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

I'm Chris Cooper.

Cucumbers are a cool summer snack, but they can take up a lot of room in the garden.

Today we're going to learn how to build a cucumber trellis.

Also, blights love warm humid weather, and we've had lots of that.

Today we'll mix and apply fungicide.

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 Dr. Natalie Bumgarner.

Dr. Natalie is an Assistant Professor of Residential Consumer Horticulture for UT Extension.

And Mr. D will be joining me later.

- Alright, Doc.

We're going to trellis our cucumbers.

How about that, that's going to be pretty cool.

- Right.

Let's talk cucumbers.

- How about that?

So what do we need to know?

What do we need to do?

- Well, so there's several different methods that you can use to train cucumbers.

And we're going to kind of talk about a couple of different ones.

- Okay.

- And of course the first thing to say is these are not going to be our most compact cucumbers, right?

[Chris laughs] So, I mean, we're talking about cucumbers that are going to have some good, good height or a spread on them.

And so, you know, why do we, why do we train?

Well, we can get the leaves up off the ground.

We can get more air movement around them, which can help with leaf diseases.

- Okay.

- And, let's be honest, they're a lot easier to pick.

- They will be so much easier to pick, that's for sure.

- Yeah, so cucumbers are handy because, you know, they have tendrils and they can hold themselves up a lot.

So the first thing that I, that I think will be cool to show people is how to train individual cucumbers.

- Oh okay.

- And so we have this nice little row here that we're going to demonstrate this on, but also keep in mind that this would work if you had a barrel on your porch and a single plant, right?

- So there are lots of ways that this could be scaled down to a much smaller system.

And so what we have here is just, we have three T-posts, which are going to provide us with the opportunity to put up a top wire here.

- Alright.

- And we'd, they're definitely strong enough, right?

- Definitely, yeah.

- I mean, you wouldn't need quite this much physical support, but it's certainly handy because, you know, we can do a pretty good job of getting some tension on this wire.

And so, this is 17-gauge wire, you know, it should be fine for a few cucumbers.

But, just keep in mind that if you're really going to have a lot of weight on it, you know, you're going to need to have a little bit heavier gauge - It looks easy enough so far.

- Yeah.

- You just tie it around.

- Yeah, so, we're just kind of looping around.

And I think that you may actually have the wire cutters in your back pocket.

There we go.

- I think I have those, there you go.

- Alright, so we're just gonna cut this off right here.

- Okay.

Thanks.

- And then we go ahead and twist that around there.

- Okay.

So I brought with me a couple of gadgets, right?

- Yeah, we like gadgets.

- From the greenhouse world, but these are really easy to get hold of.

So don't feel like these are inaccessible, you know, all kinds of online suppliers have these.

So these are just little bobbins that have a whole lot of nylon twine, right.

- Okay.

- It should probably be enough string to last you for years.

And they just have a little hook here that allows them to easily clip over the top of the our wire.

- Ah, easy enough.

- Yeah.

And so what we're going to do is just have one bobbin for each one of our cucumber plants.

- That's it.

- And so you can get little vine clips and that's certainly fine, but lots of times with cucumbers, since they have these tendrils, you don't really have to worry too much about vine clips.

You can simply just twist -- - Oh, just wrap it around.

- Yeah, and of course there's, yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of learning to that.

You don't want to do it real tight-- - Okay.

- And those sorts of things, but the tendrils will soon do a pretty good job of holding that cucumber up.

And so, you know-- - Gotcha.

- It'll continue to grow and each time it grows a little bit, you just twist it a little bit, and you'll soon have the cucumber trained up very well there.

- Nice, nice, nice.

- Now this is my other favorite gadget.

- Okay, [laughs] you like gadgets?

- Yeah, so this is the saddle.

And you may ask, right, what happens when the cucumber gets to the top of the wire, right?

- Right, what does happen?

- We just take the cucumber back down the other side of the wire.

[Chris laughs] And this is a nice little plastic clip here, which once again just goes over the top of this metal line here.

- Okay.

- And what it allows us to do is when we get this cucumber all the way up, then we'll just simply take its little stem-- - Aha, I like the gadget.

- And then it'll be able to grow back down.

So we'll have, you know, another, almost five feet of growing space, because if we just took that cucumber over the top of this thin metal, it would probably crimp it.

- Gotcha.

- So we have a nice gentle curve here.

These can be reused as well.

And so, yeah, it's a pretty cool little way-- - Okay, yeah.

- to be able to train those cucumbers.

- Nice.

- And so people have different schools of thought about tendrils.

Some people leave them on, some people pull them off.

- So what do you do?

- Well, if I'm going to be training a lot of these cucumbers vertically up close together, I may pull them.

- You're going to, okay.

- Because what they're going to do is all grow together.

- Okay, that's it.

- But it's not a big concern.

You can leave them, you can take them, either one.

They will provide stability-- - Stability, good.

- If you leave them.

And so, it's going to be real easy to pick.

We can also see that, you know, we're starting to get little blooms.

- Yeah, I see that.

- Of course our fruit are going to be coming right out of, you know, those leaf axils.

And they'll be easy to pick.

We'll get them up off the ground.

And so this is a nice thing, a way that can go, you know, many feet or one cucumber.

- One cucumber, how about that?

Oh, excellent, I like those gadgets.

- Yeah, yeah.

- I thought they were good, yeah.

I can see where that comes in handy too, okay.

- Yeah, indoors, outdoors, pretty handy.

- So it doesn't matter.

Okay, Alright.

Alright, so what about another method?

- Alright, so this is kind of the new farmer way, right?

- That's the new farmer.

- So now let's do, we'll do the old farmer right here.

- Alright, yeah, let's go old school.

- So the second method that we have here is cattle panel.

So we've already got a couple of T-posts that are driven.

I brought along my post driver.

- Wow, how about that?

- You know, you just never know-- - You just happened to have it.

- You may need to drive some posts.

- And you're driving them pretty good.

- So I usually like to drive them until we get our little V into the ground.

That ends up being close to a foot.

- Okay, that's about a foot.

- So that's pretty secure.

And you can see, you know, we have our flat side-- - Aha, right.

- Where we can easily connect this cattle panel.

And so once again, you know, your farm supply store, these are really pretty easy to get ahold of.

We did cut this-- - We did.

- To be the right length.

- Okay, let's get it in here.

You must have used that before a few times, driving into the ground.

- About once a year, I get in a pretty good amount of tomato stake driving.

And so we have our clips here that we're going to secure these panels with.

And we're going to get that in place.

And then we'll twist this around-- - Okay.

- With our handy dandy pliers here.

- Alright.

- And there we go.

- There we go.

Alright.

[pliers snip] Alright, so now we're ready for our third one.

- Alright, get it up there.

Alright.

- We're just going to secure this bottom here so that it doesn't swing.

- I think that works.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, that works, that works.

- We've got a nice, that's pretty sturdy.

So this will be the vertical structure that we'll be able to just train our cucumbers on.

And this will be, it'll be a pretty simple process.

[Chris laughs] We'll really just kind of weave these young plants, get them vertically supported.

And of course the tendrils will definitely do the work for us once we get going.

I would definitely not worry about removing any tendrils on a plant that's growing on this system.

- Okay.

Yeah.

that's pretty good.

- So yeah.

Yeah, so it won't be very long at all before these cucumbers will be up and pretty much just a whole wall here.

There we go.

- And there we have it.

- Yeah, city farmer, country farmer right here.

[Chris laughs] - So it doesn't matter, right?

Thank you, Doc, we appreciate that demonstration.

That was pretty good.

[gentle country music] - When is the correct time to harvest your beans?

Normally takes about 60 to 90 days once you plant your beans before they're ready.

And you don't want to harvest them when they're too small or when they're too large.

This one here is too small.

That bean is too small to harvest right here.

And this is too large here, too big to harvest, this here.

This is the correct one to harvest right here.

You want to try to harvest this bean here, when it's about this size here, and about three inches long before you harvest it.

It's good to harvest them when they're just right before they get too big and now they don't taste good.

They're going to be hard.

[gentle country music] - We're out in The Family Plot garden, and we're going to be talking about fungicides.

And we actually going to be mixing up some fungicides to control blight.

So what do we need to start with that, Mr. D.?

- Well, we have a, first thing we have is a fungicide that we can use.

We have a sprayer and hopefully this is one that we've not used any herbicides in.

- Hopefully, so.

- So if you've been spraying RoundUp or 2,4-D or something like that around in the yard, do not use that sprayer-- - That's right.

- For one that you apply fungicide to tomatoes.

- Labeling is very important.

- Very important.

I would take a Sharpie and write on there in big letters, fungicide or insecticide only.

And then on your herbicide sprayer, write Herbicide only, weedkiller only, you know, whatever terminology you want to use.

- Okay.

- But it's important to control blight on tomatoes.

On these tomatoes we don't see a lot of sign of blight right now, and that is a good time to start spraying because fungicides, as you know, are more preventative in nature.

- Right.

- During conditions when fungal diseases can become present, like we've been having the last few days, you know, rainy conditions every once in a while and high humidity, then it's important to have a protective coat of fungicide on those tomato plants.

- Okay.

- And, you know, tomatoes, if you don't do that with tomatoes, unfortunately they will start browning up from the bottom.

And in late summer your production will decline and then they'll just kind of die on you.

If you control blight and the fungal diseases on tomatoes, you'll have tomatoes until the frost kills the plants.

- Right.

- And that's what's supposed to happen.

That's what's supposed to happen.

But I'd say with this, no more we've got what, one, two, three tomato plants, let's mix.

We'll only probably need a half a gallon or less than a half a gallon of material.

- Okay.

- And the way I start out is I put a little bit of water in the bottom of the sprayer here, half or less than half than you're going to add, and we've got water here, right?

So let's see here.

We certainly aren't going to need this much.

We've got this marked.

The lower mark is a half gallon.

- Okay.

- And the higher mark is a gallon.

And so we're only gonna mix up a half gallon.

So I'm going to pour only probably about a quarter of a jug here of water.

[water pouring] And then I need to be pretty sure that, and this spray tank has already been rinsed out.

I know it's clean.

[water pouring] Okay, that's done.

- That's about it.

What we're going to need there?

- Can you see it there?

- Yeah, that's good.

Now the rate on this particular fungicide that we're using varies from, you know, a half an ounce to like two ounces per gallon.

And now when we don't have a lot of disease pressure, we haven't had a real heavy rain in the past few hours, we'd go with a lower rate.

- Okay.

- And that would be about a tablespoon per gallon.

Since we're mixing up a half gallon, that's a half tablespoon.

And we have here our trusty measuring spoons.

Let's see if we got a half tablespoon.

Wouldn't that be neat.

We've got teaspoon and there are three teaspoons to a tablespoon.

We've got a quarter teaspoon.

- And?

- And a half teaspoon.

- How about that?

- So we will take the tablespoon one.

And we're going to fill that about half full.

- Okay.

- To give us the rate that we need.

- Okay, and what kind of fungicide are we going to be using today, Mr. D.?

- This is a copper fungicide.

I know on, with the UT Redbook, they recommend a Bravo or chlorothalonil and Maneb to control early and late blight.

- Right.

- Our copper one is an inorganic fungicide that is also labeled for use on tomatoes.

And that's what we've got, so that's what we're going to use today.

[liquid sloshing] - Alright.

- With any pesticide, you probably need to shake it up real good before you use it.

Make sure it's in solution.

- Okay.

And [bottle hisses as it opens] - There you go.

- That's on there good.

Thought I was going to have to get you to take that off for me.

[Chris laughs] Look at this, what a pretty blue color.

- Ah, that's pretty.

- That's copper, that's copper.

So I'm going to put about a half a tablespoon.

Would you say it's about a half?

- I would say it's about half.

- It's smaller on the bottom than it is on the top.

Let me put a little bit, because like I said earlier, the rate is variable.

- Yeah - That looks pretty good right there.

- Okay.

I'll let you cap that off for me.

- Let me cap that.

- And I'm going to pour this in.

Okay, then I'm going to set this aside and I'm going to go ahead and bring my level back up or bring my level up to my mark.

My half gallon mark.

I tell you what I'm going to do.

- Can I rinse that out?

- You can rinse this out as I'm doing it.

It's a good idea to triple rinse any of your mixing utensils.

That's one, may do more than that.

[liquid trickling] That way, this fungicide goes where it needs to go.

It goes on the plant, not down your drain.

That's got that in better shape.

Okay, I'm going to bring that up to the half gallon mark [liquid pouring] Is that about right?

- Yeah, I think you've just about got it.

- Yeah.

- That's good enough.

- Just about got it, I can put that back in there.

- Okay.

- Let me take this off.

Put this back together.

Why didn't I take it off like that?

- I don't know, you just wanted to make it hard.

- Yeah.

[Chris laughs] Okay, snug it down good.

I'm going to shake it up now, real good.

Make sure everything's tight.

- Sure everything's tight.

Yeah.

- 'Cause that'll let you know if it's leaking.

- Yeah, that's right.

- Okay, we have our solution ready.

- Okay, well, Mr. D., why don't we go ahead and spray these tomatoes.

- Let's spray tomatoes.

[footsteps] [mechanism pumping] Alright, let's see what we've got here.

Shaking it up again.

Let's see what kind of pattern we've got.

Don't want that pattern.

- Yeah, It's a stream - Stream.

Oh, that looks good right there.

Okay, the key to controlling fungal diseases is to get good coverage.

And with blight, you definitely need to get the underside of the leaves.

- Okay.

- So I'm going to do that first.

Try to get the underside of the leaves.

And then you spray to the point of runoff, basically just before the point of runoff.

Because if it runs off, you're contaminating the soil, and this fungicide doesn't do any good on the ground.

It's got that pretty good.

- Yeah.

- Let me get this one.

Again I'm trying to get the underside of the leaves first.

[spraying] - Mr. D., it looks like you've done that a time or two before, right?

- I have done this a time or two before.

[Chris laughs] - You know, this is something that needs to be done, like I said earlier, every five to seven days.

Seven to ten days, if you don't get any rain.

If you get a rain on this thing, you know, half-inch rain, you probably need to do it again.

But just pretend like you didn't put that application out there.

- Okay.

- Very important to follow the label on mixing these.

It's important to observe the restrictions on harvest.

We don't have to worry about that right now because we're not harvesting tomatoes.

However, there is a green tomato right there.

- There's a couple.

- If you like fried green tomatoes, [Chris laughs] that would probably work.

- Yeah.

- That's got these protected for a few days.

- Okay.

- Provided the rain doesn't wash it off.

- Alright.

I appreciate that demo, Mr. D. - You're most welcome.

- Alright.

[gentle country music] This wilting that you see here on the squash leaf may be an indicator of the squash vine borer.

So we're going to look at the base of the plant and I can actually see where it looks like squash vine borer may have been there.

So let's yank this out and see if we can find it.

You can see here, the entry points that the squash vine borer made.

You can see the frass that it left behind.

Let's see if we can cut down here and find one.

Maybe he got away from us.

Well, you can definitely tell it's been there.

Of course it tunnels through the vascular tissue.

So we didn't find a squash vine borer.

It has probably already completed its lifecycle and flying around somewhere and probably laying an egg.

But what you want to do as far as control goes is use carbaryl.

Spray the carbaryl, or sprinkle it around the base of the squash vine.

And that should give you the control that you're looking for.

[gentle country music] Alright, Doc, here's our Q & A segment.

You ready?

- Yeah, let's go.

- Great questions that we have here.

So here's our first viewer email.

"I have 2 pepper plants planted in a 10-gallon container "and only one of them has flowers and peppers.

"Why does one of my pepper plants not have any flowers or peppers?"

This is Al on YouTube.

So, interesting right?

Two, but one, one has the problem, right?

- Yeah.

The other one is okay, but one has the problem.

Mm, what do you think?

- Yeah.

- It's always tough to me.

- Yeah.

I mean, and this was one that we could throw out some ideas, right.

But probably we may not have all the information that we would need, you know.

- True, true.

Are they, are they the same cultivar?

- Okay, okay.

- You know, so we may have a little bit of a different yield time.

Sometimes, you know, some of our smaller-fruited cultivars may, you know, bloom earlier, right.

- That makes sense, I'm with you.

- And it's also possible that, you know, even if he got them from a garden center and they're different cultivars, they could have been of different maturity.

You know, seeded at different times.

- Okay, thought about that.

- So, you know, the plants may be different ages.

The other thing that could always stress them and hold them back is, you know, are we seeing any disease or pest issues?

- Definitely thought of that.

Because do peppers have major, you know, pests?

- I mean, the pests, we, you know, we can certainly see some.

One that I would think about in terms of a young pepper that's just performing poorly would be bacterial leaf spot.

- Ah, okay, that makes sense, okay.

- So we know as a young plant, you know, that can be something that can spread well, well, like a pathologist-- - Okay.

[Chris laughs] Yeah.

- Spread quickly in a humid greenhouse environment.

And if that plant, you know, had leaf infections and then we have reduced leaf area, it stresses the plant.

It's not able to grow as well-- - Right, right.

- You know, fewer sugars and-- - That makes sense.

- You know, an inability to photosynthesize.

So, you know, there could be some holding that plant back from disease and pests.

- So what do you think he should do then, just... - I mean, if it's healthy-- - Yes, if it's healthy, okay.

- Be patient.

- Right, be patient.

- Well, I guess we haven't mentioned nutrition.

- Okay, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

- If they're in the same container, you know, make sure that they're, you know, fed properly and that we're not seeing any leaf yellowing or something like that.

- Because a pretty good size container is a 10-gallon container.

- Yeah, yeah.

- So, yeah.

- Yeah, and with peppers peppers are sensitive to poor drainage, but if they're both in the same container, then we would think that probably it's not something like a drainage issue when we're relating to poor performance.

- I would agree.

- Yeah, rule out the environmental, the disease and give him just a little bit of time.

Maybe he's a late bloomer.

- Yeah, just a little time, just a late bloomer, right?

That happens sometimes, doesn't it?

Alright, so there you have it, Al.

Just be patient and see what happens, okay?

It is a pepper, It'll grow out of it.

- Yeah, give him a chance.

- Right, so here's our next, viewer email.

Interesting question here.

"Is there a way to get female flowers on my squash plant?

"Last year all but a few were males and this year it seems to be happening again."

And this is Grant in Memphis, Tennessee.

So a lot of male flowers, no female flowers.

- This may be our most common cucurbit question, [Chris laughs] don't you think?

- I think so.

- Yeah.

- I would agree with that, I would agree.

- So first off, Grant's in great shape because he already knows that you get both male and female flowers from cucurbits.

I mean, that's a great place to begin.

[Chris laughs] Early, early in the season, it's common for cucurbits to produce male flowers before they really start bringing on female flowers.

- Right, because the male flower is going to of course have the pollen, and lead to... - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We don't want to go to all the bother to have female flowers if we're not gonna have pollen available to pollinate those fruit.

- Okay.

- So that's kind of an early season thing to think about.

And then we also want to think about the fact that later in the season, when the plants are actively growing, if there's stress, be it be moisture, heat, you know, when those plants get stressed, they may also produce fewer female flowers.

And so there's, you know, make sure that, you know, we're irrigating or properly managing nutrition and having a healthy well-performing plant can be a way to, you know, bring that into balance.

- Gotcha.

- I'll throw in one more geeky thing.

- Okay, go on, we like geeky things.

- Alright.

- Come on.

- So it's more common in cucumbers right?

But they're there in the cucurbit family.

So you can purchase cultivars that have been selected to just have female flowers, right.

- Really?

Oh.

- So they're called gynoecious and they only produce female flowers.

Gynoecious, parthenocarpic.

- Parthenocarpic.

There it is, the geeky term for the day.

How about that?

- We use them a lot in enclosed environments-- - Okay.

- Like in greenhouses where we, so we don't have to bring in bees to pollinate.

- Gotcha, to pollinate, makes sense.

- They have all female flowers and those, those flowers will produce fruit without pollination.

- How about that?

And most of your female blooms are larger anyway.

So a lot of that energy needs to go to producing the bloom, and it has an ovary of course, which is the fruit.

- Right, yes, the ovary, the bloom, all of that's more energy consumptive than the smaller male flowers.

- Alright.

So don't worry, right?

It'll be fine.

- Yeah, I mean, there's some things you can do, but also there's a little bit of patience that may be involved with it, yeah.

- Alright, Grant, just a little bit of patience, alright?

I think you're doing good.

Alright Doc, that was fun.

- Yeah, a really good set of questions.

- So thank you much for being here.

- Yeah, always glad.

- 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 joining us.

If you need more information about cucumbers, or fungicide go to familyplotgarden.com.

We have information on that and a lot more.

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

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]