Book & Plow Farm

Click to open the transcript

- [Maida] I use she, her pronouns, and I am the manager at Book and Plow Farm at Amherst College, and I'm really excited to be here with the farm team and alumni office to talk to you about gardening. Just two logistical things. Before we start, we are recording this webinar so that we can share out with folks later and other people who couldn't attend. That's also a reminder for us, Kaylee and Julia. And yeah. I'm really excited to talk about gardening. So if you don't know, Book and Plow is this farm that Amherst College has. We are in our ninth growing season, and our mission is threefold. We work to engage students in productive and collaborative farm labor and experiences. We provide quality produce to Amherst College dining and the surrounding community. And we offer people a space on campus to connect with food, land, and each other. And just a snapshot of what we do at the farm, today we had a lot going on. We were testing out our tractor that was recently repaired, building some cabinets. Julia was working with the work-study crew to mulch our pick your own garden. Kaylee was giving a great talk to a geology class about the importance of microbes and soil health and climate mitigation. So we're really happy to be here with you all as well. And I want to thank the alumni office and Kim and Alina for joining us. And Kaylee and Julia and I will be taking turns giving this presentation today. So I'm just going to share my screen real quick, and then tell you a few more things. At the bottom of your screen in Zoom or at the top depending on where your little toolbar is, there's a Q&A function. That's how you can communicate with us. We'll be taking and we can look at your questions throughout the course of the workshop. We may not get to it immediately in the moment, but we're going to leave a lot of time at the end to try to go through as many questions as we can. And for anything we don't cover and also for more information on what we're talking about, we'll follow up later this week, probably tomorrow, but possibly the day after with a sheet of resources, links to some websites we referred to, or some images so that you can also follow along. And at the end, we're also including our contact information. So you can just stay in touch with us as your gardening season progresses. And great. I think we're going to start with a little poll. At Book and Plow Farm, it's a tradition that when new folks come up to the farm who haven't met each other, we try to do some kind of introduction. So I'll have you answer these questions just so we can kind of see what kind of group we're working with. So one, how do you plan to grow your garden? This is like choose all that might apply or multiple choice questions. Choose all that apply. Question two is what is your gardening experience level? Are you new or are you getting into it? Are you seasoned? And then finally, what do you find stressful about gardening or the thought of gardening? So I'll pause for a moment so you can answer those questions. And then in full candor, I have no idea how to see the results. So it may remain a mystery for the moment. I will tell you though while we're waiting that Kaylee, Julia and I have a combined over 20 years of farming experience. We've been gardening for significantly less amount of time, but we find that there's a lot of overlap in the practices that we try to do at Book and Plow, and what gardeners can tackle at home as well. Great. We've got 87% of participants who have voted so far. And yeah, we can share those results now. Wow. Okay, excellent. So we've got a combination of container, raised bed and ground gardening. Most of us have gardened a little bit, and we're worried about everything, which is understandable, but really want to know when to plant and timing. So great. I'm going to pass the speaking portion off to Julia for now. Feel free to introduce yourself as you start.

- Awesome. Hi everyone. I'm Julia. I work at the farm. I'm also an alum of Amherst class of 2019, and we'll just get started with our presentation. Kind of the first place where you want to start is figuring out where you want to garden. The best way to know this is by knowing the ideal conditions that plants are going to want. So we kind of know that plants are going to want six hours of direct or full sunlight per day. And that's especially if you're growing something that you're going to want to take or harvest the roots or the fruit of. So tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, things like that. You can get away with having six hours of, you know, filtered sunlight if you are growing things that you're going to want the leaves or the roots of. So think lettuce, kale, carrots, beets, but you don't really want less sun than that. Your plants are going to kind of struggle to grow and produce. Some other things to keep in mind is you're going to want a spot that's going to have good water drainage and air circulation, easy to get to from your home. You want access to water, and we find it really helpful if you can figure out the history of the space. It'll help you get an idea of what you're going to expect from just working in your space. So it'll give you insight into whether you should be worried about pollutants or if something had been demolished there, you might run into some glass as you're working in your, you know, soil. So it's really helpful to get to know that information. And if something concerning pops up as you're doing that, looking into the history of this space, we really recommend a soil test, or if you're not really sure at all, the history of the space, it's also a great idea to do a soil test. And Kaylee will talk a little bit about those logistics in just a moment. If we could move to the next slide, that would be awesome. So if you are looking at those ideal conditions and thinking, I don't really have any of that, or you are in a city doing or want to garden in your patio or balcony, there is container gardening for you. It can be relatively simple, really anything that can hold soil and drain out water can be a container for your garden. Something that we really recommend, or something we like to recommend is getting five-gallon buckets from Home Depot or Lowe's, drilling some holes in the bottom for drainage, and then adding a small layer of sand or rocks and filling the rest up with compost or potting soil. And that's like a pretty cheap and easy way to just get started into container gardening. But you can also make use of things that you have laying at home. We've heard of people using like kiddie pools or sandboxes, just making sure that you're drilling at the bottom of those things so water can get out. A big question we get about container gardening is just knowing what size of container you're going to want for the that you want to grow. So our general rule of thumb is think about the size of the plant above ground, and imagine that it is about a one-to-one ratio in terms of size below ground. So as you're picking out, you know, the container for your tomato plant, you're going to want that to be quite a bit larger than something for a lettuce plant. And if you are gardening in the city or on your patio, you know that space is a big consideration. So some ways to make the most out of your space is by growing multiple plants inside of your container as you can kind of see in these examples that we have here. It doesn't work well with every type of plant that you might want to plant. So taking a little look at what spacing, the veggies or flowers or herbs you want, what they're going to want basically, and making assessments on how many things you can fit inside of your container from there. Another consideration is succession planting. So taking a look at the days to maturity for the different veggies that you want to grow. If you have a relatively short period of time for certain crops that you're interested in, you can kind of stagger them. So an example might be doing a spring arugula, which might take around like 20 to 30 days to be ready for you to harvest. Harvest that, seed some carrots which might take 40 to 50 days to be ready. Harvest those and then do your fall bok choy, which might take around 40 days to be mature. So that's a really great way to just get three seasons worth of things out of one container. And with that, I'm just going to pass it over to Kaylee who will have some specific stuff for folks growing in ground.

- Awesome. Hi, folks. I'm Kaylee. I use she, her pronouns, and I work at the farm. I saw that some folks are asking if we can see you. We can not see you. So feel free to relax and just hang out. Okay, cool. So I'm going to talk about if you have a yard that does fulfill all the criteria that Julia was just mentioning. You might want to just grow your plants in the ground. The first thing that you're going to want to do if you're growing in your yard is to take a soil sample and get your soil tested. I'm not going to go too much into the details of that because there are really good resources on the UMass Extension website, which we will link in that document we're going to send you later with instructions on how to take a good soil sample and how to even like mail it to them. So that's the first step. It's really important to do that so that you're not guessing. I think it's really helpful to kind of gauge how much fertilizer or what kind of fertilizer you might want to add, and then also as Julia was mentioning, just making sure there's no contamination of wet is really the big one in your soil. So if we can go to the next slide, we have an example of a soil test, because step number two is interpret your soil tests. So this is pretty much what it's going to look like. There's a lot of numbers there that you don't necessarily need to look at. I recommend looking at the aluminum and lead kind of in the bottom, making sure that those are within the right range. Aluminum can kind of make it hard for your plants to grow if there's too much of it there, and lead, obviously, you don't want to be growing in soil with lead in it. A soil test is really interesting. We do them every year on the farm. You don't have to do that every year in a garden, but you can if you want to, we kind of see it as like a checkup on our soil to see how good it's doing and yeah. How we've been taking care of it. The really important part of a soil test is that bottom graph that you can see, and that I think is the most useful part. It's pretty easy to understand. They test your soil with a scanning electron microscope, and they see what's in it and use their knowledge about how plants grow to tell you where on the range you fall. If you take a soil test from your yard and you get it tested and it's all very low, that's totally fine and normal. This is a soil sample from our farm fields that we have been adding fertilizer to for the past couple of years. So that's why we are mostly in the optimum range. And I will say that I really recommend you take a soil test. If you do that, and you have trouble interpreting your soil test, feel free to email us because we do like looking at them. We only get to look at for a year. So it's really nice to kind of see what's going on in other people's yards. Okay. So once you take your soil test and you interpret it, the next step is to make your garden. And if you're going to be turning your yard where your grass is growing into a garden, the biggest thing that you want to make sure that you do is to kill the grass. On the farm, we know that grass is the most frustrating weed to kill. It's a very resilient, and it's very hard to pull out when it's growing around your plants. So the key to having an in-ground garden be successful and not super frustrating is to make sure when you're establishing it that you kill your grass. So the first thing that you can do, it's kind of a container, it's kind of in your yard, is a wooden raised bed, or any kind of raised bed. And there's tons of tutorials online on how to build those. But it's just what it sounds like. You're just going to make a box, and then some folks will put down a layer of plastic sheeting or something. We don't recommend that unless you have lead contamination as we have mentioned. But you don't need to do that to kill the grass. Once you build your box and you fill that with compost and topsoil for several inches, that is going to prevent the grass from photosynthesizing, and over time, it will just die and break down. So that's pretty simple. Then if you're going to be just growing like in your actual ground, you've got a couple options on how to make your garden. The first option is a relatively hands-off option, but it takes a lot of time. So that is using a tarp. It's called tarping, using a tarp. We use six-mil plastic that is black on one side and white on the other. You could also use like a really heavy tarp. You don't want to use something that's going to let light through 'cause again, keeping the grass from photosynthesizing is what we are doing. You're going to take your tarp. However big you want your garden, you're going to find a tarp that big or you could use multiple, and you're going to pin it down really, really well with like a lot of rocks. We use straw bales sometimes. You're going to have it in place either from the spring or summer, all the way through the summer, through the fall, through the winter, back to the spring again. So you just really want to make sure that it's not going to blow away while it's sitting there for that long. And all that's doing is keeping the grass from photosynthesizing. It kind of heats the soil up underneath a little bit. It can germinate weed seeds, and then they don't get to photosynthesize either, and then they will die. It's a technique that is really gaining popularity over the past couple of years because it's a really cool, no-tail, low-tech way to get bare ground. So that's the first one. If you want to get started right away, and you don't have a tarp, or you just want to get started right away, you've got two options. You can either use a rototiller if you have one, or a neighbor has one, or someone in your neighborhood can come and rototill your garden. That is a really fast way of establishing your garden. We do recommend against doing it every year. I know that's like a pretty common gardening thing to get in there and rototill your garden in the spring. But it's not super necessary, and it also is pretty detrimental to the life in the soil to work that much air and stir everything up like that. So once is fine just to get your garden established, I would say, let it sit for a couple of days, go in and find the chunks of grass that are still there, and shock them out of your garden so they don't re-root and keep growing. But yeah, a rototiller is a fine option once. And then the last option is if you want a garden really soon, and you've got a shovel and some elbow grease, it's called double digging. And we have an example on this slide. What you're going to basically do is use your shovel to cut a square out of your sod. Scoop that out and move it to the side. You're going to come back to the hole that you just made. You're going to loosen that soil, and then you're going to move right next door, make another square and you're going to invert it so that the sod or the grass is buried with that soil, and that's going to do the same thing of preventing it from photosynthesizing, helping it break down. If you're going to double-dig your garden, I would say, do the whole thing. Let it sit for a little while. Maybe you could go back in and kind of chunk it up a little bit with your shovel. I would let it sit for at least a week so that you make sure that the grass is really dead before you go and start putting your plants into it. So the last step is adding amendments to your garden once you have it established. If you take a soil test, they will make recommendations on how much fertilizer to add. It's really important to add fertilizer, not just compost to your garden, especially for fruiting crops like tomatoes or things that are just producing so much compost isn't really going to be able to give them enough nutrients to make those fruits for you to enjoy. And then the last step; plant, observe, and enjoy. I just want to say if all of that sounded very complicated and confusing and all you do is dig up a little dirt, add a little bit of compost, plant a seed, and tend to it, you will get something out of bed. And that is kind of the whole point is that gardening it feels good and feels fun and enjoyable. So there's always time to really geek out about it later. If it feels overwhelming, just do what feels good. And next I think is Maida.

- Hello. This is Maida. I'm back to talk about variety selection. So you have figured out with Julia's help where you may have sunlight, and if you're going container and ground route. You've figured out how to prep your soil if you're in ground, what kind of soil you're working with, added some fertilizer, and now you get to pick what you're going to grow. So the most important thing is to grow what you want to eat. To reiterate what Kaylee just said, try something and see how it goes. This should be a fun experiment, and the food is an important side effect of that or benefit to that experiment. Here's some considerations that we make when we're picking crop types. One is the traits of the variety such as what it looks like, how it tastes, if it's spicy, if it has thick or thin skin. Another one is days to maturity, and this is how long it takes to go from seed to harvest. And as Julia mentioned, days to maturity is important to note for succession planting planning, and Kaylee will also talk about how days to maturity helps you to determine if you should buy seeds themselves to seed in the ground, or if you should buy plant starts. And then pest and disease resistance is another important characteristic that we look at in variety selections as there's a whole host of fungal and bacterial diseases and pests that affect veggie crops here in Massachusetts. And I'm sure if you're living in other parts of the country or the world, similarly, there's pests that want to eat your veggies too. And the last two things on this list are while you're looking at the varieties, might as well take note of the seeding and planting specs, like just the information about how far apart to see things, how deep, et cetera, and then also any notes about harvest. And that's all just good to pay attention to for best results from the food you're planting. I will say that at Book and Plow, once we determine the type of crop we want, like red slicing tomatoes, bell peppers, or carrots, our next most important consideration is that pest and disease resistance. We want to minimize use of organic pesticide and manage to get a crop, and we're working on that larger scale. The neat thing about the... So the image on this slide is actually a page from the Johnny's seed catalog. So also Book and Plow, we purchase most of the seeds we use from Johnny's and from Fedco, and they are two seed companies based in Maine, and they're great. And even if you weren't buying seeds or starts from them, they have a lot of information. So in this page on cucumbers, you can see all of that seeding, harvest storage, information in that green column on the left in that box. And then if you look at the two varieties, you get a ton of information about them. So looking at Olympian, they advertise it as the best combination of flavor, yield and appearance. It also tells you that it is an F1 hybrid which we'll talk about, and that it takes 52 days to maturity. It lists also a code of the diseases it's resistant to and we're especially concerned with powdery mildew and cues. And then this one also has a little key image that tells us we can trellis it. So you get a lot of information from these catalogs that can help you make your decisions. We will also say that your neighbors who are gardeners or farmers in the area would also probably have really good advice about varieties that do well in your climate. So there are great people to look for as well. And I'll just add that Johnny's and Fedco are based in Maine. So we know they're great for Northeast crops, but people buy from them from all around the country. Some of our favorite varieties that I'll tell you right off the bat, we love Market More slicing cucumbers, Carmen peppers, which are red bull's horn type, we also love delicata winter squash, and then we're working on this new, as our second year growing, this new crop called the mara which is an Ethiopian kale featured in our newsletter in the past. And then we choose a curly kale like winter boar that is cold-tolerant to keep us harvesting in the winter. And one more point, while you're picking varieties, if you're interested in saving seeds, then you have to make sure you're picking from open pollinated or heirloom varieties as opposed to hybrid, which you cannot save. So open pollinated crops are ones that are pollinated via wind or animal or natural activity outdoors, and their output is true to their seed parents. So if they're cross of something or if they're open-pollinated, the fruit that they bear, if you save those seeds will bear the same fruit that you saved it from. That's very different from hybrid seeds, which are crossed, either two different species of a plant or two different varieties of the same species, and this also can occur naturally, but it also occurs via human intervention. So if you tried to save a hybrid seed, it probably would not reflect. Like you'd get a surprise. It would not reflect the crop you saved it from as truly. An F1 hybrid just refers to the first generation of an intentional cross. And those are great because they have hybrid vigor. So they're usually really productive. And I will say that the seeds that we tend to save very easily are winter squash, tomatoes, peppers, and this year we're trying to save flower seeds with some success. So I'm going to pass this on down to Kaylee again for when to plant things

- Amazing. Okay. So probably one of the most common questions we get as farmers from our friends is, how do I know when to plant what? Like, how do you figure that out? And it gets pretty complicated when you're growing on many acres with many successions and things like that, but it's pretty, pretty simple. It's just a math problem. We start with our harvest date. So we start by thinking when we want to be harvesting this crop, and then we subtract the days to maturity. So how long does it take the crop to get to the harvestable state? And for us, because we have our greenhouse where we start all of our seeds, if that math problem takes us kind of earlier than the last frost, so if it took us to April or something, our last frost is typically mid-May in this area, if it took us earlier than that, we would just start those seeds in our greenhouse. But if you, I'm assuming that you all don't have greenhouses at your homes, so if you do that math and it takes you into a cold part of the year, that would be an indicator that that might be a crop that you would want to buy as a transplant. Most of our crops are transplanted between mid-May and mid-June. That's especially important for fruit and crops as we keep talking about the tomatoes. I'd plant melons, winter squash, things like that. They want to have a good amount of time to grow in that like sunshine before they start making their fruits. There are some crops where that simple math problem doesn't totally work. Excuse me. Some crops in the brassica family like arugula, radishes, turnips, and bok choy, they don't really like the heat of summer. They get really bitter or spicy, and then they kind of go to seed very quickly before you can actually harvest them. So those crops, I think, we have a pretty short days to maturity, and we see those in the spring and in the fall when it's a little bit cooler. So we just skip that middle part of the year, and we're still able to get those crops growing. Another question we get is often about, like when would you put seeds directly into the ground? What crops like that, and what crops would prefer to be transplanted? A lot of our root crops, the crops that we're consuming their root of like a turnip, a carrot, a beet, those sorts of things, those all want to go right into the ground. Because we're eating the root, it doesn't, I don't know. It doesn't do super well with getting seated in a greenhouse and then transplanted. A lot of the fruit fruiting crops like tomatoes and eggplant, those are ones that we start in the greenhouse because of the timing, but also they do really well having like a big robust transplant that we can then put right into the ground. We're able to kill weeds before you put them into the ground to kind of give them a leg up. And then some crops don't really care. They can kind of go either way. Things like zucchini, corn, there's probably some others that I'm not thinking of, but those crops can either be transplanted as a transplant or put directly into the ground. The thing you want to think about is if you're putting a zucchini seed right into the ground, it's just going to take longer, and you might have more of a problem with weeds if you choose to direct seed versus transplanting. And then the last thing I'll say is if you are buying transplants or you're looking for transplants, we would recommend going to like a small local garden center or even a farmer's market. Oftentimes in the spring, farmers will sell transplants as a way to get some influx of cash before they have a lot of vegetables to sell. And that's a really good bet that if your farmer is selling the transplant, it's a great time to plant that crop in your area. If you go to a bigger box store, they're going to be selling pepper plants like past August, and that's a really bad time to be planting peppers if you want to get a crop out of it. So yeah. Again, if you want to take the guesswork out, just go support a local farmer, buy some transplants from them, and all that map has kind of done for you. And if you like math, or you just want to figure it out yourself, you can just do a little math problem and figure it out. That makes sense.

- Awesome. So once you're kind of out of this planning phase of your garden, it's time to get started and start planting. So these are just a couple notes on all the things that will kind of come up for you as you're tending to your cart. So firstly, if you're using organic fertilizer, that tends to take a little bit longer for the nutrients to become available in the soil. So we really recommend spreading your fertilizer about a week in advance of your actual planting of your crop. If you forgot or didn't do it, that's totally fine. Just spread it before you plant. Planting itself is quite easy. If you're doing transplanting, you just really want to make sure that your root ball is being fully covered. So that way it won't dry out. If you are direct seeding something, really the most important thing is not to bury your seed too too deep inside of the soil. So take a look at the width of your seed, and then you're going to want to basically bury your seed about two widths worth down into the soil, and that will just kind of make sure that it has an easy time getting up and starting to photosynthesize. So once you plant, you're going to notice that weeds are going to come up pretty quickly. So kind of our word of warning is just that procrastination does not pay off in the weeding world. Weeding is so much easier when they're tiny little baby seedlings, and you can just go out there with a butter knife or with your hands, disturb the soil, and there'll be dead as opposed to pulling out huge weed later on in the season. So just keeping on top of your weeding is really the best thing you can do for your garden. These are plants that are going to be competing with your crops for nutrients, sunlight, water, and it's going to disrupt the air flow around your plants. So it's really great just to weed pretty regularly in your garden. Watering is a question that we get a lot. It's hard to know when your plants are getting enough water. We recommend watering twice a week, and doing a nice good soak each time. A good way to know what a good soak is is after a nice rain, you want to go out and feel the soil. How does the soil feel in your hands afterwards? You kind of want to replicate that each time that you are watering your garden. Each garden is going to be a little bit different. Like if you're doing a container garden, it's going to dry up a little bit quicker than maybe if you were doing like in-ground gardening. So it's going to be a little bit variable. But if you are on top of just like touching underneath the top layer of your soil and feeling whether there's moisture or not there, you're going to kind of figure out how much you're going to need to be watering. If you ever noticed that your plants are wilting, that tends to be a sign that they're not getting enough water. Before you kind of rush and water your garden, just poke your finger down under the soil and just feel what that feels like, and that's just a good like point of reference of like I don't want my garden to get to that point again. So it's just a lot of observation work there, but we recommend just doing twice a week and then making adjustments from there. And then, if hearing about weeding and watering, you're just like I want to do the least amount of that as I possibly can, mulching is going to be your best friend. We got a question about like, what are our opinions on mulching? We love it. We do it as much as we can. It's really great because it's going to cut down on your weeding time. It's going to allow weeds to germinate, and then not get enough sunlight. So they won't really grow if you do it right. You want to make sure that you're mulching thick enough where that will be the case. And then also, the mulch will kind of keeps some of the moisture in the soil, a little bit easier than if your soil was just bare and exposed to the sunlight. So some certain crops are going to need some extra care, namely tomatoes. Just good to know that if you're growing tomatoes, you'll need to trellis them, keep them off of the ground, and prune them. And certain other crops can benefit from having places to grow and crawl up. So think about beans and peas. So that's just another thing to be aware of when you're choosing the veggies that you're going to grow. And when you're growing plants that create fruits, you'll want to harvest pretty regularly. Basically, any time you notice that something is ripe on your plant, you'll want to take it off and not allow it to get overripe. When fruits get overripe on the plant, that'll send signals that basically just say, hey, we've done our job, and our job is to reproduce. So we're out. We're not going to keep producing. It's over. So making sure that your plant is not going to get to that part is going to make you get the most out of your plant. And finally, keeping a little garden journal is really helpful. There's going to be some like weird things that happen that you weren't expecting, and it's just good to have all of those like observations and information in the same place. So that way on the off-season, you can make note of that, and just learn and grow from it in the next season, do your research, and it's a really great way to just approach gardening as a learning experience. So that's just a little bit of information of how to tend to your garden. I'm going to pass it over to Maida who's going to talk a little bit about what to do when you have your veggies.

- Excellent. So if you're diligently harvesting your fruit crops, they may choose to really overwhelm you with lots of vegetables. Congratulations. When we were talking about this workshop this morning, I prefaced this slide is saying, hey, you're amazing. You grew so much food. And I just want to say we are all amazing regardless of how much food we grow. But it is a great problem to have to grow more produce than you could eat in the moment though I know it can be really stressful for gardeners. Best thing to do with an abundance of food is bringing to your neighbor and make some friends. You can just straight up knock on people's doors with a basket of veggies and see if they want to take some, leave it out in your front yard, leave a basket in the lobby of your apartment building, set up some bags, and just hand it out. If you don't want to do that, or if you've done that and you still have lots of crops to work through, there's some things you can do. Common pitfalls with like an overabundance of food is growing many tomato plants that keep producing or zucchini or having a lot of kale left before a big freeze and wanting to make sure you get all of that food to eat later. So the best ways that I know about preserving food for future consumption are, one, freezing, which is my favorite way where you just store veggies in your freezer. And the one thing I'll say about that is you want to try to avoid big blocks of frozen veggies where you need to defrost the whole thing to use a little bit for that night's meal. So what I suggest is for something like tomatoes, I will roast tomatoes and then put them in individual sandwich size bags and lay them flat in my freezer, and I can stack them like six high and pull one out for a meal at a time. If I'm also trying to freeze something like corn or chunks of hot peppers to use, I will quickly boil those really quick, and then I will spread them out on a baking tray and put that tray in the freezer, and those things all freeze individually. So then when I put them in a big baggy, I can just break those chunks off really easily and they haven't all kind of congealed together. The another option is pickling or fermenting, and both of these make your food really acidic. Pickling involves soaking food in acid liquid like vinegar. And then when you have fermented food, you are having a natural chemical reaction between the food sugar and the bacteria that's present, lactobacillus. And if you want to go on, you can can your pickles and their shelf stable, fermented food should go in the fridge. And things that I love to ferment include carrots and cabbage, and I'll pickle zucchini as quickly as I pickle cucumbers. Canning is another step that's fairly common though it is quite labor and supply intensive. But basically you are sterilizing food by cooking it and then storing it in a sterile jar and using heat to seal the cap closed so that no bacteria leaks in. Love is opening a jar of summer salsa in the winter time. And then you can dry food also either in your oven or in a food dehydrator or I'll dry chilies and herbs just by kind of hanging them in a sunny, dry, breezy place in my apartment. As with everything we've talked about, if you're preserving food, this is the time to experiment. Try new things and forgive yourself if it doesn't work out. Use your judgment just like with gardening. Use your other senses to see if the thing you tried to can actually seems like it's good to eat. And we'll include a lot of information about this in the resource page we'll send out in a couple of days. The last thing I'll say is, if you don't want to grow food that you feel pressured to eat in the moment, you could focus on growing storage crops. Good options for storage crops are things like cabbage, beets, carrots, and potatoes. And these can all be stored for months and months in your fridge or in a really cold spot. They don't want to freeze, but they want to stay cool, and have a little bit of humidity in them. Or you can grow things like winter squash, sweet potatoes, garlic, and onions, which would rather be stored in an warmer drier place. And I know that Julia recently ate a Napa cabbage that we harvested last October. So she just had it storing in her fridge. She took off a few gross leaves, but it was great. So that's what you do with the other fun part of gardening. Having food. So I'm just going to take a moment and scroll through some photos we've gotten from our friends and they're just pictures of their gardens with some good visuals of some of what we've talked about. This is a garden of a student farmer, Nishant, and this is in Maryland. And there's some really great examples of Nishant using old leaves as mulch around his veggies so that there's not weeds growing up in these pathways. And also got some pretty sweet trellising going on over here with these cukes. This is a photo of the grandpa of one of Kaylee's friends, and they had an in-ground swimming pool that they did not use. So they filled it with soil and turned it into an amazing little garden. Again, example of tomatoes trellising. And then the former energy manager at Amherst College, Matt did want to start his own seeds earlier than he could seed them outdoors. So he built a little greenhouse under a workbench in his garage, and in this closet. And so he had some kale, some broccoli rabe, some Swiss chard, basil. And what he did was have these grow lights be on a mechanism that could lift. So as the plant got taller, he could get the lights out of the way. And then this last photo is from Jerome who's worked at the front desk at the gym, and Jerome is really seasoned gardener. And what's special about this photo is Jerome's showing great example of season extension. So if you are in the Northeast or in a place that has a cold climate during the year, there are things you can do so you can eat fresh veggies during the year as well. So Jerome plants a lot of spinach and kale, and this is some lettuce too, and then he protects it through the winter with row cover. If you want to grow kale and spinach to eat in the winter, you'd still need to seed it and plant it and have it grow in September or October. So you should be seeding that in August and then planting it out in September and letting it grow. Then your job is once it's winter time, you just have to keep it alive to be able to harvest it through the winter. Kale and spinach in particular can freeze and thaw and still be edible. The only thing you need to make sure of is while the kale and spinach is frozen, make sure that the plant does not move. Don't knock it. Don't let wind blow it. If the kale or spinach moves while it's frozen, the cells will burst. And that kale or spinach will be really even sweeter than normal in the winter time because they kind of develop a sugary antifreeze to keep their cell walls from bursting while they're freezing and fine. And the last thing Jerome does is put row cover over the plants to keep them a little bit warmer, protect them from the wind, and probably protect them from any deer that may be around. And that is what we have to show you. Thank you so much for listening to our workshop. We're going to answer some questions out loud in real time now. But if you want to stay in touch, we're at BookandPlow on Instagram. You can go to this link tree to sign up for our newsletter and look at old editions. And then please feel free to email any of us. And I really want to thank Julia, this year's farm fellow, for planning this event with the alumni office, and I also want to thank Sydney Tate, our farm fellow from 20, gosh, what is time? 2019 for actually making this original sideshow. So now I'm going to put myself on mute for a sec while Kaylee and Julia start answering some questions.

- Awesome. It looks like we have a lot of questions about mulch. Julia, would you want to tackle those? There's a question about fall leaves being used as mulch, and what they should do with them. Till them into the soil or rake them off? And then any other materials you recommend use for mulching.

- Great. Awesome. So for materials, we really liked to use straw, and specifically straw rather than hay because hay can have seeds inside of it, which you can just kind of like make your weed problem worse. So specifically straw, we really like to use, but you can definitely use grass clippings or leaves that you have left over from the fall. I have also seen people use cardboard. You just have to pin it down really well. So that way it's not moving around. And in terms of having leaves and whether you should keep them in the soil, I would say yes. I don't think that you need to move them. They can just kind of break down, and add to the organic matter inside of your soil. You'll just basically want to add another layer for the next season. But it's totally fine to leave them and let them break down.

- Awesome. We have a question here about how do you safely move heavy objects in the garden like soil bags or watering cans? My biggest suggestion is don't push yourself past your abilities. If something is too heavy for you like a bag of soil or something, you can always get like a five-gallon bucket or another container and just like open it up, take some of it out, and carry the lighter thing to where you need to go. On the farm, we often use teamwork to lift stuff. So if you've got a buddy, that's always a good idea. And then just always, if you are going to lift something that's kind of like on the edge or just lifting anything, you're going to want to make sure that your back is really straight. You're going to point your butt to the ground, and you're going to tilt your eyes up to the sky as you lift something. And you want to really make sure you're lifting with your arms. And I'm pretty sure that we all carry things like carry some things and rest them on our bellies when we walk. It really helps. So we also have a lot of questions about rodents. And that is kind of a really common question that we've gotten giving this presentation. And we also don't have a ton of advice because I'm sure that we have some rodents eating some of our crops. We've certainly had groundhogs which is specifically mentioned in this question, and our answer, because we're a farm, is that we just grow on such a scale that the groundhog can have a couple of lettuce plants and then we get to have the rest of the lettuce plants. We do have trouble with deer definitely. We've used sort of different approaches in the past to keep them out of our beds. If it is not the height of the summer, we will cover our lettuce with that row cover that you saw on the side with the hoops. We'll cover our lettuce with that. The deer really like crunchy things like lettuce and radicchio. So we try to keep track of the things that are going to be at the most risk of being eaten, and cover them with that. If it's mid-summer, that's going to keep it too warm and not enough airflow. So we actually have an electrified fence, a double-layer electrified fence that is solar-powered that we use to keep deer out. But that's because we just grow a lot of lettuce, and losing all your lettuce at once is a pretty big bummer. The last time we gave this workshop, someone was recommending cinnamon on a raised bed. Apparently some rodents don't like walking on it. You can also make a foliar spray out of hot chili peppers that apparently chipmunks and squirrels don't like to eat. I think that there's a ton of advice on the internet of course, of different ways to keep your rodents out. And as with everything, it's going to be successful sometimes and not successful other times. So it's just kind of part of growing food. Maida, I'm wondering if you want to take this question. Someone is asking what are easy and low risk ways to determine if last year's seeds are still good for this growing season?

- Great. Yeah, we're working on this right now. So one thing you can know is different types of seeds are viable for longer or shorter periods of time. So tomato and pepper seeds will usually last about four years, whereas a carrot seed is probably one to two. So you can find out which seeds you're looking at and what's the likelihood it's still good. And then if you want to, you can do a germination test pretty easily with most seeds. So what we do is get a piece of paper towel, and we use like the brown paper towel at the college. So we just write on it with a pencil, and then we make it really damp and sprinkle seeds on it, fold it up, and then make sure it's keeps pretty moist and at least 45, ideally like 50 degree temperature for about a week. And then most veggies we're growing will likely germinate in a week's time. Flowers and herbs can take a fair amount longer. So you may want to give them like 10 days or two weeks. And so then I just peel back the paper towel and see what percentage of my seeds have germinated. And if it's a high percentage of seeds have germinated, then I'll just treat them like I just bought them yesterday. If it's a low percentage, you can still use them just seed extra. Like if you were trying to reuse some arugula, and 30% germinated, seed 30 times as much. You weren't going to use a seed anyways. So it's like in lieu of buying more, you can just use them that way. And that's kind of the main way I know and it works pretty well and we've had reliable results with that. The more seeds you use, the more accurate of a data collection you'll have. So if you want to sacrifice 100 seeds for a germination test, you can, if you want to use 10, you can. That can just give you an indicator.

- Awesome. I see a comment here about lead in soil, which is really great. This person says, I've actually read that the only danger in gardening in soil that has lead in it is from the lead dust that can be created and lead that's not absorbed by the plants. And that is totally true. They have done tests with plants grown in soil with lead in it. And if you wash the kale and then they do a tissue test and see if there's lead in it, that is not in like high levels. So that is true. I don't want to give the advice to just go wild and grow in your like lead-filled yard and hope that everyone remembers to wash their veggies all the time. So if it's something that you're really, really nervous about, don't do it. If you put down mulch, the amount of dust that's actually going to get onto your vegetables is pretty low. Always wash your veggies if you're bringing them in, but I know that I often, not during COVID times, but in non-COVID times, if I'm out in the field, I might harvest a kale leaf and just eat it. So if you're prone to doing that, probably don't grow in your lead soil. And then, it's okay.

- Probably got time for one more before we wrap up. Yeah.

- Great. I see one that says, can you recommend any local to Amherst locations for local plants to transplant? And there are a ton of places around. I know of the have the Hadley Garden Center. I don't know if it's called that anymore, but it's still in the same spot on route nine. Andrews Greenhouse is another one. And then a lot of local farms tend to bring transplants to the summer farmer's market once that starts up again.

- Yeah, or have them at their farmer stands.

- Yeah, farmer stands also, yeah.

- And you included a link that gardening the community does a plant sale every year as a fundraiser and so there's definitely places. We'll include some of that also in the resource document.

- Awesome. I think we might have time for one more if you all are up for it.

- Great.

- We have one about companion planting in containers. And the specific example was tomatoes and carrots together, and the timing of that. I think I will start by saying most of the benefits that you're going to get from companion planting, unless you have your containers like spread really far apart, even if they're in separate containers, they're still going to be attracting pollinators and things like that. So if it's fun for you to think about pairing things up in the same container, that's great and you should do it. But if you have a small enough garden, they're going to be bringing in all the benefits anyways. And I wouldn't really recommend growing carrots with tomatoes necessarily right next to each other because tomatoes just get so big and will probably shade out the carrots. Unless you transplanted your tomato like right before you were going to harvest your carrots, I think it probably wouldn't be the best pairing.

- If you want it to pair with carrots, a good one could be something like lettuce which doesn't get as big and shady, and the carrot is going down into the ground more than the lettuce is above ground, but the tomato is so dramatic that it may be shading out, competing the carrot.

- Totally.

- Yeah.

- If either of you wants to answer the last one about just kind of walking through a tomato trellising, and why we do that, or pruning, sorry, tomato pruning, and why would do that.

- Great. It's been a moment since I've planted tomatoes. So I might defer to Maida.

- Okay. So tomatoes get huge and bushy and brushy, and they put a lot of energy into all those different branches on them. So one thing. When we're pruning, we are basically removing a sucker branch from the plant. So imagine if you will, that my head is the main stock of the tomato and my arm is a branch that will grow fruit. You can tell on the edge of each finger a cherry tomato or tomato will grow. Right from my shoulder, a little branch might grow that's only going to have leaves on it, no fruit. And that will just take energy from the photosynthesizing plant into that getting big rather than my fruit getting big. So if you want to prune, you want, I don't have enough arms, you want to snap that off or cut it off with the knife. So reducing your kind of damaging the plant, and get that off of the plant. So you're just left with the stocks with the fruits. You can leave some of those branches on there also so they can photosynthesize, but really you're just trying to lessen the amount of branches on your tomato plant for energy purposes, but then also really so that your plant has a lot of wind moving through it as tomatoes are really susceptible to fungus and bacteria. And so you would like your plant to be able to dry off quickly after it rains or is watered and just get a lot of sunshine to kind of neutralize fungal spores. How'd that go, Kaylee?

- That was great. I think that there is another part in the question asking about picking off the bottom leaves. And I think on our scale, it's not something that we tend to do, but I think especially if they're starting to get yellow or they're getting a little bit spotty, it certainly makes sense to take those off.

- And Kaylee mentioned the UMass extension is a great place to get a soil test. Anywhere you are in the country, you can probably find the closest land grant, university, or ag extension program. They can also offer support with like pathogens, or if you notice diseases on your plants, you can contact them and they can help diagnose an issue as well. We'll often Google. I will Google like, you know, black spot with a white spot inside cucumber, and then I can kind of get a little closer diagnosing what's going on. So I think now we're kind of just past our hour point. I just want to say thank you to everyone who is here and listening. Thank you again, Kaylee and Julia. It's so fun to work with you, and Sydney for making the slideshow. And yeah, we would love to stay in touch. So we'll look at any other residual questions and make sure to add answers to those to our resource doc before we send it out, and please stay connected with us. Read the newsletter, follow us on Instagram, come visit when it's safe to do so, and I don't know if you have anything to add, Kaylee and Julia.

- I think you said it, Maida. Thanks you all for coming.

- Yeah. Thank you everyone.