GB 175 TRANSCRIPT Frost vs fruit trees. Regenerative gardening.
Farmer Fred 0:00
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Farmer Fred 0:32
Welcome to the tug-of-a-war season. Is it late winter, or early spring? Will daytime highs be in the 60’s and 70’s? Or will the overnight lows dip below freezing? Or both? Deciduous fruit trees, such as peaches, apples, plums, apricots and more in every part of the country get confused when sunny, mild days are followed by a few freezing nights. And if those trees are blooming, and a frost or freeze is predicted, you just might have fewer fruit to harvest this summer. What’s a gardener to do? We have tips to help you stave off the loss of those fruit tree flowers when temperatures get temporarily chilly. Also: do you know what regenerative gardening is? It’s a great way to get a more bountiful harvest of food and flowers, and it’s easy! And you might already be a regenerative gardener without knowing it. We talk with gardening author Emily Murphy, who explores and explains that topic in her new book, “Grow Now”. We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. We’ll hear more from the dogs later on. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots. And we will do it all in under 30 minutes. Let’s go!
Farmer Fred 1:54
We like to answer your garden questions here on the Garden Basics podcast. Joining us today is Master Gardener and Manager of Fair Oaks Boulevard Nursery in Sacramento, California. It is Quentyn Young. And Q, we get an email from Jeremy who lives in Anderson, California, which is in the northern end of the Sacramento Valley, about halfway between Redding and Red Bluff. And he probably has a beautiful view of both Mount Lassen and Mount Shasta. And he has a rather cold question. He says, "What is going to be the effect of the freezing temperatures we've had in the valley lately on my fruit trees during bloom? We had a very warm January and February this year. This caused my fruit trees to bloom up about one to two weeks earlier than normal. Towards the end of February, we had an unseasonable cold spell for a few nights with overnight lows around 28 degrees, while most of the trees were in full bloom. This caused many of the flowers to appear to die. What's the general impact on freezing during bloom? Is it too late for me to do anything about it now? However, I was curious if I should have done something to protect the trees knowing those cold temperatures were coming." Well, Q, you've had personal, hands-on experience with similar questions like this, since you're one of the co-managers out at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center's orchard. You had to contend with basically the same situation.
Quentyn Young 3:18
Yeah. And I think like you said, you did a great job of describing where this letter writer lives, because it really comes down to where you live and understanding your microclimate. So at the Hort Center, we have a citrus row that's next to a fence. So to us, it's somewhat protected, and we did not cover them this year. And then further into the orchard, where it's a little bit warmer, we'll probably see a little bit of frost damage on the flowers, and those blossoms will fall off. And so that's just something you're gonna have to deal with, depending on where you live.
Farmer Fred 3:49
What is the end result? Does it mean no fruit or just a little bit of fruit coming up for this summer, a reduction in yield?
Quentyn Young 3:57
It depends. like I just walked through the nursery, and I noticed that, for instance, some of the problems. Even though they're in full flower, you can see some flowers that were frost damaged, and they fall off as soon as you touch them. So, they're not going to be producing fruit this year. But there's still quite a bit of very happy, healthy looking, flowers on the tree. So I think it'll be just a reduction in yield. But to me, that also means less fruit that you have to thin, if you properly thin your fruit later in the year.
Farmer Fred 4:25
Will that fruit tree try to set buds again? We're talking about deciduous fruit trees here. Not citrus, but deciduous fruit trees. Is it one bloom for the year?
Quentyn Young 4:38
I would say you should expect that. I mean, you might be lucky it might re-bloom, but I wouldn't count on it.
Farmer Fred 4:45
Alright, and you can't trick it into reblooming by lightly pruning it.
Quentyn Young 4:49
You could try, but depending on where you prune it, how lightly you prune it, you may end up just cutting off some more blossoms, as well.
Farmer Fred 4:57
So Jeremy, the first part of your answer is, Good Luck. Enjoy the few fruit you may get. Now the second part of his question was, "What can I do to stave that off, knowing that there might be colder temperatures in the future?" And by the way, we're still in winter here. In the Sacramento area, we've had frost as late as the last week of March. And wherever you are in the country, you probably are in the same boat. Just in a little different time frame. You may get surprised freezes in April or even May, and have the same issues with your deciduous fruit trees. At the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, Q, you've got size control going on. Those fruit trees are no more than seven feet tall. So, I imagine that eases the process.
Quentyn Young 5:42
It is the process for covering them, if you have to. And size control also eases the process for harvesting and fruit thinning. So if you know the cold weather's coming, the main precaution you can do is to cover your trees. Use the old C-6, C-7 (or C-9) Christmas lights. It just really depends on your setup, and again your microclimate. Because here at the nursery, all my fruit trees and citrus trees are in a part of the nursery that are backed by a large stone wall. And so that releases heat during the night. So that gives me about five more degrees of protection, because I know that's how that works. So I know my own little microclimate.
Farmer Fred 6:21
And that's true for anybody who may be planting deciduous fruit trees this year: think about the various microclimates in your yard. And think about areas where there may be reflected heat, especially a south or a west facing wall that can add a little extra heat on those nights that get surprisingly frosty.
Quentyn Young 6:39
Exactly.
Farmer Fred 6:40
What about that cover that you mentioned. What sort of fabric works best on covering fruit trees, to protect them.
Quentyn Young 6:47
So the industry name is usually Agri-bon. It is a really well known and it comes in different thicknesses. 25,50, 75%. But most nurseries, like Fair Oaks Boulevard nursery, we just carry a nice one, it's called frost cloth. It's I think, a 12' by 10' square, so it's manageable. The nice thing about it unlike let's say a blanket or a tarp is you could leave it on for a couple days at a time, it lets air and light through, unlike let's say if we had to use our comforter or a blanket at the last minute. And you want the shape of it to look like a ghost. So you wanted to go over the plant all the way to the ground. You don't want it to look like a lollipop, you don't want to gather it all into the base and let that radiant heat from the ground escape.
Farmer Fred 7:40
Yeah, frost cloths are great for letting light and air and rainwater pass through. And it comes in various weights. And I would think for a light frost, or even when temperatures are dropping down to 28 degrees for less than an hour or two, you could probably get away with a lighter weight frost cloth. But it probably pays to have several different weights handy.
Quentyn Young 8:03
Yeah, just you know, just have your backup, have your plan. Where are your frost cloths? Have them ready, and then just have your plan for when you're going to need them.
Farmer Fred 8:13
Let's stress one point, though. You mentioned to leave that frost cloth on for no more than a couple of days. Why is that?
Quentyn Young 8:20
Well, you you don't want to leave it on, let's say maybe longer than a week. You want the plant to get as much light as possible. If it's going to be flowering, you obviously wanted the flowers to get pollinated; and, you don't want to end up bending the branches. There's a whole whole series of reasons. But I'd say anywhere between three to five days would be pretty good.
Farmer Fred 8:38
All right, and that should protect you. And again, by removing it during the day it allows the surrounding soil as well to collect some heat and release that at night too.
Quentyn Young 8:48
Exactly. And that goes back to the whole you want to drape that over the entire plant to capture as much radiant heat as possible.
Farmer Fred 8:55
And of course wetter soil is also a warmer soil.
Quentyn Young 9:00
Yes, that makes sure your plants are well hydrated. A dried plant gets really stressed out from being frost damaged.
Farmer Fred 9:06
So basically keep your fingers crossed. hope there are no late season frost and you'll have plenty of fruit to be picking this year.
Quentyn Young 9:13
Yeah, I think you should be fine. Yeah.
Farmer Fred 9:15
Quentin Young is the manager of Fair Oaks Boulevard nursery here in Sacramento, also a Sacramento County Master Gardener. And one more thing, too. if you happen to be in the Sacramento area on Saturday, March 12. The Fair Oaks Horticulture Center, which is run by the Sacramento County Master Gardeners, is having an open garden day from 9am to noon in Fair Oaks Park. You can just do an internet search for Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. And we'll all be there to answer your garden questions. Nine to noon Saturday, March the 12th, an open garden at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. Quentyn Young, thanks so much.
Quentyn Young 9:51
Thank you, Fred.
Farmer Fred 9:55
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Farmer Fred 11:47
You know, I thought I was finished writing about all the vegetables and flowers that were discussed in Episodes 168 and 169 in the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. But nooooo, for the fourth week in a row, the Garden Basics newsletter, Beyond the Basics, shines a light on award winning flowers and vegetables that didn’t get mentioned in the last three newsletters. So, in the latest newsletter, We’re talking petunias, zinnias, begonias, eggplants… all of them are All America Selections winners, and there’s a few Gold Medal winners, too! Wherever you live, these plants will probably do well. It’s in the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred newsletter, Beyond the Basics. Find a link in the podcast show notes; or, at Farmer Fred dot com; or, by going to substack dot com slash garden basics. Think of it as your garden resource that goes beyond the basics. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred newsletter. And it’s free. Please subscribe. Thank you.
Farmer Fred 12:55
"Growing a garden is one of the most powerful things we can do as individuals to enact positive change and make a difference." Those are the words of our guest today, Emily Murphy. She's the author of a couple of garden books, including "Grow What You Love: 12 food plant families to change your life". And her latest book that just came out, called "Grow Now" go beyond organic. If you've listened to this show for any length of time, or the radio shows over the years, you know how I feel about gardening. It just helps you out as an individual. It makes you healthier, it widens your perspectives. It gets you more in tune with the rhythms of life, as a lot of people discovered when the COVID outbreak began a couple of years ago and a lot of people took up gardening. Well guess what? Here we are three winters later. And people are still gardening. That's right, because it's fun, and it's healthy. And it's not only healthy for you, it's healthy for the environment as well. Emily Murphy's book, "Grow Now", gets into a subject called regenerative gardening. And we'll talk about that in this interview about "Grow Now". Emily, tell us a little bit about you first, before we get into this. Let's talk a little bit about Emily Murphy. You've been close to the land for quite a while.
Emily Murphy 14:12
Yeah, I have. I am one of those lucky people who was raised in a couple of different environments, but close to nature in both. And when I was seven, I began living with my grandmother in the summers. My parents knew how much I loved it there and they say okay, that's what you want to do, you can stay with your grandmother. And the only rules at her home, which was in the foothills of Sonoma County, where redwood trees meet oak woodlands, just over the hill from from the ocean. The only rules were to be home before dark and watch out for rattlesnakes, no shoes required. And sometimes I was there alone with her and sometimes my cousins were there. We would horseback ride and I had the best summer feet. Plus swimming. It was truly incredible. And she had this garden that she would tend in, and I would try to help her. But really, I ended up just playing next to her while she was tending her garden and watch the butterflies and listened to her talk to herself as she was working along and chatting with me and she had chickens. When I left her garden and walked out the gate, it was truly the wilderness, she was a mile up from a one one street town. And it was a stark contrast. But it also made a lot of sense to me that these spaces that we tend and wild places are there, they're not that different. Now, our gardens aren't quite tame, but they're not quite wild. But we can do our best to make them wild. And they feed us in wonderful ways. And I learned this as a young person, if I didn't have the words for it, I learned it through osmosis, because it carried me through all my years. And later in college, I studied ethnobotany and environmental science and soil, soil science, ecology, social ecology, and was really lucky to do so because it's sort of bookended those early experiences and brought me here, many, many years later. It gave me the foundation to work on this book "Grow Now".
Farmer Fred 16:09
If there's anything I rant on this program about, it's the benefits of compost and mulch, all of which feed the soil to increase the microbial activity in the soil. It's also something you talk about in your book and you've labeled it "regenerative gardening", and I would imagine there are some tenets of regenerative gardening that can be summed up very easily for the people listening.
Emily Murphy 16:35
Yeah, absolutely. Regenerative gardening is a term that is used to describe the process of growing. It uses a set of tenets that are so old, they seem new. And I think many of these tenets are probably things many of your listeners are already doing. They possibly also watched their parents or grandparents or people they knew using so many of these same practices because they're simple and effective. And the term regenerative, before we go on, is really a term that asks us to go beyond organic to regrow, reassemble nature, and to use to the best of our abilities, the principles that nature again uses to grow itself. And the idea is that it's no longer enough to be sustainable. Consider the word "sustainable". The root of sustainable is sustain, to maintain the status quo. And when you consider where we are with the climate crisis and species extinction, loss of biodiversity, it's no longer enough to be sustainable. Were facing extinction, the loss of over a million plant and animal species in the coming decades. That's 25% of life on Earth, looking at that, and knowing where we're headed with our wacky changing climate, but clearly it's no longer enough to be sustainable. Instead, we really need to look at regrowing, restoring rewilding our landscapes including our food systems and our our veggie gardens. And what's fabulous is that the regenerative process is so incredibly simple and it asks us to do just that what you were mentioning, apply compost to our gardens use mulch, use straw, any form of organic matter. And of course, different forms of organic matter are best applied in different situations, which we could talk about, but other other tenets of regenerative growing besides applying and protecting soil with compost and other mulches, is to take a no-dig approach or no-till approach and disturb the soil as little as possible. When we take a no-dig approach, we're doing a few things. We are reducing the need to weed because when you till and dig, you're unearthing weed seeds, bringing them to the surface where you're giving them the conditions to grow. With no-till, you're protecting the soil ecosystem. There's a fabulous underground superhighway that connects plants and microbes and plants to other plants. Plants communicate with each other through fungi through these mychorrazal fungi that exist in soil, 90 to 95% of plants form these mychorrazal relationships with plants. And I'm sure some of your listeners have heard of the book, The Secret Life of Trees (and the Hidden Life of Trees) or read the book, Finding the Mother Tree. I might be getting the name wrong, but it talks about these very things, how trees communicate. And it's not just trees, it's plants in general, and they're using this underground superhighway. And then going back to what we were talking about before. When we foster soil ecology, we're fostering biodiversity and we also then have an opportunity to begin sequestering carbon underground, pulling it from the atmosphere back into the soil and we take the no-dig approach and other tenets are of regenerative growing includ going organic, avoiding the use of pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers; protecting water. Wild places are reservoirs for biodiversity, doing no harm and planting, again, biodiversity for biodiversity. That's really at the core of regenerative growing. And it's pretty simple. I mean, think about how nature grows itself: leaves fall to the ground, animals do the work of decomposing those leaves, moles burrow, worms do their work, birds move seeds about. There's no digging or tilling. And there's typically a biodiverse range of plants that foster biodiversity and we're just doing the best we can to, to do exactly what nature's doing.
Farmer Fred 20:37
You were paid a very high compliment by our favorite retired college horticultural Professor, Debbie Flower. When I was mentioning to her that I would be talking to you about regenerative gardening, she said, that is a very positive approach to take. It turns people on, it's something people can do in a positive vein, as opposed to saying, taking a no-till approach, which is wagging your finger in front of people saying don't till. On the other hand, you're saying regenerate your soil.
Emily Murphy 21:07
Yeah, regrow your soil and see your soil is this living organism, because it truly is. There's something really wonderful about that for us, too. One of the questions I like to ask people is: you know, when you were a child you played in the dirt? Why did you ever stop? Not that that person did, it's more of a rhetorical question, but there's something really magical about soil. And when you've ever smelled good soil or great compost, boy, doesn't it just light you up? It might sound kind of strange and geeky to say that, but boy, there's something really wonderful about soil and being connected to soil and fostering good soil. And we know for a fact from research that having contact with soil, helps your body to produce serotonin, which makes you feel better, increases your good mood, decreases stress, does all these physical, wonderfully good physical things for us. And it does great things for our gardens too.
Farmer Fred 22:06
In your book, "Grow Now, you point out the regenerative gardening essentials which include: step away from tilling and take a no-dig approach; feed and protect soil with compost and organic mulch. Keep living roots in the ground with cover crops and perennials, foster biodiversity by growing diversity; grow organically; say no to synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides; and celebrate living things. And not only do no harm, but also do more good. Those are all very, very good points to make. Let's talk a little bit about the no-till, no-dig approach. How practical is that for a backyard gardener?
Emily Murphy 22:43
It's incredibly practical. You've been doing this for a long time, too. So I'm sure you have some experience with this. Think about the effort it takes to till. I was raised with my parents getting out the roto-tiller. And that's what you did when you first work the soil to prep the space for a garden. I understand that is a place that many of us come from. That's what we saw our families doing. Or maybe we've done it ourselves, I get it. But what I've learned is that it's not necessary. And it's actually beneficial to leave the soil as it is. And instead of digging down, layer up. That's really the idea. To layer up, take the tilling part of work out. Yeah, it's more up to layering mulch and compost on soil. You can use a sheet mulching technique, if you're growing in the ground with perennial plants, for instance. And I'm doing this right now. I'm rewilding part of my front yard. The front yard was an abandoned lawn. We bought this house - I like to say it was a garden with a house attached - it's not a huge house. It's a two story house. So it looks big, but it's not. It's on a half acre, which is more property than I ever imagined we'd have. And I was so excited. But at the same time, the house itself was move-in ready, which I was so thrilled about, especially during the pandemic when it was so hard to resource anything. So thank goodness I didn't have to remodel anything. We just painted a little bit. But the garden and the yard was a pile of deferred maintenance, with plants such as poison Hemlock were growing in the yard. And then there was this old lawn. You should see the bindweed and the mallow and all these, you know, plants with many of them with deep roots and thistles. It's crazy what was there. It was rock hard, like concrete. And the first thing I did was use the no-dig technique of Sheet Mulching. You probably are familiar with this as well. I put out a layer of cardboard. I wet that cardboard, and then I covered it with compost.
Farmer Fred 24:52
I would think the first step you probably did, though, is either mow down or cut down any existing tall plants, especially any grass in order to lay that cardboard down.
Emily Murphy 25:03
Yeah, typically, that would be what you would do. But when I was starting, there wasn't any. It was early spring. It was March, it was a year ago. And weeds were starting to come up, but they were just more like a duff layer. It was more like winter had sort of done its work of everything, and it kind of died back and senesce, you know, in a dormant stage. And I was lucky enough to get to this particular plot of Earth before it went hog wild. But you're absolutely right. If you're working in a space where you already have tall grass, or you already have, especially woody plants growing that you want to cover, you want to cut them all really short, and then put your cardboard down. And then put your compost or your mulch over the top, the area that I had the poison Hemlock growing, I put cardboard down. I don't think I put any water on it because I didn't want to encourage any growth. I decided that nature and spring rains would do the work for me. And I put down a really thick layer of woodchips because I wanted to get rid of the poison Hemlock without having to touch it. And I have a dog, and oh gosh, what if he's eating the grass next to the poison Hemlock and gets a little bit by mistake? That would be a deadly mistake. So there's many different ways to use sheet mulching. But that's what I did for my front yard and a year later I'm planting in it. I could have planted in it sooner. But a year later the soil is truly incredible. It is a beautiful, beautiful soil and it's only getting better and it's full of life, full of centipedes and worms, all kinds of things I can't see. And it smells great. And you know, it went from concrete to that beauitiful soil in a year, but you can also plant in a sheet mulch situation right away.
Farmer Fred 26:53
We've been talking with Emily Murphy. She's the author of several garden books, including her latest, "Grow Now. You can find out more information at her website, passthepistil.com , pistil being spelled p-i-s-t-i-l. We learned a lot from you today, Emily. Thank you.
Emily Murphy 27:09
No, thank you so much for having me, Fred.
Farmer Fred 27:16
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