Episode 1560: Seg 3 of S10E12 Guest Charlie Nardozzi - The Gardening with Joey and Holly Radio Show

Welcome back to the Guardian with Join Holly Radio show.

Happy to have you along.

Charles Nardosi will be with us,

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Holly, let's go to the hotline and bring in our gas for this week.

Charlie Nardosi is a regional Emmy award-winning nationally recognized

garden writer speaker radio and television personality.

He has worked for more than 30 years bringing expert gardening information to

home gardeners through radio television talks tours online and the printed

page. Charlie delights in making gardening

information simple, easy fun and accessible to

everyone. Welcome to the program Charlie.

Well, it's nice to be here. Thank you for having me on your show.

Well, thank you for taking etching a little time out of your busy schedule.

Not only to join Holly myself but all of her listeners and educating us in

some areas that we may not be fluent on.

I'll start with this. What is your best tip for getting the spring vegetable garden started?

Everybody's got these little neatness that know what is what is the best way to

to make a move and do it right the first time?

Well, I think the first thing especially this year because in the mid-west end

in northeast where I am we've had a kind of a brutal winter and as soon as you get

signs of spring everyone jumps out there and wants to start planting things but

you should really kind of just slow it down. It's still march and take a look at

what things you need to be putting in, what things you need to be

looking at purchasing, what things you need to be maybe starting from seed

and really have a plan. That's I think the one thing that most

beginning especially vegetable gardeners don't do they kind of think

wake up on a Friday and say oh I think I'll plant a vegetable garden this weekend

and they don't really come up with a plan and how to do that. So I think probably the best tip to be

to do is to have a plan no one you're going to be putting things in and stick with it regardless

of what weather it comes at you and you'll see that it'll actually reward you with a really

healthy garden. And you bring up a good point oh it's four days of 75 degree weather

but you didn't look at the 15 day forecast you're going to get snow three to six inches in a week

so you know and you move all this stuff around you've got good bugs and bad bugs on this soil

that still needs to overwinter a few more weeks before you start cleaning the garden out and get

ready to plant. Exactly don't want to rush the season and march as you know it can be like that

very fickle it can be beautiful one day and I'll blizzard the next day so be patient with it

have a plan and kind of work from that and you'll actually see that by being patient you'll

be able to grow things at the right time and they'll grow much better and much healthier.

Definitely. So what is something you learn later on in your garden experience?

You wish you would have known much much sooner. Well I think because my gardening experience

goes back decades now which is hard to believe actually I think what I wish I knew earlier that I

learned later on would be being able to garden more in tune with nature and being able to really

understand what happens when you turn the soil or add fertilizers to the soil or pesticides

to the soil and what happens if you kind of let nature take the lead on how you're gardening and

don't be so much thinking that I'm going to control it all I'm going to make it just perfect

just this one way but really garden more in tune with nature not only is it better ecologically

for your whole garden and your whole yard it's better for the plants you'll get more productive

plants and healthier plants and it's better for you you won't get stressed out so much when things

don't go your way or think don't go well you think they're they're supposed to go so just

being a little more relaxed around the garden and kind of watching and observing and

following the cues that nature gives us can really help you become a better vegetable gardener.

Yeah you bring up two key words stress and pesticides people think that you know you have to use

some kind of pesticides in order to have a pristine garden and people get stressed because oh I

got weeds or I need to do this you're not trying to present your garden on the cover of a magazine

or a PBS program it's okay it's supposed to be a detachment from society it's supposed to be

fun you're not making it fun and also the chemical aspect it's okay to have some bad bugs too you

gotta have a balance. Right exactly and you're not trying to be like a professional farmer or an

orchardist who's going to have like these perfect blemish-free fruits and vegetables there's no

need for that and the vegetables and fruits will taste just as good if they have a few blemishes on

them if they're a little deformed they'll still be good and they'll still enjoy them and when

you cut them up and you throw them in a salad or you cook with them you'll never even know

they were blemish they're just very tasty fruits and vegetables. Now you spoke about being in the

gardening world and being a gardener for decades how did you get started I believe you were

following what was your your Italian grandfather around the garden is that how it all began?

That is how it all began in Connecticut my Italian grandparents had a farm there and each time

one of their kids got married they gave them a piece of land on the farm to build their house so I

grew up with all my aunts and uncles and cousins up and down the road and the the farm in the

background so it was the Italian American enclave and every spring he wouldn't my grandfather would

come up to my mother's house and would tell the soil and we would plant the vegetable garden

there and that's when my mom wouldn't have us boys go out meet my two brothers and we go pick the

rocks and she'd go plant all the plants and that's kind of how it got started I wasn't really

that excited about it as a kid of course I mean like many kids but we did it and but we also had

that atmosphere of gardening all around my grandfather had a huge big garden and of course he raised

animals and had other things going on too in his what we call now a diversified farm so it kind

of got into my blood there and then when I started thinking about what to do professionally and

going to school it just kind of came back that I love being out in nature and I also love gardening

and growing things and so that's kind of where it started and where it's continued my whole career

actually and we asked that question you know how do you get some people found later on life and

other people grew up with it and knew nothing else but that and they turns that you know that

memory into an occupation and a career yes exactly and that's kind of what happened for me I

tell people how my career is gone and they're kind of amazed that I haven't shifted around and

bounced around different jobs and different careers it's all been around the world of gardening

and it's been great because I've been able to expand and write books and do TV and radio shows

and take trips and do all kinds of things but it's all about gardens and plants and that's really

the basis of my career and what I've been doing for work so let's let's talk about your newest book

the continuous vegetable garden what can our listeners look forward to when they pick up a

copy and what can they learn from it yeah the continuous vegetable garden book is one that I've

been kind of doing parts of it for years and it was an opportunity to put all of the different

types of techniques I've been doing under one cover so to speak and that's what I've done with

this book and the hope is that you'll be able to be a continuous vegetable gardener and what that

means is that instead of having that boom and bust cycle that I think all of us grew up with I know

with my mom too she would plant everything around memorial day and then everything would mature

depending on the plants maybe a month or two later and then you have nothing after that instead of

having that kind of boom and bust cycle this is a way to actually garden so that you're out in the

garden on a regular basis I'm assuming you like to garden you want to be outside you want to be

around plants but you don't have to be out there for hours a day it could be a 10 15 minutes stretch

a day where you plant something you weed something you water something you move something around

and continue a vegetable garden by using techniques like succession planting inter planting and

companion planting you're able to grow small amounts of food right through the growing season so

you have it continuously fresh fruit from the garden continuously and I do the same thing I have

a chapter on doing that with fruit too how to have a continuous fruit garden as well and the idea

behind that is that you're not overwhelmed with it you have fresh vegetables there it's easier on

the soil it's easier on you and also we use techniques in the book that's going to help you

garden more in tomb with nature so for example no dig gardening that we've alluded to already that's

a great technique for not having to turn till or dig the soil so you preserve the microbes in the

soil and the soil is healthier and the plants of course will be healthier in return but there's

also other things I have chapters on growing perennial vegetables so you don't have to work so hard

they come back here after year all you have to do is harvest them and just take care of them a

little bit during the growing season or self-sowing vegetables once that naturally go to seed drop

their seed and then the next year they'll grow back up again even in a northern climate so you

don't have to buy the seed and you don't have to sow the seed and guess when to plant it it's just

going to come up when it naturally is the perfect time for it to grow so there's sections in this

whole book and as well as a whole a whole chapter on designs too and illustrated designs where I

show you step by step what your garden will look like in the spring in the summer and the fall

using these techniques so you can get an idea of just going into the garden with this book and

saying okay this is what we're planting now and a month or two this is what we're going to do

and a month or two after that this is what we'll do and we'll have that continuous

succession of plants growing right through the season. Now you brought up a term no dig vegetable

garden for some people who are listening they grew up in a world where it was religious

to their parents or they tilled weekly or monthly and you couldn't garden without tilling the soil

can you dive in a little bit more to how and why someone may want to go that route or at

least partially go that route to explore the benefits of it. Yeah so what we found you know this

is the same as motel agriculture you probably have heard of and there's a lot of lasagna gardening

a lot of different names for it but it's becoming more and more popular because not only is it a

better way to garden and tune with nature but it's a lot easier on us gardeners as far as the work

you have to do and the rewards you get for that work so the idea of course is to not turn or

till the soil because you don't want to destroy those microbial networks or in the soil in one

table spoon of soil there could be over four billion microbes fungi bacteria viruses and what they're

doing in there is creating these networks that transfer water and nutrients between plants

every time you tell it you break that up and the soil has to recreate it over and over again

so the idea with no dig is to leave it be let it be that way and then build healthy soil on top of

whatever your native soil is and that's where the lasagna gardening comes in where you add layers

of organic materials such as hay or straw chopped leaves grass clippings from untreated lawns

and then eventually you top the whole thing with compost and then you literally plant right

into the compost whatever transplants or seeds you're growing and what happens is all that material

breaks down but you're still in contact with the native soil so you're getting some of the benefits

of whatever soil that is too but you don't get the weed seeds because everything is kind of buried

you don't have to water as much because you have high organic material material holding the water

in the soil and you can plant things closer together and do what we call inter planting

so using these techniques of no dig gardening you can actually grow a healthier garden that's

less work than what you normally would have and to maintain it all you're going to do is just

chop down the plants that are there if they're healthy so say you had a bean crop is really healthy

that a pulling it out we don't do that we chop it down with a hedge trimmer and just drop it there

and leave it there let it decompose a little bit put a layer of compost over the top plant your

next crop after that or if it's winter time you can just chop it and leave it over winter

or if it's diseased you remove the plant and then you put bring some organic materials into

protect the soil because another tenant of no dig is to always have something covering your soil

12 months of the year whether it be plants or organic matter you want to protect that soil

fantastic so what are some tips for newer gardeners who may be in their first seasons of gardening

that can help them get them on the right track yeah if you're just starting out I always recommend

that people start out small you know don't go out and and create five six seven raised beds or

something start with one simple raised bed and raise beds are nice because you elevate the soil

you can bring in some fresh soil so again you're not really dependent on what the native soil is

like so start with that start with maybe one bed think about the things you really like to eat

because you always want to grow something you want to eat and if if a lot of those plants are

available as transplants start with that you know start with a couple tomato plants a couple

pepper plants a couple broccoli plants whatever it is it's much easier to start with a seedling versus

seed if you do want to do seeds start with easy plants like bush beans sprinkling those around

or lettuces and arugula some of the leafy greens the Swiss chard those are the kind of plants

that are give you big rewards really quickly and the whole idea is to grow things you like

grow small quantity of them take good care of that one bed and be successful that's the key if

you can be successful the first year then you'll gain the confidence to expand in following years

and don't stress about it this is not a life or death this is a hobby fun hobby to get your hands

in the soil exactly and once you get hooked on it by eating fresh vegetables herbs and fruits from

your own yard then you'll just kind of this follow your lead as far as where your passion is going

well Charles we greatly appreciate the time the the information you share with Holly myself and

all of our listeners how can people find more about you find your podcast find your radio show

your radio shows and your books yeah so it's the easiest way to find out about where I am and what I

do is going to my website at gardeningwithcharlie.com gardeningwithcharlie.com and that'll talk all about

on the website there's all articles podcast videos there's webinars that I've done it talks about

the radio shows that I do and of course the trips I do internationally to different gardens

around the world. Would Charles Charlie thank you so much for helping us understand more about

how to be better gardeners and if you're a new gardener how to help them out as well.

Well you're very welcome and thanks for having me on the show.