50+ Key Vegetable Gardening Tips for Old & New Gardeners: Many Topics Covered - Use the Timestamps

Welcome to the Rusted Garden Homestead. I'm here with Kim, Callie, Kim, Jerry. We're going to talk about 25 tips, maybe we don't wish we knew, but 25 tips for new gardeners, old gardeners, something we wish we would have known early on. We're just going to walk through the garden, throw out ideas, and hopefully help you guys have a better garden. My first tip, which I always talk about, we just did a video on it, is start your compost pile first. Organic gardening is all about the compost. We love compost, but we always tend to wait to get started, and sometimes years go by and we don't get it started. So before you even start the first bed, build your first pen like something over there, throw all your compost in there, you're good to go. Tip number one. And tip number two, I'm actually going to walk over this way as we share tip numbers two, is keep it simple. A lot of people get overwhelmed when they're first starting out gardening and just garden with whatever you have. And I love Gary's small little space garden here, right before we walk into the big garden. Very small space. Very small space, enough for me to trip over. And it consists of, I don't know, maybe eight feet by about three feet. It's got a grow bag, a simple raised bed, and a couple other grow bags over here. And you can grow a ton of food in a small space, really even enough for a family with a couple of kids. You can grow some tomatoes, some greens, herbs in this space, and a nice little simple trellis to maximize your space. So just start with the space you have and keep it simple. You can always expand later as you really get into it in your garden or your family grows. The other thing that we're going to do is going to shoot this without editing, except for transitions. So we'll see who messes up first. That's right. And that's the thing, people get really overwhelmed and think they have to have a garden like the size of my garden, which is a teaching garden. Jerry, to your left is the simplest way, I don't know, and we'll try and count the tips out, but it'll be like 25. But number three, you don't need all the fancy raised beds, the metal raised beds, they're really expensive. This is just growing in the earth. This is where I grew potatoes, have some peppers in here, and this is really, there's my dog barking in the background, we're gonna have to reel her in shortly. Potatoes. Deer come out here so I don't grow a whole lot, but if you have deer protection, limited budget, just want to get started, go ahead, plant like this. This is Willow, she's the one who wandered off the homestead and was barking at the neighbors. Willow is human, sorry Gary to interrupt you, but she's like a human dog. She's very smart, but she likes to wander. So I just wanted to be clear, my point with this tip was you don't need anything fancy, you can just grow right in the earth beds, plant as you wish, get some skills, learn how to garden, and then expand with time. But start small and you just dig a place and you start growing. That's right, so if you have a little spot in your backyard that you can dig, just do this. And the next tip, I think it's tip number four, is use whatever materials you have on hand. So Gary's a great example of that. He's got lots of repurposed materials in his garden. So here we've got some poultry wire, which is very inexpensive, you might keep chickens, you might have some sitting around. T-posts and string, Gary, I think you use this for like a deer deterrent? Just a deer deterrent, yeah. The chicken wire and the string won't keep deer from jumping in there, but it keeps them from going in pretty deep. That's right, it helps so you don't have to build a big huge fence when you first get started. Here's a gate that I'm sure you repurposed from something else, Gary, maybe from a dog pen or something like that. Nothing fancy. And then just kind of made a little division here with like bricks, some planks on the ground, and just dug things out. So look around, you might have a lot of these materials already in your own backyard, or you know, barter with your neighbors. Yeah, nature, well, I should say a garden is not a beauty contest. Nature wants to grow, it doesn't have to look perfect, it doesn't have to be HDTV ready, you just need the earth. And when you come inside, the bed over here too, this is a good setup too. This is just a little bit of a raised bed, fabric pots. The bed over there I made out of firewood lumber and just screwed it together right up here. This has been here for four years, growing oregano in there, I grow garlic in here. Outside my garden I'm growing stuff that the deer don't really like. That's probably another tip, is that you want to make sure you protect from deer and animals the best you can. But this works, it doesn't have to be fancy. Come on inside. Willow, let's go inside. This is perfect. Jerry, let's get a little bit closer shot of this, because Gary, I think these are pieces of firewood that you chopped up from your own property. Yeah. Just stacked up and just put a screw in the middle here, so you don't have to buy a lot of, you know, lumber and things like that. Again, look around, see what wood you have or materials you can use to create a raised bed. Go on. Now my garden is a teaching garden and it's real easy for people to get overwhelmed. You absolutely don't need all this. This is a basic root pouch container garden. If you're growing in a place that doesn't have the great earth, you can just grow in pouches and I do recommend that. These are nice too, because you can kind of take them with you if you have to move. That's right, so containers are a great way if you are growing on a patio or a balcony and have no earth. Just grab a couple, the five gallons, the ten gallons. I have them over on our website. I think Gary's got some on his. And just fill them with soil and plants and what you like to eat and you've got an instant garden. Now the next tip that I love to do that you can garden on the cheap or for free, really, you're already growing and you've got something like this hanging from your vine. These are actually cow peas, but you can do it with beans, peas, all kinds of vegetables. You let them just dry on the vine like this. There's a little bit of a rattle when they're really dry. Hopefully you can hear that. That means the seeds are nice and dry inside. They're mature when they're dry like this. Just open them up and then just kind of scrape them out into your hand. And you can even just throw these in your container right now or wherever you have an empty spot. Poke them in the ground or you can save them to plant for next year. Funny thing is, I was just out here yesterday, I tend to do this all the time, is just stick seeds in my pocket. It's a quick way to succession plant, which could even be the next tip. Throw some seeds in your pocket, keep them by your back door, and when you go outside, just toss them in your raised bed or your container. If you're gonna container garden, one mistake that I made early on is when you're doing your own transplants or you're buying the transplants, they're small, they're cute, you want to keep every one of them. When I seed started tomatoes, I only probably needed three plants, but I would seed start maybe a dozen. This is a 20-gallon container. This is one cucumber plant, but it's actually two cucumber plants. And this is, I hate doing this, but in a 20-gallon container, only one plant really needs to be in there. You have to get rid of it. When you start container gardening, moisture is the biggest issue. A small little tiny cucumber looks great in there. You could have three or four in there. When it gets to this size, the root systems develop. When it's full size, this big, it's gonna suck the life and water out of this container. And if you put in too many plants, you're not going to get a good harvest. You're going to be disappointed. So you really have to keep in mind the full size of the plant. You know, six weeks, eight weeks after you plant it, you have to keep in mind how hot it's gonna get. It's been 95 degrees here, and you really have to keep up on the watering. But don't over plant your containers is tip, whatever tip we're on. Next tip is, one thing I love to do is look around the garden and see what I can use for a trellis that's already growing. So case in point, Gary has all these beautiful sunflowers, which by the way, he told me all of his sunflowers reseeded from last year. It's another way to save money. But look around, see what you can use for a trellis. I can even plant these cowpea seeds that I have in my hand right at the base of the sunflower. So it saves you time. You don't have to install or build a trellis. Saves you money on trellises. Just poke them to the ground here, and even now in August, it's still pretty warm. The soil is pretty warm. The air is warm. These cowpeas are going to grow very quickly. And before you know it, you'll have some seeds to harvest with very little effort and no money. If you come over here, Jerry, take a look at this pepper plant. So a couple of tips mixed into one. I haven't watered for the last couple of days because the temperatures have dropped down into the 80s. The question I always get is, how often should I water? And the answer is, when your plants need it. Like I'm not trying to be smart or anything like that. But we tend to woefully underwater our plants because somewhere down the line, somebody said it's really easy to overwater them and you're going to drown them. So when you're looking at this pepper plant, notice how the leaves are kind of limp. They don't look perked up. This plant needs to be watered. And I'm really watering in the heat of summer when things are 95 degrees, just about every day, if not every other day, to really make sure you get the water in there. The other beauty about peppers is people think you can only put one plant in a planting hole. This is two poblanos. The peppers look really nice, ready to get picked, you know, turning that brown color. But you can plant two pepper plants in the same planting hole, keep it fed, keep it watered, and the plants don't really suffer in size, and the production is really, really nice. So plant your peppers a little more closely than you think. You'll get more production out of your garden, and you'll be able to put in other plants. Next tip has to do with pollinators. A lot of people ask me, can I plant my flowers with my vegetables? And my answer is absolutely yes. Don't think too hard about it, just plant whatever you want together. But here Gary has a lot of pollinators here planted right in with his vegetables. We've got echinacea over here, which is a beautiful perennial, and we've got some marigolds, which are said to help deter pests. I don't know if it actually does help, but they have a nice strong scent. But the most important thing is, is that you're getting your pollinator flowers in right with the vegetables, so you're bringing the pollinators in to help pollinate your fruits and your vegetables right where it needs it the most. Now here, obviously it's working for Gary because he's got a beautiful A-frame trellis and some really nice looking calla. Let's just peek under here and take a look. These look fantastic. They're not quite ready to harvest yet. Vertical gardening is another way to really expand what you can grow in your garden, and this is an A-frame trellis. It's massive, like I wanted to build a really big trellis. Very simple to put together. I have lots of build videos on trellising, and if you go right up to the top, it's just a hinge and some 2x4s. But the idea is, instead of letting your vines sprawl across the ground, same thing with tomatoes. Tomatoes are vines. You can let them sprawl on the ground, but they take up too much space. So we stake our tomatoes. Growing vertically, it's going to save space. You're going to be able to get a whole lot more in there. I've got a watermelon on the left, cantaloupe on the right. I trellis up my cucumbers, whole beans of course, all kinds of different plants. Even vining squash you can trellis upward. If you're limited in space, really think about vertical gardening. That's going to give you an opportunity to grow a whole lot more in your garden. The next tip is make the use of all the available space that you have. I love to grow, under my A-frame trellises, leafy greens that might need a little bit of extra shade in the summertime. So typically, under my A-frames, I plant arugula. As the weather starts to cool off a little bit, I'll plant a lot of lettuces and cool other greens. You can do kale and chard, although those will take the heat pretty well. But stick some vegetables underneath your trellises that need a little bit of shade, and you'll be able to grow a lot more veggies that way. Succession planting. I don't know what tip we're on, but maybe a 10 or something like that. So it is August 16th. You still have time to replant cucumbers, squash, zucchini, other plants in your summer garden. We're in the process of transitioning over to the fall garden when the temperatures drop, but here are examples of two Armenian cucumbers planted actually on 7-15. These are going to take off as the temperatures cool. They're going to be doing really well up here, and then my other cucumber plants that are going to be dying off will be gone, and I'll be getting cucumbers well into September or October. Here's another example, too, of two plants in one space, and I'm not going to rip them out. I'm going to wait a little bit longer to make sure there's no disease showing up or bug issues on here, and then maybe in a week or two, whatever plant is strongest, I'm going to remove one. But you can certainly plant cucumbers, squash, zucchini throughout the summer. June, July, and August again. And this way you plant through the bug cycle, the fungus cycle, the disease cycle, and you continue to get production over the whole season. Don't try and keep one beat-up plant going. Remove it, get rid of it, and then put in some new plants, new seeds. One tip that I absolutely love in the heat of summer that really saves my garden every single summer is this baby right here, shade cloth. Now when it's 90, 95, or plus degrees out, the flowers tend to dry up and drop off of your cucumbers, your tomatoes, your peppers, and shade cloth is a lifesaver. So you just want to put up something very, very simple. Gary's got the shade cloth here connected to a T-post, connected to a fence, and then it looks like he was shading some of his leafy greens here. Just stretch it over the garden bed, and you know what I like to use, too, is other things just to kind of weigh the shade cloth corners down. So I'm actually just going to put this pot on top of it, and then you can attach it with another rope or a piece of twine to this fence, and voila, you've got some nice shade underneath this garden, underneath the shade cloth, and voila, you've got some nice shade underneath here. It literally keeps the plants about 10 to 15 degrees cooler, which can make the difference between dead plants and plants that are surviving and thriving in the summer heat. And I was using this, I don't know if you said it because I was walking around, but when it got into the mid-90s, upper 90s, I put all the shade cloth up, and it makes a difference. Tomatoes keep going, peppers keep going, but as soon as the temperatures then get back into the 80s, you do want to remove it. You want to make sure the sun's getting in there, and you're just trying to regulate that high temperature in the 90s, above the 90s, when the sun is beating down, because it will shut down your plants. Cucumber plants are over here. I want to show you these, Jerry. So these both, the one right here, kind of beat up, and the only reason that I kept it going, I normally would pull this out, was for video purposes. And it's chugging along, and it's produced this beautiful cucumber down here, which we need to take off, but it's only one cucumber. This plant really beat up. This is something that I would pull out. The cucumber plants over here, planted at the same time, sometime in June, there's actually two of them, and this is all the different trellising. This is a cattle panel, which I made an arch from one bed over here on the left, all the way over past Kim to the other side there, and I grow grapes up it. I'm growing the cucumbers up it, but you can see the massive amounts of leaves and growth from this cucumber plant, and this kind of ties into the tip I said earlier. The success of this plant has all been about watering. I've been watering it, really, five times a week, let's just say, to give you an idea. Deep soaking, good 15 seconds around where the vines coming out of the ground, all the surface roots. Watering is what's going to make a difference in your garden. If your garden is kind of managing okay, try upping the water and see what happens, but this is just beautiful. The cucumbers are still producing, lots of baby cucumbers, water makes all the difference. I want to take you over here to the beautiful basil that's growing, and these are just gorgeous plants, and Gary was telling me these have been in here since June, and still looking really good, but one thing I like to do, too, for the next tip is let some of my herbs, especially the basil, go to flower and go to seed. Now, when it starts to kind of get hot, or it needs harvesting, the basil stem will turn a little bit thick, like this one here, and then it starts to flower at the top. At this point, the leaves do change flavor, so if you're going to harvest it for the leaves, get it before it starts to flower, but when these flowers bloom, it brings in the bees like crazy. They love the basil flowers, so let a few of your plants flower to continue to bring in the pollinators, and then leave a few that aren't flowering, and harvest them for beautiful basil on your sandwiches and your cucumber salad, and that's what we've been eating a lot of here, is basil cucumber tomato salad, so just clip off the basil, chop it up, bring it into the house, you won't believe the flavor, it's amazing. Now, on the ground are cucumbers, and we're going to actually have a whole video out about why cucumbers become sour, why they become bitter, but when your cucumbers are on the vine, you really want to pick them before they start looking anything like this. These cucumbers are just overly mature, and actually, right to your right, here we go, right in there, is a cucumber that's over mature. If you can remove that, Kim, we don't want it on there. Make sure you take your cucumbers off as quickly as you can, because it does mess up production a little bit, and then right to the left, behind it, is a cucumber for me, right over here. Oh, perfect. So, don't let the cucumbers over mature. You want to pick them when they're small, when they're green, they're sweet, they're tender, and you're gonna like them. At the end of the season, leave a couple of these hanging on the vine, and you want them to get this dark orange color. Let them kind of go till the frost comes. This is a mature cucumber. You'll be able to cut it open, save the seed, just like the beans, and you're not gonna have to spend any money next year on your cucumber. Okay, next tip, we're actually going to walk down here to the strawberries, and take a look at those. Strawberries are one of my favorite fruits to grow. They're very, very easy to grow in raised beds or containers. Gary has them growing, actually, right here in raised beds. Look at all these strawberry plants. They will actually send out runners, see if I can find a good runner here, and you can root them for free plants. So, the runner is a shoot here that comes out from the parent plant, and these are already starting to develop roots. There's so much humidity here that things root very, very easily. So, what you can do, you can either root it right here in the ground. I'm actually gonna pull this one up, and just put it right here in the raised bed. Great way to, again, save money on gardening, get free plants. You can just stick it right in the soil. You can secure it, if you want, with a little landscape staple or even a bobby pin, and that will root and provide a free plant for you for next year. I just want to give you a quick little look here at the green stalks. Gary probably has hundreds and hundreds of strawberry plants in the green stalks. So, again, growing vertically, you can do the exact same thing here with the runners. Let's find a good runner that's maybe already rooting. I think here's one, and then this one's kind of empty right here, so it's a great place to poke it in there, and then once it roots, that one won't stand at the moment, but once it roots, and it's got some roots established, and it kind of gives a little bit of resistance, you can go ahead and cut it from the mother plant, and it will just start to grow new strawberries for you. Now, make sure you keep your strawberries well fertilized, and with some good water-soluble fertilizer, you can even throw a handful of compost in here. Strawberries are one of the easiest things to grow. That was going to be my tip. So, mid-August. I'm going to add to it. Mid-August, you know, you don't want to dig these out and then feel like you got to put fertilizer in there and compost in there. Leave your plants going. Just crunch off the dry leaves, the dead leaves. If some of them look bad, pluck them off. Hit them with that water-soluble a good amount. This is where sometimes I use the chemical type fertilizers, which will not harm your plants, they're not going to wreck your garden, but they're really high in nitrogen. That's what the tomatoes need. Being container plants, and this is also a tip for container plants, when you're growing in containers, it's not like the earth. They take the nutrients out so much that, you know, when your plants are small, you set them up with organic granular fertilizer, you set them up with compost, maybe you water what, once a month maybe, with a light water-soluble fertilizer. When they get larger, you may have to water them every 10 days or 14 days. So in containers, keep up the fertilizer. But if you want a second round of strawberries, hit them now, water-soluble fertilizer, clean them up, keep them watered, and you're going to get September and October strawberries here in Maryland. And let me just talk a little bit for the next tip, a little bit more about strawberries, is winterizing your strawberry plants. Now we don't have to do much of that in Southern California, and Gary, I don't know if you winterize or if you just cut back, but they will survive a very cold temperature, so, and then come back next year. So what I usually tell people to do is mulch them with a couple inches of shredded straw, shredded leaves, keep those roots alive, that's the most important thing, but they will start to die back in the cold temperatures, so don't be alarmed. Your strawberry leaves will start to get dry, it may change color with the cooler temperatures, so you can just cut them off, mulch the roots and the crowns, and then when the weather warms up in the spring, they're going to start to spring back to life again. At that point, you may need, you may want to hit them again with some water-soluble, and you'll have strawberries next spring. So I'm in Maryland Zone 7. These green stalk towers, I am affiliated with, so if you'd like to purchase them, check out the video description, but I've had these, I've been with green stalk for maybe nine years. These have been sitting out a good eight years, 24-7. They don't crack, they don't split. My point being, is they've been sitting out here with the strawberry plant, so during the winter, I don't even mulch them. They stay out here, they freeze. Again, Maryland Zone 7, we get 20-degree winters, sometimes into the teens. Strawberries are really hardy. Come the spring, like you're saying, I hit them with the water-soluble, clean them up a little bit, they take off, and I get strawberries, but they're really, really hardy. I don't know, tip number 15, get a cup for your garden. It's a lot of fun, and she loves actually being out here. She knows where the garden is, and will come running if I call her or tell her to go to the garden. Blueberries, I've been growing blueberries here. This is actually my fifth season here at the homestead. I'm not pruning my blueberries. I've planted them pretty close together. They actually have shallow roots, so you don't need much space. They don't need a lot of water. They do like soil that's a little bit more acidic, but you don't have to freak out about that. My soil here is about a 7 pH, which is pretty much neutral. Spring, at least once, maybe again in the fall, I use a Miracle-Gro Acid or any kind of acidifier, and I just water in the base. It's a water-soluble fertilizer. Drops the pH down, and the blueberries have been wonderful year after year. So you don't have to over-worry about getting the pH of your blueberry soil down to the perfect amount. Just plant them, get them growing, water-soluble, acidic fertilizer. Spring, maybe again in the fall, and the blueberries are going to do really well. Let's talk about peppers and how they do in warmer climates, frost-free climates. So in frost-free climates, peppers will come back year after year. So right now these peppers are producing very well, but in a couple of months, say they were in Southern California, the production would start to decline. The plants might get a little bit of cold damage on the leaves, and at that point what you can do is don't pull the entire plant out. You can actually cut the plant off at the base, and what you want to do is cut it where this little Y is at the bottom. So you completely chop it off, leave the Y here. So leave the Y here over the wintertime, and what this does is it cuts off all the dead weight on the pepper plant, and your goal at that point is just to keep the plant alive. So typically I'll put a little bit of mulch around the bottom of the plant. I'm not going to expect it to grow much over the wintertime, but as the weather warms up in the spring, you're going to see new little shoots, new little leaves pop out from your pepper plant, and then you'll have a second year plant, which gives you a little head start in the springtime because you've got your seedlings going inside, but you've got a full-on pepper plant already going outside. Did you talk about the different zones? I just put willow away. I did not talk about the different zones. So like in Maryland, my peppers die off, so I can't do that. So one important thing, too, is instead of, and sometimes people over-research, like they'll watch, of course, you know, watch our videos on tomatoes or something, but they may watch 15-20 videos on how to plant a tomato, how to grow a tomato. They'll read a whole lot. The best thing you can do, and this is one of my favorite tips actually, is just make a small space. Start with one or two beds. Get that tomato plant into the ground after you've kind of read about it, but learn as you grow, literally. Learn as you go. That's the best way to learn. You don't have to overthink it. So part of what you're doing, too, is trying to understand, like your tip for overwintering peppers works on the West Coast, doesn't work in Maryland. They're gonna die. It's just not gonna work. Now, other tip, switching gears, grapes can be hard to grow. These are muscadines, which look like grapes. They're much hardier than grapes. They get less diseases, and they have these beautiful grape-like looking fruits on there. Now, these are very hard and very bitter. Over the next two or three weeks, they're gonna start ripening. This one's not full. It just broke off. This one's not ready. It's still hard, but muscadines produce these beautiful fruits, and it's really an alternative to grapes. All the leaves will die off. They can take, you know, a deep freeze. They're very hardy. Come back year after year, but I do recommend fruits for your garden, and muscadines are great. Definitely. The next tip, too, kind of goes along with that, is plant what you like to eat. I mean, if you don't like eggplant, don't waste your valuable space on eggplant. So, find out what your family enjoys eating, and then plant those vegetables. You can even do that in a couple of small containers. A few fruits, like your cantaloupe and your strawberries, and really just stick to those, and then the next time you plant, you can maybe pick out one or two new varieties to try and give those a go, but don't be afraid to experiment. Things are gonna die. Things die on us all the time. Just expect it, and make adjustments as you grow your garden. One of the things people ask me is, how do you keep from being disappointed, and I do get disappointed, but I balance it out with taking a look. There's actually, in this space, there are, I think, 10 or 12 pepper plants. They've been growing wonderfully there for the last four years, so go with what's successful. Like, peppers grow really well. These are shishitos. I keep planting this way. On the other side, I don't know if we're gonna walk back there, but I just had a butternut squash get killed off by a vine borer. I went away to help my daughter build a garden. Grasshoppers came in, ate the lettuce. Yeah, that's disappointing, but then I look around at the rest of the garden and say, okay, this is going really well, so you really have to keep it balanced. Also, with that, and I know that you have written a book. We can talk about that in a second, but how do you manage the time to manage a garden? And you can break things down into short tasks. What I don't recommend is having a list of a hundred things and then always looking down what you didn't do. As you check off something, go ahead and take a look at it, be proud that you did it, and then move to the next one when you have time. That's right. I think garden overwhelm and garden burnout is very real for gardeners, and actually, my new book is called The 10-Minute Gardener, and that's what it's all about. It's 85 time-saving tactics so you can have a garden and have a life, because we don't want our gardens taking over our whole life. Let's get real here. We're busy. We've got kids to get to soccer games, work to get to, all kinds of things that we need to do. So my book breaks it down into little tasks that you can do, and I just encourage people in that book, do a little bit each day. Do something for 10 minutes. Even set your timer on your watch or your phone, and then be happy at what you've accomplished at the end of the day. At the end of the week, you've done an hour's worth of gardening without even really realizing it. You're just working into the routine of the day. Now over to your right, Jerry, are two dwarf, not, they were supposed to be, but a dwarf nectarine and a dwarf plum tree. And the tip here is strategy. Over your right shoulder, if you pan to the right, that is the Southern Sun. A little bit more. That's where the Southern Sun comes. So it's all coming from your right side, hitting these trees. You want to come back to these trees. The Southern Sun hits the trees. They're growing beautifully. Just when you buy dwarf trees, buy them from a quality place so they don't get massive. But the shade is thrown towards my greenhouse. So if you're planting bigger plants in your garden, put them towards the back so that the Southern Sun throws the shade away, and then you can grow blueberry bushes or something down there. So there is a strategy on where you put the taller plants. Southern Sun is that way. Western Sun is that way. And then the tall plants stay over here. This way the shade won't mess up the rest of your garden. So in this space, I had other stuff growing through the summer. Sometime in the beginning of August, and I'm gonna have you look down here Jerry, there are remains of beets. They were actually chewed up by dresshoppers. And that's one of the things that was disappointing. They're starting to come back, but the beets here were put in on 7-14. Today is 8-16. I always mess up the dates. Now is a great time to get a lot of your fall crops in the ground. And we're gonna be talking about that actually today at 3 p.m. We're gonna be doing a live stream. You can use the warmth of August to plant beets, turnips, peas, carrots, all your cool weather crops. Some of them, you know, depending on where you live, if you're on the West Coast, you probably want to do that now. But you could shift and plant them in September. The benefit is the warmth of the ground gets your fall crops, the crops that like the cool weather, growing a lot more quickly, getting to size. And then when the fall temperatures come here in things cool down, I'm gonna get, you know, a harvest sooner to my table by doing that. I also love peas. Peas are a cool weather crop, but you have to make sure you have at least 70 to 80 days before the first frost. The pea leaves can take a frost and a freeze, but the flowers and the pods, if they get frost, can die and the pods become rubbery. So even though these are cool weather crops, you've got to make sure the frost doesn't come. And then finally, what is a cool weather crop? Cool weather crops, we have the turnips over here, beets, carrots, radishes, the brassicas, cauliflower, broccoli, brussels, you can throw out any others you think of. They can freeze. Lettuce, spinach, the leaves can actually freeze solid and then in the morning when the sun comes out, they defrost, they're perfectly fine. The ice doesn't rupture the cell of the plant, therefore they keep growing. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers are warm weather crops. If a frost hits them, it destroys the leaf. So we're always planting cool weather crops in the spring, warm weather crops in the summer, later spring, and then in a lot of places you can go back to those cool weather crops in the fall. So you can really grow almost, I can't say in every place, but at least in Maryland we can grow from March into November. I know in California you can grow year-round. So your garden is going to be different on what you can grow and how long you can grow it. And I was going to throw in there too, in frost-free zones, I'm always out there with those frost-free garden zones like Texas, Florida, all the really southern zones that don't get frost. Wintertime is really the best time to grow those cool weather vegetables, but the key is get them started early. We're going to head outside in just a moment to Gary's seed starting station, but for us in Southern California, it's really tough to grow the cool weather vegetables right now. So often I will start from seed indoors and then get good transplants established. I usually start about mid-September, end of September. In six weeks, in November, I have those cool weather transplants to pop out in the garden. We're pulling out the summer crops at that point. So I always like to look ahead about six weeks and then start whatever seeds are going to be good, whatever vegetable seeds are going to be good in that season about six weeks out. The timing is important. So just like you were saying, I keep a journal, and Jerry if you can come in here, I want to show you the peas here and then we're going to look at a couple of different things. But we can look at the peas while I'm talking about the journal. You're going to be learning new things, so the best thing to do is to keep a journal. So these peas went in on, let's see if I can put the date on here, on 7-18. And again today is August 16th. This might have been a little bit too soon to put peas in here. In Maryland, you can see how the bottom is dried up. So by keeping a journal and taking notes, I can, you know, reference back next year saying 7-18 is a little bit early for peas. If you look over here, the peas are doing better. They went in about 10 days later, and then the peas to your hard right went in even a week after that, right over in there. And they're a little bit smaller. What I'm doing is I'm putting them in at different times over August to learn what works best in my garden. And the only way you can do that is to plant and to keep notes. And I just finally want to end with, at least in this section, these are carrots. Carrots are cool weather crops. They're also biannual. You want to get these into the ground, at least in Maryland, and then you adjust accordingly. Now, great growth, looks beautiful. You know, here's three of them. Here's the thinning again. You can, I got to thin these down too. One or two, a carrot will push itself out, but you want to, you know, not over plant. So you have to come back and thin them out. But carrots are biannual, so you want to get them in August so that they can fully mature by the time a hard freeze comes here in Maryland. If these kind of grow a little bit, they make it through the winter and then they start growing again next year. Because they're biannual, that means the second time around, the second spring, they want to flower and produce seeds. So they're not going to really produce a nice carrot. A lot of mistakes people make is they'll put the carrots in in September, October here in Maryland, not enough time for the carrot to develop. So just start them early while it's still warm. The other little tip I'm thinking of while we're here with the peas is you could also use shade cloth to help shade your, protect your cooler vegetables from the heat. So Gary, you know, it'd be a fun experiment to try. Like if you would have thrown shade cloth over here, it would have kept them a little bit cooler. Yeah. Hey, we all make mistakes. They were supposed to get a shade cloth, but they didn't. But, okay. Well, so much for that, right? No, but, you know, give yourself a little, you know, break there, but experiment a little bit and see if that might help it prevent it from drying out with the shade cloth. The shade cloth really does make a big difference. Well, let me tell you more about shade cloth. Okay, tell us more. So the reason that you're using it in the summer, even though, say it's 95 degrees or 85 degrees, top 2, 4, 6 inches of the soil warms up to at least that temperature. But when the sun is beating down, it can warm that top 2 inches, 4 inches to well over a hundred degrees. That high heat not only dries out the soil quickly, that's why you really want to keep up on watering more often than you think, but it sends a signal to these plants that it's not safe to grow. They may, you know, shut down if they're tomatoes or peppers. They may want to flower and bolt if they're the cool weather crops. So the shade cloth isn't just about the ambient surrounding temperature. It's to stop the sun from heating up that 2 inches to a good, sometimes 110, 120 degrees, even hotter. And one day will kill the plant. Yeah, it totally will. We've, you know, like we'll put our thermometer in the sun because it's a lot, most temperatures are taken in the shade, like on your weather app, on your phone. But if you put your thermometer in the sun, it's about 110 on like a 90 degree day. So that's what your plants are feeling. So a shade cloth can bring it down to a manageable temperature to keep your plants alive. And for warmer the vegetables, not right now, they can even thrive even in 100 degree temperatures under shade cloth. And for shade cloth too, probably another tip to throw in, I don't know where we're at, but shade cloth can come in 70% shade cloth, 80% shade cloth, 50% shade cloth. And what it means, an 80% shade cloth blocks 80% of the sun. So it's not total shade. That's very different. Still 20% of the sun's getting in. Here in Maryland, I recommend for, you know, being budget-friendly, a 50% shade cloth will work. Maybe in California, if it gets hotter, well, actually you don't get too much hotter than that. But maybe you go towards Arizona and South, you want a 60, 70, 80% shade cloth to even protect it more. So the type of shade cloth you're going to buy, it's going to vary on how hot your sun is getting. That's right. We even have a lot of gardeners in Arizona, usually can't grow much in Arizona or Florida in the summertime, but they'll just leave their shade cloth up. Like for example, they might have four stakes in the corner of this garden bed and then drape the entire garden bed with shade cloth, roll it up so they can get to it and work on it, and then roll it down in the heat of the day. And that way they can actually grow in the hottest part of the year when they might not otherwise be able to grow anything at all. Geri, I appreciate being mic'd up. So we'll walk over to the nursery and stuff like that, but we'll talk about other tips as we go. Sure. A lot of people will be asking me, you've got a sunflower stuck to your back. A lot of people say, I can't grow tomatoes in Florida. And they can, but they can't really grow them July and August. It gets too hot. So if you're in an area that gets, you know, super hot July and August, you may have to shift growing to September, October, November, or December, January, February. So your garden is going to, what you can plant in your garden is going to vary based on the temperatures. Just because you see the most of the U.S. planting tomatoes May through September, means you might have to do it August through December. That's right. And you know, your local family-owned garden center is a great source of information. You're not going to find much growing information at like the big-box stores, but if you can find a local family-owned garden center in your area, I definitely recommend making good use of that. Going over, picking their brains, buying a few plants from them, because they'll know what grows well in that area. Let's go over to this side first. So if you have a bigger property, if you want to make some money for a plant set from a plant sale, a great way to kind of get money for your garden garden habits is to sell plants. So right in here, I have mint. Sometime in November, I will dig this up, I will break it up into little pieces, and then I replant it into containers like this. We have shake cloth over there because these dry out so quickly in the summer sun, but they're beautiful. These are all propagated plants. Garlic chives, onion, our standard chives, peppermint, mint. You can sell these easily for $2 a plant, certainly probably $3 a plant. Much cheaper than the dreaded, I should say, Bonnie plants. I hate them because they charge so much money and they rip off consumers. They're charging $4, $5, $6 a plant. The plants are okay, but the expense is too high. You can do a plant yard sale, sell your own plant. If you want to save money, don't go to like the big-box stores. Look for your local nurseries, local hardware stores, and you can get transplants really at a great discount. There's nothing worse than seeing new gardeners going to Home Depot and they have like a hundred dollars worth of plants in their cart. They're just not going to do well, I can tell. Sometimes I interrupt them and say, hey this isn't going to work, or maybe tip whatever we're on. A lot of stuff can be planted from seed, but you don't need to buy, I'll throw it to you, but you don't need to buy bean transplants. They grow so quickly. That's right, that's the thing. If you're going to start your garden, just pick easy to grow plants like beans, squash, cucumbers. You can easily grow them from seed. You can have a nice looking transplant in about four weeks and you're going to save yourself a ton of money. No need to spend $5 on a plant. Now Gary, I know you've got a really cool seed starting station on the side, unless you had any other tips to share while we're on the way, but I wanted to show people how they could start from seed outdoors instead of starting from seed indoors. We'll do that after we talk about one more thing. Sure, go for it. I get a lot of questions about deer, so I have deer on my property and we kind of like deer, except when a deer comes and splits my peach tree in half and kills half of it. This is a four foot fence. A deer can easily jump over this. I had six foot posts put in in case I needed to raise the fence level. I don't have to. Tip for a deer is like people, they don't want to jump over this fence and then land on a tomato stake. So if you plant along the inside, even though a deer can jump over here, and if they're starving and there's no other food they're gonna jump anyway, but there's usually enough, they're not going to want to jump over this because they don't want to land on something they can't see. So a four foot fence can work if you plant along the inside. And then to keep out rabbits and other animals, this is like a one inch by half inch square. I have metal in here and that keeps the animals out. For groundhogs and such, it's buried, but I have wire or boards coming out from here so that a digging animal can't easily get into the garden. But there is a strategy for a fence, you know, and it's been effective. The only time the deer have ever gotten in is when I've left the gates open. Let's go over... So next tip is make sure you close the gate. Well that's, yeah, that's a no-brainer, but yes, gates only as good as you use it like that one's open. That's right. All right, so let's walk over. Yeah, I'm gonna shut it. But you walk people over to the greenhouse. So, you know, a lot of people start from seed indoors in the early spring, set up grow lights, which is wonderful when it's too cold to grow outside. But at this time of the year, you can easily start your things, your vegetables from seed outdoors. Now for me at home right now in my garden, a lot of my garden beds are still full. So I like to use this strategy to get some new transplants going. That way when my old plants are dying off, I've got new transplants to take its place. So this is a perfect spot for it because it gets partial sun, partial shade, so the plants don't get overheated. So Gary's got a ton of transplants here going. Lots of herbs, lots of leafy greens. So here would be a great spot that you could start like new cucumber transplants. You're just gonna poke your cucumber seeds in some of the six packs, and I would probably use a bigger... You picked the worst looking six pack growing there. I would actually use a larger six pack or something like cucumbers or squash because they do grow fast. There's a great one here, Gary. These larger six packs work really well for cucumbers and squash, and you really only want to let them grow in these six packs for about, I'd say maybe four weeks. After that, they kind of use up all the nutrients. The plants just kind of get overgrown in here. The roots get crowded. But so in four weeks, so you plant your cucumber seedlings, maybe the beginning of August for Southern California people, you'll have nice transplants in just a few weeks to pop into your garden as your old plants are dying out. But perfect little spot here to get some new seeds. Yeah, we'll show off more of it. Even your cool weather vegetables. Now this is Chinese cabbage, and it's overseeded, and I just wanted to get them growing. And like you said, we get morning sun here, a little bit of afternoon sun. If this sat in full sun, any of your transplants, summer or warm weather crops, cool weather crops, it's gonna bake, it's gonna heat up, they're gonna die. And if you're growing these longer for some reason, like the herbs I'm holding, you're right, they run out of nutrients. So hit them with the water-soluble fertilizer. Whenever your plants look weak, hit them with the water-soluble fertilizer. We didn't talk about this, so people know, water-soluble fertilizer means? It's easily dissolved in water. It's like fish fertilizer, but you want to really, easy does it on the seedlings. So maybe a half-string, quarter-string. And? And worm tea. I love worm tea. But the point that I'm trying to get at is that the water-soluble mixes in water real easy, but it's immediately available. The nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Sorry about that. That's alright. This is unscripted. Is totally available to the plant right away, which means as soon as you hit this with the water-soluble, the plants are going to green up in 24, 48 hours. The organic granular, when you mix that into your soil, it could be weeks or months before it really starts breaking down from microbes and is available to your plant. So water-soluble fertilizer is like your best friend. Whenever your plants are yellow, hit them with that. Because? Because it's immediately available to the plant. Excellent, yeah. And you can even put like on the side of my house, I have just a simple little shelf where I stick the transplants that I'm working on outside, rather than starting them inside. Or just put them like on your deck rail, on your balcony floor. Whatever you can do. If you live in an apartment, it's easily doable that way too. And this saves you a lot of money. Like a six-pack of plants might cost you six or eight dollars or something like that. A seed pack cost you about two bucks. You put in a couple of seeds, store your seeds in a Ziploc bag, keep them in a refrigerator. Seeds can last three years, five years, seven years. So you can just redo this. And for two dollars, three dollars worth of seeds, you can, you know, save yourself money. Instead of buying this every year, paying four, five, six dollars, you only spent two bucks. You might have extras to share with your friends too, which is always fun. I do. And that's always fun. Figs from cuttings, these are gifted to me. They're doing really well. And they're actually starting to look a little bit yellow to me. So they're going to get hit with watered soluble fertilizer. They're also dry. When you're growing any kind of plant in these containers, and we can see like these are starting to, these are watered two days ago by the way, and it's been in the 80s, they're starting to kind of, you know, lose moisture. When you're growing in small containers like this, you may have to water once or even twice a day, depending on how they're sitting in the sun, or they're going to die off. So just keep up on the watering. I know I've already said it, but watering is probably next to not starting compost right away. Watering is probably my next biggest tip, is people just don't water enough. And I know when you were down here a couple years ago, you thought maybe you need to increase the drip irrigation, which I don't have drip irrigation. I did, and that's another thing too, having to do with watering, is Gary usually has a lot of rain, so he hasn't needed to install drip irrigation. We have six months of no rain in Southern California, so if I don't have drip to automate things, it's an absolute mess in the garden, and things wouldn't survive. But for the transplants out here, what I do with mine is I just hit the bottom of the tray and fill it about halfway up with water, and then let it soak. I usually end up letting it soak all day, because I forget to come out and pour the water off. But then what happens is the transplants, or the little six packs, have holes in the bottom, so they'll soak the water up from the bottom, and then pretty soon you'll see the top of the soil turn a darker brown color, like these right here. These are pretty moist, which indicates that it has enough water content, and then you can just pour the rest of the water off into your garden, or water another plant with it, but it's a really effective way to water from the bottom, and that way the soil gets fully saturated too. That's exactly right, because this container doesn't have holes in the bottom, and it holds the rainwater longer, and that's why they look better, versus the rest have holes in it. So if you're in a really hot area, making sure you use a container with no holes, and you can use, you don't have to go and buy all this stuff, like from our seed shop, which would be nice, but you can go to like dollar stores, and just get a baking foil tray. You can start in yogurt cup, just put holes in it, and you can grow that way, and you can fill the baking tray. A little bit extra water goes a long way, but there's a lot of ways to do it. I just don't want people to feel like they have to go and spend a ton of money to get growing. Going way back to the beginning, to that earth bed, is where you can start. And a lot of the garden centers and nurseries, they have so many of these plastic pots and containers. They give them away for free. I mean, I've literally seen them piled up at the garden centers, and you can just ask them if they have any extras, which they almost always do. Then you've got your seed starting containers right here. Maybe even they have flats there, I'm not sure, and you're well on your way to free, cheap, easy gardening. If you take a look in here, these are things that I've collected from nursery plants, some stuff that I'm just reusing. These pots, the black, the gray, the terracotta, were all on sale for 12 cents each one time at Home Depot, so I buy a lot of them. I keep all the containers in a space, this way I can reuse them. That saves you a lot of money. Again, gardening is not a beauty contest, so you don't need the most expensive, most perfect objects in your garden. You just need soil, your time, and you know, nature to take care of things. Should we talk about fertilizers too? About the ten different kinds that you can buy off the shelf? Sure, we should, but then we have our live stream, so we should kind of wrap it up. We'll save that. So fertilizers. If you're a new gardener, and even if you've been gardening for a while, and it took me a while to figure this out, you go to Home Depot, you go to the big-box stores, you go to Lowe's, Walmart, you know, and you look on this shelf, you may see ten different kinds of organic granular fertilizers, the dry ones. Organic is good, they're good fertilizers, but they all tend to have the same thing in there. Blood meal, bone meal, fish meal, chicken manure, maybe some alfalfa, some kelp, but when you read the bags, they'll say berry tone, or they'll say leafy greens, or they'll say tomato fertilizer. They can say heirloom tomato fertilizer. Berries, whatever the case might be. Peppers. You don't need to buy separate fertilizers. Just buy one bag of any organic granular fertilizer. I like to say try and get it under $2 a pound because you're gonna see so much fancy labeling. You don't need all that stuff. It's already probably in there. If you go and look in different sections like where the lawn is, you can find a 27 pound bag of Espoma, which I do like. I'm not affiliated with them, but that 27 pound bag is only like $20, so it's well under a dollar a pound, and that's going to stretch your budget. Just don't get fooled into buying separate fertilizers for your pepper plant, your squash plant, your cucumber plant, etc. It's just not necessary. And also I know in this area here, Gary, you have a lot of clearance sales at the end of the gardening season, so Southern California we don't have that so much, but then you can pick up for pennies on the dollar a lot of different fertilizers and soils and amendments for your garden, so keep an eye on that. As long as you have somewhere to store it during the off season, you'll really be able to save a lot of money that way. That's in December or January, so that $20 bag of 27 pound fertilizer, I got for well Alright, so I think that wraps up everything. Wraps up everything. Hope you guys have enjoyed these maybe 20 to 30 tips. I have no idea how many tips we lost count, but comment below and let us know which one is your favorite, maybe which one you're going to try and implement in your garden, and we're actually going to be live streaming right over here talking about fall gardening tips in just a little bit, but I know we both have live streams on our channel on a regular basis, so check those out. We would love to see you in Thanks so much for watching and please check out my seed shop at TheRustyGarden.com Thanks so much for watching. We'll see you next time in the garden.