Urban Gardening Week One

Welcome to Detroit....my garden in Detroit, that is.

Run down of the basics:

Things to consider with planting, basic pest control, and (sadly) if you listen close enough I crush a watermelon (his name was Citrus).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi and welcome to the Can I Borrow Your Skin podcast? My name is Lee Clemens and I am the host and as you can see I am a proud urban gardener. So I am a native of Detroit and I garden using raised beds. And I do this because one, it's easy for my home, and two, you could do this at work if you have people who are food insecure and you have a limited amount of space. Generally, I start my garden from seeds. I have a lot of seeds from my family, especially heirlooms like uh those of Native American indigenous descent, and I also have a lot of family from the southern parts of the state, and so I tend to have seeds from both communities, and actually, interestingly, this year um you can see I have a bunch of squash. If you are not a gardener, you will not necessarily notice that these are the leaves of a squash, but I do have a lot of squash seeds and squash plants. I'm gonna back up. You can see from this that not only are they big, but they do sprawl out. They are what we call plants that need to spread. And when you are planting a garden, including an urban garden, there are several things that you have to consider. Timing is one of them. If you grow from seeds, you generally have to start indoors and then go outdoors from what zone you're in. I am in a place here in uh the Metro Detroit area where you have to start inside with seed and then come outside and plant into the ground, whether you're doing raised beds directly into the ground or you are doing pots or planters. Another thing that you have to consider is how long does it take something to go from seed to full plant? It varies by zone and also varies by plant. If you buy seed packets, it will say exactly on it when to plant, when you can expect to harvest. And you know, when to plant, whether you're going directly into the ground or you're going from seed into the house, greenhouseing, and then into the ground, it is very important of knowing that if you're going to direct sow, which means taking your seed and putting it directly into your dirt, you need to know the free thaw cycles, you need to understand crowding, and crowding is important regardless of how you plant into the ground. You can see here with my squash, it looks like it's very crowded because it grows very big. But if we actually step in, you can see there's actually only a few plants that are actually planted here, but they sprout and they go out. Um, if you actually pay attention to my garden here, you can actually see that it has been already from the cutting plants taken off of it. You can start to see that some you're getting what's called well, one, you have actually spider uh webs growing in here. You can see the spiders. Uh, here's a really good example of a spider web there. Let's see if I can get it to focus really good. Because with gardens, you're going to get certain insects, and spiders love that. So they are going to weave their web inside of your garden. And then the other thing that you're going to get, you see some of the what's called rot, which is common, with excuse me, with squash, and I'm pulling some of it out because it's bothersome to me. And that's actually very common. It's like a moss that happens and grows with certain kinds of squash, and you will get yellowing from that. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull some of that out. So that's also very common, and you'll see the leaves start to go yellow before you actually get some of the dead, and you can see it's still a very happy, healthy, and happy plant, as you see, all the different squash blossoms and squash growing in there, even though you do have some plant that is starting to die, and even on the plant here that is starting to die, if you work your way out, you can actually see that there is sprawl here, and very happy squash blossoms, and actually squash fruit growing on the end of this plant here, so you can see that there's fruit there. So those are things that are actually very common, and it's very important that you know about those. So I'm gonna go ahead and break off a couple more leaves just because I am very obsessed at this point. So let's take myself out. So, another topic to consider when you're doing an urban garden, I'm gonna take a really good close-up of this guy here. You can see he's actually spurting, is to look at your critters. What kind of critters do you have in your area that you want to avoid? You know, grubs and beetles are very important with grubs and beetles, and you can actually see over here. I'm gonna get very close on my cauliflower and broccoli. You can see that they have been eaten, and some places that one looks actually pretty decimated, some of the other ones don't look as bad, but that comes from a cabbage white, which is a kind, some people call it a butterfly, some people call it a kind of moth, but it is a pollinator for a lot of things, and so what I do, and this is all broccoli and cauliflower here. You can see that there are several heads, and you can actually see here too that there are some heads that didn't take off as well. And what I actually do with my broccoli and my cauliflower is I will plant a lot more than I want or need because I know that there is going to, and there's a cabbage white right there floating around. I know that there is going to be some damage from the cabbage white, and as I'm working here in my garden, I am actually working in my garden, so I'm going to be, as you saw with the squash, I'm going to be pulling weeds and things as I go. You will get things like cabbage white that will actually come and eat some of your stuff. And if you can see here, my actual cabbage looks really good, and it's not eaten up. And the cabbage white is named because it likes to eat cabbage, so I overplan, and I do that because I know that I am going to lose some to nature's colonizers and pollinators, and I want to make sure I have enough for those who are going to help propagate my garden, and two, if they get very happy and very prolific, that no matter how much they eat, I'm still gonna have a very good garden, and so those are certain things that you plan for, and this bad boy right here that I showed you earlier, it's called a hoont, and I am not paid by hoont, I am not saying that they are the best thing out there, I am saying that they are an option, and the thing with the hoont, they will actually deter some of your flying annoyances, like the cabbage white, it will go off for that because it just looks for things that break their plane, and they will just go ahead and just spray a spray of water. You can actually see that my fence is wet there, and so it starts from there from where I set it, and it will go and span my complete garden, and then it goes back to the beginning. If there's still something there, it will keep going until there's nothing that it detects. The thing with mechanisms like the hoont, they're non-discriminate, they will do flying, they will do walking. So, this works for things like cats and dogs, raccoons, and it's very nice when you start getting into things that will eat the actual fruit themselves. So, for example, right here, I have some of my watermelon growing. I'm very, very proud of my watermelon because this is the very first year that I've been able to get my watermelon to grow. Uh, I used that you will actually see them, and I'm gonna get close up so you can see, they are actually kind of shiny, and they're kind of shiny because I put castor oil on them, and I put castor oil on them. And if if I can see if I can get around and get to some of my other fruit, like my tomatoes and my cucumbers here, you will see that they are uh slightly shiny as well, and it is because see if I can get a good get in here good so you guys can see some of the fruit on there we go, on some of my couple in here, and you can actually see it also on the shine of some of my tomatoes. I will give a good sprit of the castor oil. This is a break, so we're gonna go ahead and take that off so it doesn't give nutrients to something that is not growing, and that deters everything. It's actually kind of cool because the only thing that it does not deter is humans. Castor oil is an asphyxiant to everything else. So cats, dogs, raccoons, deer, it's actually very, very popularly used in a lot of suburban areas for deer. So if you are having an issue with those sorts of things, please consider using castor oil. It just deters them away, it does not kill them, and they don't come back. If you are in certain regions of the US where the Japanese beetle was very, very popular, then you know that they will come through and almost like baby locusts, get rid of entire communities of plants, and they would just sit on a leaf and completely eat everything on the leaf. The reason why I know Japanese beetles didn't do this, and it was a cabbage white, is because you would still see it covered in the bug, and they look like ladybugs, but they are not ladybugs. Nym oil is good for that, and the last thing I want to talk about today on my episode of focus on my eggplant right now is going to be rain. All plants need water, and you need to consider you know, what kind of water do you need? Is this area going to have a lot of drought? How will I water it? Can I use my water? Because there are some places that get natural water that you cannot use the water, and so you want to figure out okay, I don't have a lot of plants, or I don't know how I have a lot of time, so I'm not gonna start from seed. Well, then you need to start from plants and you need to use a good nursery. We have a few good nurseries here in the metro Detroit area that I do trust. Some of these plants were started from nursery plants, and some were started from seed. I have a pretty good mix. I started indoors. See how did my lettuce? I didn't have to deal with the volcano lettuce poops because I grow my own. Um, and so you want to look at price, you want to look at quality of the plants. Do they all look half dead? And actually, you can I'm gonna zoom in here so you can see. I actually have a seed pot there. Um, from some of the things that I started indoors, and you know, there are some discounts that nurseries give. If you do not have a full flat, you want to buy the whole flat. So if there's two or three pods instead of four, they'll give you a discount for that as well. So those are things to look at. I want to thank you right now. We're gonna do this whole month here in August focused on, oh, and you know, some of my supplies under my deck there. I've been doing this for a minute. I'm gonna do the whole month focused on gardening, and I want to thank you for walking this with me. We're gonna cover everything from what to pick, who to grow together, if you're using some heirlooms, what do you do? What are some things that I've learned over the years? I am still learning there is no such thing as a gardener that knows everything. So, other than that, thank you so much. I am Angeli Clemens. Jump in these comments. Let's talk about gardening, urban and suburban, and hopefully, we'll take a couple of field trips. Thank you so much. Bye.