Episode 1546: Seg 4 of S10E9 Gardening Q&A Part 15 The Gardening with Joey and Holly Radio Show

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Question and answer time.

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I have bad light on my tomatoes.

I have had bad light on my tomatoes the past few years.

What can I do differently?

So it depends on what kind of blights.

But early blights, so there's different kinds of blights.

Yes.

Early blight spores are the originate from infected plant debris

left in the soil from previous seasons as well as

infested seeds and then volunteer slash pepped potatoes slash

tomato plants and those spores over winter in the soil

and are spread via wind, splashing rain, irrigation and tools.

So for early blight, a couple of things you can do is you want to make sure that

you are for any any reason.

You need to make sure that you are clean.

If you have any sort of garden problem,

clean your tools at the end of the garden season and then

splashing rain, things like that irrigation mulch.

Well, right, right.

When you refer to splashing rain, when you plant your tomatoes,

you want to create a barrier between the soil and the plant.

And you can get blight on other plants, but we're focusing on tomato

specifically in this question.

So your plant, your tomato's first step is you use a little

whole grain cornmeal.

This has a beneficial bacteria called trichodermin in it that

fights the bad bacteria in the soil.

Now this, we started doing this Bob Webster,

master gardener and radio garden talk radio host out of the central Texas area.

We found him online and he said, this is what you do.

And we did that.

And it has worked.

It has reduced our tomato early blight by like 85 to 95%.

And we've done seminars and we've talked at libraries and exposed.

And people came up to, you know, we explain this to them.

And they come back to next year and said, we thought you were crazy,

but we did it and absolutely changed how we garden.

It does sound a little crazy.

So it's got to be yellow whole grain cornmeal.

You can just get name brand or whatever.

It's going to be a little expensive, but you're going to have tomatoes all

the way up to the day of frost.

So you put the whole grain cornmeal one handful just sprinkling on around the

plant, cover the soil with some type of mulch, shredded leaves,

shredded paper, chemical-free seed-free grass clippings,

straw, whatever it is, create that barrier.

And step three, as the plant grows, whether on a floor to weave

or on a cage, continue to trim the lower six to eight inches up the stock

of the foliage, of the limbs, making that, making a open cavity at the bottom.

And then any limbs from the canopy that are starting to hang down

that could potentially get some splash up, go ahead and trim those as well.

If you do detect early blight on your plant, you can remove up to 25%

of the plant leaves in order to get rid of that blight off the plant.

Otherwise, it's progressively going to work up the plant.

And by the end of the season, you're going to have a plant with no leaves.

That's dead with fruit that's partially ripe.

There you go.

All right, first time indoor seed soar for me.

I started flower seeds this past week, and my containers have a lot of condensation on them.

My air vents on the lids are completely closed, asking

for information on what I should do.

I need to open them or just dump the condensation off the lid.

I was careful to squeeze out as much water out of the seed soil starting mix

as possible.

Advice would be appreciated.

Thank you very much.

Sounds like you're making your little ecosystem terrarium there.

Which isn't a problem, but it's not good because you're going to have mold.

Yeah, you definitely know how to mold.

So if you do need to keep the lids on for some reason,

I would prop them, vent them, whatever you can do, you know,

kind of offset them so that you can get some air underneath those lids.

If you can remove them, then remove them.

And then after the seeds germinate, you do want to remove the covers completely.

And then you can run a fan for half a day, like four hours a day for air circulation,

and just be careful with watering.

The goal is not to keep as much moisture on the seeds or in the container,

because if you do, yes, we need moisture next to the seed in order for it to germinate.

However, if it's a swampy bog, that's not going to be any good either,

because soil has to have a certain amount of oxygen in it.

And yes, you want moisture, but you want some circulation, like in nature.

Yeah, you're going to get rain, but then the sun's going to come out,

the wind's going to blow.

There's going to be circulation of air and everything.

So keep that in mind, and you will do quite well.

I have a sort of a trash area of the yard where I want to plant pumpkins.

I feel like I saw one time online that you can plant seeds inside of a bag of soil.

Would that work, or mound a big pile of soil, and then try growing them in that?

I find that's relatable about the trash area.

I feel like we all have a trash area in our backyard.

I feel like that's probably a common thing more than people realize.

You can actually do this.

We've talked in past weeks about when we buy compost.

We put a big mound somewhere at a store.

Yeah.

We've thrown seeds in there.

We've threw Jardel pumpkins in there.

We've thrown a Hubbard squash in there.

Though it wasn't humongous, it's still vined and produced.

Okay, so you can take a big soil, a mound of soil, whatever you decide to do.

But the thing is to keep in mind is that pumpkins are vines.

So it is going to vine beyond wherever this trash area is.

Well, it depends on how big the trash area is.

It might be what you need.

It might vine in your trash area.

But just keep that in mind.

You've got a pumpkin growing out of the trunk of a rusty car.

The pumpkins are going to vine.

There's no rhyme or reason to their vines.

50 to 80 square feet in some varieties.

So yes, you can absolutely grow in a mound of soil.

But then they are going to make kind of a bigger footprint as they vine out and grow.

But it's really cool to grow your pumpkins.

My sister does this almost every year.

She grows pumpkins and then they carve them.

We don't have that much success with pumpkins ourselves.

But it's cool that they do it.

So I say go for it.

And we've got videos on our parent website, the Wisconsin vegetable gardener dot com.

We took bags of compost.

There was like two cubic footbed of compost and sat them vertically.

Which made the bag about half full and then rolled cut the top off and then rolled the sides down.

And I'm trying to remember we didn't grow.

I think we grew a pumpkin or some type of squash.

We didn't grow watermelon.

That's clashed.

Yeah, because we grew watermelon out of the straw bell one year.

And that was successful.

But yeah, you can certainly do this.

And it's a great way to take an area that's not really good.

Now the other method is straw bell.

If she doesn't want to mound the soil up or buy extra soil, get a couple of straw bells.

Add more trash to the trash here.

But the straw bells would work like your sister.

We did straw bell gardening in her backyard.

And the whole backyard was butternut squash and spaghetti squash and pumpkins.

It was just a vine jungle all because they were growing out of some straw bells.

And we grew them one out of a conventional normal size agricultural shrubba.

And then it was like a dwarf straw bell or what I think they call a pony bell.

It was like a quarter of the size.

And we grew phenomenal out of that as well.

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