Episode 1545: Seg 3 of S10E9 Garden Q&A Part 14 - The Gardening with Joey and Holly Radio Show

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Your garden questions are garden answers.

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I hope you're all doing well and staying warm.

My husband and I recently bought our first home and I'm finally having enough land to

grow flowers and start vegetable vegetable garden.

I'm hoping to plant small sunflower patch, but I have no idea where to begin right now.

All I have is a spot picked out and a lot determined, a lot to determine.

What would you recommend as my first steps?

All right.

Well, congratulations on your first home.

So for a sunflower patch, you want to obviously feel this spot picked out.

I'm assuming it gets a lot of sun because sunflowers like the sun and sunflowers are pretty

easy to grow.

Depends on which one you are.

Are you getting the mammoth sunflowers, which get 8 to 15 feet tall?

Are you growing them in a block or are you going to try to stagger them across the perimeter?

You're going to have squirrels that you're going to have to deal with.

You're going to have to plant some extra ones, that type of thing.

In this situation for her or with for them, it is a very daunting task.

It's like you, the example is you're going to remodel or refinish a basement, an old dingy

basement.

Where do you start?

You got to start a little bit here and a little bit there.

You just are going overwhelmed if you just set there and think about it.

I would grow over.

This is what I would do.

Yes.

I would grow a variety.

I would get a variety of sunflowers and I would grow them and then I would determine

at that point what grows better, what I might like.

You might grow some sunflowers and be like, I'm not that jazzed about it, but then you

might grow another variety and you'd be like, you know what, those are pretty.

I want to grow more of those next year.

I would grow a variety of sunflowers.

I would make sure that it has full sun.

I would then learn if squirrels are going to come and attack my sunflowers and use this

first year as learning experience and then tweak things next year.

And with the vegetable side, number one, grow what you want to eat.

Grow what is not commonly available or it's more expensive either at the grocery store

or at the farmer's market and grow a bunch of varieties.

If you like tomatoes, yeah, you're going to spend some money on seeds, but grow eight or

nine or ten different varieties because there are some varieties that are absolutely

magnificent and other ones are like, I know it's a tomato, but it's in.

Right.

Right.

And the same with other varieties.

And again, this is a good year for just kind of laying the groundwork, especially

if you have a lot of determination, hopefully a lot of patience and that you want to just

go ahead, try different things, see what works, see what sticks and then make changes.

And the thing is, is that Joey and I have been doing this for a combination of however

many years, right?

Well, over 50, well, 50 years, we've been in the two of us, yeah.

And you know, we still make mistakes, we still have learned an experience.

We don't know everything.

We still are like, okay, we're never going to try to grow that again.

So just keep that in mind, it's a continual learning experience and that to me is like

what's so fun about gardening because you always get like something different and it's

fun.

All right.

Here's a canning question for you.

I have canning lids that are around three years old.

Are they still good?

I know they have a rubber gasket, does that go bad or should I buy new canning lids this

year?

They should be fine, I think it's like five years, they say usually and you can always,

you could always, I don't want to say try them after five years.

I wouldn't do that.

Well, you can, if you open up and you, you can take your fingernail and kind of press

on that rubber gasket and you can tell if it's dried out or if you press on it and you're

finger and it retracts and it fills the gap back in.

That's not, you know, I mean, that's not scientific, university of ex, you know, but that's

a way to determine whether or not that is as a high probability of sealing.

I don't think they have dates on them.

I mean, I've gone to grocery stores and I've like, on the box it does.

Right.

I think they do.

But I've seen like where you go to grocery store and you pick up the canny lids and

you have to like blow the dust off of them.

So I three years is fine.

Bring the canny lids back out.

It's that time, Bill, you know, that, you know, that's how it feels.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

All right.

How do you guys determine which seedling to thin out in your seed starting trays?

I just picked the best looking one.

Yeah.

That's going to be, that's, you do not pull them and what we're referring to if you're

not from Mary in a seed starting tray, let's say there's 32 cells.

One root maker, my root maker dot com and we're starting peppers.

So we're going to put two pepper seeds in each cell.

So that's 64 peppers.

Yes, there is a finagling in which you could separate them and then double your production,

you know, take the big one and move it to another tray.

It's easier to just cut the one off that is the least likely to survive or the weaker

of the two, I guess.

So when in plants, you're like, oh, I want to save it.

There's a reality of plants.

If it looks weak at the beginning, it's not like Charlotte's web where the pig is going

to be healthy and happy at the end that that there's some plants just don't survive.

So instead of pulling it out and disrupting the roots of the adjacent plant, simply take

small snips or or fingernails, scissors or pruners and snip the one off at ground level,

soil level, call it good and move on.

Yeah.

Definitely.

Bush beans or poll beans, I grew bush beans last year.

I am curious if I should try different variety or go to poll beans this year.

I would still grow bush beans, but I would try poll beans and I would do both.

If you like the type of bush beans you grew, I would stick with those.

You could try different variety if you want, but I would stick with the bush beans that

you already had success with and then if you want to try something new, I would grow

some poll beans.

I would get blue lake because blue lake are like the full proof go to and try that variety.

You might find them easier to grow, easier to harvest.

You might find that you, to me, I can't tell the difference in taste, but maybe you can.

It all depends on when you harvest it.

Now the key to bush beans is bush beans will take 40 to 60 days to reach a harvesting

state and I was always taught that they would produce for about four weeks and then shut

down.

What we learnt years ago was if you continue to harvest them on a regular basis and not

let the pods get over big and the beans in the pod get oversized, they will produce up to

a frost.

Poll beans on the other hand, they're easier to harvest because they're elevated either

on a string or a fence or some type of elevation mechanism in which they can climb up.

They'll take 70 to 80 days to reach maturity and again, you can harvest them all the way

up to frost.

In poll beans, you're only going to get green pod beans.

In bush beans, you have a choice.

You have the green pod beans.

You have a burgundy or purple bean, that bean when cooked, that pigmentation reverts

back to a green bean.

If you're trying to can purple beans, that doesn't work.

It's not a genetic modification.

It's just the way the plant works.

You have yellow pod beans, which that yellow pigmentation stays throughout the harvesting

cooking, canning, eating processes.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.

Yeah, that's good, yeah.

Keep that in mind.

Hey.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.

Keep that in mind.