spk_0:   0:01
Hello, everybody.

spk_1:   0:02
Hello, everybody. And welcome to the show The big show. I'm afraid this show is going to be nothing but a big pile of the newer.

spk_0:   0:11
Some days you're that way.

spk_1:   0:12
Some days it's just a load of poop.

spk_0:   0:16
The whole pickup blowed up poop

spk_1:   0:18
to scoop the poop. That's poop Day today in the salty and Spice household. Welcome to the show. The Big Show, the most important critical acclaim podcast that is recorded in our car today. We are in the red studio, and we're happy to be heading south. That's right, we're driving down the road. So if you hear the road sounds, you'll know what's going on and why. The audio quality, perhaps, is not Studio press steen. It's because we got headset microphones on and we're doing our best. But it's just not gonna be a studio pristine. Neither of us has. He's brilliant broadcasting voices anyway, So hey, maybe I should stop talk about bigger breath and talk about boob. You talk about

spk_0:   1:02
because if you want to garden grow, you gotta have soiled little girl. Garden that seems

spk_1:   1:07
rather axiomatic,

spk_0:   1:09
reflects the statements are always true. I learned that in high school. So the thing is, lawns are not the same as gardens. I did not know that. I bet you can't did.

spk_1:   1:21
Maybe I do.

spk_0:   1:22
But many people actually dump things on their lawns that will kill garden plants because a lot of herbicides were designed to kill what it called broad leaf plants. Broadly, plants includes things like tomatoes and peppers and beans and peas and potatoes and every other vegetable except corn. Pretty much the greens are grasses, and so do fine on what used to feed lawns and what you do to kill weeds and lawns. But pretty much everything else is a broad leaf, and a lot of the loan treatments are designed to kill him. So if you intend to be able to produce your own food, then you really need to have a place of ground that's good for growing food in ahead of time. Because this is not the kind of thing you want to make an emergency run to the store. For when t odd walkie happens the end of the world as we know it. Let's go pick up a pickup load of compost. No, that's kind of how it goes

spk_1:   2:22
right. We're talking about a stuff. Hits the back of the pickup truck so you could spread it out over your garden, Not the van situation.

spk_0:   2:34
I will fling it out all over the garden, but

spk_1:   2:36
not with Rhodri oscillator.

spk_0:   2:38
Now with the rotary oscillator.

spk_1:   2:39
Although there are rotary oscillators designed to do exactly

spk_0:   2:43
Yeah, they're called manure spreaders. And we had one on the farm next door when I was getting

spk_1:   2:47
what I tell you. What do not You may not know this, but do not

spk_0:   2:54
follow through another spreading.

spk_1:   2:57
Do not drive, drive a pair of horses or ponies or whatever you happen to have in front of a front of a mechanical manure spreader on a windy day. You are going to get covered in the stuff. Trust me. I know this for a fact.

spk_0:   3:14
Something you should just learn the hard way.

spk_1:   3:17
Yeah. Dugan next story asked me my will, but I was a kid. He asked me Hey, you want to go out and drive around the manure spreader today? Sure. That sounds like pounds. I hooked it all up for me and said all right over there. And do those 10 acres right there. so I did what I always liked driving the horses. I wouldn't. You know, these two courses were the single most study tractable pair, good natured beasts that you'd ever find. So I went out there and I seen found out and, uh that, you know, it was way too windy to be driving a newer spreader around. And I got back and I was covered in he kind of a snicker. And and he said, Well, you learned a lesson today and I'm like, What's that? He's like, find some other fool to go out and spread manure

spk_0:   4:15
with friends like those?

spk_1:   4:17
Yeah. Anyway, that was a story from my youth.

spk_0:   4:23
So to keep our guard unhealthy, the thing about gardening is you grow lots of nutritious stuff in it, and then you harvest the nutritious stuff and you eat the nutritious stuff. And then most of the residue of the nutritious stuff gets washed down the toilets. And unless you're running a composting toilet system, you don't get that back. And some nutrients will always be washed through the soil to the deeper layers. So if you want a bit of land to continue to be good for food production. You gotta regularly fertilize it. You can do that with chemical fertilizers, but it's a more expensive way to go, for one thing.

spk_1:   4:58
Chemically. Way to go.

spk_0:   5:00
Yeah. And you don't tend to get trace minerals and stuff inlet like you do with come. So composted waste. So we go with compost. About 60 bucks for a truckload of the stuff. Pickup truck

spk_1:   5:14
actually was $24.

spk_0:   5:16
Yep, August 50 bucks for a pickup truck worth of the stuff picked it up today. Gonna spread. It may be tomorrow when I've got more time to spread it. Because here I'm travelling south and podcasting. Here's the thing, though. What we bought was composted. It's called mushroom compost because it's a favorite among mushroom growers. What they do is they pick up the litter from underneath the chickens. If you've got a big egg facility or a, um, meat chicken raising facility, you have a bunch of loose in there because those guys like to sleep on roosts and you put straw or other no degradable stuff underneath him to help soak up the letter, which is pretty liquidy as chickens ejected. And then you scruple that stuff out of the bottom of the container. Periodically, you throw it in a big, fat pile, and you let it sit there for a year or two while the microbes that are in their work on breaking down the material. If you throw straight up fresh manure on a lot of plans, that'll Burnham. Because the nitrogen is so supercharged and in an unfriendly form, a lot of it's in the form of ammonia, you'll get burning of the plants. If you try and throw it straight on it, do you throw it in a compost pile? The heat of the compost pile actually kills off a lot of the pathogenic, which is the disease causing microbes that might be in there. So if those chickens had salmonella or something like that, that group sits in the hot pile and the salmonella bacteria or killed off. So what I'm spreading on my garden isn't spreading salmonella all over the place,

spk_1:   7:06
and the heat is caused by the manure or poop or whatever else is in there degrading.

spk_0:   7:14
Yeah, the chemical breakdown. There's microbes in there that like the heat and doing that job for you. And if you're actually running a compost pile in a scientific way when the temperature of the pile suddenly drops. You know that it's ready to be put on a garden if you want to do that, but we don't. We going by it, we compost, but we don't have enough to feed our role garden.

spk_1:   7:35
We're just not really very wasteful. We're just two people, and we don't intend to waste a lot.

spk_0:   7:42
And most of organic waste gets flushed,

spk_1:   7:44
and you were very conservative on our on are wasted.

spk_0:   7:50
Now if we're running lovable Lou kinds of toilets, Yes, composting toilet read

spk_1:   7:55
about on our website

spk_0:   7:57
and in an emergency situation. That's exactly what would be doing because they're the nicest and happen most pleasant of the non flushable toilet system

spk_1:   8:07
that we have one

spk_0:   8:08
and we have one. But we're not at the moment accepted the place, right, so we buy a truckload, spread it over the garden and then spread whatever we've got in the fall. You also don't want to put fresh vegetable, weighs directly on the garden. You want to toss it in a pile and let it degrade for a year or so. That way, because there was a lot of fungi that like to grow on fresh vegetable waste, which, if you've ever been a bachelor with a refrigerator, you probably know and you don't want that stuff in your garden. So you let the fungi do their thing in the compost pile and it breaks down to a really nice, rich, black soil like stuff, and then you toss it on the garden.

spk_1:   8:51
I don't know where you all work, because I don't really know who you are, but I don't know where you work. But, you know, mushroom compost is also important ingredient in many office situations. They use it, you bring it in and use it inside a, uh, insurance office or a bank or something like that, in a situation where you know you got the employees and then you cover them with a bunch of poop and keep him in the dark. And maybe a year later, something good will come from it.

spk_0:   9:23
I don't think that's the kind of mushroom compost it is. I don't think that's the ah bunch of poop that you feed your employees. If you run a business, I think you verbally do that way. There's less to vacuum up that way.

spk_1:   9:42
Maybe you're right

spk_0:   9:43
because it's kind of messy when you have ah, truckload of compost and you're spreading it all

spk_1:   9:47
over the place. It is. So we got We got our truck load today. We went out to the local outstanding garden centre.

spk_0:   9:56
Oh, yeah,

spk_1:   9:57
we have a very, very good one. Very, very, very reasonable prices. Family owned quality plants. You know, you're in a family owned family Run, um, garden centre when you go out towards the back of the garden center and you see the swing set in the toy box said the little sandbox right next

spk_0:   10:17
to the watering controls

spk_1:   10:19
the water in control. So please for the kids to play while Mom and Dad are working.

spk_0:   10:25
Then the older boy is driving the scoop that fills up your pickup truck

spk_1:   10:29
jump Family owned

spk_0:   10:31
him set me up today,

spk_1:   10:32
which we like

spk_0:   10:33
and Customer Appreciation Day. So they were giving away free cinnamon rolls, and these were not cheap store bought, nasty c thes

spk_1:   10:41
were woman who knew how to bake and I don't mean to sound sexist. I just I mean,

spk_0:   10:46
that's it's a Mennonite family tried, and

spk_1:   10:52
she apparently I didn't. You seven role. I'm not certain

spk_0:   10:56
I would e t share.

spk_1:   10:57
Yes, you will eat my share. You will show you your share. Surely all the cinnamon rolls you forever. How was it? Was a good

spk_0:   11:05
excellent. Of course they know how to bake. Yeah, Here's what we didn't do, though. We didn't go down to the livestock auction that is just a couple blocks from her house, which we couldn't. We didn't load up with a pickup load of free cattle manure,

spk_1:   11:22
which they will give you get rid of it. Yep. A lot of people do come get it.

spk_0:   11:28
And I'm not against doing it in the fall when you can put it on the garden and let it compost deep enough that will heat up a little bit and get it to compost. The thing is, you gotta compost the stuff at least for a while before you put plants in it. And E. Coli bacteria cause some kinds of food poisoning. That's one of the food borne diseases. Certain strains of E. Coli and cattle are quite happy to carry E. Coli and their guts. They always do. Usually, it's not the disease causing strains, But it can be. And they often have antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria because a lot of cattle are fed antibiotics regularly to increase the growth rates.

spk_1:   12:12
But for what this is used for, it's no big deal because most of this stuff goes right onto ah ah, corn crop.

spk_0:   12:19
Yeah, you throw it under corn crop. It's fine. I would take it in the fall, and I would put it around my trees because that's a good thing to do with waste, which might conceivably hold infectious material but certainly holds good nutrients. And you don't want to waste the fertilizer. Like if you have composting toilet material, it might be better to put that on things like trees that on your garden, because if there are microbes in there you don't want, you're not eating the tree roots anyway.

spk_1:   12:51
Well, let's talk a little bit about tree fertilization.

spk_0:   12:55
Yeah, that was that's this week, too.

spk_1:   12:57
Yeah, that was another project she had. We weren't really planning on talking about it, But did you? I don't know. Did you write a story on that?

spk_0:   13:06
Uh, no. It was just pounding in some tree steaks. We did want a little bit ago about early spring preps in general and included fertilization in there and pruning

spk_1:   13:18
tree steaks we bought. I bought a display box full box full of these trees. State 160. Yeah, And they were I don't remember how much they cost

spk_0:   13:28
about $100 that quite a lot of money they cost about. If you buy five of them, it costs just short of 10 bucks, so you can get him for in small lots for about two bucks apiece. Or you can get him in great big lots for less than a dollar or a little more than a dollar apiece.

spk_1:   13:51
But if you're going to do is one

spk_0:   13:52
160 steaks for 90 bucks, I'm about 50 cents. Be 60 cents piece, yeah, up. So I've got maybe 15 different fruit and nut trees I needed to fertilize this spring, and they take two or three apiece, depending on the size that I tried some experiments by, Given some of them near the roots of my perennial berry plants. See if my berry plants like that, too. Some of my bare producing bushes we'll see how that goes. But it was. I've noticed that the trees out the place, the soil at the place. Guys, it's pitiful. I got an inch and 1/2 a good soil on top, and then it goes to sure, clay. It's nasty soil and the trees were not thriving.

spk_1:   14:34
Frankly, it's there's a reason we could pay cash for the place. I mean, it's not like it's

spk_0:   14:39
Yeah, this'll is not Fridays River.

spk_1:   14:43
Bottom part you want to grow like elm trees, oak trees,

spk_0:   14:48
oaks and hicks. Hickories do well there, Heinz. I did put in some walnuts and they're gonna be good eventually, but they take a long time to grow all those growth. Fine. But fruit trees tend to want a little more nutrition than that. And I put in a lot of fertilizer compost actually with him when I planted him. But I've noticed that although they were most of more surviving pretty well, almost everybody survived, and some of them were growing really well. I didn't get much fruiting last year. I only had a couple of trees that actually fruited, and they're getting old enough that they ought to be fruiting. So I'm thinking the nasty soil might be the reason and this spring as we speak here, we're seeing the first greening of the grass. The last of the ice is melting off the her pond, the first of the spring peeper frogs. They're starting to sing. It is right at the cusp of winter and spring here, and I went out there and gave all the trees two or three steaks, spikes, fertilizer. See if they'll do a little better with that help this year.

spk_1:   15:53
Okay, let me translate from space is too English. The her pond is our old cattle pond. It's a pond Baidu, water, cattle and for cattle to go stand in the middle of and cool off. It's

spk_0:   16:08
a little shallow,

spk_1:   16:09
very shallow, filled with cat tails. And and it's not in frogs. It's freezes in the winter so it won't have a fish in. It

spk_0:   16:18
frees the salad,

spk_1:   16:19
and we but we bought air. We built a fish pond as well, not actually very far from the other pond,

spk_0:   16:27
but it's deeper, so we'll freeze solid and the fish survive in it

spk_1:   16:31
instead of three. The other one probably is. I don't know. I never

spk_0:   16:36
went to the middle of it,

spk_1:   16:38
so yeah, we s O that she calls it her pond because there's a lot of

spk_0:   16:42
herb tiles brought snakes, frogs

spk_1:   16:46
Another jumpy, slimy, slimy. Plenty of mosquitoes, I'm sure

spk_0:   16:53
with all those frogs. Actually, it's not a bad mosquito area at all, because the frogs eat it. We have more mosquito problems along the major pond because we've got turtles in the bigger pond and the turtles do a number on the frogs.

spk_1:   17:10
I'll tell you what. We we are biggest flying past Problem was flies because guy ran cattle across the road from us, and fortunately, they put in this house over there. You can't really see it from where we are,

spk_0:   17:25
said it back over the top.

spk_1:   17:26
Step back over the top of it, and he stopped running cattle there. So the problem, in a way, it was like really a lot of flies. We were kind of like, Yeah, we had the opportunity to buy that across the road, but we didn't happen to have an extra 120,000 sitting around, so we only bought the little patch. Dirtiest acres that whatever it is,

spk_0:   17:51
it's not. Not as valuable. You can't run cattle on it didn't

spk_1:   17:55
could, but it would

spk_0:   17:57
be. Wouldn't sport cattle very well

spk_1:   17:59
know? Could be a place for them to stand While

spk_0:   18:03
it's not somewhere you can do ro cropping either it is. That was so terrible.

spk_1:   18:08
Hunting land

spk_0:   18:09
hunting. Yell Oh, boy, we have, dear. We have got deer over the place this spring. We have got based on the amount of dear pellets I saw when I was walking around taking care of the trees. See how we did our fertilization tree spikes for the trees because they'll gradually release over a period of months and the load of compost for the garden. And once I get that spread out, all but be ready to start putting in garden plants. So we spread it out this time cause salty may have time to help me this year. His his work schedule is not as ridiculous as it has been in the past, something approaching civilized. I've been doing most of the garden and tree work because my work schedules more civilized, so if you wanted to grow, you gotta prep it, and this is a good way to prep it. And this is a good time a year to prep it. If you don't want to do a vegetable garden. Now you can prep your pieces of ground, put in a whole bunch of pretty perennial flowers, not have to mess with them, not have your neighbors complain about it. Talk about a stealth prep. We'll look at the nice flower garden the guy has got. And then if you ever need that for a vegetable garden, it's really easy if you need to to pull out flowers and put in tomatoes and they like the same kind of soil.

spk_1:   19:35
Good to know. All right, we're gonna We're gonna stick a fork in this one and thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time.