- From the rapidly-aging studios of Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem P.A., it is time for another old-fogey episode of chemical-free horticultural hijinks, You Bet Your Garden.

I'm your septuagenarian host, Mike McGrath.

That's right, cats and kittens.

Today, we are taping a brand-new episode on my actual birthday, of January 26th!

Which occurred in a year when pinball machines used metal wheels and you could really buy candy for a penny.

Besides my ramblings about how cool it was to be a free-range child in the '50s, we'll continue to help you become better seed-starters and take your fabulous phone calls, questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions, and adroitly anodized admonitions.

So, keep your eyes and/or ears, cats and kittens, because it's coming up faster than you saying, "He's how old?"...

right after this.

- Support for You Bet Your Garden is provided by the Espoma Company, offering a complete selection of natural organic plant foods and potting soils.

More information about Espoma and the Espoma natural gardening community can be found at... - Welcome to a brand-new episode of You Bet Your Garden, which really is being taped on my actual birthday of January 26th.

Now we don't want to... What?

What's going on here?

What's going on here?

Who's doing this?

Um...oh, my goodness.

It's our beloved CEO and Grand Puba, Tim Fallon.

And he apparently has a message for me, as he does a Harpo Marx imitation.

You should've had the curls, man.

OK.

Here's... Oh, yeah, yeah, my driver's license is made of wood.

And the big finale.

He's late for a meeting!

What a shock.

Tim Fallon, ladies and gentlemen.

Woo!

My, this is the gayest day ever.

All right, so what we're going to do is we'll tell you... Take two.

Part two of our seed-starting extravaganza series.

And you know, in between, we're going to take a couple of your fabulous phone calls.

And I hope my hat doesn't fall off.

Pam!

Welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Thanks, Mike, how are you doing today?

- I am just Ducky!

- That's great, how's Ducky doing?

- Ducky is celebrating my 70th birthday today with me... - Happy birthday!

- Wearing a special Ducky hat.

And, of course, still a COVID mask.

Although I don't think it's going to be the one that we're told we have to use now.

So, we may have to get Ducky a new mask.

But yeah, here we go.

There we go.

Happy birthday!

Done with that.

- Happy birthday!

I would sing, but I don't want to... - Oh, God, no.

- Take up too much time.

-You never want to hear me sing.

That's a federal punishment for a major crime.

Where is Pam?

- I'm in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.

- Okay.

And what can we do you for?

- Well, in mid-December, my husband and I were very motivated, and we needed to get some arborvitaes, and we found a place that was selling them at 75% off, since it was late in the season.

So, we purchased about 16 arborvitae green giants at about six feet tall in plastic pots, as you would usually find them.

Planted about eight of them.

But unfortunately, we got that freeze and the ground froze.

So we still have eight that we need to plant, and I was interested in knowing where is the best place to keep the trees, and what your advice would be?

We had them in the garage, but I took them out... - No!

- Because they weren't getting much light.

- Yeah, um... You have two options.

I don't know if you have a really good chance of a thaw where you are.

Do you have a big pile of mulch, or leaves, or soil, or anything like that?

- I do have a couple...

I have leaves that I was going to chop in the spring, two containers, two bags.

- Okay.

- So I do have some leaves, they're not chopped, but I guess that's not important.

- Not as important, and it's too darn cold!

- It is!

It is.

- So...

This is a lot of tree mass here, you're doing a major project.

- Yes, we have to reforest our yard since we got hit by that tornado.

- Oh, OK, I'm very sorry about that.

All right, so... - Yeah, we're trying to put up a screen.

- What we want to do here is called healing in.

It's the way that the tree farm you bought them from would try to get them through the winter.

If possible, the best thing would be to dig holes in the ground, drop the pots in the holes without removing the trees, and then, mulch that over.

If you can't do that, make a big pile of non-frozen stuff.

Soil, peat moss, potting soil, leaves, anything neutral, even some... Because there's not going to be any interaction over the winter.

Even arborist woodchips.

And make sure that it's in a high spot on your property, not in a low spot.

And put the pots in there, plant the pots in this, and make sure it's deep enough to cover the top of the pot.

- Okay.

- And then, as soon as things start greening up in the spring, you plant the others.

- All right, that sounds like a plan.

- All right?

- Perfect.

All righty.

Well, thank you so much for your help.

I really appreciate it, and happy birthday again.

- Oh, thank you so much!

Here we go, one more time.

- Take care, thank you.

- Thank you.

- I'm 70.

Nobody can say anything about me anymore.

- That's right.

- Now it's elder abuse.

All right.

Good luck, Pam.

- Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.

Carl, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Hi, Mike, thanks for taking my call.

- Well, thank you for making it, sir.

How you doing?

- I'm well, staying home and warm today.

- Yeah, well, that's what winter's all about, isn't it?

And where is...?

- Well, that and planting.

Sorry.

- No planting now, Carl.

Unless you're in Southern California.

Where is Carl?

- I'm calling you from Berwyn, but I'm actually asking a question about a property I'm going to acquire in Pike County, Pennsylvania.

- Whoa, beautiful territory.

Go ahead, tell me.

- So in anticipation of what I might plant, I consulted the USDA growing zone map, and it appears this property is either on or real close to the line between zones 5A and 6B.

So a couple of questions, then, is, I don't know how often the map is updated, particularly as concerns the climate change situation.

And being close to the line, should I err in caution and go to 6B, or what would you suggest?

- That's not cautious.

That's suicidal.

Any time you see a five, you know, you're in a cold zone, that's what you should depend on.

Now, as I'm going to be telling people to do over the next couple of weeks on the show, I want you to research the historical weather data for this new region you're going to move into.

You want to look at the past five years.

April, May, and June.

And you want to look at the average nighttime temperatures for that region over the past five years.

Don't worry about a last frost date.

That's not useful at all.

Because if you're going to plant tomatoes and peppers, and stuff, the nighttime temps have to be in the 50s.

Now what are we talking about?

You talking about buying big trees and shrubs?

Having a vegetable garden?

When to turn on the hot tub?

- I wish.

No, I have a slope, it goes down to a large lake that faces east-southeast, and I was thinking of some grapevines and possibly a couple of apple trees.

- On a slope?

- Yeah.

Kind of like the Rhineland.

- How much gardening experience do you have?

- Oh, well, I've been doing it for quite a few years here in Berwyn, in the raised beds.

I've got a couple, at least four vines right now.

Grapevines that have been healthy for years.

Apple trees, not so much.

- Apple trees are a lot of work.

I don't like the slope.

Don't you have any flat ground?

I don't like the slope.

- Oh, yes, oh, yes, we do.

But I thought that would have a favorable sun.

Okay.

- Well, if you're going to terrace the area to make it easy for you to tend the grapes, and you get a grape that's designed for colder regions, that seems to be OK.

I don't like the slope for the apple trees.

And if you hadn't had success with apple trees, which is nothing to be ashamed of, stop trying.

You know, you're probably good at growing 100 other things.

Don't go chasing the will of the wisp on this one.

- Okay.

Well, that's good advice, Mike.

- But I can see you terracing your grapevines.

Just don't let them go down too low.

Keep them towards the top of the slope, so that you don't accidentally get them into a frost soon.

- Thank you.

Enjoy the show and stay in good health.

Bye-bye.

- You, too.

Bye-bye.

Janet, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

- Oh, I'm glad to be here.

- I'm glad to have you here, Janet, or else I'd just be talking to myself, you know?

How are you doing?

- I am doing fabulously.

- Excellent, excellent.

And where is Janet fabulous?

- In Williamsburg, Virginia.

- Oh, OK!

All right, continue.

- Okay, first, I had a question for you, which does have to do with the seed-starting you were going to talk about.

And then, another more info about composting.

So first of all, last year, a fellow called you, and you and he were discussing deformable lights for starting seeds.

- Ah!

- And I wondered if you tried them, and if so, how were they?

- I love them.

I bought two of them.

Yeah, they came in a pack of two at the time.

Incredibly inexpensive.

A lot of lumens, cheap to run.

I screwed them into what's called the trouble light.

So it was very easy to put them onto a timer.

- Oh, yeah, the big yellow thing with the hook on the top.

- Correct.

Except that's what it used to look like.

It's classier now.

- Oh, boy.

- But I like them so much that I am retiring my fluorescent lights and plan to just buy another deformable LED light.

And for people who don't know what we're talking about, this product was given the worst name in the history of naming products, deformable.

But really, they're advertised as garage lights.

They screw into a regular light socket, are 180,000 times as bright, and they cost less to run because there's just dozens of LED fixtures.

I've had great results.

Thank you for asking.

All right, compost.

Come on, let's move.

- Compost!

The...

I know you never want to get grass clippings from treated lawns.

- Correct.

- When I've been poaching leaves, I've been wondering if I take the bags of leaves from a yard that has been treated, are they okay?

- Yes.

- Oh!

That's what I want to hear.

- Yes.

The herbicides that kill plants that are applied to lawns are systemic.

They stay in the body of the blade.

They don't transfer to leaves that fall on them.

- Okay.

So does that also follow for properties that have had "natural" lawn treatments and mosquito fogging?

- Well, you would want to see what they actually used, especially for mosquito fogging, because we've got two very different types here.

The one type is the old-school chemical spray that kills everything but mosquitoes.

But now, hip municipalities are using BTI, bacillus thuringiensis israelensis.

And when that lands on any kind of water, even a wet lawn, it prevents mosquito breeding and is absolutely harmless to everything else.

But lawn clippings should be left on lawns.

I would not be tempted to use them in a compost pile, especially because you told me that you have acres of coffee grounds.

- Yes.

And they are a superior form of nitrogen, leaving the clippings on the lawn feeds the lawn.

You use the coffee grounds, you take it out to a waste stream, you take it out of the waste stream, and Al Gore will give you a medal of some kind.

- Okey doke.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

Bye-bye.

- Bye-bye.

- Hey, kids, what time is it?

It's time for the Question of the Week!

Yay!

Which we're calling... As you will recall from our last thrilling episode, Robin seemed to be doomed, piloting a truck that goes down a deep, deep embankment with Bat... Oh, no, that's a serial I'm watching on Saturday morning.

In our last thrilling episode, we tried to pound home the importance of using a professional-bagged potting soil/seed-starting mix that contains no chemical fertilizers!

Yes, miracle gag products are the first thing you'll see in almost any garden center because they control the supply chain and pay for the best display.

But any good, independent garden center will also have the natural and/or organic mixes that are chemical-free.

Most mixes in the U.S. will be peat-based, which is fine by me, as I am convinced the Canadian peat bogs are harvested sustainably.

However, some mixes in the United States substitute coir, C-O-I-R, which is shredded coconut fiber for the peat.

And that's fine, especially if you're careful not to overwater as coir doesn't seem to have as much natural antibiotic activity as peat, which can help reduce the chance of damping off disease.

A depressing condition caused by overwatering that results in your tiny little starts withering at the soil line and joining the choir invisible.

If this happens, do not mourn.

Instead, embrace and learn from the valuable feedback you have just been given and buy your plants already started by professionals, of which you are clearly not one yet.

And remember, as in baseball, there is always next year.

Unless there's a strike.

Let's get started starting.

As we said last week, start your seeds approximately 60 days before historical weather records reveal when you can expect your nights to be in the 50s... "last average frost date"!

All that misleading number means is that you'll have a 50-50 chance of not experiencing actual freezing temperatures after that date.

Which is less than helpful, as peppers, tomatoes and such are tropical plants that suffer greatly if planted when night time temps drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is important.

Pay no attention to daytime temps.

They're a trap.

Unless climate change goes even more Bizarro world, nighttime temps are the key.

Defy me on this, and misery will become your horticultural roommate.

Containers!

There is no really good substitute for the plastic 4x6 plant containers the garden centers use.

They have the right depth and drainage, and can be reused for many years before they start to fall apart.

And then, you can recycle them.

If you have no such leftovers, ask your experienced gardening friends for some of theirs.

I have hundreds!

Warning, warning!

If you use kindergarten seed-starting containers like eggshell cartons and old yogurt containers, don't blame me for the results.

Fill your containers with your seed-starting mix.

You will note that they feel impossibly light.

Good!

That's what you want.

Place the containers in a sink containing an inch or two of water, and allow those containers to become moistened via their drainage holes.

Don't water them from on top.

They will have a tendency to float while still dry, so place a brick or something overtop each one or add water gradually until they stop acting like Aquaman's bumper cars.

When you remove them from the sink, they should be totally saturated and feel much heavier.

Now, place them on a metal tray that has a small lip that will hold excess water.

I think normal people use these things to make cookies.

Carefully place two seeds of the crop you want to grow in each cell.

Not one, and not 20!

Unless the seed packet says they were packed for 1998.

Cover the freshly-planted seeds with about an inch or less of your mix, and mist the surface gently.

If you don't have a small dedicated hand, mister, get one now, mister.

Now we need bottom heat.

Professional seed-starting heating mats will do the job perfectly and amortize nicely over the years.

They'll keep the roots of your starts between 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit for speedy germination.

Now is also the time to stretch Saran wrap over your starts to keep them moist.

If you're using a kit that includes a hard plastic cover, install that now.

No light is required yet, but you need to have some idea of how you're going to provide bright light in a week or so.

If your answer is a "sunny windowsill," you should now give up, watch more TV, and plan to buy professionally-started plants, where?

At your friendly neighborhood garden center.

Over the next week, you want to see water droplets beaded up on the plastic every day.

If you don't see that evidence, remove the plastic, mist the surface of the soil, and replace the plastic.

Don't go nuts with the water.

Evenly moist, but not sopping wet is your goal.

After a week, give or take, you should see sprouts.

When you see the very first sprouts appear, remove any coverings.

Naked to the wind, should your babies be!

Within a few days, the rest of the sprouts are going to be up.

But note, pepper seeds take longer than tomatoes, so maybe do them separately.

When everything is up that's likely to come up, remove the bottom heat.

Now, go back in time and label all the individual cells with the variety they contain.

Yes, I should probably have said this earlier.

But you know, there's a lot of good streaming stuff on the air, I got other stuff to do, and hopefully you'll read all of this before you get started.

Well, that sure was an intensive look at seed-starting now, wasn't it?

Luckily for yous, the Question of the Week appears in print at the Gardens Alive website.

To read it over in detail at your leisure or your leisure, just click the link for the Question of the Week at our website, which is still and will forever be... Gardens Alive supports the You Bet Your Garden Question of the Week, and you will always find the latest Question of the Week at the Gardens Alive website.

You Bet Your Garden is a half hour public television show, an hour-long public radio show and podcast all produced and delivered to you weekly, actually strongly, by Lehigh Valley Public Media and Bethlehem, P.A.

Our radio show is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

You Bet Your Garden was created by Mike McGrath.

Mike McGrath was created when a failed nuclear experiment freed him and his pal, Godzilla, from a polar ice cap.

Yikes!

My producer is threatening to open the window next to my baby seed-starts if I don't get out of this studio.

We must be out of time.

But you can call us anytime at... Or send us your emails, your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse teeming towards our garden shore at...

Please!

Please... include your location.

You'll find all of this contact information at our website... You'll also find the answers to all your garden questions, audio of this show, video of this show, and our podcast.

A special note to podcast listeners, we are dressed up in silly birthday outfits today.

So if you haven't yet watched the half-hour version that is a TV show and streaming, and whatever.

I'm your rapidly-aging host, Mike McGrath, and I'll see you... - Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday, dear Mike!

Happy birthday to you!

- Whoo!

- The best thing about having a birthday in January is you can buy all the old New Year's Party favors at 50% off.