- Hi, thanks for joining us for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

I'm Chris Cooper.

We have been growing a square foot garden this year.

Today we're going to review how it did.

Also, now is the time to get th e ground ready for next year.

One way to do that is with a lasagna garden.

That's just ahead on The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

- (female announcer) Production funding for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South is provided by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund, and by viewers like you, thank you.

[upbeat country music] - Welcome to The Family Plot.

I'm Chris Cooper.

Joining me today is Peter Richards.

Peter is our local gardener, and Ms. Ginny Fletcher will be joining me later.

Alright Peter, this is our square foot garden, right?

- Yeah, it is.

It looks sad 'cause it froze two nights ago, and so it's all dead now, right?

Well, at least all the summer stuff.

- Well, tell us this, how did it do?

- I thought it did really good.

Square foot garden is a concept that Mel Bartholomew came up with and if you do his method exactly, there's special soil blends and fertilizing and things like that that you do.

I didn't do a special soil blend here.

I just used the soil that we had in the garden, which had a lot of compost in it.

- It's good soil.

- So yeah, it was good soil.

And so I don't know if that's gonna affect what actually came outta here this year, but we did get a lot.

So it was very high density, it's four feet by eight feet.

We had 32 squares in the square foot garden.

Each square gets a certain number of plants planted in it.

So larger plants, you're gonna plant one.

So for instance, a pepper.

Smaller plants, you can plant multiples.

So for instance, one point here in the spring, we had 16 onions in one of the squares.

We had 2 squares of 'em, so we had 32 onions, four lettuces or things like that.

So after doing this for a year, there's some interesting things that I think we've learned.

- Let's hear that.

- So I have here a list of everything we grew outta here.

And it totals 106 and a half pounds.

- That's good though.

- Yes.

Here's the list of what we grew.

- Yeah, I wanna hear this.

- So we got five and a half pounds of radishes.

There were 32 of them.

Those were the very first things that we harvested.

We got a little over a pound of spinach.

We got 0.7 pounds of turnip greens.

1.7 pounds of mustard greens.

3.7 pounds of peas, 1.1 pounds of green lettuce and that's in the spring.

.08 pounds of cauliflower, that was one head.

3.7 pounds of basil throughout the year.

3.8 pounds of carrots, there were 45 of them.

- Okay, good.

- 18.7 pounds of tomatoes, there were 158 of them.

- Wow.

Okay.

- And then I also want to add, that right before it froze here, I came out and I stripped all the tomatoes off the plants.

So if you know fried green tomatoes in the south, that's because the tomatoes start producing again in the fall when it cools off, but they don't have time to ripen.

So I got 6.1 pounds of green tomatoes.

There were 54 of those that I took off right before the frost.

- That's a good number.

Okay.

- 4.8 pounds of onions, that was 16 of them.

A half a pound of summer squash.

We only got two of those.

So that was a disappointment.

8.6 pounds of eggplant, 25 of them.

But our eggplant was a tree.

I would not have chosen to grow this eggplant in such a small space had I known it was gonna be this big.

So 7.8 pounds of cantaloupe, there were 4 of them.

9.9 pounds of watermelon, 3 of them.

Now obviously the cantaloupe and the watermelon were both really small for that.

We had 20.8 pounds of cucumbers, th ere were 32 of them.

We had 3 pounds of peppers, 18 of them, 8.4 pounds of sweet potatoes.

There were only six of them, but they were gigantic.

They were huge.

And then here in the fall we ha rvested .06 pounds of lettuce and 1.3 pounds of romaine.

So we had a couple things that just totally failed on us.

- Okay.

Let's talk about 'em.

- The green beans, we committed six square feet to green beans and they didn't produce.

They grew fine, they flowered fine.

They didn't produce any beans.

So I think we got like two little beans off of them.

- It wasn't much.

- Six square feet.

So that was a total fail for us.

In the spring we planted purple lettuce with the green lettuce and none of it came up.

Swiss chard, we tried to plant that.

We had a little Swiss chard that finally came up.

It grew about this high and two months later it died.

So that didn't work either.

And then potatoes, we were supposed to grow three square feet of potatoes in the fall and they came up, and then they just died back as well.

I think, they started growing about the time we had a lot of heat and humidity, and I think they got some pretty bad blight early, and it killed them off.

So those are things for us that didn't work.

- All right.

It didn't work.

- Yep.

- We're experimenting.

- We're experimenting.

So this was a hundred pounds out of a four foot by eight foot plot of land.

That's pretty good.

Anybody can fit something like this in their backyard.

We have it in a raised bed.

It'd probably be best to do it in some sort of raised bed, 'cause it cuts down on the weeds, which, because it was so dense, we didn't have many weeds.

We have a few growing now because it's thinned out and our winter weeds are coming in.

So this isn't enough to keep you from having to go to the grocery store all summer long.

But there's a lot of stuff here.

- Oh, there's plenty.

- Yeah.

- Definitely plenty.

- Yeah.

Now, a couple of things.

I talked about the watermelon and cantaloupe.

And we had them growing in here, we had them grow off, into the walkway here.

I don't think they did well in here because the watermelons were supposed to be 25 pounds each and they were like three pounds each.

They were little, not big.

So it probably would be best not to grow watermelons and cantaloupe in such a dense setting.

The peppers did, they could have done better.

The peppers that were in our in-ground garden over across the way, they did a lot better.

- They did very well.

- Really good.

Lots of peppers there, but here the peppers didn't do as well.

Part of that might be because the eggplant was shading them.

- I was about to say, look how big this is.

- I tried to space the garden so that the short stuff was on the south side and the tall stuff's on the north side.

I wasn't expecting the eggplant to grow to be the tallest thing in the garden.

And it was pretty close to the north side, or pretty close to the south side.

So that might have had something to do with it as well.

So just because it's winter doesn't mean that we're done yet.

Now we are in Memphis, Tennessee, we're in zone 7B here.

So you may not be able to grow some of these things farther north, but still growing we have two plants of kale, that we're gonna continue ha rvest good through the winter.

They look really healthy and happy.

We still have cauliflower and broccoli going over there, and they're starting to head.

- Yeah, I see some heads.

- So we'll pick them, and we'll harvest the heads and maybe we'll get some side growth and some additional heads later.

Assuming that it doesn't get super cold and kill 'em.

We also have the lettuce that we grew in the fall, which is right here.

We got a little bit.

- It's coming up pretty good.

- This I harvested already, but it's regrowing.

So we'll see what happens there.

I might get another harvest off of that.

I left the romaine and it's starting to regrow.

And there's one plant that is in there.

So that may regrow and we might get another harvest off of that.

And then in the next little while we're going to be planting some garlic.

And that will go through the winter and it won't be ready to harvest until probably June of next year.

But that's a good winter crop to just keep your garden going through the winter.

Minimal maintenance on that.

- Okay.

Where you gonna put the garlic?

- Garlic's gonna go right here, it's gonna go where the watermelons were.

We were just waiting for the frost to kill off the watermelons.

- Got it.

- So now that that's happened.

- Oh, that has happened.

- Now that that's happened, the garlic goes in.

And a lot of this was set up to be a rotation.

So some of these squares had three plants or three crops over the course of the year.

Some squares only had one, depending on how long the season for the crops were.

- All right, Peter.

So if people wanted to keep track of what you did here over the years, how can they find that information out?

- Yeah, so we kept a blog of what we did here along with all of those harvest numbers and stuff, I have on there so you can see, and you can even keep track as we continue on this.

And you can go there, see where we had problems when we planted things, when we harvested things and get an idea of how it worked, what the problems are we had, when we sprayed, things like that.

- Good deal.

Good deal.

So yeah, I can pretty much follow you throughout the year.

- Yeah, mm-hmm.

- That's pretty good.

I appreciate that information.

- Thanks.

[upbeat country music] - Sucker.

- Yeah, well... P.T.

Barnum said there's one born every minute, right?

Isn't that what he said?

But that's not what we're talking about.

A sucker as a horticultural or gardening term refers to a shoot that arises from the base of usually a shrub or tree that you really do n't want, in most cases.

We usually remove it.

For example, some of our crape myrtle cultivars wanna sucker and shoot up all these little shoots from the base when what we want is to make more of a tree form with our tree-form crape myrtles.

So we usually just cut those off and they can also arise not from the base of a plant, but also from roots from adventitious buds.

Think about mimosa, you know how if you have a mi mosa tree and then it'll start shooting up everywhere across the yard.

Those are suckers theoretically too, 'cause they're coming off of a root from that parent tree.

[upbeat country music] - All right, Ms. Ginny, we're gonna talk about lasagna gardening.

And I like lasagna.

It's one of my favorites.

- I do too.

Especially in this mode that we're gonna play with today.

- Right, the plants will love it, right?

- They do.

They really do.

The traditional method for us to plant a garden or a flower pot/bed is to... remove all the sod and the weeds and then till it up and then dig it up because you need a good depth for the nutrients and things to get to the plants, and that's a lot of work.

- Yes.

- So a lot of people say, "Well, I can't garden because, "I'm not physically able to do that.

"I don't own a tiller.

I don't wanna rent one and I just can't do all that work."

Or maybe they feel like they're just too old to do that.

But, you know we don't ever get too old to play in the dirt.

- No.

- So this is a method by which you can garden and not have to do all that work.

- Really?

- Right.

- Okay.

- Yeah.

So it's really a simple way to create a good garden bed.

- Okay.

- And so what we are going to do first is determine where are we gonna put this.

And the reason we want to do that is if we plant vegetables or shrubs or perennials, they're gonna need from six to eight hours of sun.

So we need to be sure we put it in the right place when we start.

And we probably would do a soil test so that we are sure that we've got the nutrients we need and if we don't, we can amend them throughout this process.

- Correct.

- Then we gather up all our materials.

We want to have browns and greens, browns for carbon, greens for nitrogen.

And we're gonna build this and it's gonna become sort of like one big compost pile that we can just leave alone and let it work.

So that's the beauty of this is least amount of work.

- Yeah.

Leave it alone.

Let it work.

- Let's just start the layers.

How about that?

- Let's start it.

Let's start it.

- First thing we want to do is to find our location and then we're going to use either cardboard or some thick layers of newspaper, okay?

What we're doing is we're going to put that down on the ground and we are going to cover all of the soil and the grass and all the weeds with this cardboard and/or the newspaper.

And we're gonna wet that down so that it stays put.

That will prevent our weeds and our grass from continuing to grow.

- Even Bermuda won't grow through that stuff.

- No, sir.

It will kill it dead.

- Yes.

- That's what we need.

- That's what you need.

- Yes.

Then we're gonna add some peat moss.

We're gonna have a layer of peat moss.

- Peat moss is pretty dry.

- It is pretty dry.

And we will probably do a little bit of watering in between.

We don't wanna wet it down really a lot.

But we do want to be sure that we have enough coverage because we're aiming for a two to one ratio, of browns and greens.

- I was gonna ask you about that ration now, okay.

- Okay.

Don't breathe while I'm spreading this around.

[Chris laughs] - It is dry.

- Now, we've got us a layer of peat.

Now we're gonna follow that with some... some good old straw.

- Straw.

- Now we want to use straw and not hay.

It takes hay a long time to decompose.

Straw decomposes very quickly.

And in the process of hay, you get all kinds of seeds that are gonna sprout and grow in your pile that you really don't want.

So we're gonna do that.

Look at our layer and be sure it's good and thick.

- So far so good.

- Yeah, now when we are doing this on the ground, when we are actually doing it, not in a demonstration, you would probably want to have about four to eight inches of this straw.

- Wow.

That's a lot.

- Yeah, it is.

All right.

Now, and we're gonna add another layer of peat.

As you can see, this is like a cake.

We're just layering it along as we go.

- You'll still water that too, right?

- Just a little.

Recycled coffee cans make great scoops.

- That works good.

- All right.

Now we got some more of that.

Okay, I've covered up my stuff here.

We've got everything everywhere.

Let's add at this point, some shredded newspaper.

- Shredded newspaper.

- Yeah.

We don't have much of this anymore with the newspapers not being our main focus of media anymore, but you can get this from your shredder where you shred your office supplies and things.

So it's not hard to come by.

- Now what about the ink?

Do we need to be concerned about ink?

- No.

- Newspaper or anything like that?

- Most of the ink nowadays is very, what do you call it, edible.

It's soy-based.

So it will compost very easily.

And will not give us any harmful additives in our deal.

- Okay, so how thick do we need to get the paper layer?

- Our paper layer is gonna be probably another four to six inches.

Now we're not doing that in this particular demo because we'll run out of room.

- Right.

- 'Cause ultimately you want 18 to 24 inches of this.

'Cause as it sits during the winter, and composts, it's gonna shrink.

So now we're gonna add some barnyard manure.

This is the fun part.

- Oh, barnyard manure.

- I always use barnyard too.

Pet manure is not a good thing to use because there are many kinds of bacteria and things that you can get from that.

But barnyard manure is really good.

And it can even be green when you put it in your lasagna bed if you're doing it in the winter, because it has time to cure and compost.

If you put green in too early, you're gonna end up with fried plants.

- Yeah, it'll cook it.

- Yeah.

All right.

- All right.

- One other point, you need to use dark fingernail polish.

- Oh, dark fingernail polish.

That way your dirty fingernails...

I don't usually wear gloves and that's bad.

But dark fingernail polish covers up a lot.

- So here it goes.

- And now we're going to put a layer of compost on top of that.

- So top it off with the compost.

- Now then if we were doing this in the spring, we would compost it and then we would add a very good layer, a good thick layer of good garden soil, so that we could go ahead and plant.

But since this is the fall, and this is the best time to do this, we might dust it a little bit with some bone meal to add phosphorus and potassium.

So bone meal and some even wood ashes would be good to have.

And just let it sit.

- Good wood ash.

- Yeah, now once you get to your height you're aiming for, which is 18 to 24 inches, then you're done.

- You're done.

- And we haven't dug the first hole.

- That's not bad, huh?

- Well, that's not bad.

So you just continue layering, just like we did 'til you get to the height you want, eighteen to twenty-four inches, and then let it sit throughout the winter, with a good covering of compost.

- Yeah, so I was gonna ask you, do you have to cover it or can you just leave it?

- You don't have to cover it as long as you've got a real good layer of compost on top, to keep the wind from blowing it and keep the water from washing it away.

- So you want some good organic compost though?

Something that could be broken down.

- Yes.

Always.

- Always.

- Use organic if at all possible in all of this.

That's the best way to go.

- Right, Ms. Ginny, we appreciate that.

- Yeah, wasn't that fun?

- Yeah, it was pretty fun.

- And we didn't get dirty.

- Didn't get that dirty.

My nails look okay too.

- Yours look fine.

Mine are a little nasty.

- Well, thank you much.

- You're welcome.

[upbeat country music] - A lot of times we think there is nothing to grow through the fall in the vegetable garden, but one of the great things you can grow is garlic.

In the South here where we are, we tend to grow soft neck garlic.

Up North, you'd probably want to try hard neck garlic.

I have some here.

I actually went to the store, just the grocery store and bought this.

I've done that before a lot and it works great.

So the first thing you want to do is you wanna peel off the outer paper.

We're just gonna break the garlic off one at a time, and that is what we're gonna plant.

You can see there are some that are larger and some that are smaller.

You wanna plant the larger cloves.

They'll turn into larger heads.

The smaller cloves won't do as well.

Now in the square foot garden, we are going to be planting nine cloves per square foot.

So it'll be in a grid.

You're gonna go ahead and just make a few rows here to loosen the dirt up a little bit.

And then we'll take a garlic and we wanna plant this side down.

This will turn into the roots, this will turn into the stem, and we just put it down about two inches into the ground.

And we'll do that here for the other ones.

Okay.

And then we'll just cover 'em up.

There we go.

Now, it may take quite a while for you to see garlic poking up here, a couple weeks to even a month.

They don't need any fertilization, at least at this point in their growth.

And so you can just come out and check on 'em every once in a while and see that, hey, it may be cold, it may be winter, but I've got some garlic growing in my garden.

[upbeat country music] - All right.

Here's our Q&A segment.

Y'all ready?

- Yes, sir.

- These are great questions.

Here's our first viewer email.

"I have had a problem growing turnips in my garden "over the last few years.

"My turnips look good on the outside, "but have a dark inside.

"This happens to my radishes as well.

Do you have any advice for this problem?"

And this is Harry from Westport, Tennessee.

All right, Celeste.

So can we help out Mr. Harry?

- I think we can.

So this is just a simple issue of boron deficiency in the soil.

Some people call it brown heart and cut it open.

And then you can see that brown area on the inside.

If we're seeing deficiencies like this in crops, we need to do some analysis of the soil, right?

So let's go ahead and get a soil test.

Let's see what those levels of boron are in the soil, as well as pH.

Because some things can go wrong there.

So we can have boron in the soil, but sometimes it's not available to the plants.

And that could be due to pH.

It tends to be less available to plants at higher pHs, because it binds to soil particles.

It could also have to do with your soil texture, soil moisture levels.

So generally we see more boron deficiency in coarser soils.

Those would be soils that have larger particles like sand.

And then also, we can see the boron levels in plants swing throughout the growing seasons, depending on moisture in our soils.

So if we have a period of drought early in mid-summer... - Which we did.

- Right.

So say boron was plenty available earlier in the growing season, but then it got very droughty.

The soils were very dry, and that boron was no longer available to the plant.

So then we can see those deficiencies showing up at that point in the growing season.

- All right, so there you have it, Mr. Harry.

Thank you much for the question.

- Good question.

- All right, here's our next viewer email, and nice picture as well.

"Would you please tell me what is causing my roses "to grow like this?

They have been growing like this all summer."

and this is Kelly from Olive Branch, Mississippi.

So Celeste, any idea?

- Well, I'm just gonna take a wild stab.

- Let's take a wild guess at this one.

- I'm almost positive that it's rose rosette.

So this is actually a plant virus that is vectored by an insect.

A very small, microscopic, aerified mite.

They blow in the wind.

I mean, they're not little flying insects that you can see with your eye.

So don't try to find them.

[Celeste laughs] - No, no.

They're microscopic.

- Yes.

So anyway, these insects, as they feed on the plants, they vector this disease from one plant to another.

There are a number of signs and symptoms to look for, I guess you would say.

And I try to aim for the big three.

So excessive thorniness.

- Yes.

Yes.

- And this one's tricky because some people, they'll bring me a cutting, they're like, "Look at all these thorns."

I'm like, "That's normal thorns."

Roses are supposed to have thorns, but I'm talking like thorns everywhere, up and down the stem.

- Excessive.

- So, proliferation of those-- - Yes.

- Soft, pliable thorns.

- Yes, definitely.

- Often small.

- Small.

Number two that I try to look for is, so we all know that new growth on roses is kind of maroon colored, but a sign of rose rosette could be that that never matures into green growth.

- Okay, that's good.

- So, sustained red growth, burgundy colored growth.

And then the last one is just witches brooming, where the foliage seems to be growing in these weird, contorted, clustered areas.

And so that's what we call witches brooming.

So looking for at least two of those symptoms together kind of can be a good indicator.

If you see just contorted growth, that's not automatically rose rosette.

That could be from other insects feeding, soft-bodied insects that are feeding on the juices of those plants.

So different things could be at play there.

But we wanna look for at least two of those big three, I usually say.

- I would say that as well.

Anything you'd like to add to that, Peter?

- Yeah, when you see it, pull it out.

- Ah, yes.

- Pull it out.

Get rid of it, throw it in the trash.

- Did not address control.

Thank you.

- As soon as you possibly identify it, because you have mites on that plant that are feeding and if they go and land on your rosebush that's right next to it, that's healthy, well, that has a good chance of getting it too.

- All right, Ms. Kelly, we appreciate the question and that picture and yeah, I've lost several roses at home to rose rosette, so I know it very well.

So those symptoms Celeste talked about, pay close attention.

Thank you much.

All right, so Celeste, Peter, that was fun.

- Yes, thank you much.

Thank you much.

Remember, we love to hear from you.

Send us an email or letter.

The email address is familyplot@wkno.org, and the mailing address is Family Plot 7151 Cherry Farms Road Cordova, Tennessee 38016.

Or you can go online to familyplotgarden.com.

That's all we have time for today.

Thanks for watching.

If you want to learn more about the square foot garden, we have a blog with entries for the whole year.

That along with more information about everything we talked about today, is available at familyplotgarden.com.

Be sure to join us next week for The Family Plot: Gardening in the Mid-South.

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]