to do your garden planning is in the winter when the snow is blowing, or even in the fall when your mind is fresh from the last year's trial and error, things that you need to, that you want to get, that you didn't have last year.

And so make your planning well in advance.

And I like to, for those that are just beginning, and even advanced market gardeners, a plan is essential.

And what I, I usually put it out on graph paper.

And there's many different plans you can make, but lay it out so that you have it all out there.

You want to have your variety that you want to plant.

You want to have the date that you plan to plant it and the feed of row that you're going to be planting that will help you then to calculate the number of see the amount of seed that you're going to need and get your order in early so that you'll have it when you need it.

If we're planning to have perennials, we want to put them off to the side of our garden where They will not interfere with our annual plants so like your strawberries asparagus Blackberries or raspberries What You want to have those or comfrey artichokes.

You want to have them to the side So they'll be out of your regular annual area.

And another thing that for those who are just starting, Especially if I'm moving to a new area, I like to find some local seasoned gardener that I can gather information from.

By doing that, you can determine what your season schedule is gonna be, when the last frost is in the spring generally, and when the first frost may be in the fall.

And with the weather changes, that will fluctuate some.

But you can also go to your county extension agent for your county.

Every county in the states of the US have a county agricultural extension agent office and you can go there and they will generally have recommended planting dates, and you can use those as a guideline as you're getting started.

And as My brother will be sharing about season extension by using some of these other Approaches for Season extension we can push Push the limits but for what you plant in an area where you're not protecting it with plastic, those recommendations will be very helpful.

Another thing that you'll want to keep in mind is the spacing of your plants.

There's some things that work very well in beds.

Those would be like any of your salad material, beets, lettuce, kale, broccoli, those type of things.

I generally plant them in beds, 32 inches wide.

And then other things work well to have in rows like the corn.

It needs a spacing of like 36 inches, 32 inches, depends on what kind of, how you're going to cultivate between the rows.

If you are cultivating it just with a stirrup hoe or by hand, then you can plant closer together.

But if you're going to be using like a Troy-built, then you need to consider how wide your machine is and then have a little bit of space for the row.

So if I'm using a Troybilt, I'll usually have the rows spaced at 32 or 36 inches.

Then for melons and winter squash, they sprawl out and you need to space your rows plenty wide because they will sprawl out and they need about, you'll need about 8 feet between the rows on winter squash and on watermelon and cantaloupe.

On cucumbers, you can go with just about 4 feet.

The other thing that we want to keep in mind is that, in your garden planning, is that some of your plants will go for the whole season.

That would be like your tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, corn, and then we'll have some that are shorter season.

It would be like the salad material and like peas.

So in your planning, you want to plan so that you kind of group the shorter season things together and that way you can follow it up with a successive planting that will utilize that ground after that is finished.

And so in your planning before the season and in your ordering of the seed, you want to keep that in mind also.

Okay, so Here are some of the ways that we group the crops together by hardy, semi-hardy, tender and very tender.

And this would be related to the time that we can plant them.

So the very hardy ones, or the time, how long they will go into the fall.

Because the onions, we can start very early.

We can set them out very early and they can handle.

And anyway, all the ones on the left side there, radish, spinach, lettuce, and carrots, they can handle a little bit of freezing.

And the semi-hardy, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, potatoes, and Swiss chard, they can also take some frost, but not real hard freezing.

They would need some protection if it's freezing very hard.

But they actually, many of these greens, get tasting a little better with some frost.

And then the tender ones, cucumbers, green beans, summer squash, sweet corn, tomatoes, they can't tolerate frost.

And the very tender ones, cantaloupe, lima beans, okra, soybeans, squash, sweet potatoes, and watermelon.

And eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, they need the soil to be nice and warm before you plant them.

2. Gardening 101: Growing Transplants

Okay, we're going to begin covering the topic on growing transplants.

Several of you have mentioned that you've tried them and you're struggling to know how to grow good transplants.

There's nothing like growing your own baby plants to be able to set out at the appropriate time.

So first of all, we'll talk a little bit about the kind of potting soil that you need.

And you can potentially just buy potting soil, but oftentimes my brother and I have made our own potting soil.

And we, I'll give you the formula of what we used in our potting soil, and you can jot that down if you'd like.

We used woods dirt that was in the places where, You know, there's lots of trees, and we just rake back the leaves, and then we would get the few inches of topsoil that is in the woods, because there aren't any weed seeds there, and so you're not going to have to be fighting weed seeds in your transplants, and that's a great benefit.

And right on top of that woods dirt, there's leaf mold.

There's that where the leaves have rotted and it's kind of has white streaks in it there.

So we use 1 part of leaf mold and 1 part of sand And 2 to 3 parts of compost, depending on what the quality of the compost is.

And then we generally used 1 part rotten log.

If you aren't, then you use 1 part peat moss, just regular peat moss.

This would be agricultural lime, not hydrated lime, not the kind that they use on ball fields to mark them off.

So you would get that at a farm and feed store.

And we would do 1 teaspoon of lime for a gallon of soil that is mixed up.

And The kind of soil that this will create is soil that is nice and light and will retain good moisture, it will also have good drainage, and it will have enough nutrients to provide a steady supply of nutrients for the growing plants.

Now for some of the transplants that are going to be in the flats for more than 6 weeks, say like peppers or some of the others, you may need to feed them with like compost tea watering, or water where you've soaked some alfalfa pellets in the water, that will give you nitrogen, water that is high in nitrogen to help keep them growing well while they're in the flats.

So what I'm saying is that if you are growing them there for more than 6 weeks You're going to need to foliar feed them or water them with with some other nutrients And This will also be a We want a kind of soil that will not be crusting over.

If you make up soil and you're using something that has a fairly heavy clay base, it's going to be crusting over.

That's why we use the topsoil that's out of the woods.

We have the sand and the peat moss and the compost that all combined together will help the soil not to pack or crushed over.

And you want it to be the kind of soil that will not be too dense, so that it will have a low density so the root, it will be loose so the roots can get their way in through the soil particles and be able to have a really nice root structure.

So in the regular flats that you buy, they have the holes for good drainage.

If you use something else, you need to make sure that you put holes in it so that it drains well.

And Here's some tomatoes that are being planted with the youth with the soil blocking method, but we're not going to go into all that.

It's just 1 way that you can do the plants.

Here's the larger soil blocks, but starting out it's easier to just stick with a more straightforward approach.

And here we hooked up a little vibrator to vibrate them in, but just on a home gardening basis you don't really need that.

But the depth at which you plant them is very important.

So you want to be just a general rule of thumb.

We generally will plant them about 3 times the thickness of the seed will be the depth at which you'll plant them.

So the Very small seeds will be planted quite shallow.

And in your Johnny's seed catalog, it will give you recommendations of the depth at which you plant them.

And we have a handout for you also that will give you the depth at which you should plant.

And the temperature for germination, and how many days it's going to take for them to emerge, and how many weeks you need to be planning before it will be time for them to be set out in the field.

And just in a general way, for the cabbage family, we usually will plan them to be in the greenhouse or under a grow light in your house for the cabbage family for 4 to 6 weeks, and for melons like cantaloupe and watermelon.

They're very fragile, but we will plan for them to be indoors for 3 to 4 weeks.

If you let them go too long, they can't tolerate the transplant shock when they get bigger and they'll conk out on you.

And then for tomatoes, and it'll be about 6 weeks that you have them indoors.

Anyway, we'll have that all on a handout here for you.

So you plant them according to the planting rates that it's given on this sheet here, And then you want to cover them with fine soil, firm the soil slightly, and then make sure they're well watered.

There are some flower seeds that need light to germinate, but most of the seeds need to be covered.

When you water the plants, when you water the flats, you need to be careful not...

I generally like to have my soil moist before I plant.

That way you already have moisture in the soil.

And to go ahead and moisten it a little bit more, it will not float the seeds out.

But if you start with just powdery dry soil, and then you plaster them with water, you can float those little seeds out.

And so you want to be careful not to do that.

And then you can cover them with plastic to prevent them from drying out too much, and remove the plastic as soon as the seedlings emerge.

And then 1 of the most important things is to be aware that you need to have good air flow in your growing area.

Because when the seedlings are very young, there's a potential for what is called damping off, a fungal disease that will hit the plant right at the soil surface, and it'll just boom, keel over.

And so you'll have that problem when they're being overwatered and where there's no air circulation.

And so if it's a damp, if your greenhouse is very damp and hot and you don't have any fans moving the air, then is when you'll have problem with damping off.

So Typically our germinating temperature will be between 70 and 75 until they're germinated and after that The temperatures can be a little bit lower to 65 to 70 during the day, and night temperature can be 60 to 65.

By having the temperatures a little on the cooler side, it will help to develop, at night, it will help to develop stockier plants.

You'll have ones that have a nice, healthy, thick stem and a really good root system.

So, and having plenty of light is essential, otherwise you'll end up with leggy plants if they're having to try to stretch to get to the light.

So, Here we're transplanting them from the little plug trays into the 2-inch cells.

And we do that at the time that the transplant is getting its first true leaves.

There are the other leaves and then when it's getting its first true leaves, that's when we'll transplant it.

By doing this transplanting, having an extra transplanting from the little plug tray into a larger pot, it helps to strengthen the root system.

And like with lettuce, we'll start that about 4 weeks before setting it out.

And if you're growing them inside under a grow light, then on nice days you can set them out where they're exposed to full sun, and that will make them hardier and help prepare them for when you do set them out in the garden.

So They'll be acclimatized to the wind and to more direct sun.

You can also direct seed them into the two-inch cells and then thin them out so that you just have 1 per cell.

But if you do that, then you want to make sure that you start out by having enough seeds in there so you're not going to end up with a lot of blank spaces.

And so here is just growing them indoors under a grow light, and that does work very well.

If you start them and then transplant them, it will just help develop the root system a little bit more.

And you can also plant them just a little bit deeper so that they're not quite as leggy.

Yeah, so the question was whether you, if you can start them and should start them in smaller pots if you're going to end up in a 4 or 8 inch pot and that's a good idea.

What type of sand and where do you get it?

We generally just got our sand along a river stream, a creek.

Yeah, we're country boys, so I don't know where you'd go to get it if you live in the city, but there's generally some creek around that you can...

It seems like when you go to a cement place, they have dry sand and then coarse sand.

The cement place should have some sand too.

Stephen Meyer

3. Gardening 101: Steps to Productive Soil

Steps to productive soil to many people the soil is kind of a mystery You know and they have ideas of what to do and square foot gardening and this and that and they put the stuff on and then They kind of cross their fingers and hope it'll work So we want to know when we plant something it's going to produce like this Okay, and I must say most of this the credit for this This is taken back in the 90s at Eden Valley Institute 1 of our training programs And I must say most of the credit for this would be to my brother Joel, because he did this organic soil building program for years before I showed up there at Eden Valley.

And of course, he would say that the major credit goes to God, you know, because it says in Christ's object lesson that our part in spiritual things and in other things is so small Compared to God's part which is so big you can't even compare to it See so the Sun the soil the microbes the subatomic particles He's got them all going right And we just need to know how to cooperate.

And the better you are at cooperating, the better garden you're going to have.

And here's a quote that really challenges me from Fundamentals of Christian Education that says, false witness has been born in condemning land which, if properly worked, would yield rich returns.

When you're picking stuff out of your garden, you want your kids to feel, wow, we're rich.

Okay, you may not have very much money, but true riches, you can feel it.

Say, wow, look at all the peppers on 1 plant, you know.

The narrow plans, the little strength put forth, the little study, that's what we're gonna do today, as to the best methods called loudly for reform.

There's some parts of my garden calling loudly for reform.

Oh, what you're sharing is too complicated, Steve.

But what I'm going to try to share with you is a full spectrum of maybe more simple and then what you can do as you get into it.

People need to learn that patient labor will do wonders.

It's work, I'll tell you, to build the soil.

There is much mourning over unproductive soil when, if men would read the Old Testament scriptures, they would see that the Lord knew much better than they in regard to the treatment of the land.

And then it goes on to talk about resting the land.

I guess you just read that last part there in part of Joel's presentation.

Now that's kind of a rebuking statement, that 1 we just read, okay?

Called loudly for reform, but this is a really encouraging 1 from volume 6 of The testimony 178.

We should work the soil cheerfully, hopefully, gratefully, believing that the earth holds in her bosom rich stores for the faithful worker to garner, stores richer than gold or silver.

With proper intelligent cultivation, the earth will yield its treasures for the benefit of man.

The mountains and the hills are changing.

The earth is waxing old like a garment, but the blessing of God, which spreads a table for his people in the wilderness will never cease." Boy, those are the kind of statements you just wanna get together and just have them when you're trying to move out and make the land produce and all.

You need all the encouragement you can get.

And so we want the land to really, we wanna know how to really make the land produce, cooperate with God and reap those treasures, richer than gold or silver.

And as Joel probably told you, our family growing up, we were part of the great advent movement before my parents ever became Seventh Adventists.

My dad kind of followed the cloud, which meant every 2 to 4 years we were moving, we had to have a garden.

Land, or rented a house, and it had to have land for a garden.

That was much more important than the amenities of the house was that it had a place for a garden.

And my parents had grown up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and they knew what it took to get the land tuned up fast.

And we went and we found some source of manure.

We put it on there because it had to produce that year.

It takes time for soil to really build up and it really to become a good texture, loamy soil.

Series

Intensive: Gardening 101

1. Gardening 101: Site Selection

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Special Interests

Microgreens the Next Level

57m

Special Interests

Irresistible Basil

1h 6m

Basic Gardening

Help! How do I Start My First Garden?

1h 7m

Breakout Session 3

Veganically Grown: Our Journey to Certified and Beyond

58m

Health and Harvest: Grow Your Own Nutrient-Dense Food

05 Successful Seed Starting

1h 2m

Turning Tomatoes into Profit

Turning Tomatoes Into Profit Part 2

1h

Market Gardening

Where Do You Go From Here?

57m

Market Gardening

5 Big Mistakes to Avoid When Starting a Market Garden

1h 12m

Starting a Market Garden

Growing Better, Not Bigger

1h 6m

Special Interests

Microgreens 101

1h

Sound Doctrine