support for conversations live get your garden on comes from the environmental programming endowment the gertrude j saunt endowment and the james h olay family endowment and from viewers like you thank you welcome to wpsu's conversations live get your garden on i'm ann danahee coming to you live from the doctor keiko miwa ross wpsu production studio many of us have already started planting cool season crops or we're getting ready to grow fruits and vegetables that like the warmer weather either way now is the perfect time to get tips on getting the most out of your garden and yard we have three experts joining us tonight to talk about everything from spring lawn care to planting and caring for trees and we'll take your questions let's meet our guests elsa sanchez is a penn state professor of horticulture systems management she works on the production of vegetable crops with a focus on environmental sustainability and she assists commercial vegetable growers tom butzler is a penn state extension horticulture educator he works with commercial horticulture operators and landscapers in clinton county his areas of expertise include vegetable production and beekeeping sarah ritzko is a penn state extension horticulture educator in columbia county her areas of expertise include fruit trees and plant disease and she manages a fruit farm with her husband you too can join tonight's conversation our toll-free number is 1-800-543-8242 our email address is connect wpsu.org well thank you so much to all three of you for coming here and it's so great to have you in person and in the studio thank you thanks nice to be here tom maybe you could start us off by just talking about the outlook for the planting season and especially with water levels we it seems like we've been doing pretty well so far what's what's the outlook how's the planting season going so far so yeah you're correct there are a couple cup government agencies that monitor moisture issues and so right now the soil moisture and the stream levels are really good and the future outlook for the next month or two also looks good so for pennsylvania overall we're right about average the southern part of the state's getting a little abnormally dry but right now no one is heading into into any drought situation so i think we're going to have a good spring summer we'll have to see how that plays out right it's a little ways off so when you say it because a couple months we're in pretty good shape that doesn't mean though that you could just kind of plant something and not worry about it or do you have a little more leeway when it comes to watering you might have a little more leeway but you know we get we head into the gardening season we're putting in transplants we're putting in seeds it is critical to make sure that we have some soil moisture there right when we transplant even though they're you know the soil might be wet it's a good idea to put some water in and they're tender they're young it does take some some effort to get them a little more established and a little more resilient so that when we head into maybe a little bit of a dry spell a week or two no rain they're well established well rooted okay but that should help us get started anyway and speaking of getting started also what can people get started planting right now where we don't have the hot well we do get a little bit of hot weather but it's coming back down into more normal spring temperatures and what can people plant now it's the perfect time to plant your cool season crops we've got some examples here of some cold crops brassicaceae for students in my systematics class you can plant your cabbage kale broccoli cauliflower all those are great things to plant and for those of you who are itching to plant your tomatoes it's not time to plant them outside but you could start transplants and we have some examples here of that too okay so we're looking at the tomatoes and we've got some peppers here as well so you're saying you don't want to even though like we might get some warm weather we had some weather in the the 70s you don't want to say oh it's warm and then put your tomatoes outside that's exactly right it's not quite time yet i know that um it can be difficult to wait um actually it might depend on your philosophy for your garden you know in my garden i might take a little bit of a risk and plant here in central pennsylvania about may 15th is the average last frost date if i see like the 10 day forecast and i'm like ah it looks okay i might plant ahead of time and if it gets cold i might use a row coverage yeah that's a good idea yep or if it gets or really cold i might just replant so that's a way to get in there a little bit earlier okay but still we're talking about may for that we're not talking about yet it would still be a little too early for that so you could get them started inside if you've got a growing light or some good lighting in the house exactly the light i think is the the key to it i think that's what you're alluding to get a head start on that and sarah what about uh fruit trees what can you be doing with your fruit trees right now can you actually plant them yeah so um right now it's it's a great time to plant both apple trees pear trees peach trees you'd want to find a location that has good drainage so near the top of a hill or where there might not be as clay-like soil because trees don't like their feet wet um so then you dig a hole and then um most of these fruit trees have a graft union it's this bulbous part near the bottom of the tree just before the roots and you'd want to make sure that when you pack the soil back in that that section is about two inches above the soil okay so if you end up with your dirt or your mulch over that then that's not good yeah so then um so the way a fruit tree is set up is the bottom part the root section is actually a different type of tree and then the variety that you want like honey crisp gala red delicious whatever that might be is grafted on top and we don't want the top portion to start rooting down in the soil okay and what do you do if you don't have great soil if let's say you have a yard a garden that's got a lot of clay in it can you just kind of dig out a big area for your tree or should you is it really important to find the right spot so it's still possible you just wouldn't want to over water it you'd want to be careful especially if you have a really rainy season and if that happens you can expect perhaps fewer fruits and a few other problems so it might not be ideal for that yeah that makes sense and what about pruning is this a good season to start pruning your trees and shrubs too and do you have any tips on doing that i know sometimes when i look at a tree and it looks like it maybe needs to be pruned but i'm not really sure exactly how to do it yeah yeah so um there's kind of two sections um the poem fruits which are your pears and your apples those you can actually start pruning way back december january you want to make sure that the tree is fully dormant so we're at the point right now where the leaves are starting to come out of the buds of the trees which means the sap is flowing and so right now if you prune them now you're risking losing some vigor in the tree so that means it might not grow as prolifically this season okay and but with peaches right now is a perfect time to prune because they grow really quickly and a lot um so we actually want to whack down that vigor at this time of season okay good to know and what about transplanting other types of shrubs and trees is now a good time to do that or is it better to wait until the fall no it's a it's a good time and fall is is the best time but spring is is just right behind it and um you go to the garden centers that's when they're getting all their trees and shrubs in right now and so yeah it's a great time to plant and do you have any tips on making sure that you get all the roots out i know okay so this is my personal question i have some little baby oaks that were actually the squirrels started bury the acorns and i thought okay i'm gonna get some little baby oaks out of this but already they've got these like really big roots how do you make sure or is it okay if some of the roots get cut off when you're transplanting you know you know for when you go to the garden center you do want to look at the root structure one thing you do want to be careful is in these pots if it's an aged tree or shrub that's been there for a couple years or two years maybe those roots tend to go around in a circle they're trained and and if you don't break up that that circling they'll continue doing that circling route once you put in it into a planting hole so you do need to disturb those roots a little bit it may require cutting those roots and it will be perfectly fine okay and then also when you're planting either fruit trees or other types of trees and shrubs we have been getting this kind of variable weather it was really warm and then i mean i hate to say this i looked at the forecast and there's snow in the forecast next week [Laughter] how do you kind of plan for that or deal with that well at least for the ornamental side of things you would want to put down a layer of mulch after you plant and so that's going to insulate that ground a little bit you know two or three inches of of of mulch and it conserves moisture it keeps some of the weeds down insulates the soil so you know the fluctuation in the air is going to be much more than the fluctuation of temperature down in the soil and they should be fine okay all right well we do have a question or a call this is from tracy in hollidaysburg hi tracy thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment hi tracy are you there a call from tracy in holidaysburg and we'll just wait a moment and see if she's through yeah hi hi tracy are you there hi yes hi thank you for taking my call um i have a question about gypsy mom um so we started to see them last year um and and your average home backyard how do we control them um i understand some people will have you know you know helicopters come in and spray but what can we do as backyard gardeners to help you know eliminate or minimize them yeah that's a great question we were talking about that a little bit before the show i don't know um tom do you want to take that one and they actually have a new name now is that right yeah the the the latin name is the same but they changed the common name it's now called the spongy moth um but regardless of the name change it still acts the same and so for a homeowner one of the things that you could do is take advantage of its if the way it acts once it's um out there in the environment so um it's actively feeding um in the evening and then it comes down the trees and the eve um uh when daylight is is approaching to try to get a you know escape predators or whatever it is and so they'll find places to hide so one of the things a homeowner can do is tie like a burlap a piece of burlap around the trunk of the tree and fold it over so that it's a perfect hiding place for these caterpillars as they're coming out of the tree to hunker down during the day and then you get up and then you can just put you know a coffee can with some soapy water put them in that and they'll drown so and that's that's an easy thing for a homeowner to do because you can't run a helicopter and you know apply an insecticide right and not everyone wants to necessarily pay a professional to come and do their area well we have a couple pictures that we are looking at here and these are i guess the egg masses with the mods on them what stage are we in now this time of year right now we're still in the in the egg stage or um they're coming out of winter those eggs will hatch soon so you can see a larva there on the on the right and on the left side of the screen is what that egg stage looks like um it's a it's a kind of a brown cardboard appearance like it's kind of spongy and that's what you'll see on the trunks of trees picnic tables things like that so that if you see those you can scrape them off too even before before they hatch if they're accessible you know if they're high up in a tree and you know it's going to be a little difficult to get to of course but right we know this is a problem that hits different areas different times of the year different years and it can be a real pain so we we hope that it helps you deal with that i i want to go back to another vegetable question because we are having this variable weather so you if you get your lettuce in now your cold season crops and we do there was this forecast we might get snow next week is that okay for them i think that's the perfect time to use a row cover as we were discussing earlier so row covers just it can be anything if you buy them like from a seed company or you know lowe's or whatever it's kind of like a dryer sheet material almost it but it's a big piece of fabric you just put it over your crops and it gives them a little bit of there's a picture it gives them a little bit of protection from some of those lower temperatures and so that will get you through that period okay and how is it for the um peach trees other fruit trees is it the same way can you protect them or i mean obviously if you've got one or two trees that might be doable but if you've got a whole farm it seems a little bit difficult yeah so i mean if you have one or two trees you could probably cover them if you have more than just a couple trees that's obviously pretty difficult um apples at this point it should be okay especially if the temperatures don't get too too cold and if the tree is still dormant which most of them aren't right now but if the tree was still dormant you know no problem at all right now we are at risk of losing our fruit buds so if the temperature gets too cold that is that is a concern right so your family you run a fruit tree farm and you actually experience this a little bit of this with the weather that we've been having is that right sarah so you actually had some trees that were damaged from it yeah so um throughout like the early spring um we had a series of not really freeze thawing but light frost sort of the temperature would increase and that would get the fruit trees to start growing and then it would get cold again so we have seen some damage to the fruit buds in both the apples and the peaches so while we're looking at it as maybe some nice warm weather there's kind of the the other side to that too yeah um and so right now actually it it's getting kind of dangerous because the peach trees have started blooming um and the apples aren't quite there but if if we get some massive frost we could be looking at a reduced crop okay well fingers crossed on that definitely and if you're just joining us i'm ann danahee and this is wpsu's conversations live get your garden on we're talking with three gardening experts and we're happy to take your calls our toll-free number is 1-800-543-8242 you can also send us questions by email at connect wpsu.org okay so we've got our cool weather plants in we've got those in maybe we'll start thinking about planting the tomatoes the peppers tom what can we do to kind of get ready for that for the warm season well i think elsa already alluded to that a little bit with the idea of if you don't want to go to a garden center and buy your plants you can start now it's not too late so you know starting your tomatoes your peppers eggplants another warm season crop some other warm season crops you might want to hold off on for a while is pumpkins those seeds germinate really quickly those plants jump up really quickly you know and they can start growing aggressively you know in your little seedling tray so that you might want to hold off on but right now would be a great time to start your your warm season plants while that's occurring the other thing you could do in in the vegetable garden is is do a soil test we've talked about that repeatedly every show what we have here on on gardening is that you know how do you know how much fertilizer to apply you're just kind of guessing and gardeners are gamblers i mean elsa alluded to planting a couple weeks before a frost event because she's gambling but you know when you're dealing with that soil chemistry so many unknowns so the idea of doing a soil test apply the nutrients and also maybe the ph is out of whack and you need to add some lime or if you're growing blueberries maybe you need to bring that ph down and acidify that soil so there's a lot of things you can do before you get into that garden and plant that you can do right now to get prepared okay so also is that what you do when you're like looking at getting ready to plant those vegetables that like the warmer weather i mean because sometimes you think okay i'm just going to kind of till the area in my in my yard and then just kind of stick them in see what happens that's one approach i mean is that okay or do you have to use like the right soils and all sorts of fertilizers right um and so i would start exactly how tom was saying do a soil test and the nice thing is you'll get recommendations for your garden that will tell you how much nutrients to add so you don't have to guess like tom is saying it takes all the guesswork out of that another thing you could do right now too is put down mulches i like to use landscape fabric in my garden i start off like really excited about the season about midway through i get a little bit tired and so i really like having those mulches to help with particularly with weeds but i i've already put those out in my garden i'm getting ready for i'm going to put some broccoli in this weekend and then i'm also getting ready for my tomatoes and peppers and other crops like that okay so it's okay to put this like kind of like a fabric down and it's hopefully will smother most of the weeds or at least help you into the later into the summer exactly and it helps to warm the soil too so okay and i think tom has done one approach to that maybe you could tell us a little bit about that your use of a a unique cover for your garden well i also use the term mulch and you can use almost anything as a mulch so one of the things i do is that after a wind event i kind of walk through ride my bike through the neighborhood and i look for those trampolines that were blown a half a block a block away and they're all mangled up and then they put them at the the trash to pick up at the trash so i used the trampoline cover and so you can see that in the picture there in the upper left-hand uh corner there is a trampoline cover and then i kind of used a chalk a line to to create a grid and then i got a a soup can put it in a fire to get it hot and i created my holes and you can see that in the lower left-hand side a photo there where i created a number of holes and then i placed that in the garden and i put my tomatoes and peppers and cabbage there and you know using that grid system it's a mulch i don't have to weed because as elsa mentioned gardeners get excited in the spring they plan everything and then it comes into july and august it's hot and last thing you want to do is go out and weed so anything you can do to minimize that that weeding task makes it a much more enjoyable experience yeah definitely and in this case you're also saving the trampoline from ending up in the landfill so it's kind of a double a win-win i'm up cycling is that the thing i like that okay that's right i like it well it looks like we have a call from red in johnstown hi red thanks for calling and do you have a question or comment yes i would like to know is there a disadvantage of planting a garden where trees used to be planted but now they were uprooted and taken out oh that's a great question so you had an area in your garden and used to have trees and then they've been uprooted or taken out i don't know sarah is that something you encounter you've got fruit trees and you want to plant something else is it okay um with fruit trees usually there aren't a lot of pests that that transfer over from fruit trees to vegetables so that's okay um the only case that i could think of would be um i can't remember that tree walnut yeah yeah a black walnut tree which can make other plants not able to grow yeah that's the only case i can think of right that's a really good point so in general is it okay if a place if it's not a black walnut to plant other plants where a tree used to be in general yeah that'd be fine but those walnut trees can secrete a toxin and that can kill i mean tomato plants are really susceptible to that and it takes years for that chemical to break down kind of to go away but yeah other than that that would be fine okay and this might be also a time when you get your soil tested too to see if it's suitable for whatever it is what uh that you want to grow after the tree is gone so usually the soil test will tell you things like ph and the nutrient levels and so you can definitely get those back into you know the correct range for the vegetables that are going in next they won't really tell you anything about like if there is any leftover chemicals from the trees or anything like that okay so that you would have to know so okay we hope that helps red so as long as it's not a black walnut that used to be there you might you should be in pretty good shape but and hopefully that'll work for you and we have another call and this is from abby in lebanon hi abby thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment hi thank you for taking my call i do have a question um pepper plants in my garden in the raised bed last summer they were just all very tiny little almost like miniature vegetables and i'm wondering if there's any um tips or hints you have about growing pepper plants okay very kind it was my jalapeno and the green peppers and so they were very tiny and it wasn't like you bought like miniature pepper plants right okay yeah great question so yeah we actually we have some pepper plants here right yeah we do yeah any tips on growing pepper plants and what might cause them to not thrive was it the plant or the fruit that was small oh maybe it was the fruit she might be gone but it sounded like you're right it was that the fruit was it was the fruit the plant the plant almost seemed dormant it got to a certain size and then the fruit um it produced was just small tiny fruit okay one thing that's coming to my mind is maybe the water is that coming to your mind too yeah you know i looked up some some data for last summer and last summer was for the northeast as a whole was one of the hottest on record and june was the hottest june on record now july and august cooled down a little bit but but not much so overall it was very hot and when you look at vegetables i mean they're like ninety percent fossil water we had a colleague that would say why do you think they call it a watermelon yeah they're mostly water and yeah i agree with you i think it was waterproof so that you know going out maybe once every three or four days might not be enough in the heat of the summer that that water evaporates from the soil quickly right i think another thing that's coming to my mind is if you have a vegetable garden it's really important to have a water source you were talking about where you have these periods where it's you have a droughty week or two and it's really important to have access to water to have good fruits and vegetables okay all right well we hope that helps you abby and you have better luck this coming summer and we have a call from jane in johnstown hi jane thanks for calling and do you have a question or comment yes i do have a question because of the variable weather that we've been having when is a good time to start pruning roses and when should you stop pruning them and just generally about rose care rose care okay great question i don't know who wants to weigh in on the rose care here if any of you have any experience or expertise in pruning roses i nominate tom i mean you could you could go in and and prune any time except as you get later on into the season just because you want that plant to get ready for dormancy if you if you plant too late if you prune too late into the season it's going to stimulate growth kind of like what sarah was talking about with the fruit trees and so that's really the only time that you probably want to avoid pruning and it depends also what type of rose bush that you're pruning if it's something that's uh pruning on on a new wood you might want to prune during the dormant season so that that new flush of growth can can grow and put out flower buds so that you can take that into account also you might not want to remove your buds for for this year okay because you want to you want to get the benefits of that sure yeah definitely well we hope that helps jane and you get to enjoy your roses this summer i want to um talk about one of the invasive insects that we have here we had a question earlier about one and a big one of course is the spotted lantern fly and it's spreading across pennsylvania it's reached the center county and it's kind of moving up across the the state i think the state added 11 counties to the quarantine zone tom can you talk about why the spotted lanternfly is considered such a pest such a threat well rory i just want to point out the map that you have up on your screen that you know this was concentrated in southeast pennsylvania now it's over half more than half of the counties here in pennsylvania so it is moving and you know it's a there's a myriad of problems i think for homeowners for the most part it's just a yuck factor i mean they they just they're in large congregations and then you know they're they're they have this feeding structure that can tap into the phloem of the plant and they extract a lot of the the the the sugar content they can't utilize much of the sugar they use some of it and some of the minerals and nutrients they extract but a lot of it they just defecate behind them and everything underneath them gets sticky and it's just a wet mess and so it can be kind of a problematic now for commercial growers such like as our grape growers that they can kill grapevines so some of our vineyard owners are very worried some of our large grape growing areas up around erie are very worried about this insect so for homeowners it's more of a a yuck factor it's not really killing much but for some of these commercial growers it's it's problematic in in the vineyards and then for tree fruits it's it's also problematic especially for the commercial growers yeah exactly and part of it is just the hordes of spotted lanternflies that you know can appear in an orchard and um they one of their main food sources is the tree of heaven which is a very common um invasive tree um that we have you know all over in orchards so getting rid of that is is important but it's difficult um so yeah are there other uh pest insects that you have to worry about when you're growing fruit trees um quite quite a few quite a few understatement yeah yeah depending on the year i mean if it's very wet we have to concern ourselves with a lot of diseases um in terms of insect pests we're worried about things like mites things like um yeah the spotted lanternfly is the new one um what else am i thinking of right now i'm mostly a disease person right so there are those always those concerns every year that you probably have to be in touch with and monitoring closely and some of them seem to spread across the state and come from other states and then some of them seem to get under control like the um the gypsy moths or the spongy moths that we're talking about they seem to die out too periodically well you know whether it's commercial food production or backyard gardeners insects diseases weeds i mean they're everyone has to deal with them right that's one of the things that goes with gardening well um i wanted also to talk about if we're going to talk about the kind of the negative side of some of the challenges to gardening that noxious weeds that have been labeled by the state as noxious weeds these are things that used to people maybe we're planting we've got the barberry and the bradford pear tree and the states is actually saying that you aren't going to be able to sell and plant these anymore in pennsylvania tom can you tell us a little bit about why they're considered noxious weeds and when they used to be in pear trees they're blooming right now i think yeah so you mentioned too i brought in a sample of one this is a barberry and it's just starting to to leaf out this was along the trail on on pine creek but the the barberry and the calorie pair you mentioned bradford pear that's a specific cultivar but the calorie pair those ornamental pears and the barberry will not be allowed to be sold here in 2023 there's a process where they're starting to limit the sale or the the production of it and eventually you won't be able to purchase them for use in a landscape you know they they're not native and so there's a whole slew of problems with the barberry um it's getting out into our naturalized setting they produce these big thickets wildlife can't go through there but there's they're finding through researchers there's an intimate relationship between ticks lyme disease and barberries so when you look at a thicket of barbers in a naturalized setting it's impenetrable i mean it's so thick so underneath that barberry it's a it's a microclimate and ticks just can thrive there if they're out in the open they dry out and they die so they live under these barberries but so do mice and mice carry the bacteria for this lyme disease so when when a tick is newly born it doesn't have this bacteria it can bite you and you're not going to get anything but once it feeds on a mouse it goes to the next life stage and then it will go to humans into deer and it can spread this lyme disease so not only is it invasive this barbarian or naturalized setting but it is playing a role in this increase in lyme disease in the human population which we've been seeing a lot of in pennsylvania is a real concern yes yeah definitely and what about the pear tree why is that such a problem well as i was we were we were commenting on that before the show driving to the studio on the highways you see all these trees that are in bloom these these white blooms and they look pretty um but those also are becoming invasive in naturalized settings disturbed areas and it's crowding out our native vegetation when it was introduced back in the 50s these calorie pears it was all one cultivar and so they didn't produce any fruit but now that they've introduced these other cultivars you've got this pollen that's being spread around and now you've got this massive fruit production and then it's just it's just running rampant okay so that makes sense so something that we try to get a handle on yeah yeah and it looks like we have a call from dick in johnstown hi dick thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment i do have a comment we're getting a lot of calls from johnstown it's sort of an aside years ago i had a very good friend that had a large greenhouse here in johnstown not the city at a higher altitude and i recall on two occasions in the past i would visit him and say boy everybody's running in for tomato plants they froze last night this would have been june maybe even the third so i wondered is the climate change used to plant you know memorial day which then was may 30th so you could get a frost very easily on june 1st or june 2nd and i recall it was really interesting because most of the plants at that time were sold so if you have a comment or a thought on that i would appreciate it and thank you very much it's a wonderful show thank you jake for the call yeah i remember that used to be it was kind of memorial day that was kind of like the rule of thumb is that changing do we know if climate change is a factor um so it is like you said around memorial day when we think we passed that last fro frost but it is the average last frost date so it is possible to get frost after that date we i have a colleague who grows tomatoes and he said one year he planted a whole bunch of tomato experiments and they got a frost after june first and he had planted a memorial day so it does happen um how much of it is due to climate change um i mean i i'm sure it plays a role but i couldn't say for sure the exact role it's difficult to measure exactly how much it is but it seems like yeah maybe you could plant them a little earlier than you had been able to but it's important to know where you live also you know he mentioned a john stein in high elevation it's a lot different than down in the valleys too and so there are some online tools where you can put in your like your zip code and it will tell you on average when that frost free uh event will occur in your area so it's going to vary widely in pennsylvania okay and if it does if you do have them planted and there's a call for a frost as we we did talk about this a little bit earlier you can cover them up and hopefully protect them that's correct so using those row covers you can get a few degrees protection from that if it does get too cold you might be going to the greenhouse and buying some new plants or just getting your tomatoes from the farmer's market or grocery store that year right that's a thought too yeah good good point and we have a call and this is from mike in warren hi mike thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment yes i do i have a vegetable garden i'm in northwestern pennsylvania and for the last two years both my tomato plants and my sweet pepper plants the root structure is barely visible when when i pull the plants out in the fall and the production isn't very good i sent a soil to a lab in virginia and they're going to analyze the soil for nematodes but i haven't received that report yet and if in fact i do have nematodes in that soil how do i get rid of them okay thanks for the question and um i don't know maybe first you can start by explaining what a nematode is sure uh a nematode is a non-segmented realm word they're just really teeny tiny microscopic kind of worms that live in the soil and they can attack your plants like the root knot nematode is what's coming to my mind if they are a problem is there another spot maybe to put the garden is the first thing that comes to my mind there's also things you can do like there's certain types of mustard that you can grow to help with certain types of nematodes although i don't think it's root not nematode i think it's dagger nematode that the mustards work with and then other than that you get into using chemicals to kill them so it just depends on your goals and how you want to manage that okay so hopefully he'll get some results from the testing that might provide some answers but one possibility is to try a new a new spot if you have that spot try a new spot for the garden are there resistant cultivars what are the resistant cultivars i don't know that there are i don't know i mean nematode has really historically not been a big problem in pennsylvania we're starting to see a little more of that activity but um i i just haven't seen it with a lot of our commercial growers i don't know about fruit tree production if that's nematodes are a big issue but not not too much they can be sometimes and we'll still do soil samples but they're not typically a problem okay well yeah thank you mike we hope that helps and i want to talk one idea one possibility is to have planter gardens so a lot of times you've got the garden in a part of your yard or maybe you have a raised bed but there's different options for that elsa what do you what tips do you have for people who are maybe have a smaller yard or just want to have something that's a little smaller and under control yeah sure so container gardens are an option and so i have an outdoor garden that's in the ground and i also have pots in my garden because there are certain plants like for example my rosemary i put in a pot because then i can bring it inside during the winter but there that's definitely a way to go like in a small space and you can grow your tomatoes any of the crops really that we've talked about one thing to look for is plants that are labeled for containers because usually those are kind of smaller and and do a little bit better in those and the key is to make sure you water them they dry out really quickly and so in the like last year when we had that really hot year you might be watering once maybe twice a day so that is the key okay so the containers dry out quickly than if you have it in the yard that kind of makes sense but i can see that you would for you might not think about that that you think you've got it in the container and it's kind of like it's supposed to be less maintenance right you know in some ways like you're not managing weeds in there for example but you the watering it is a little bit more critical to keep an eye on that than compared to the garden so okay and if people do want to stick with something that is not chemical if they are having these problems are there ways of dealing that we talked about relocating your garden are there other options or at some point do you have to consider using insecticides if you do have these pests coming in so i one the first thing is to look for resistance in whatever plants that you're growing um and so if you're buying them usually they'll have they're labeled right this plant is you know late blight resistant or something like that and so if you know that there is a pest that you commonly have and you can find a plant that has a resistance that's like your first line of defense because in some cases like breeders have been able to keep one step ahead of the pests and so that would be the first line of defense and then there are other things you can do that are preventative like if i'm growing a tomato i don't want to crowd them in too much for example you want good air flow for example those row covers that we were talking about for frosh protection there also act as a barrier for certain insects and so there are other things you can do really the last line of defense should be applying some sort of a pesticide okay well it looks like we have a call from arnold in brookville hi arnold thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment i have a question i have a couple of peach trees and they produce real well and the problem seems to be a couple of years ago they some of the peaches started to rot right on the tree and i was wondering i don't spray my trees i don't want to you know use chemicals and i was wondering if there's anything like what what what's happening and there's anything that i could use on the on to prevent them from rotting like that yeah arnold well sorry to hear that um that's a good question we have a peachtree expert what do you do have you ever encountered that sarah and what do you suggest yeah so um it sounds like i'm not i'm not sure without seeing it what it sounds like is brown rot to me um so likely what he's seeing are um peach trees starting to rot and turn into mummies is what we call them um they'll be covered with like fuzzy um fungal spores and then what what subsequently will happen is those will fall there will be a wind those spores go everywhere in your peach tree and if you have a few more peach trees in the in the area they'll become infected so what's really really important is when you see that happening to prune those fruits off and get them away from your growing area so that you know the when the wind doesn't spread the spores and so that they don't hit the ground they'll also overwinter on the tree or on the ground if you leave them in the growing area so it's really important to remove those and should that help should the next year if you can if you can remove them and get kind of get them under hand should that be enough to get the tree back to healthy so without using chemicals um it would probably take you know a few years to get that under control but it should it should help decrease your spore load which will help the tree recover okay all right well we hope that helps you and you get some better peaches in the upcoming years and we have a call and this is from jack in indiana hi jack thank you for calling and you have a question or comment okay thanks for taking the call i grow tomato plants every summer and from time to time i get leaf blade on them and it's a two-part question number one what can i do to avoid that and number two is if if i can't avoid it and leave flight gets on them how can i treat the tomatoes then great question i know there's a lot of tomato growers out there who probably are dealing with the same thing elsa or tom do you want to weigh in on that tomato blight how do you prevent it how do you deal with it sure so the first line of defense again is to look for resistance and there are cultivars that have resistance to both early blood and late light so that would be the first thing when you're planting um again try to get good air circulation so not putting your plants too close making sure like maybe you're staking them or putting tomato cages around them so that they're you know there's air circulation within your planting our plant pathologist beth gogina always says if you could be out there with a hair dryer drying off the leaves you know the point is to try to keep it as dry as possible in there because really moist conditions can really set those um diseases going and so uh keeping it as dry as possible is another thing to do um what else tom yeah we've talked about the watering and um there's like good ways and bad ways to watch you're saying to keep them dry so right maybe tell us a little bit about the best ways to water well i think elsa's kind of alluding to that is that when you water you want to make sure that water is going down at the base of the plant not on the foliage so those spores will land on the leaf and they need a water droplet to start the infection process and work its way into the leaf if that spore lands on a dry leaf it just sits there so this idea of of good air circulation keeps those leaves dry and those spores just can't get a leg into that leg up on on on the plant leaf so circulation and then of course there are some fungicides if if if you go that way too and i do want to address the pesticide issue here too is that there's a continuum of some very very safe least toxic type pesticides some of the more harsher ones so you know we were talking about insecticides earlier um you know you can use some of the bt products some of the spinosans that are very selective not very broad spectrum and then you can go to some of the more toxic stuffs and it's the same thing with with some of these fungicides so for a lot of backyard gardeners copper a copper mixture and you can get them at any of the box office stores hardware stores and that gives you some some basic disease control a wide variety of disease control so then you can move to some harsher stuff if if you needed to so as you were saying start with the one first line of defense you maybe you can kind of prune the trees or remove the the pests or or whatever it is the problem is causing the problem and then go to the pesticide or insecticide if that's what you need to do yeah it's a term we use this integrated pest management you start with the you know the least toxic method whether it's pruning the trees in good air circulation or putting a row cover to prevent insects from coming in and attacking the plant you try those things first and then you move up to pesticides okay well we do have another question and this is from steve and dubois hi steve thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment no i have a question about i'm ready to tilt the ground and usually every year i put a common or i get a lot of few bags about 20 30 bags and put her down on the ground and i killed it now i don't know if he's at the right uh paralyzed you know for for the ground now later on i used the uh kind of like a spray and a little can from the walmart and they call me all-purpose you know steve i'm sorry i missed the beginning part there what type of problem are you trying to deal with i'm trying to deal with what kind of a feralizer i should use when i talk the garden to make the the more important the ground because it's clay here a little bit on one side and it doesn't grow very very much they die before they get ripe or something like that you know gotcha yeah go ahead so what type he's got he's got a garden he's got a lot of clay in there and he wants to fertilize it and make it better for the plants to grow in it any tips on dealing with clay i know i have a lot of clay in my yard and yeah it's tough right i think he said he used compost did he say no kidding or one of those yeah something yeah yeah and i think that's an excellent way to deal with clay is to put something like a compost in there and then you're using an all-purpose fertilizer later on and i think that's a perfect way to handle fertilizing the plants as well one of the things with compost is it contains nutrients that aren't exactly in the right ratio for plants so it's really easy to over apply nutrients and so it's not something that you want to apply a lot of every year but to you know you have a clay soil putting some in there to help working it up i think that's perfectly great thing to do actually campus is better than a car miner so one of the issues with manure is there can be some food safety issues when you use manure and so it is there's a little bit of like when do you apply it but um like if it's what organic growers do it depends on if the vegetable is touching the ground or not so if the vegetable is touching the ground you want to apply it at least 120 days before you harvest if it's something that's in the air like a pepper right that's not touching the ground then at least 90 days before harvest but it's it the manure creates the potential for foodborne problems so if i had the choice i'd use compost for that reason or you could compost your manure and then apply it that could work too okay all right but that would also be a good time to do a soil test because the nutrient levels can really kind of goofy if you add manure year after year after year and the phosphorus potassium levels might be kind of high you might need to kind of pull back from that and use something a little different okay great question we hope that helps you deal with all the clay that you've got in your in your yard and we have another call and this is from albert in clarkstown hi albert thank you for calling and do you have a question or comment yes i have a question we're putting in a larger garden this year we have well water and the ph of our well water is like 8.3 now i know you have to raise up acidic water because your nutrients are absorbed at a certain ph but when you look at the charts a lot of nutrients are they can be absorbed all the way up to nine but i don't think you really want to be watering your garden with ph of 8.3 is there something i can put in the soil does lime actually bring ph down like it brings ph up well how do i deal with this because we're going to need a lot of water and when i water our house plants and stuff i use a ph down acid and bring it into like the 6.5 to 7 range what can we do with a big yard garden with this ph of 8.3 water well that sounds like a tough question i think we're all like kind of scratching our heads on that one anybody want to weigh in on that one i think you bring up a really great issue of water quality and with high ph water and the fact that you're using a lot one thing to keep an eye out is for iron usually we see iron deficiencies and so you might need to apply iron to your water or what if you used a fertilizer like an acid fertilizer you know that might be something to do with a high ph water as well i mean our commercial growers you know to bring the ph down on their irrigation water they'll use an inject an acid injector you know i don't know if that's something that a backyard gardener would want to do so some of the granular fertilizers to bring that down and i guess the other thing is again you'd want to do a soil test and keep track of that because you don't know how much buffering capacity is in that soil it may not be as bad as you think and i have to say this for the last caller we didn't talk about cover crops that would be such a good thing to use for your clay soil to grow some sort of cover crop add some organic matter to the soil and you wouldn't get into some of these issues with the nutrient imbalances that we were talking about okay so that's a great point we'll kind of throw that in there too so for the previous caller if you've got soil he had clay soil so cut using cover crops which is kind of the off season crop or how would you describe a cover crop for someone who doesn't know so a cover crop is something that you're going to improve the soil not to like harvest fruit or you know eat the leaves or anything from and it can add organic matter can help to suppress weeds there's a lot of things good things about cover crops you can bring in natural enemies you know a lot of good things and you can plant them whenever you want to if you can dedicate your garden for a whole year to it you can plant something all summer long you can start them in the fall they can grow all winter long there there's a cover crop pretty much for every season oh that's great and i want to ask a question too about fruit trees and shrubs is that something you have to worry about too for the ph level are you constantly having to check that every year sarah when someone grows fruit trees so there's a little bit that you have to worry about especially because we we use a lot of rain water and also pond water but it's not it's not really critical for for palm fruits again the apples pears and stone fruits peaches and such things like small fruits blueberries definitely important but not really for the fruit trees okay good to know and we have time i think for one more caller this is mary in state college hi mary do you have a question yes thanks for taking my call i have a pretty old hydrangea bush and i noticed that i think it got zapped a little by the force so i'm just wondering is that it for the season i mean will it send out new buds will i get blooms that's what i'm asking will it be able to blossom this year if if the frost already did get it yeah that's a i mean that's a great question we had some pictures earlier that we were looking at of sarah's fruit trees the ones that did get zapped from those frosts that we've had is there any hope for the hydrangea it kind of depends on the species of hydrangea so if it's like hydrangea macrophylla those flower buds were set last year so if they got damaged with this cold spell whatever one she's talking about yeah you're not going to get flowers but if it's something like hydrangea paniculata that is blue those blooms are being set on new wood so you'll have new branches that will grow and then those flower buds will set on that you'll get flowers in the middle of the summer so it depends on which species of hydrangea that you're talking about okay all right so hopefully fingers crossed on that one that you're going to still get some more buds coming in and we have just a couple minutes left i think we might actually be able to squeeze one more call in and this is dwight calling from smith mill hi dwight are you still there and do you have a question or comment yes i'm there yes uh i was my question is every year my roses start to bloom real nice and then i get either i think it's japanese beetles or uh june bugs and they just eat the heck out of them what can i do to keep them from doing that yeah they are a pest any suggestions on dealing with those japanese beetles i mean that's the bane of every garden i mean there's not a lot of good options bags you can hang out or but you don't want to put them next to your bush because those pheromones are bringing those japanese beetles in mass into that area you want to put those off to the side okay any other options or tips i mean there are i mean really i guess insecticides if that's the way you want to go but that's really about it i mean we don't have a lot of good answers for that one okay uh sorry dwight we couldn't be more help with that one but know that you're not alone in your struggle dealing with that and we have just about a minute left i wonder if we could just end with all of you sharing kind of what you're looking forward to most as we move into the growing season elsa we'll start with you my asparagus asparagus i'm looking forward to asparagus asparagus omelets nice okay tom how about you i want to pick up on a theme that elsa was talking about earlier planting early i like that idea of being a gambler gardeners are gamblers and so i always like to get in the garden a little early with some of my warm season vegetable plants okay nice sarah what are you looking forward to his growing season kicks off here definitely picking peaches it's not the most popular job on our farm but i really enjoy it well thank you all so much for coming here to talk with us elsa tom and sarah and thank you so much for answering all the questions and sharing your expertise with us as we move into the growing season and warmer weather our guests tonight have been extension educators elsa sanchez tom butzler and sarah ritzko i'm anne danahe thank you for joining us on wpsu's conversations live get your garden on [Music] [Music] [Music] you