Garden 101 - Terms & Definitions - Ep17

Let's talk gardening! Spring is right around the corner, and gardeners are getting out their seed packets in anticipation. If you are a new or beginning gardener, this episode is for you.

From annual to hybrid to days to harvest, in this episode, I define common gardening terms. I share examples and give you the knowledge you need to understand what you are reading in your garden books and on the backs of seed packets.

The growing zone map I mentioned can be found at https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to this prepared life podcast where homesteading and the apocalypse meet. I'm Allison, your host. Hi, and welcome to This Prepared Life. I'm Allison, your host, and today we are going to start a series on gardening. And gardening is a huge part of our preper homestead and the just the things we do revolving around food. It is one of our goals to be as self-sufficient as possible. And so that means being able to produce, you know, what we can of our vegetable needs, our berry needs, and our fruit needs. And so one of the first things we did when we moved here over a year ago to our North Idaho homestead was get our garden started. We declared that first year, the year of the garden, and the deer fencing went up. The bare root fruit trees went in. Any perennial that I thought we wanted went into the ground. That was just our huge goal. We left behind a large garden at our homestead in Southwest Washington and an orchard that was almost fully productive or to the point of being productive. So getting all of that in just was really high on our priority list. So let's start today in this garden series just talking about some basic terms. When you first jump into gardening, I know that it can be a little overwhelming. There's all these words like annual and perennial and heirloom and hybrid and succession planting and what do these things mean? So today I am really just gonna give you a load of definitions. And we're gonna start there, start with learning what some of these main terms mean. Then we are gonna move into another podcast episode on planning your first garden and how to choose that space and what that could possibly look at look like if you don't have a lot of space. You do not have to have 20 acres in the country to homestead. You can garden and grow your own food on a balcony. And so we are going to talk a little bit about what that might look like. And then I am going to share how I do my garden planning. And for me, gardening is a year-round project. It doesn't stop when the snow flies. So we get our garden put to bed before that first frost in the fall. Hopefully, we get it put to bed. Sometimes we don't. And that's when I start thinking through okay, how did this year go? And I look back at my garden notes and I make plans for next year. And then come December, January, I'm ordering the perennials I need to replace or my seeds that I need for the next year. And then I start planning so that come February, March, when I am starting my seedlings in my greenhouse, I know what I'm planning for the year. I know how much I'm planning for the year, and I know where it's going to go in my garden. So we'll talk about planning for a bit. So let's jump in today and talk about these garden terms. So first, just grouping of terms. Let's talk about different types of plants. So annual, what is an annual? An annual is a plant that has a life cycle of one year or less. So you are going to put that plant in the ground, it is going to grow, and you are either going to eat it or it's going to go to seed. And then that plant will die come fall and be gone. There's a biennial, which carrots are a biennial. And this plant has a life cycle of two years. So typically a biennial will do a lot of leaf growth, or in the case of a carrot root growth, for that first year, and then the second year it produces seeds. We also have perennials. Perennials are something that come back every year. Think of things like your asparagus or your rhubarb or your blueberries, things like that. There's also what's called a tender perennial, and these are not cold hardy plants. So here in my climate in North Idaho, I cannot grow tender perennials unless I'm going to bring them inside and keep them warm throughout the winter. So tender perennials usually will not come back unless you are in zone seven or higher. And then we also have the term bare root. Bare root plants are plants that are dormant, so they're kind of sleeping, and they're sold without pots or soil, typically in the late winter or early spring. And it is a lot cheaper to buy bare root fruit trees than fruit trees that are in leaf and growing in a big pot. So I typically, most of my perennials, my berry bushes, my our orchard, we all start that with bare root fruit trees. And so you order those, they come different times depending on where you live. And then your goal is to get those in the ground before they start to grow for the season. So the next section of definitions we're going to talk about are seeds. Seeds can be so confusing. You see terms like open pollinated and hybrid and F1 and heirloom and organic and pelleted and just all of these things. So open pollinated means pollination occurs by insects, wind, birds, humans, or other natural mechanisms. Open pollinated plants, you can save the seeds and you will get that same plant as long as the seed pollination was not crossed with a different variety within the same species. So that's called cross-pollination. When two types of the same broccoli plant, two varieties pollinated each other, those seeds are no longer going to be true and to grow you that exact broccoli plant. Heirloom seeds, these are essentially plants with a history. All heirloom seeds are open pollinated. So you can save their seeds. Not all open pollinated seeds are heirloom. Hybrid seeds, and when we have a hybrid seed, you'll see it on the seed packet and it will say F1. And these are deliberately created to breed a desired trait. I think sometimes people think of hybrid and they confuse it possibly with the GMO terms that fly around. Hybrid seeds are not bad. You cannot save seed from a hybrid plant because the seed will not be true. Sometimes hybrids are created just in nature when two things cross-pollinate with each other. That's a hybrid. Sometimes it's done by humans when they take this really good tomato plant and cross it with this other really good tomato plant because they want both great traits in that plant. So hybrids sometimes I think get a bad rap. And I grow hybrids, I grow heirlooms, I grow open pollinated seeds, I grow all of them. And hybrids really are focusing on, you know, just the what thing in that plant is good. So maybe a hybrid is bred because this plant is resistant to a disease. Or maybe the hybrid is bred because when they crossed these two varieties, you had a really short days to harvest. So you're now able to grow a tomato in your short season climate. The reasons are not always negative when it comes to hybrid. So let's talk about some of the terms in regards to planting the seeds. So we have the term direct sowing, which essentially means you're just putting the seeds straight into the ground. Then we have the term transplanting, and this is just transferring the plant to a different growing space. Maybe you are transplanting it from a pot into your garden, or maybe you are in your greenhouse and you are transplanting it from a smaller pot to a bigger pot. Thinning is the act of reducing extra seedlings so plants are spaced properly. When I plant my tomatoes, every single cell in my tray gets two seeds. One of those gets cut. So I am thinning my tomatoes. If I direct sew uh carrots into my garden, I then have to go back and thin those so that the carrots have enough room to grow and give me a good root. So that's what thinning is. And sometimes thinning is so hard because you are just pulling out baby plants and killing them, but it is a necessity. So hardening off is the process of gradually exposing plants to outdoor conditions. If I took my tomato plants that had been sitting in my greenhouse for three months and I just planted them straight into my garden, they'd die. They would die because they have been living this posh life and they're climate-controlled, heated, warm with no wind and very few bugs life. And they can get sunburned from too much sun, their stems are possibly not as strong, and so maybe we get a big wind gust and it breaks their stem. Hardening off is just the slow process of accustoming your plants to being outside. So succession planting is the process of sewing or planting again after the initial sowing to extend the harvest. So if you live in an area with a long growing season, you can sometimes get, you know, two, three, even four harvests of different crops in during your growing season. I live in an area with a very short growing season. So succession planting is not something I can do a lot of. I can do it a little bit, but I have to plant it very carefully. So there's three ways to succession plant. You can stagger sewing the same crop. So say you plant carrots, and then two weeks later you plant some more carrots, and then two weeks after that you plant some more carrots. Number two is you can sow two different varieties that have different maturity dates. And number three, and this is the one I think that most people tend to do, is you can replace one crop when it's harvested with a different crop. So say you planted some cool weather peas, and those are they do not like warm weather, it starts to get hot and they start looking sad. You can now pull those peas and put something else in that place that you have enough time to harvest before first frost. So that would be an example of succession planting. Companion planting is planting different plants together that benefit one another. Um, if you look it up online, you can look up Three Sisters. A lot of people plant corn beans and squash together. Um, a lot of people sprinkle marigolds or garlic or onions throughout their garden because those are said to ward off different insects. Um, you know, planting flowers near crops that really need a heavy pollination is a way to attract the insects that are then going to pollinate those crops. So that's companion planting. So when you see the term variety in seed catalogs or your garden books, this is just talking about a specific characteristic within a plant species. So let's take green beans for example. One variety of green beans is purple. That would be a specific variety within that species. So germination is the moment the seed begins to grow, and the days to germination is the number of days it takes the seed to emerge from the soil. Days to harvest is the number of days from sowing or transplanting to harvest. And this one is important because if you live in an area that has 90 frost-free days on average, and you plant a winter squash or maybe it's a pumpkin that has 120 days to harvest, you may not get that crop before frost comes. So paying attention to days to harvest within your growing season is important. So you'll see the term growing zone or USDA hardiness zone thrown around in catalogs. Um, and this is another really important term to know. This is the historical average of the lowest winter temperature in specific US geographical areas. And I will link a map in the show notes, and it's an interactive map that you can type in your address and zoom in, and it's color-coded, and it will give you just like your growing zone for the area. So when you see like 5B or 5A or 9, those are growing zones. And these are really important for perennials because perennials, if you plant a tender perennial and you live in zone three, that perennial is going to die. So pay attention to your growing zone and the perennials you are planting. I am in zone 6A and we moved from zone 8a. So I have lost a considerable amount of growing days in the zone that we moved to. Two more important terms are last frost and first frost. So last frost is the average date that you can expect frost to occur in the spring. So for me, that is May to the beginning of June. And first frost is the average date that you can expect frost to occur in the fall. For me, here in our growing zone, we had frost September 1st this last year. I had thought we would get until maybe the middle of September and we did not. So some of my winter squashes didn't have time to grow and finish harvesting. So that is definitely something I am paying more attention to in my timing of planting things this year. And the difference between these two, if you counted up how many days, that's your growing season. So if you get frost May 1st, or your last frost is May 1st and your first frost is September 1st, sit there and count up those days, and that will give you a better picture of what days to harvest you can use. A few more just general terms. Bolting. This is when an annual plant goes to seed. Cool weather crops will typically bolt at some time in early summer. Indeterminate and determinate, these are tomato-specific terms. And indeterminate tomato varieties continue to grow until the first frost. So these plants get big and they definitely need a strong trellis. So if you have ever seen someone's garden and their tomato plants have just kind of taken over by the end of the season, those were most likely an indeterminate variety. And determinate varieties are tomato varieties that grow to a certain size and then they stop growing. Typically, determinate varieties produce a larger crop at one time. So a lot of our paste tomatoes or our sauce tomatoes are determinate varieties. A term that you might see, which is NPK, and you're going to see this on fertilizer bags. And this stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And these are the three most important things for plants to grow. And so when you see those on your fertilizer bag or whatever it is you're amending your garden with, that's what that N, P, and K mean. And then pH is another term, and this is just the measure of the acidity or the alkalinity in your soil. Most plants just tend to thrive in a certain range. Some plants like lower acid and some plants like higher acid. So you can get pH meters, you can test your soil and find that out. You don't have to, but if you are noticing issues with specific plants like blueberries or something, test your soil and see if the soil is how they like. So these are just some pretty basic definitions, and I hope that helps you understand some of the garden terms you're reading as you're doing your research online or you're reading seed catalogs or the backs of the seed packets. I know that gardening can seem overwhelming, but I really just urge you to just jump in, just plant something, just get started, and expect failure and expect weeds because those things are going to happen and it's how we learn. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode and that you have an amazing garden season. Thanks so much for listening today. And until next time, remember, every little thing matters, and a goal without a plan is just a wish. If you have questions, you can find me on Instagram at this prepared life. I'd love to connect with you over there. You can also find me on the internet at www.thispreparedlife.com. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, I would love it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts.