AdAgrA Conference 2025: Growing Better

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AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

John Dysinger

Berry Good Strawberries

Do you love, I mean you wouldn't be here if you didn't like them probably.

When the sun is shining and the birds are singing and the freshness of spring is in the air, but they have no idea what goes into bringing that fruit to maturity.

So I just want to challenge you to count the cost before you dive in.

If you're just new in gardening, strawberries is not the best place to start, because there's a lot that can go wrong with them.

So having said that, I don't want to discourage you.

Last time I did 1 on strawberries, I think I discouraged everybody.

But we're gonna try to keep it positive here.

Much of what I say in this presentation is now up in the air because of a major new disease called neop and that's short for a very long word but all major Eastern suppliers tested positive for the disease in the fall of 2024.

Western nurseries have not been affected yet.

In fact, it almost certainly means there's going to be a real shortage of strawberries this spring, at least in the eastern half of the country.

We propagate strawberry plants for others.

We had 22, 000 on order and we were able to get 7, 500 from a nursery in California and that was it.

So it's just it's too early for them to even really know how to deal with it.

Except heavy, heavy spring, which is the reason why probably most of you want to grow strawberries, because they're the most toxic fruit and vegetable, have been for years and years because of all the spraying of fungicides.

So anyway, with that kind of to dampen your spirit, I believe the Lord has the answers.

So, you know, we're not going to give up because of a new disease, but 2 main growing methods matted row and plasticulture.

The matted row pros, we're just going down the first column here, it's a lower initial investment.

You don't need to buy nearly as many plants.

To my knowledge they're not doing plastic culture north of like Illinois.

So if you're further north than that, although they keep trying to adapt it for colder climes, and then there's less risk of frost damage because they're not on plastic, they don't flower as early in the spring, so less chance of frost damage.

Weeds are a big challenge anytime you get into perennial plant.

And I guess I should say, I'm assuming, well, I just want you to know I'm coming from an organic perspective okay.

So there are conventional things that can deal with some of these but we're trying to avoid those things as much as possible.

I mean totally we're not yeah we're not spraying those kind of things.

Slower picking and I think you'll see this when I show you a picture in just a minute here.

Potential for higher disease pressure because what you end up with is literally just a matted row of strawberries.

There's not good airflow, not good sunshine penetration, and so you're gonna have a lot of rotten berries.

And you'd normally plant them in the spring, but you don't harvest them till the next spring.

So they're in the garden for a whole year where you've got to be watering, you've got to be weeding, you've got to be taking care of these little things and you're not getting anything out of them, which is kind of discouraging.

So for those reasons and a few others, I highly recommend plastic culture.

That's what we do and it's what I'm mainly going to talk about just because I personally think it's a much superior method.

Now having said that it uses plastic which I would rather not have to do but there's a tremendous yield advantage of using plastic.

So the pros of plastic culture, increased picking efficiency, better weed disease control, higher yields and bigger berries, less ongoing maintenance.

You plant in the fall and you don't have to do a whole lot in the winter.

They winter over and then you harvest them in the spring.

You pull them up or plow them in, however you want to do it, and you're on to the next crop.

Well, I'll tell you it's a lot less work than the alternatives in my mind the cons it's going to cost you a little more because you got to buy the plastic and the drip tape and Ideally some specialized equipment You have to replant every year So of course that is a fairly major cost.

And then you've got a greater frost risk because they will start flowering much earlier.

So you have to be ready to deal with frost.

The 1 on the left of course is plastic culture.

You see you can see individual plants and the berries are all just around the individual plants.

So it makes it much easier to pick and there's more airflow and stuff.

On the right you probably can't see it as well but there's a picture of a matted row and You know you're doing a lot of searching for the strawberries and then it's like wait did I already do this part I'm not sure you know so there's just it's not as efficient picking and up above that you can see how a matted row works.

You plant them in the spring approximately every 1 and a half to 2 and a half feet in the row and then 3 to 4 feet between rows and then over the summer you just let the runners fill in.

So you're getting a lot of quotes free plants but it comes at a cost.

So there's 4 main ways to start strawberries.

We like to use plugs, the 1 on the left here.

We root the runner tips in potting mix and that's a little bit of a process because you have to do it under mist.

So that's not something I'm going to recommend to you.

Ideally you could buy plugs from somebody.

The 1 next to it on the plastic is what's called cutoffs.

That's a living plant that they just dug up and cut off all the leaves to make it easier to ship and get established.

If it had leaves on it, it would die before it ever got established.

So that's, I would say that's not a good recommendation for intermediate growers.

That's pretty advanced stuff to get that done right.

The 1 up in the top right, dormant bare root plants, that's the way most matted row is done.

You buy a bundle of plants and the trick is to get the roots in without what they call j-hooking.

They need to be straight down and ideally spread out a little bit.

So that's the normal way and what we did this year, we're gonna see how it works.

We use dormant bare root plants in the fall.

And it seems like it worked okay, but boy they runnered like crazy.

They thought it was spring and and so they were just going everywhere and we had to keep cutting them off.

Then what you can do if you're trying to just keep propagating your own is actually kind of make your own plugs by by rooting them the runner tips in some kind of media, that works well.

You just can't cut the runner tip off until it's well rooted.

Then you can cut it, you know, cut its umbilical cord and You've got a new plant there.

You can technically start strawberries from seed.

Although we have had strawberries growing on our compost pile.

From rotten strawberries that got deposited there.

Ok so the rest is just kind of what I call strawberry plastic culture 101 tips and techniques to keep it working well.

The challenge is because we can't predict the weather too far out, you don't know whether it's going to be a warm fall or a cool fall.

A cool fall ideally you would plant them a little earlier and a really warm fall you'd plant them a little later because you're trying to get them a certain size in the fall.

You're really trying to manage the growth of that thing.

So we normally set tips the end of August that means rooting them under mist and then they're planted in the field the end of September or even the first week of October.

The last few years have been warm enough that we keep pushing our planting date back a little bit.

Now obviously, well if you wait a week past target planting dates, yields can begin to suffer.

If the plant doesn't get to the right size in the fall it's not going to produce as much in the spring.

And finally if you're north of where we live we're close to the 36th parallel just under it.

You would need to plant earlier in the fall and if you're further south they're planting well into October.

6 to 8 inches high, 30 inches wide is kind of the standard.

Kenny Point

Cultivating Sweet Potatoes for Storage or Market

I've been growing sweet potatoes for a while now.

It's a crop that I enjoy, really love growing, and I feel like all of us should be growing sweet potatoes, and that's 1 of the things we're going to talk about during the course of this presentation.

The outline, we're going to look at reasons to include sweet potatoes.

How many of you are currently growing sweet potatoes?

Before we go any further, let's have a word of prayer.

Our Heavenly Father, thank you for the many blessings that you provide for us.

Thank you for this opportunity to come to this conference to learn of you and the things that you've created, the things that you have provided for us to take care of us.

Please help us to use the time that you're giving us to prepare for everything that's coming down the road.

So we ask you to guide us and direct us and help us to fill the role that you design and designated us to be in this world.

We ask this in the name of your son, Jesus Christ, amen.

Okay, so going back to just the outline, we're also gonna cover just the cultural requirements, the things that you're gonna need in order to grow sweet potatoes.

We're gonna touch on pest control, controlling any pests that you might be faced with.

We're gonna look at harvesting, the curing and storage process for sweet potatoes.

That's something that I think is important, but it's also something that a lot of people don't cure their potatoes.

And I think when you do that, you could get better results by curing.

So we're gonna discuss that a little bit.

And then some sweet potatoes secrets and surprises that I've learned and that I wanna share with you.

And I'll save some time at the end for questions and answers.

So starting out with the reasons to grow sweet potatoes.

For me, it starts with, you know, the culinary uses and the fact that sweet potatoes are, they're good in terms of the flavor, the versatility.

There's so many ways that you can use sweet potatoes, so many things that you can do with them in the kitchen.

There's Low maintenance in terms of growing the crop.

So I think that's something, another reason why we should be growing them.

Self-sufficiency, this is something that I'm big on in food independence and food security, especially in the times that we're in, People are recognizing that there are issues with our food supply, things that they're doing to the food, things that they're putting in food.

So the more that we can grow and produce on our own, the better off we're going to be.

Like If you're farming or if you're even in a backyard garden, if you're growing sweet potatoes, there's something that there's a lot of demand.

People are interested in sweet potatoes and people like them.

So if you can take them to market, that's something that you're going to be able to profit from.

Then another thing that I really like about sweet potatoes is that you can store them, and they're easy to store.

It's not like if you're harvesting produce from a garden and you have to can it, go through that process with sweet potatoes.

Yeah, there's a curing we're going to talk about, but that's just a simple thing.

And then after that, you can store sweet potatoes.

I've stored them easily for a year beyond a year.

I think you can get, you know, possibly close to a couple years of storage.

And so that's something, another benefit, another thing, the reason why it's important to grow sweet potatoes.

Last year, well, this current year, we went in West Virginia, we had a severe drought.

So my sweet potatoes weren't as productive, but they still, they were productive, they survived.

And the prior year, previous to last summer, I had 1 sweet potato plant that yielded 25 pounds of potatoes.

So think about that, that's from 1 plant.

And if you could, yeah, that wasn't the average, that was the highest yield for a plant.

So even if the average was 15 pounds over the entire garden, that's still a really good production.

I mentioned that we had a drought this past summer.

And in spite of that, I really didn't irrigate my sweet potatoes.

So I was reserving that water for the high tunnels.

So in spite of that, the sweet potatoes, they still survived just on the little rain that we did have.

And throughout the drought period, they lived.

Production would have been higher if there had been rain or irrigation.

But in spite of the drought, and that's the type of conditions too that we may be faced with in the future.

So we need to be prepared, our plants need to be prepared, the varieties that we're growing.

We want things that are hardy, both in terms of drought, in terms of cold, whatever condition we may face, we want to be able to work towards being able to handle those right now.

So, and then the next point was that just that everyone that can grow sweet potatoes, you should be growing them.

So, I want to encourage you, or even if you had failures with them in the past, try again.

You want to continue, you want to develop your skills at this point while we can, while you have that time and opportunity.

So now I have a picture, which you can't see, but it's just from where I lived in Pennsylvania.

I was doing more going along the scale of backyard gardening, but I was still growing and producing sweet potatoes.

In this photo, it just shows the diversity because there were different colors of the sweet potatoes.

And you could just look by looking at the photo, you could tell that there was a lot of diversity in the varieties that I was growing.

If you're just starting, you want to plant some sweet potatoes, what's the first thing you're going to need?

You're going to need sweet potato seed, yes.

In terms of sweet potatoes, the seeds are going to refer to as slips.

We're going to discuss how you can, and you should be growing your own slips.

But even before that, you have to decide, okay, what varieties am I going to grow?

And there are lots of different varieties.

Typically when we go shopping, we go to the grocer, we're faced with a single variety.

If it's a sweet potato, it's just going to be a sweet potato.

Maybe you'll see some things labeled as yams, but you're not going to be able to get that diversity to get, oh, here's a yellow sweet potato over in this aisle.

Around here, you have your orange or your white.

You're just going to be stuck with whatever they're growing.

But if you can go and select your variety and that way, even the purple sweet potatoes, a lot of people have never even heard of or seen or tasted a purple sweet potato.

Getting back to the seed, the slips, that's something that is so easy to grow your slips.

And for me, when you talk about food security and independence, This is 1 of the crops that everything, every aspect of it is in your hands.

You're not dependent on someone to grow your and provide seeds for you.

And here's like a, I have a sweet potato just in this little container.

And there's many options that you can use to grow your slips.

You could just put that potato in water and have it just growing in water.

Or in some cases, you don't need to do anything.

Alan Seiler

Ricky Seiler

Bed Prep and Planting for Thriving Plants Part 1

I'm going to tell you just a little bit about us.

This is Alan back in 2003, right here on the right.

We started off with 3, quote, raised beds where basically we killed plants.

That was our goal pretty much just to kill plants, plant them and kill them.

That wasn't our goal but that's what we did.

So I won't go into the details but it wasn't a very fun experience.

And it didn't invoke a lot of encouragement or it didn't encourage us to do more than that.

But, a few years later, Alan had started to read a little book, and this was in 2009.

Now we took the raised beds and we had these little tiny hoops over them, and we have some beets here, and it looks like some, I don't know what that is over there Maybe some peppers here, but you can see we're actually oh these are tomatoes.

Okay, very good Those are 2 minutes, but you know we're kind of making progress So this is 6 years later because for a few years.

We just gave up We just gave up, okay Then this is from a couple years ago, but this is our place now.

Now, we have, these are not growing beds, these will hopefully be future...

But, and this is a couple of years ago, we have, like, we'll talk about hoop houses.

If anybody's interested in knowing more about hoop houses Please join us on Friday afternoon or Friday morning We'll talk more about that, but we have 10 hoop houses now.

We grow different varieties in different beds, different times of the year, that type of thing.

We're located about, we're in south central Oklahoma, which is about halfway between Dallas-Fort Worth and Oklahoma City.

We're a few minutes off the interstate there.

This will be our eighth season growing at this.

This is not where we lived when you saw that other picture.

We relocated only about 7 miles from where we used to be.

This is me, my wife Vivian, of course Alan, his wife, our grandson who will turn 1 on Friday.

So for those of you who were at the conference last year, my wife was sweating because we were sweating because Alan didn't make it because his wife was due any day.

We got home 2 days later, Travis Alan Seiler was born, so maybe you'll see him around.

They actually live on the property that we have there.

And this is kind of where we're located, kind of right there where that red dot is.

There's Oklahoma City and that type of thing.

So what we want to talk about a little bit is this concept called tipping the balance of nature in favor of the plant.

If you're familiar with the Inigot, with somebody named Elliot Coleman, he's written a number of books.

This is a concept that he introduced us to.

Tipping the balance of nature in favor of the plant.

Because here's the thing, most places where we grow aren't necessarily always plant friendly.

You may have times of the year where they're kind of plant friendly, but a lot of times they're not.

I can tell that at least from where we grew up.

So what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about 5 keys to tip the balance.

This is a two-part series so we're going to try to get up to about somewhere in this area with this first hour and then the next hour we'll cover these sections down here.

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Series

Level 2 Home & Market Gardeners

Bed Prep and Planting for Thriving Plants Part 2

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Attachments

Breakout Session 3

Best Fertilizer Sourcing

57m

Soil Fertility

Porosity & Air Exchange in the Soil- Part 2

2h 5m

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 4

51m

Short Course: Soil Health

Soil Health- Part 5

56m

Soil Health

7- Choosing the Right Resources, The End Matters

53m

Home Gardening

4- Steps to Productive Soil

1h

Soil Fertility Advanced

Soil: Carbon Fertility

1h

Home Gardening

Doctoring the Soil: Compost, and the Difference between Organic and Synthetic Fertilisers

56m

Sound Doctrine