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

I'm Chris Cooper.

If you don't have enough space outside for composting, you can do it in your garage, with worms.

Also, a lot of people like to garden organically.

Today we'll give you some tips.

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 Mr. Bill Abresch.

Mr. Bill is a local worm farmer.

And Tonya Ashworth is here with us today.

Tonya is our local garden expert.

Thanks for joining us today.

- Thanks for having me.

- Thank you for having me.

- All right Mr. Bill, so worm composting.

What do we need to know about the worms though?

- Red wiggler worms will do 100-fold your investment.

If you spend $10, you'll get $1,000 over a period of time, because they keep giving, and giving, and giving, and it's always organic.

What you're gonna get is you're re-purposing your refuse from your home, and you turn it into a nutrient source for your plants to use.

And the results that you get are just, wow.

- I could tell, I like the passion already.

Don't you like that, Tonya?

It's the wow factor.

Okay, tell us a little bit more about worm farming.

- Yes, sir.

Some of the worms that we have in the region, we have basically two types of worms that you would find in your own garden.

One is just the regular earthworm, it's basically, it came from Asia, in its, where it came from, origin.

And the other one is the African night-crawler.

That's the one, that when you dig in your soil, that turns out to be 10, 12, 13 inches long.

That's the one that you wanna keep.

That's the one that does the biggest for your soil.

That tills up its own weight in soil, a hundred times every day.

So it's pretty impressive, you have that.

But the red worms, if you wanna do home composting, you generally start out with a good amount, two to three pounds, and then you confine them.

I like to use a 35-gallon trash can, and I put a little spigot on the bottom of the trash can, so I can divert the water into a container, because the water is so nutrient-dense.

It's fresh from the worm castings, from what you fed the worms.

This is part of my compost tea that comes off of my worm beds, and the results that that can give you immediately from your worms without having to harvest the worm castings is just phenomenal.

You literally, you water your plant with that, and then you see the results that are 10-fold, like what you would see without using it.

Because that is calcium, phosphate, and potassium rich.

And it also has microbes in it that you can use, that help to make your soil alive.

Because the more soil, that it's more alive, the more stuff going on in your soil will create more growth above the soil.

So, I like to do red wigglers, and I guess I started about 10 years ago.

And ever since then, it's been a run.

I've been running.

How much more can I do?

And the way I do it, is I tell them to start out at a small bed, read a book.

Get a book.

Get it from your local library.

This is the one I started out with 10 years ago, and I read it cover to cover.

And then even today I pull it out occasionally, but generally I get the knowledge before I wanna do something.

And then I started doing raised beds, and with worms in 'em.

And it just took off from there.

Then I found out that when I started helping other people to do their worm beds, I told them, start out with just Cheerios.

- (Chris) How 'bout that?

My goodness.

- Honey Nut Cheerios are the best way to start a worm bed.

They are, they're just so easy and you can watch it, as far as the worms eating it, and seeing how they do-- - And you said this actually breaks down pretty easily in water.

- Yes, sir.

Give it a couple of minutes, cup of water, and then put that on your bed, and of course your bed should always have a covering on 'em.

And most containers that come with lids, take the lids and throw 'em away.

That's the number one failure.

Most people put the lid on it, and the next day they come back and they tell me the worms are trying to crawl out.

On most compost, there is a lot of methane build-up in a closed area, and that basically suffocates the worms.

So if you have an active compost going, you wanna have as much oxygen flow into the bed, 'cause if you don't the worms will, they're like us.

We just suffocate.

- (Chris) Oh, that's good stuff.

- Yes, yes, yes.

And this is what everybody wants.

It's called black gold.

- Oh yeah, black gold.

- This is nutrient rich.

A hundred fold, for what normal clay soil could give you.

And I was talking to Chris earlier about how to maintain a garden.

If you got worms in your soil, you never have to till your soil.

If you keep your soil covered with some type of covering, whether it be straw, whether it be paper, just so the rain won't hit it.

Because the rain is a compactor, it compacts your soil.

And then you're actually creating a layer for the worms to manage themselves, and that's when you should also feed your soil, because when you're feeding your soil, the soil will feed you.

That is my mantra, of what I'd like to tell-- - Feed the soil, the soil will feed you.

I like that.

- Yes.

So, you keep an active soil, and use worms to keep your soil active, and also your composting operation, the results what you can have are Olympic in size.

- And tell me this, why are you wearing the gloves?

- I wear the gloves because this is so active, these guys are coming straight outta my worm beds, and the bacteria content is just huge.

You always wanna keep yourself prepared, because of bacteria in soil compost.

You can't totally control your environment, and I know I have to leave and go back to work after this.

[Chris laughing] So, yes.

One other thing, sir.

I've got a bottle of water, and I put a gummy bear in it, and I'm gonna let this sit for a day.

I feed my worms vitamins, because I know that that vitamin, it's really good stuff, and then it's gonna end up in my worm tea.

- (Chris) That's good.

- And if you wanna take it to the next level, you can bubble this to increase the bacteria content in there, and then you could feed that to your plant.

The growth is spectacular.

- Well tell me this.

What else can the homeowner feed their worms, outside of the Honey Nut Cheerios?

- Well, if you could imagine this, everything you would eat, in our home, except for meat products and milk products, that's pretty much what you would give your worms.

Because the worms really survive on sugary substances.

I think I stuck a half a watermelon in there that spoiled one time, and a week later, everything was gone except for the rind.

So I just knew, maybe I shouldn't put the rind in there.

And I just didn't start puttin' rinds.

Now cantaloupe also.

They're sugary items, and worms just go, they love it because it's sugar.

They got a sweet tooth.

- They just like people.

[Tonya laughing] Just like me.

- Me too.

- I got a sweet tooth.

Mr. Bill.

- Sir.

- Great information.

Appreciate that.

[upbeat country music] - So, here in the South it can be challenging to have a really productive cool-season garden because you actually have to get the majority of those plants started in late summer when the temperatures are still really high.

But, if we can plan ahead, we can actually have a really productive stand of some of our leafy crops.

What we have here is romaine lettuce.

This has already been harvested once and has come back.

It is less cold tolerant, so when we get into freezing temperatures, if you want to sustain those, they'll need to be covered.

But, if you look behind us here, we have some kale growing, and kale, as well as spinach, is one of the cold-hardiest crops that we can grow here for cool-season annuals.

Red bor kale would be one of the most cold tolerant, and you may even be able to grow that up into some northern areas of the United States.

Luckily for us, we're aiming to harvest this while it's still in a vegetative state, so we're harvesting the leaves of this plant.

We're not looking for this plant to go into flower, or bolt as one may say.

As long as we have consistent cool temperatures and not huge fluctuations between cool and warm, these plants will stay in a vegetative state, and you'll be able to harvest these throughout the winter.

Just pulling off the most mature leaves, which are here at the bottom.

And harvesting those as needed once they get to a desirable size and tenderness.

Some people have different preferences.

And also, they tend to develop a better taste once they a few hard frosts on the leaves.

So, that's another unique thing.

They really love that cold weather, and actually taste better when they get some frost on them.

[upbeat country music] - All right, Tonya.

So we just got finished learning about earthworms.

Now we're gonna talk about organic gardening.

The two go together a little bit-- - Yes, absolutely.

- Wow.

So I have a couple of questions for you about organic gardening.

What do we mean by organic gardening?

'Cause we hear the term all the time, but what does it mean?

- It's a moving target.

It means different things to different people.

So it means one thing to a farmer who's trying to grow commercially to sell their vegetables in a grocery store and have an organic label on there.

But today we're not gonna get that technical.

We're just gonna deal with what the average vegetable gardener in their backyard would consider growing organically.

So that just means using all-natural products, and trying to reduce the amount of pesticides that they use in general.

- Okay.

So what is the most important thing to know about gardening naturally, or organically?

- I would say that prevention is key.

The most important thing in my opinion, is if you're gonna try to limit your use of chemicals, is that you set yourself up for success from the beginning.

Good cultural practices.

Because you don't wanna wait until you have a large problem to deal with, and then you're limited on what you can use to combat the problem.

- Okay, so let's go back.

Naturally versus organic, though.

What do we mean by naturally?

- Well, non man-made chemicals, for the most part.

- Okay, so it's natural.

- Yes.

- Okay, I got you.

All right, so what are some things you can do to prevent disease in your garden?

Because of course, you think about it, we've had a lot of rains recently, over the past month.

We're getting a lot of calls at the office about diseases, so how do we prevent those?

- Right, you want to try to prevent your disease before you have it, because once you have it, there's not a whole lot you can do about a fungal disease.

So the first thing you could do is, grow varieties that have disease resistance in their genetic make-up.

So, start out with a tomato plant that's already resistant to some of your fungal diseases.

Of course, that usually eliminates most of your heirlooms, but if you're not interested in growing the heirloom, or you're just starting out trying to grow organically, I would suggest start with a plant that has some disease resistance built in.

And then when you plant your garden, you want to make sure that you space things far enough apart so that you get good air circulation, and good sunlight penetration.

That's gonna help draw out the moisture, because moisture is gonna breed your fungal problems, your fungal spores.

Like you were talking about with the wet weather.

Another thing you wanna do is, a lot of people don't think about mulching their vegetable garden, but mulching your vegetable garden can go a long way in disease prevention, because it provides a layer between your soil surface and your plant leaves, so when you water, you're not splashing fungal spores onto the leaves of your plants.

Another thing you can do is practice crop rotation.

That's very important.

And what we mean by crop rotation is that you don't plant the same plant in the same spot year after year after year.

So you don't put your tomatoes in your same spot year after year.

You want to put them on a three- or four-year rotation with other plants.

One way to remember it is legume, root, leaf, and fruit.

So, you have different plant families that you are moving around, you can do it in a circular pattern, or however way that you have designed it in your garden plan, but you don't want to put the same things in the same spots, because you'll get a build-up of fungal, you could get a build-up of fungal material that particularly enjoy, for instance, peppers or eggplant.

So you want to vary what you're planting in that same spot.

- So you mentioned crop rotation for disease purpose, but how about for insect pressure?

- Yeah, you could do that too.

For insect prevention the first thing you wanna do is scout.

You wanna scout your plants.

You wanna get familiar with your garden, and be out there every day looking around.

Know what a squash bug egg looks like.

Know what an aphid looks like.

If you're out there actively looking for problems, you can catch insect populations before they get out of control, and then you feel like you have to use something heavy to kill them.

If you have a light infestation, picking off the eggs of the stuff.

Or you know, spraying it down to get the aphids off, or even using a sponge and soapy water to get rid of things in the early beginning stages.

So scouting your plants.

Also, don't kill your beneficial insects.

Your beneficial insects like the ladybug.

The ladybug kills, eats aphids.

So make sure that you don't kill your ladybugs, and you need to know what the larval stage of the ladybug looks like, because it undergoes a metamorphosis.

Most people don't know what the larval ladybug looks like and they'll kill it inadvertently.

And tomato hornworms, if you see one with little white egg sacs all over its back, you wanna leave that one alone, because it's breeding more beneficial wasps to go out and kill your other tomato hornworms.

And then there are other things that are harder to control, like the squash vine borer.

That's a very difficult one to control, but one thing you can do, maybe not with 100% success, but you can try to cover up the stems of the squash vines.

It's called a barrier method, or exclusion method.

You could either cover the stems with mulch, or keep on wrapping 'em with aluminum foil.

I've done that myself, but that's kind of a bummer.

[Chris chuckles] Yeah, 'cause you have to constantly go back, and it's not fool-proof.

Cover the stems with mulch to provide a barrier between the squash vine borer and the squash plant.

Those are some things you can do for insect prevention.

- So what are some organic things you can use if you have a problem to address?

- Okay, well I brought some things to show you today.

The first one is an insecticidal soap.

This is very, kind of a lightweight stuff for your soft-bodied insects, like spider-mites and aphids, and those type of things.

Probably not gonna work on your squash bugs, but for light infestations you can use an insecticidal soap, it's very safe.

I brought some Bt to show you.

These are called Bt dunks, and this is actually, if you have a rain barrel that you're using to irrigate your garden with, you can put.

Bt is a soil-borne organism that, you just crumble some of this up in the top of your rain barrel, and it controls mosquitoes.

So that's a way to keep a rain barrel to water your plants without the mosquitoes.

You can also use a different type of Bt to kill any kind of caterpillar that you have, like your hornworms and such.

I did bring, this is horticultural oil.

We use oil a lot of times on our fruit trees and things, when they're dormant, to kill scale.

What an oil does, is it coats the back of the scale, or the other insects with oil, so they can't breathe, because a lot of insects, they breathe through spiracles in their back.

If you coat them over, they can't breathe and they die.

So we have this horticultural and dormant spray oil that we can use on our trees and shrubs, especially if you're growing fruit trees.

Let's see.

I brought some neem oil, comes from the neem tree.

Neem oil has a variety of uses.

It can be used as an insecticide, as a growth regulator.

It messes up their ability to reproduce.

And it can make them grow kind of in strange ways, so that you can, maybe not kill them, but keep the population from getting larger.

Some things just because it is an oil it will kill, just like the scale we just talked about, suffocating them through their back.

Neem oil has also been used successfully to prevent powdery mildew.

Let's see, I brought this.

This is a combination thing, controls insects and fungal diseases.

It contains sulfur, and that's the part for fungal, and it contains a pyrethrin, and that's your insecticide part.

Now this is a little bit heavier insecticide, and maybe would take care of your squash bugs, whereas insecticidal soap probably won't.

So if you got some other things a little harder to control, you can go to the pyrethrins.

And pyrethrin comes from chrysanthemum extract.

And then I brought this diatomaceous earth, it can be used for a lot of different things.

But in my landscape I have problems with slugs on my lettuce, trying to get my lettuce, and also my bedding plants in my front yard, so I use this for slug control.

- All right Tonya, we appreciate that.

Good stuff.

Thank you much.

- Thank you.

[gentle country music] - Alright, we're gonna talk about some of these sprouts that grew up in odd places of the tree.

This is a water sprout.

Some people call 'em suckers but suckers actually grow from the root system out of the ground.

And water sprouts grow off the branches of the tree.

All up and down the branches here are what we call dormant buds, or epicormic buds.

They're hidden, and they only sprout out, like the water sprout here, when they're encouraged by some external stimuli, like temperature, or usually stress.

And what we do when we prune on trees to eliminate some of these water sprouts, you can see it's kinda gone crazy and it's gonna be rubbing up here in the canopy.

It really doesn't fit the tree.

If I wanna do a preliminary cut, I could cut it back to a node, or a lateral stem, like so.

[saw cutting] And we can subordinate that stem.

And this year, we're gonna utilize the foliage that comes out where these buds are to produce more energy for the tree, and then next year, we'll eliminate the whole thing.

But, today I'm gonna show you how to properly eliminate a cut of a water sprout.

We're gonna take it back just above the collar where it grows out so that we'd have a good compartmentalization of this wound.

[saw cutting] So, next year that should close over well.

[gentle country music] - All right, here's our Q and A session.

Mr. Bill, you jump in there and help us out, all right?

- Yes, sir.

- All right, here's out first viewer email.

"Can I cut my roses back this fall?"

Tonya, what do you think about that one?

- The best time to cut your roses back is late February.

- Late February, that's when I do mine.

- Yes, late winter.

- So yeah, you would do that in late winter.

I wouldn't do that now, you might get a flush of growth or something like that, which can be knocked out by frost.

So I always wait 'til pretty much late February, early March to do that.

You'll be just fine.

I actually cut mine back pretty hard.

- Yes.

Pretty hard.

- And they actually grow back every year and look beautiful, so I don't have a problem with it.

All right, so here's our next letter.

We have a letter, believe it or not, people are still writing letters.

All right, so let me get this out.

So it says, "I planted some dogwood trees "three or four years ago.

"My dogwoods are about eight feet tall now, "but they don't have a trunk or base, just long limbs.

What's wrong?"

And this is from Melvin in Senatobia, Mississippi.

So we appreciate that, Mr. Melvin.

So, Tonya, the dogwoods are eight feet tall now, but they don't have trunk or base.

And Mr. Melvin, it would be real good if we could have a picture of that, so we could see that, but what are you thinking?

- Well, my first thought was, are we sure it's dogwood, because dogwoods are not usually multi-trunked.

And then my second thought was, did they get topped somehow, when they were young, with a lawnmower, a weed-eater, something that cut 'em off close to the ground, and made them decide to branch into these long shoots.

I'm not really sure what else would make 'em do that.

Do you have any other thoughts?

- First thing that comes to mind is yeah, something must've happened to it.

Did it get pruned back too hard, or somebody run over it or something like that.

You know, for it to shoot up like that.

But that's all I can think of.

I can't think of anything else that'd make it grow like that.

- I know, I can't either.

- Not a dogwood.

- No.

- No, I mean dogwoods have problems, but-- - That's not normally one of them.

- That's not normally one of them.

So Mr. Bill, anything you could think of, perhaps?

- Well, grafting comes to mind.

A lot of plants are grafted today, and depending on how they grafted, it would shoot up extra shoots, I would imagine.

- It'd be interesting if we had a picture, just to kinda see that.

Because that could be a possibility.

Or it could've been hit with something, or whacked back pretty hard or something like that.

It's that tall, with no base and no trunk.

- You may wanna start over.

Unfortunately, yeah.

- I might yank that out, and maybe go with something else.

Alright Mr. Melvin, hope that helps you out.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"When would be the best time of year to dig up my iris?

I want to move them to another location."

And this is Ms. Betty in Arlington.

Tonya, so she wants to dig up her iris and move them to another location.

- So July, August, and September is, according to the National Iris Society, what they say, and other places, I did some research.

Now is the time.

July, August, and September for you to dig up, and transplant, move, whatever you wanna do with your iris.

- Okay, and it'll be just fine, right?

- I would probably make sure that they were well watered during the winter.

- Yeah, so good time to do that, be fine.

Look for that other place that you wanna put it in the ground, and hope for cooler temperatures as we go throughout the year.

I think your iris will be just fine, Ms. Betty, and I thank you much.

All right, here's our next viewer email.

"What is causing small bumps on the leaves of my grapes?"

And, what did you think about that one?

One thing that comes to mind to me is the grape phylloxera.

- Yeah.

- You know, almost like a pecan phylloxera, you have a grape phylloxera of course.

And the feeding causes, of course, these little bumps that you'll have on those leaves.

From what I've experienced in the past, these leaves will actually drop off prematurely.

You know, it can cause some defoliation.

You can get some reduction in the photosynthetic process, of course.

But this late in the season.

- (Tonya) Probably not much you can do.

- There's not too much you can do about that.

It's not gonna be anything that you can really spray for it now, because it's so late.

Now if you wanted to start back in the spring, I mean, there are some means that you can use to control that.

The fruit tree sprays contain malathion, which is something that you can use to control the grape phylloxera.

Some publications will tell you that there's a systemic that you can use as well, to control the phylloxera, but again, you would do that early in the spring.

But this late in the year, it's not gonna be too much you can do about that.

- It's another one of things you have to prevent.

- Right, and it's something that you talked about earlier.

So you just have to prevent it.

All right.

And, somebody actually dropped this off for us today to take a look at.

I'm just gonna pop it on the table there.

And here's the question that goes with that.

"So, what are the white growths on the tomato hornworms?"

And this is from Stacy.

And Tonya actually mentioned it earlier, so Tonya?

- Yeah, that's the eggs from the parasitic wasp, and that poor hornworm is not feeling too great right now.

[all laughing] But if you just let nature take its course, then all those little eggs will hatch and fly, and find another tomato hornworm, and keep you from having to use chemicals to control those hornworms.

Beneficial insect.

- That's what it's all about, right there.

So why would you wanna spray anything on that?

- You wouldn't.

- The parasitic wasps are actually doing the job for you.

So this is what you want to see in the garden, Ms. Stacy.

You have that there, just let nature take its course.

Mother Nature has it all together.

She's gonna get rid of that problem for you, so there you have it.

All right.

So Mr. Bill, Tonya, we're out of time, thanks for being here today.

- Thank you, sir.

- Thank you.

- 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.

You can find more information on organic gardening and worm composting at FamilyPlotGarden.com.

While you're there, take a look at the gardening calendar, or ask us your gardening question.

Thanks for watching, I'm Chris Cooper.

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

Be safe.

[upbeat country music] [acoustic guitar chords]