Want to get your kids out in the garden, growing food that they will enjoy eating, too? Pam Farley, The Brown Thumb Mama, has suggestions for Vegetables and Fruits Kids Love To Grow.
Roses are blooming, and the bad bugs have found them! Our favorite college horticulture teacher, Debbie Flower, tackles two of the prime culprits this time of year: aphids and thrips.
Want to grow food? But all you have is a small backyard or patio that is mostly shade? Today’s Quick Tip offers up some vegetables that will do just fine there, growing in containers.
All of us are battling cabin fever, along with uncertainty and worry about the future. As gardeners, though, there are some things we can do to raise emotional spirits of residents throughout the neighborhood, even those you don’t know. It's called "Yard Of The Day", and it’s easy, it's fun, and the whole family will get a little exercise, too!
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. We’ll have you in and out in under 30 minutes. No standing in line! No masks! And we won’t take your temperature.
Thank you for listening, subscribing and commenting on the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast and the Beyond the Garden Basics Newsletter.
Want to get your kids out in the garden, growing food that they will enjoy eating, too? Pam Farley, The Brown Thumb Mama, has suggestions for Vegetables and Fruits Kids Love To Grow.
Roses are blooming, and the bad bugs have found them! Our favorite college horticulture teacher, Debbie Flower, tackles two of the prime culprits this time of year: aphids and thrips.
Want to grow food? But all you have is a small backyard or patio that is mostly shade? Today’s Quick Tip offers up some vegetables that will do just fine there, growing in containers.
All of us are battling cabin fever, along with uncertainty and worry about the future. As gardeners, though, there are some things we can do to raise emotional spirits of residents throughout the neighborhood, even those you don’t know. It's called "Yard Of The Day", and it’s easy, it's fun, and the whole family will get a little exercise, too!
Welcome to Episode 8 of the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. We’ll have you in and out in under 30 minutes. No standing in line! No masks! And we won’t take your temperature.
Thank you for listening, subscribing and commenting on the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast and the Beyond the Garden Basics Newsletter.
Welcome to the garden basics with farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, well you've come to the right spot. Do you know if you let the kids grow it, they'll eat it, especially these five backyard garden treats. Pam Farley, the Brown thumb mama, talks about five garden fruits and vegetables that are going to keep your kids happy, busy in the garden and eating healthy. College horticulture professor Debbie Flower tackles some of the biggest springtime pests of roses, aphids and thrips. Hey, maybe all you have is kind of a shady backyard patio, but if it gets just a couple of hours of sun, you have some foods you can grow. Today's quick tip will let you know what healthy vegetables you can grow there. Do you want to make a stranger or neighbor feel good in this era of worry and uncertainty? Well, we have an idea of something to do that will make everyone in your family smile and yes, it does have something to do with gardening. It's all on this week's Garden Basics With Farmer Fred podcast. And we're going to do it all in less than 30 minutes. Let's get started. So while you're sheltering in place, what are you and the kids doing? You might be running out of things to do by now. Well, maybe it's time if you haven't already, to get that vegetable and fruit gardens started because kids can really get into it. And one person who knows that is Pam Farley, the Brown thumb mama. You can find out more information about her at her website, Brownthumbmama.com. And Pam, as a parent, you've experimented with growing different fruits and vegetables. What are the ones that your kids gravitated to? And when you talk to others, what are the foods that they gravitate to?
Pam Farley:Absolutely. So we've been gardening here in our little city backyard for longer than we've had kids. And it was pretty apparent right away which ones, which fruits and veggies the kids would run over and eat right off the vine and which ones they wouldn't touch with a 50 foot pole. Um, the first one is going to be a no brainer for just about everybody. And that's strawberry.
Farmer Fred:Yeah. I would think any fruit or vegetable that has sweetness attached to it would be popular.
Pam Farley:This is true. This is true. And we, we actually grow strawberries in our front yard because the sun is better out there. There's two kinds of strawberries and it's important to get the everbearing kind of strawberries because if you get June bearing, they'll all come ripe at once which is great, but then you have to wait so much longer for them to be ready. With everbearing, You can just sit in the garden or every time you walk by, grab a couple because they produced through the whole season instead of, you know, all in the same day.
Farmer Fred:Now it depends where you live about your strawberry growing season. Here in California, we are lucky enough to have strawberries able to overwinter and produce two crops. They're also called day neutral strawberries. And there's, there's a lot of good varieties that are out there that are, are large and sweet and high yielding. And the beauty of planting strawberries here in California, if you plant them when they become available in late summer at nurseries and you get the everbearing varieties, you're going to get a fall crop and then you're going to get a crop the next spring. So you get a lot of bang for your buck with those everbearing or day neutral strawberries.
Pam Farley:Definitely. And you can get a six pack at the nursery for less money than a pack of them at the grocery store. And you get many, many more strawberries. And they taste amazing.
Farmer Fred:Exactly. Yeah. And I know that in taste test trials, here in Northern California, the everbearing strawberries that seem to do the best, the varieties include Selva, Muir, Irvine, F ern and Hecker. I love the Hecker variety. It's abundant. T hey're small to medium size, a bit smaller, but they have a mild flavor and they're deep red and it produces throughout the year.
Pam Farley:I bet my kids would love to run around saying Hecker. Yes. And then they can, and then they get i nto, then they come in the house all smeared with red. Yes. Oh y eah, y eah. Good idea to hose them off in the front yard. Well that's always fun on a summer day. Yeah. Yeah. Just s ave it. Saves a lot of s truggle.
Farmer Fred:All right. Speaking of a sweet tasting fruits and vegetables that kids really enjoy. Another one that, I mean even I have a hard time walking back into the house with a full bucket after picking them because I'll munch on them, is our cherry tomatoes.
Pam Farley:Yes. Oh my gosh. Cherry tomatoes are the perfect size for little hands to pick. If they accidentally drop a couple, you'll get a volunteer plant next year. And with our elementary school has a full garden and replanted a few cherry tomatoes. Um, this has been several years ago now and the kids had a taste testing at lunch and I figured that, you know, elementary school kids would not be big fans, but they just wolfed them down. It was amazing.
Farmer Fred:There's a lot of good cherry tomato varieties that do well just about any place in the country. Uh, some of my favorites include sweet 100, sweet million. Sun gold is a very popular variety. It's, as the name implies, sort of a yellowish golden color and a another one that's coming on strong. It's called Juliet, which is, more of a grape tomato but a little bit bigger than a cherry tomato, but still,, kids love to munch on those in the garden as well. What are some of the ones that you've planted?
Pam Farley:So this year I have just planted sweetie cherry, which I started from seed because I'm crazy. It's much easier to go to the local nursery and get them, but I like to challenge some years, some years I, I only plant from start, but this year I, I'm trying to the sweetie cherry, but it's only about four inches tall right now.
Farmer Fred:Have your kids, did they ever get interested in growing main season vegetables from seed?
Pam Farley:We've plant almost everything from seed. Um, it's more economical and like things like, like snow peas and cucumbers, green beans. The seeds are all big enough for them to handle. Lettuce seeds, not so much.
Farmer Fred:That's a very, very good point you're bringing up is to get kids interested in gardening, especially from a seed starting point. big seeds help.
Pam Farley:Yes. Yes. Then you can plant them in Dixie Cups in the windows sill, start them in the house so they can keep an eye on them. That that really helps. Especially the littlest ones. They're like, Oh look at, you know, the leaves are poking through the soil and yeah, they just get a real blast out of watching them grow and grow and then planting them and taking care of them in the garden.
Farmer Fred:You mentioned snow peas and I could see how they could be popular. First of all, the pea seeds are easy to handle and uh, and the pods, especially the snow pea pods, you don't have to peel off the pod to eat the peas. You can just munch on the pod if you get to it before it hardens up.
Pam Farley:Yeah, absolutely. And so the only way we actually plant snow peas in three different areas in the garden because I can't get any because the kids eat them all. So I have to have each have our own patch because they'll just sit out there in the garden and just eat them right off the vine.
Farmer Fred:You know, you call yourself a Brown thumb mama, but on your web page entitled five best vegetables to grow with kids. I can tell you're a real gardener because the, I bet that's the picture of you holding the snow peas and you've got, you've got a bandaid on your ring finger.
Pam Farley:Yeah, yeah. I, I have um, yeah, pictures of me with dirt on every possible molecule of my hands and bandages and gloves and exactly that. Also pictures of me holding potatoes that are the size of golf balls because things don't always grow well.
Farmer Fred:There's a lot of good snow pea varieties to try and growing them from seed is the way to go. And they do need a trellising system and you don't want them sprawling on the ground where snails and slugs can get to them. But what do you use for a trellising? Looking at the back of the picture of this, it looks like you've got some, it looks almost like field fencing you're using.
Pam Farley:So I've, I've done it a few different ways. I have the, um, the field fencing thing. I lay it on it side because I only stand it up the hallway for folding, but I lay it on his side and I can do quite a few there. I have a nice wooden trellis that we built. I have used the, the easiest way is to get a couple of nice straight sticks or pulls or scrap wood and then use jute, um, trellis thing or netting from the garden store. Because then at the end of the year, you don't feel like untangling all the vines and everything. You can just flip it off and put the whole thing in your compost bin.
Farmer Fred:Oregon sugar pot is a good variety. I noticed that you mentioned that in the article and uh, they are a very prolific,
Pam Farley:yes, they're my favorite because a lot of the time you can get two pods off of one node.
Farmer Fred:Now another, uh, vegetable that you recommend, uh, as part of a kid's garden. And even though they can't see it grow, when they yank it out of the ground, they're going to be thrilled. And it's a multicolored carrots.
Pam Farley:Yes, these are amazing. There's, there's several different, different seed companies have different blends or combination character, something that you have to start from seed because they cannot handle being transplanted. So, um, I like carnival blend, which has a whitish parrot of purple-ish carrot and the normal orange. And when you cut the purple carrots open, they're orange in sight. So it's just, it's like fireworks. It's the coolest thing that kids are just like, wow.
Farmer Fred:Uh, and carrots are, are easy to grow. Now we're dealing though with small seeds, aren't we?
Pam Farley:Very, very small. So something that I liked to do to make it easier on the kids to plant the carrot seeds. Cause otherwise you're just going to have a big old Dumble of thesis. Lay out two or three squares of paper, missed it with a couple of spritzes of water and then flop on the toilet paper. Let that dry and then place that in the garden. It's kind of like homemade pate.
Farmer Fred:How far apart do you space the seeds on the toilet paper?
Pam Farley:I usually do five per square. You could probably do them closer than that, but that that's easy for the kids to count and see.
Farmer Fred:Exactly. And they have smaller fingers too, so they can more easily move the little seeds around. This is true. Yeah. That's the first time I think I've ever talked about carrots and toilet paper in the same sentence. Well, there you go. But that makes, that makes perfect sense. I like that because, because it is a biodegradable, the toilet paper and so you could plant that with five or six seeds on it and that's a great way to do it. Hey, all right. I saved the best for last because you're going to have to have, you're going to have to tell me about this one. Kids like to grow cucumbers.
Pam Farley:Well, if you think about the way you converse taste, they're mild. They're not, um, like asparagus is, you know, way too strong flavored broccoli, things like that. The ones that the kids always turn up their front of their nose is that, and there's several different kinds of tooth numbers. Of course there's, you know, tasting green or the Japanese cucumbers that are birthless cucumbers of course, the to commercially make pickles out of the ones that the kids, especially like our little Persian baby cucumbers, they're about the size of your thumb or a couple of, or the size of, you know, a couple of tears because they're just like little delicious, very low steam. And they, so my kids end up picking them off the plant and pretending they're like Carly Teflon with a cigar, you know, and just knowing on the cucumber right there in the garden,
Farmer Fred:boy, if your kids know who Charlie Chaplin is, good for you. You're a good parent.
Pam Farley:I'm not sure that they exactly know who they're pretending to be, but you know, they're waddling around with it.
Farmer Fred:Okay. All right, so there you go. Five fruits and vegetables that the kids will take a liking to and get them out the garden and get them interested in gardening. A habit that will last with them for a lifetime. Talk a little bit, Pam, about a Brown thumb mama.com and you've got some publications available for beginning gardeners.
Pam Farley:Absolutely. So I have been gardening in this house for more than 20 years and I've done a lot of things well and a lot of things has not turned out. So that's where the Brown thumb monitor comes from. I have a, I don't have a super green thumb, I'm just regular mom who's figuring it out and sharing gardening information, easy recipes and ways to make your home more natural. Maybe ditch the disposables, the plastic bags, the paper towels, things like that. So I have so many people asking questions about gardening, like basic vegetable gardening and it's always a good idea for us to produce what we can not be consumers as much if we can help it and be producers.
Farmer Fred:So Pam, what's in the ultimate beginning? Gardner bundle.
Pam Farley:The bundle has everything that new gardeners need to get started. So it has my book about dinning, vegetable gardening called get your garden started. That book has information about basic basic garden questions that nobody seems to answer. Like do you have to plant your seeds right side up and what does full sun mean? So that book is as 40 pages of the best vegetable gardening information. I have vegetable garden planting schedules, so for anywhere in the U S as long as you know your planting zone, it will tell you exactly what the plant each month customized for your area. And there's something that you can plan almost every month, no matter where you are in the U S a booklet on the beginner's guide to making compost because that is invaluable for having healthy vegetables and fruit and flowers in your garden and easy to make and you don't have to buy it at the garden center. And then a bonus principle called vegetable garden companion plant.
Farmer Fred:For more information about all of this stuff, go to Brown thumb, mama.com there's a lot of great information there. You can look up the ultimate beginning Gardner bundle that's there. That includes the vegetable planting schedule for wherever you live, the beginning book, get your garden started, the companion plant information and the beginner's guide to making compost. It's all at Brown thumb, mama.com Pam Farley. Always a pleasure. Thank you.
Pam Farley:Thanks for having me.
Music:[inaudible]
Farmer Fred:here on the garden basics podcast, we want to answer your garden questions a couple of ways you can do that. Give us a call,(916) 292-8964 that number again,(916) 292-8964 you can either leave a message or you can text that number as well. Be patient. There are a lot of rings before we pick up. Another way is email. Send your garden questions to fred@farmerfred.com that's fred@farmerfred.com one benefit of email is you can attach a photo of a bug or a plant that you're trying to identify. We're looking forward to hearing and seeing your questions and thanks for listening to the garden basics with farmer Fred podcast. I appreciate all your support and all your comments here on the garden basics with farmer Fred podcast, we like to answer your questions and this time of year, there's a lot of them. Larry from Folsom writes in and he says, I have a very persistent problem with my roses. There is something that is causing the flower to not develop properly. I suspect it's a bug problem. Do you have any suggestions or can you recommend someone should take a flower too for diagnosis? Well, actually that last question, Larry is not a bad suggestion because a lot of counties have master gardener programs here in California. There are master gardener programs throughout the United States and that's always a good go to research, a resource to find out information about a pest you can't identify or a problem with a plant you might be having like with your roses, but you did send some pictures of your roses and Debbie flower is here, retired college professor and a, you've seen the pictures, Debbie, and there's a lot of bugs. There's a lot of bugs amongst those distorted roses.
Speaker 4:Yes, there are. The roses are showing some Browning and some, uh, distortion or misshapen pedals. And there are certainly lots of aphids there, both winged aphids and aphids, uh, that have no wings and they are a sucking insect and they actually fade. They're very small, they're very small mouth parts and they like to suck on the youngest tissue. Uh, I believe they were on the bud, set up the leaf, but they're also on the flower. They were on the bud of the flower as well. And in that process they can prevent the, uh, developing flower from the developing pedals, from expanding. And so when the flower does open, it is distorted or misshapen. It can also cause cells to die. And that can be two, two Browning ACEs are pretty common problem. You see them. There are many, many different kinds of agents. They come in many different colors. These happen to be gray and black on the Rose pictures that were sent, but on other plants they can be yellow and they can be red. They can be all kinds of colors, uh, even like white and fluffy. So first thing is to get that identified and his pictures so that he does have a ACEs and they are um, pretty, I was going to say easy to control. I don't know if that's fair. You have to be persistent. They, we don't want to use insecticides on the ACE. It's because there are many, many beneficials that seed eat those aphids as their protein meal. And theirs, it's a little hard to tell, but there could be a lacewing larva on that Rose, but in the picture and that lacewing larva wa is a great consumer of aphids as our lady beetle larva. So if you see a feds and you see worms among the eighth, it's the worms in general are the larva or babies of the beneficial insect. And so that's a good thing. So if we were to spray that, that Rose bud or that flower Rose flower with, uh, a pesticide, something that's poisonous or something that coats their bodies and causes them to die, we would also be killing those beneficials.
Farmer Fred:And that's so true. And bad bugs have more sex than good bugs and they will reproduce quicker then. I mean things like aphids, what they re reproduce, what every two weeks.
Speaker 4:Oh, I think it varies by temperature, but yes, and they don't need to have sex and thrips, which is another potential problem on his roses. Don't even need to have sex to have babies. They just have a whole lot of females. And then once in a while a male shows up or they have a male and there is some sex and they get some, some males in the process, but they don't have to have sex to, uh, to have babies. And so it's, uh, it's, you know, poisoning them. They have babies so fast that the ones that survived the poisoning live long enough to have babies that are now resistant to the poison. So the next generation, you've used some sort of pesticide on your plant, the next generation of a fits and thrips, uh, are resistant to that pesticide that you have just used. And so it, they can adapt to their environment, including the poisons. We are applying to them faster than we can control them. So the control, the best control for, uh, to try, especially for aphids is, uh, with strong stream of water and knock them off. You want to do it during the day, early in the day so that the flour and the plant dries off before evening. Because in the evening temperatures can drop to a certain point that will allow focus to grow on the plants. But if you do it early enough in the day that the water dries up, then that a problem with the fungus doesn't occur. It will not be the hard water. A stream of water will knock the aphids to the ground and they don't have the wherewithal in most cases to get back on the plant. But you're going to have to do this over and over and over again because they are so prolific. So, but the other thing to watch for is the beneficial insects that are coming in to eat them. And so if you see lady beetles hover flies lacewings little worms on, on the flower with the aphids, then you might just want to leave things alone and let the beneficials, those are all beneficial. But those beneficials eat the aphids
Farmer Fred:thrips are a little bit harder and they can cause that a pedal distortion as well because they're buried inside that bud and you couldn't even hit them with chemicals anyway.
Speaker 4:Right? Right. They, they feed inside the bud. They are so tiny, uh, that the way we often identified them is to take a piece of white paper and put it under the plant part that we see with the distorted distortion problem and tap on the plant part and look for a little grain of almost a pepper and some, some strips are larger but that hits the paper and runs away. Uh, then we assume if we can't catch it and don't happen to have, you know, the correct magnifying tools to look at it. We assume we have a thrips and thrips are, are difficult to control because they do feed in the, and so if, if that is a problem that's regularly occurring on the plant and thrips tend to like lighter colored of pedals, pink, pink, white, yellow, the pale ones. If, if you are getting repeated, discolored flowers, one uh, or distorted flowers, one technique is to just cut them off for a little while and, and throw them in the green waste, not your compost pile or dip them in a soapy water mix so that they, uh, you have killed the thrips that are present and then, um, get rid of them and hopefully you're removing the adults which are, have the ability to reproduced and, uh, lowering the amount of, um, uh, syrups that are present. There are beneficial wasps that eat strips. And so if you can handle the amount of damage you're seeing, uh, the population of beneficial wasps will build up over time. But again, we don't want to hit the plant with topical pesticides, things that we touch the plant with, touch the insect with because, uh, one, the thrips is buried in the bud and it's not going to do much good. And even if we can see it, we will may be also, uh, hitting these wasps. The wasps are also very tiny, uh, and may not be visible. Uh, we may not know what we're looking at. We may not be able to see them and so we would kill them as well. And we just been the thrips build up their resistance and the next population, uh, we can't kill anyway. So it's a, it's a vicious kind of circle.
Farmer Fred:I guess one strategy, and since everybody is sheltered in place, you have plenty of time to do this would be to take half a bucket of soapy water out to the garden and start shaking your rosebuds into that bucket of soapy water and whatever falls off would basically drown. Hopefully most of them would be thrips right? Don't forget you can get your garden questions into the garden basics with farmer Fred podcasts through a myriad of ways, including a, leaving it via telephone.(916) 292-8964. You can also text your question there. Nine one six two nine two eight, nine six four email it in to fred@farmerfred.com and you can leave it on a number of social media outlets including the get growing with farmer Fred Facebook page or on Twitter at farmer Fred and Instagram farmer Fred Hoffman. Debbie flower. We learned a lot. Thanks for your time. My pleasure.
Music:[inaudible]
Farmer Fred:one question I get a lot from gardeners. They say I don't have much room. I've got a patio and as far as sunlight goes, there isn't much. It's kind of mostly shade. Is there anything I can grow there that I can eat? There certainly is leafy greens, lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, bok. Now in hot summer climates, greens might turn bitter if you allow them to grow longer than a couple of months. Some lettuces do better than others when it comes to growing in hot weather, that includes loose leaf lettuces and loose leaf. Lettuce by the way, is one of the easiest to grow as well with fewer problems than head lettuce. Good selections include black seated Simpson's Simpson elite Oak leaf though those all have green leaves, salad bowl that has deeply cut green leaves. There are a lot of lettuces with red verigation like red sails or new red fire. Give those a try. One of my favorite hot weather resistant lettuces to grow is also very colorful. I won't try to pronounce the French, but in English it's Marvel of four seasons. And if you want some 10 years salad greens, well don't forget things like mustards a rugala crest chicory roadshow or mizuna's. So get in the habit of growing a succession of greens in several medium sized pots or wide containers, maybe plant a dozen or so seeds every week and then harvest the greens with your scissors for salads when the plants are about a month old.
Music:Okay,
Farmer Fred:so even though a lot of the restrictions placed on us during this Corona virus epidemic are continuing, things are loosening up a little bit, but many of us are still sheltering in place. Many of us are still spending time with family and to alleviate the boredom, many of us are taking walks with our family. Well, here's a great way to get your kids interested in gardening, interested in the natural world and also make somebody happy. This was posted on Instagram. It was a piece of paper and on this piece of paper it was written, you are our pick for yard of the day and this piece of paper was left on their front porch and they opened up this folded piece of paper and on the inside it said, thank you for making our neighborhood a little bit more beautiful. The Jones family. What a great idea. Mom, dad, the kids go for a walk and then they all look at people's yards, but they look for different things. They look for maybe color or texture or arrangement of plants or the care of the plants. Everybody could have different criteria or whatever strikes their fancy, their eyes, their ears, their nose that they might see in that yard, the family votes and that house gets a nice award, a piece of paper written on it. You are our pick for yard of the day. That raises a lot of spirits in your neighborhood and as we continue in these, well let's just call them interesting times, we have to continue to uplift each other's spirits and this is an easy way to do it.
Music:[inaudible].
Farmer Fred:Thank you for listening to garden basics with farmer Fred. I appreciate you listening. Would you please subscribe? You can find the podcast at Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcast, attic, and Hey, Alexa, play the garden basics with farmer Fred podcast. Thank you.