From the sweetly centered Universal Studios at Lehigh Valley Public Media in Bethlehem, P.A..

It is time for another figgy episode of chemical free horticultural high jinks.

You bet your garden.

Do you hope to get garlic in the ground sometime soon?

If you have a fig tree that needs winter protection.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

Hand rusted and ready.

And on today's show, I'll discuss proper fig protection with author Lee Rush and all fourth on Growing Great Garlic.

And of course, your telecommunication questions, comments, tips, tricks, suggestions and amiably autumnal adjudications.

So keep your eyes and ears right here.

Cats and kittens, because it's all coming up faster than you have in your figs and eating them, too.

Right after this.

Support for you bet.

Your garden is provided by the sponsor company offering a complete selection of natural organic plant foods and potting soils.

More information about a sponsor and the sponsor natural gardening community can be found at ESPOMA.com Welcome to a new episode of You Back to Your Garden.

From the studios of Univest Public Media's Center, I'm your host, Mike McGrath.

And I'm very happy to kick off this new season with a tribute to garlic, telling you how to plant it and what to do with it.

And an interview with my old friend Lee Reisch, who has written a book about protecting figs over winter in cold climate.

There's a lot of debate about that one.

That's a lot to get done, however.

So let's jump right to your fabulous calls at eight 8849 two 9444.

Lisa, welcome to You Bet Your Garden.

Thanks for having me.

Well, thanks for being had, Lisa.

How you doing?

I'm doing well.

One well.

And where is Lisa doing?

Well?

I am in Houston, Missouri.

What can we do for Lisa in Texas, Missouri.

So I had a question about trick treatments in the yard.

So being in Missouri, I've got a yard that backs rural Missouri, a yard that backs up to a wooded area.

And we've got ticks galore and we do the best we can managing them with what we've got.

So we've got insect shield treated clothing, we have our pets treated with various different products to help keep the ticks off of them.

But we are still finding ticks all over ourselves and I'm very hesitant to treat the yard with anything because I'm very worried about health effects on other insects.

Wouldn't help and it would damage your environment.

Now I'm happy to hear that you have insect shield clothing.

This is clothing that's been impregnated with permethrin, which is deadly to ticks.

Anything you can do to mow the tall grass if it's, you know, if it's just there to keep the height down and more importantly, to let sunlight in Missouri is remarkably humid.

Missouri Saint Louis is the most humid place I've ever been.

I've been in Louisiana.

You know, people don't realize that about you guys.

You can actually swim without water.

It's incredible.

Sometimes I'll just walk outside at seven in the morning and just automatically be dripping sweat.

It's something I've never, never experienced that anywhere else.

Sure.

Is some fun, huh?

Oh, I love it.

Anything you can do to open up the woods, pruning away low branches, cutting the cutting the undergrowth.

I mean, I don't know if you have one, but a brush cutter you can use to just cut trails.

Real trail.

So you're not pushing any plant material out of the way.

Now, there's two other things that come to mind.

There is a product called Chick Tubes to UBS.

You can find they have a website just search tech tubes.

And these are cardboard tubes that are stuffed with little cotton balls that are saturated with permethrin.

And how is that going to stop ticks?

Well, everybody talks about deer ticks, but the primary vector of ticks that transmit Lyme and other diseases are mice.

The American field mouse ticks must feed on field mice to progress to their next stage of development.

So if you've ever, like, had mice come into your attic or anything like that, you know, they'll tear apart a box of tissues to take back to their nest or steal socks or something like that.

They love to make a nice, comfortable nest.

So you scatter the tubes around your property, the mice take the little cotton balls out and take them to the nest, and that kills any ticks on the mouse and any mice that then come into that nest to play cards or watch TV or whatever.

And it is and it doesn't hurt the mice.

It doesn't hurt anything except ticks.

My final thought is Christie Brinkley.

No, no, no.

You don't want her to stand out in the field and scare them.

But when she bought a house in Lyme and realized how pervasive the tick problem was, she researched it heavily and bought a flock of geese, which you could also do with guinea hens.

Although there were annoying as all heck, she kept contacting the USDA because their tick problem was solved immediately when she brought these specific fowl into into her back yard.

Chickens might work as well.

I'd want to research that, but I know that geese and guinea hens love to eat ticks.

And this way you're also kind of getting back at the tick.

When she finally convinced the USDA to come out, they reported using a thing called the tick drag, which has nothing to do with RuPaul, but it's a big piece of white material.

You drag through brushy areas and then the scientists literally count the number of ticks that attached to it.

So they sampled the areas around her place and they sampled the areas that the ducks, geese and guinea hens had access to.

She had achieved somewhere between 95 and 98% control of the ticks.

Sounds great.

Thank you so.

Much.

Thank you.

A pleasure to speak with you.

All right.

Well, it is time for me to welcome perhaps our most frequent guest on You Bet Your Garden, Dr. Lee Risch, the famous pruning author and perhaps Pruning Mad Man might be a better word.

He wrote the pruning book and many other books about growing fruits.

And his new book is Growing Figs in Cold Climates, The Techniques of Which Are Almost a Religion.

Lee, first of all, welcome back to you about your garden.

It's great to be back after a long time.

Yeah, well, you know, long time no see.

Now, what I'd like to start off with, if you don't mind, I'm surprised that you didn't call this book Five Ways of Protecting Figs over winter and Cold Climates, you know, because people love numbers like that.

And you have five basic techniques.

So do you mind if we start off doing one through five?

Oh, that'd be good, yeah.

Okay.

So number one is container growing.

So run us through how you do that.

So you got the you got a fig and a big pot and where are we going from there?

So a lot of people do this.

It's basically the most frequent way that people do it.

But there's a lot of ins and now just doing it.

So Fig is a very adaptable plant and in so many ways, even a lot of people think it's a tropical plant, is a subtropical plant, and it really does, but it does need protection against cold winters.

Your outdoor winters go below about ten degrees Fahrenheit.

It need it need some sort of protection.

Typically, the roots would survive cold weather, but, you know, not unbelievably cold weather.

But the roots will survive.

And if the plant sprouts from the roots fig is unique in that it's it sprout it grows fruit.

I knew growing shoots like an apple tree, a pear tree, a peach tree.

They all grow and grow their fruits and shoots that are one or more years old.

Fig tree will do it on new growing shoots.

But the thing is, if the shoots originate too close to ground level, then they don't have time to ripen.

So what you want to do is you want to leave a length of stem.

It could be a single trunk or multiple trunks about two feet high and cut everything back to that stem before I put it in cold storage.

And then that next growing season take of any shoots that grow below that top of the stem and just leave a number of shoots coming off the top and those will bear fruit.

Okay, number two, plant in spring, dig up in fall and okay, so that's pretty obvious.

You you start with your planting stalk, you let the plant grow until, say, October or November.

You dig it up.

And then are we just bagging the roots up in a plastic bag and bringing it down into your cellar again?

Yeah, that's it.

And the advantage of that is when you plant around spring, you give it a good watering.

But as growth starts in spring, the roots extend into the surrounding soil.

And then basically you don't have to do that thing of watering, taking care of watering it all season long.

So so not only do you not have to water it, but also the plant grows more.

And the more it grows, the more figs it produces.

And so you get you get higher yield and you get a higher yield and less care.

And it's easier to move because you're not dragging that big pot inside.

Well, you do have to take a certain amount of roots.

And I came up with a variation on that.

We're actually grew it in a pot, you know, very large pot maybe about this big.

And I put holes in the side of the pot.

And then when I plant the whole pot in the ground, the roots actually grow out into the hole.

Right.

At the holes.

And then I just easily because it's I that year's roots, I chop them off and then bring them pot into into the cellar.

Well, okay, number three and I think you made this up so swaddle stems S.W.

a d d l e. This is a very common method where where it doesn't get too, too cold.

For instance, in the Philadelphia area, Brooklyn has a lot of people from the Mediterranean, Italians, Lebanese and and you often see swaddled trees and, you know, there's figs under them.

And basically, if it's if it's not doesn't get too too cold at the end of the growing season.

And although any type of protection, it shouldn't be until December, probably because if you want them to experience some cold.

So at the end of the growing season, you prune it a little, try the stems together.

So it's a nice tight mash and then just wrap it with whatever is needed to protect it from the bitter cold.

In winter, it can be just burlap.

If you winters don't get that cold, it could be some sort of insulation.

But people go through a lot of very heroic measures.

In my book, I have some photos of a fig grower in in Pittsburgh who is giant fig tree and he just wrapped it with insulation.

I mean, it's amazing.

And and you point out that you have to put a bucket or something on top.

Right?

You don't want water to get in there.

So you want somewhere to shed the water.

And as I said, this might look unsightly to some people or it might look like a sculpture to others.

And it depends on how neatly you do it.

It's it's it's it's a look.

Number four is my favorite for a number of reasons.

I may be wrong, but I consider this the purest Italian way to protect a fig tree is you water the soil, you bend the tree into a trench that you've evacuated in the ground, fill the trench with soil, and then cover it with old carpets or leaves or something like that and dig it up in the spring.

When, to the best of my understanding, it's already putting on new leaves.

Well, actually, any of these methods, you really ideally get it up before leaves start because those leaves are very tender since they start growing without light.

So you want ideally you want the leaves to develop, start developing in ambient light conditions if it's not too cold or depending on how much you want to cover it with, you could just lay it on the ground, you know, pin it down.

And that's another thing about figs is they're very flexible.

And I said in time they tolerate a lot of abuse, so you can just bend the branches down.

What I like to do is you you put a shovel into the ground to cut the roots on one side, then you bend it down the other way.

All right.

Number five is winter protection via a greenhouse or a hoop house.

Now, what?

What shape is the fig in?

Is this for potted figs?

Figs?

You dig up and put the roots in a plastic bag and put inside or we grow in the fig in this thing.

24 seven.

Right.

It could be any one of those methods depending on how, you know, how cold the greenhouse are and who past gets.

So that is my favorite method, mainly because you get earlier figs and you get a lot of fish and you don't have to worry about cold protection if you have a hoop house and it's not too, too cold in winter.

And this could be winters that get down to zero, who pass if it's big enough and you have the frog in the center, the hoop pass, and you can put some sort of blanket or floating well cover over it, you could get figs that way, too.

So now in my greenhouse, which is a cool temperature greenhouse, the temperature just goes the heat goes down.

When the temperature just gets to about freezing.

And in the greenhouse, it's not only for figs that I grow salad crops all winter.

Sure.

My all my spring seedlings are grown in the greenhouse.

Before I let you go, you attempt something in this book that I don't think anybody else has been brave enough to do.

You try to sort through the different varieties of figs, which in my experience are the most mislabeled plants.

So, you know, a lot of the names came from, say, somebody in Europe, same in they they they migrate to the U.S., you know, decades ago perhaps.

And they took some they they have a fig tree.

They like they took a cutting of it.

And then they came here, they grow plant because they're very easy to propagate from cuttings.

And and then they start passing the plants around, you know, more cuttings to their friends.

And, you know, they didn't know what the name of the variety was originally.

This is a plant that's been grown for thousands and thousands of years.

Yeah.

So.

So people just make up names.

My favorite name for Brown Turkey, which is a very common and a very good fig is and is a true one of the names it's called Leaves Perpetual.

Oh, well, you wish you were right.

All right, I have to stop you here.

Or was, or else we would go on for hours.

Our very special guest today has been Dr. Lee Risch, whose newest book is Growing Figs in Cold Climates.

It's sure to induce a lot of heated conversation, but the bottom line is figs are delicious.

And easy to grow.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you, Lee.

We'll get you on again real soon, right?

Things like that.

All right.

Thank you, as always.

It is now time for the beloved question of the week, which we're calling vodka.

Saved my garlic.

We've got lots of questions about garlic this summer.

Far too many for me to answer individually.

So I will just cut to the chase and discuss proper planting, happy harvesting and an important disease preventing tip I had long ago forgotten which led to my being bit in the ro ha this summer I would say let's start this at the beginning, but which is the beginning?

Harvesting beautiful bulbs in the summer or planting cloves from those bulbs in the fall.

It's like the chicken and the egg conundrum or Lois never figuring out that Clark was Superman.

Let's start with planting, because this is the season to do so.

Come on in close, guys.

I'm going to show them how to do this.

You pull apart heads of garlic and let me show you how to do that.

What I like to do is run my thumbnail down in between the individual cloves and then there's no rhyme or reason for what you do next.

You just work it until it breaks apart into the individual cloves.

And then after that it's up to you, however you want to rub it around and get it apart.

But it is great, dirty fun.

I apologize to whoever has to clean the studio floor after this.

And now you see what you got that's really important to do at this stage.

After you pull apart your heads of garlic, you plant individual undamaged cloves in your richest loose soil.

A raised bed containing lots of compost and pine light is ideal as the light loose soil of a raised bed produces bigger, happier bulbs at harvest time.

Plant the cloves 4 to 6 inches apart, two inches deep in warm climates, and up to five inches deep in frosty land.

That means X-number of inches of soil above the tippy top of the buried clove mulch.

That bed with a couple inches of pine straw or finely shredded leaves, no wood mulch of any kind color or national origin.

Remember, rule number three of organic gardening.

Just because you have a lot of something doesn't mean you should use it generally means the opposite timing.

Basically, you should get your cloves in the ground six weeks before your last average frosty.

But the further north you are, the earlier you can plant.

If you wait until the supposedly lucky Columbus Day, you'll get smaller bulbs at harvest time.

I aim for early September planting to give the cloves extra time to grow a nice root system before the ground freezes down in the Carolinas and thereabouts.

You can wait until Halloween in really hot regions, consult your local county extension office for timing advice because I never lived in no place like that.

Now there are two basic types of garlic.

My preferred type is hard neck.

That's what I grow.

That's what I've been doing.

To show you how to separate the cloves and stuff.

It is the best tasting and most colorful type.

Many amazing heirloom varieties are available and hard necks are the type for cold climate gardeners.

But hard necks have little storage potential.

A hard neck harvested in late June or early July will typically start to sprout by late September.

But all is not lost.

You can just plant those sprouting cloves.

The other type is soft neck, a.k.a.

white garlic or California garlic.

Technically a better choice for warmer climates, but less flavorful and much less fun to grow.

However, it has a big advantage.

Soft necks are ideal for storage, resisting the urge to sprout for a year or longer.

They are also breakable because they got them soft necks.

Hard necks have a kind of a woody stem after cure.

Many gardeners grow both types hard necks for fresh eating and soft and extra long term storage.

But this verges on cowardice.

In my opinion, and a braided circle of soft neck garlic is useless for repelling vampires, while a single bulb of hard neck will send them running or flying or misting or wolfing or any of the other things they do.

Because many hard neck varieties originated in their native land.

Now you don't have to do much after clove planting.

Just clip off and eat any scapes.

Those are the little bulges that appear at the top of the plant.

Then wait until the bottom.

One third of your plants have turned brown and pull up a test plant.

If it looks like a big leak, cook with it and try again later.

If the bulbs are nice and fat and have full paper wrappers, pull it all up and cure it for a week or two.

Ideally with all the plants laid out singly on a surface, with the ceiling fan above for good airflow, so do not place in direct sunlight and never wash your bulbs.

Just shake or gently brush off most of the don't after curing gently break hard neck bulbs into their individual cloves.

Now this is really important.

You want to select the largest cloves for replanting, maybe a little hard for you to see, but this is a big clove that's going to make big bulbs.

But this is a skinny little mini.

Well, there's almost nothing to it.

So this is the type that you either eat right away or you process into garlic powder or something like that.

If you have no garlic of your own to continue the strain, buy some bulbs at a local farmer's market or from a reputable mail order source.

Don't use supermarket garlic.

And now we get to my confession about neck rot, which my garlic had to.

I have been growing garlic for around 25 years before tragedy struck my entire crop was turning brown much too early.

Even worse, the stems rotted away at ground level.

Luckily, I had gifted several friends with bulbs of my unique garlic, which over the decades had evolved to reduce heads of uniform size, shape and flavor.

None of which resembled the garlic.

So I had started out with my friends, returned the favor, and my future crops were saved.

After that, I began marking the garlic beds and rotating them.

So the garlic never followed garlic.

And I thought that was enough, which it was for a couple of years.

Then tragedy struck again this season, and I quickly pulled up every plant that had a layer of nasty mold where Plant met soil, destroyed the stricken plants and replaced their potentially contaminated shredded leaf mulch with fresh pine straw.

And then I remembered a disease prevention tip from years ago that I had foolishly stopped using you soak the cloves before planting in a baking soda solution for 24 hours, about one tablespoon of baking soda per gallon of water, followed by 5 minutes in a bath of undiluted vodka.

But I wasn't there yet, so I ran to the liquor store and bought a half gallon of their cheapest vodka for ten bucks.

The guy even said, I hope you're not going to drink this, but he didn't seem better off when I said no, I'm going to pour it on my garden.

I drenched my garlic beds with this swill, made a promise to treat my cloves properly at planting time this year, and harvested a free crop.

Thanks to my friends and cheap vodka.

Well, that sure was some helpful information about how to grow grape garlic, now, wasn't it?

Luckily for use, the question of the week appears in print at the Gardens Alive web website.

To read it over.

At your leisure or your leisure, just click the link for the question of the week on our website, which is still it will forever be you bet your garden dawg 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.

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You bet your garden was created by Mike McGrath.

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Yikes.

My producer is threatening to grab my garlic if I don't get out of the studio.

We must be out of time.

But you can call us any time in 888492 9444 or send us your email, your tired, your poor, your wretched refuse teaming towards our garden short at y b y g a w lv t dot 0rg.

Please include your location and don't forget all of you, podcast and radio listeners can see me going step by step with my garlic growing instructions at the video section of You Bet your garden dot 0rg.

I'm your host, Mike McGrath, and I'll be drying and grinding garlic and the best smelling house in the USA until I can see you again next week.