This episode covers various gardening topics such as seed-saving, planting strategy, and animal protection.

Jamie goes over nearly everything you need to consider before taking on a garden project & how to determine the value of your garden space vs yield. Jamie is the gardener of the 2 Gals. She's been doing it for a long time and she's very good at it. We all hear about how we should be saving seeds. Jamie's advice is this: "Learn to garden before learning to save seeds."

The Homestead Podcast co-hosts provide tips on how to simplify life and take responsibility for health and well-being by unleashing the homesteader within.

They share various homesteading activities, including making sourdough crackers and feta cheese, discussing the importance of organic flour and sensitivity to chemicals in wheat, and considering the growing zone, climate, and soil type for gardening.

#HomesteadingTips #SelfSustainability #GardenPlanning

Timestamps

• [00:00:00] "Start Homesteading: Gain Confidence & Impact by Doing More with Less"
• [00:00:30] "From Snowstorms to Spring: Cold and Fluid Remedies"
• [00:02:57] "The Significance of Cold Weather on Tree Growth and Settlement"
• [00:05:45] Jamie Oliver's Perfect Cracker Recipe Shared with Kelsey's Recipe
• [00:08:32] "Cultures for Health Kit Review"
• [00:13:11] "Gluten, Wheat Sensitivity, and Azure Purchasing"
• [00:15:44] Learning to Can and Preserve for Winter
• [00:20:54] "Christmas Cranberry Cake Review and Sponsor Ad"
• [00:23:29] Gardening & Seed Discussion. Carol talks about her hoophouse.
• [00:28:46] "Container Gardening Essentials: Sun and Water for Plant Growth"
• [00:30:46] Gardening 101: Tips on Choosing the Right Garden Size for New Gardeners
• [00:36:59] The Importance of Knowing Your Planting Zone.
• [00:42:05] "Tips for Planning and Maximizing Your Growing Season"
• [00:47:49] "Grow the Crops You Love"
• [00:48:52] Seed Companies for Cattle Farming
• [00:51:17] Non-GMO and Organic Heirloom Seeds: Why Some Gardeners Prefer Them for Seed Saving
• [00:56:19] Get Your Seeds Now: A Guide to Avoiding the "Seed Issue" Scramble.
• [00:59:53] Gardening Tips for Big Box Store Shoppers
• [01:05:21] Succession Planting: How Radishes Can Make Your Garden More Manageable
• [01:11:51] Gardening App for Vegetable Variety Planning and Research
• [01:14:55] Animal Pressures on Your Garden
• [01:17:20] Supply Shortages and Gardening during COVID
• [01:18:27] "Homesteading Tips with Carol and Jamie"

Carol & Jamie of 2GalsHomesteading.com are your homesteading co-hosts. Jamie practices homesteading skills in town. Carol homesteads on the farm.

Links mentioned

SeedTime App

Cultures For Health

Azure Standard

Carrots Love Tomatoes Book

Jill Wingers blog on soil testing

Best FREE Seed Catologs

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Mentioned in this episode:

PeteCo Supply

PeteCoSupply.com is a small, family-owned business located in the heart of farmland in central Iowa. We take pride in providing you with the best service and products in one place. We bring over 25 years of customer service experience, strong relationships with vendors, and strong product knowledge to one place. PeteCo Supply is where Quality Meets Service, and we're dedicated to making your shopping experience seamless. PeteCo Supply is a financial supporter of this podcast. Their financial gift pays for the annual hosting fees neccesary to distribute our episodes.

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Welcome to the homestead podcast. You are joining cohosts, Carol and Jamie of 2GalsHomesteading.com. If you found yourself here, that means you are ready to take responsibility for what you eat, your family's health, and your family's well-being while living a simpler life. You can do this and have fun saving money along the way. Let them help you unleash the homesteader within. By doing more with less, you will gain what is needed to create confidence, impact, and change in your life and the lives around you. Let's start homesteading. Let's start now.

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Hi, Jamie.

Hi, Carol.

How are you today?

I am pretty good.

Yeah. We we survived the weather.

We survived the weather.

Yes.

We're healing.

Yeah. So at the time of this recording, we while the whole United States has all screwed up with the weather, I mean, they're experiencing some really cold stuff in Texas, and, you know, we're in the north, so we we just got dumped on. We got dumped on, but not like New York. New York are, like, 4ft of snow. Holy in, like, buffalo or something. We didn't get quite that much. Buffalo always gets a lot of actually.

I think this is their second major storm. Then for the winter?

It could be. Yeah. I have no idea. I know they're just trying to dig.

Out I want to say batteries or something thanksgiving that they were before November, they were dumped on.

Okay, well, maybe we get some of that lake effect or that water effect. Snow. But we had probably a four day weather event here right before Christmas.

Yeah.

And so we haven't been together for a couple of weeks now.

Podcast. What was it the week before?

Well, I think we had weather that time, too. Didn't we have a nice star move through the week before? Kind of rain.

Rain. Yeah, we had, like three days of rain.

Yeah. And so it's been kind of and.

Then we moved in. We had a three days, and then we had, like, four days of snow and below 50 below wind chills.

And this week it feels like spring.

It was 33. 34 yesterday.

I saw somebody said that it was actually 41 just a little bit to the southwest of us. It was like it was about freezing yesterday when we did milking in the morning. So it was like 34.

Yeah, it was dripping off the house.

So it's just kind of crazy.

It was dripping in so now our deck is like an ice rink right now. I tried yesterday to get it off, to get all the snow off. Bob said he'd hit the ground out there, and I'm like, no, no, you guys, you nobody fell once. Yeah, he's like, between my torn tendon and my calf in September and then spraining my ankle at the beginning of December, it's like and the cold in between. There.

Yeah, we're done now.

We're done. If you hit your quota after we recorded the podcast about cold and fluid remedies, I had to start using all of them.

So hopefully the weather straightens out here and it sounds like it's going to be not too bad here. It's supposed to snow a little bit today, possibly. We definitely had a white Christmas.

Yeah. I'm like going. I'm like carol. I hope you're enjoying I love Christmas and I love it being white. Well, I like it white, but now I can melt it's.

Not good for our ground up here, though.

Do you dry out quickly out here?

Well, not too bad, but I don't know, I think it's good for the trees that grow here and pine trees need this where it gets really cold like that. That's something they need.

Okay. I wouldn't know that.

I read something about that somewhere that they said that if we don't have the cold come the natural things that grow in the prairie and stuff like that, it affects them because that I.

Know plants per annuals and stuff, they need that dormancy period, like your tulips. And I'm sure other plants need that.

Dormancy cold where they go hibernate and.

That type of thing, period.

Could be.

That's one thing I think it is for like tulips. Tulips need so many weeks of cold.

To be able to push I didn't know that.

Yeah, a lot of trees probably to new growth need that cold period to be able to push out their new growth for the next spring, even though me as a human really doesn't need that.

No. One thing I found interestingly, I watched something on PBS and they were talking about how when the United States was settled and how the northern states are the ones that first got settled. And it took a while to settle the southern states because people preferred to be cold versus scorching hot. And until air conditioning was developed, the majority of the population lived in the north, lived in the New England states. The states like we are in Ohio. Yeah, those states were populated, were heavily populated and the southern states were not for the immigrants that were coming anyway type thing. And intel air conditioning was majority of.

The people that were immigrating to the United States were from Europe, were cold. Russia, I don't know.

I honestly don't. We're very Scandinavian here in German.

We're German and Irish. Or I'm German and Irish.

Yeah. Rich is German and has a little bit of Dutch and I'm Scandinavian and Bohemian.

Yeah. So all cold countries. Anyway, we would like to thank you.

For tuning in today and listening to our babble at the moment. Yeah, our little coffee talk.

You and I are really good at that.

Let's get started here. Well, what's been going on in your kitchen? We haven't talked for a couple of weeks and Christmas has gone through here. So what has been happening in your kitchen, Jamie.

So I perfected my crack. A cracker?

Yes, you did.

So I want to thank Kelsey for her. It was her cracker recipe that I finally got. I did two batches for Christmas, and Bob's, like, going, yeah, this is it. And so handsome, I'm going to try to make some more this week.

Okay. And that's using your sourdough?

Using my sourdough starter oil, herbs, and salt. Did you put baking soda and baking soda?

Baking soda. Okay.

n my oven and probably, like,: 2025

Okay, so do you, like, roll it between two sheets of paper?

I did parchment no, I did it on a parchment paper, dusting very lightly with flour on top. If it started sticking, I have pamper chef Barstone. It said to put a baking stone in the oven, and, like, well, I have the bar pan from time perch chef. And so I put that in the oven and heated it as I was rolling it out because you take the batch and you divided it in four. So I baked it in two batch. I did two pans at a time, which worked out fine for me. And they cooled really crispy, and you could quickly and then you could put them in a container. Okay. Yeah.

Because you brought them over.

I brought some of them, and then I brought some of them to the family, and they were hit with my family. And then my daughter, who is finding out that she is gluten intolerant, had no issue with them either, so she could eat them, and she didn't get the bloated icky feeling that she would from regular bread products or gluten products.

Okay. So we'll share Kelsey's recipe in the show notes so that you can gather that from there, because I'm sure you don't have the measurements. And if you're traveling in your car, you're not going to be writing it down.

So we'll put that in the show notes or put a link to it.

Somewhere so that you guys can get Kelsey and Jamie's recipe here for these sourdough crackers. And I will say that when you salt them, if you think you've put enough soul down, put some extra on there, that salt really makes makes a.

Difference, because, yeah, there was, like, a tiny bit in the recipe, but it was not nearly enough. And actually when I salted it and then I took the rolling pin and rolled it over, and so I kind of wished it into it. And so I don't know if that made a difference, but that's just the way I did it.

All right. Well, they were really good, and they went really well with the feta cheese that we made from Cultures for Health with their fresh cheese back culture. November, we did that November, and it was supposed to be set for, what did it was 30 days, and I think that was around December 7 8th.

But that was like a week after I sprained my ankle really bad, and so I wasn't carrying too much extra.

So it just kind of sat in the refrigerator there, and it's still I mean, you've been using it. You've been harvesting your feta cheese.

Thinking, I'll probably take whatever left out and bring that out this weekend.

Okay.

Mix up, figure out what we're going to put in it because we decided that it needed. Or that you could do, like, an herb dip. We'd be really thinking about garlic. What was I think garlic, onion, some rosemary.

Yeah, I was thinking even maybe some dill. I'm thinking maybe we could just do three, four different flavors or whatever.

I suppose I could drain out or drain off the brine and see how much I have left.

Yeah, see how much is there. And I do have a little bit that you left here, yet I just moved it in the refrigerator. So what you left here is also here. So we can grade my seasoning and bring your seasonings, and we'll put some together and see what we can come up with and maybe add that to our show notes, too, if we find something that was a really good combination. And then we'll probably have to whip up some more. We still got culture from that kit so we can make some more fetish, since it seems to be a hit with both our families.

Both our families loved it.

We want to thank Cultures for Health yeah. For getting that kit for us. And we are really appreciating it because I'm like looking at some delicious cheese.

You probably won't hear it, but right now they have a sale. It's right after Christmas, and they have a sale on their starters.

Yes, it should say go there and sign up for their email. Their emails. And I have text messages, too. And they do a really good job of letting you know when they're having sales. Lots of times there's free shipping if.

You order a certain amount.

Yeah, I had the free shipping over the holidays. I got a few texts on that. And it didn't matter how much you.

Ordered because Black Friday had a good sale after Black Friday. And I got the culture that I used to make my Sauerkraut. I ordered two packages of that, and.

You can also find them on Amazon.

Oh, okay.

So I know I ordered something from them, but it was actually cheaper for me to order it on Amazon through them because I got free shipping with prime, and I'd pay shipping with them, but it still came from them. It's just another avenue for you to use. If they're not offering free shipping or whatever, you can go over to Amazon and grab prime or whatever.

Or if you order enough.

Yeah, if you order still.

Is that a thing anymore on Amazon?

I don't know, because I have prime membership, and I usually don't order anything that I pay shipping on unless I really need it. Yeah, that was our feta cheese, and it really did turn out wonderful. The crackers were great.

I think that because of my ankle injury and stuff, the kitchen is not I cooked for us to survive, I think, is about all.

Yeah. Okay, well, I totally get that. And I know you celebrated Christmas over at your daughters, and so you didn't probably do a whole lot in your kitchen besides making crackers for them. Crackers was probably and you did sourdough donuts.

Sourdough donuts. That was it. Otherwise, it was all cheese and crackers and nuts and fruit.

Okay. Because she was taking care of the one meal.

Well, actually, we did hamburgers. Okay. So actually we used your beef to make hamburgers. That was our Christmas meal. They wanted hamburgers. And so that's what I was like.

Okay, so did you do sourdough buns then?

No, I didn't go that far. You got to pick your list of things. It's like, okay, is this feasible?

And I was just wondering with your.

Daughter'S, and she didn't think she just went ahead and made a hamburger. She ate a hamburger bun. And she goes about an hour later, she's like going I go, what? She goes, I ate a hamburger bun.

And I can tell it that's a whole new line of thinking for her then.

Yeah, she's about a month into this. And so it's like habits. Like, I'm going to have a hamburger, I'd put it on a bun, not thinking that I need a different bun. She's getting good. I mean, she's married to a Hispanic guy, so eat a lot of Mexican food while she's found a gluten free tortilla that she can eat. And corn tortillas don't seem to bother her. She cooks from scratch a lot, but she started to do more baking more breads and stuff like that. She hasn't done a lot of breads, but, like the tortilla shell, she's trying.

Yeah, that whole gluten thing is quite the thing. There's gluten in so much stuff.

I like going, yeah, trying to get.

It would be nice if she were just maybe sensitive to wheat in the way the wheat is with an ancient grain or something.

Yeah.

That maybe she would be able to tolerate, or an organic wheat where they don't. Because you do know that most of the wheat harvested in the United States is all sprayed to be chilled. And so you've got those chemicals on there so they can harvest it all at the same time, which makes sense from a production from a production standpoint, but for those who are sensitive to those chemicals now, that is now in your wheat. And I wonder sometimes if people have a sensitivity to that and not necessarily to gluten that it's more of a sensitivity to the way we raise wheat today.

That could be. But then she had no issues with my sauce. She didn't have any issues with the donuts or the crack.

And so do you use an organic flour?

No, I do not.

Okay. And you don't use an ancient grain type? No, it's just regular old flour, red flour from the store.

Yeah.

Okay. All right. Because I use organic. I use all my flour in my house is organic.

Yeah. I want to do that once my supply is gone, I have quite a bit, because when all everything started going kind of crazy and they were talking supply chain and things issue, it's like somebody bought, like, 75lbs of flour.

I hear you, girl. I hear you.

Because I even think back in the milk room, we had conversations probably a year or so ago. So I'm still working on that 75 lbs. And once that gets down, once I get it down to, like, 20 lbs, then I'll probably look at buying from Azure or something like that, because I know.

Your husband is kind of not wanting to eat a lot of wheat type.

Products, so that slows your thing down commercial. Yeah, because even, like, I have sour dough bread at home on the counter, and he has not even been eating that.

So that slows down your consumption of.

Now he likes it fresh. If it's fresh under a day old, he likes it better. But once it starts taking on more of that sour quad, he's not real crazy about that. So then it kind of sits around, and then I'm, like, going, okay, this is a few days old. We're just going to dry it. I chuck it up and make croutons out of it.

Well, that works, too. Homemade croutons are really good. Yeah.

And then if I get quite a bit of that, then I blend it and make breadcrumbs with it.

Now you got to start breading something, huh? And as far as my kitchen goes, besides making the Christmas stuff, I really haven't done anything special, but we have a hambone left over from bean soup. Okay. Yeah. That's the first thing that always comes to mind. But I have two non bean eaters in my house, so bean soup is not something I'm going to make. So I was on the Internet searching a little bit, trying to figure out what else I can do, but it really looks like you just throw a ham bone in. You can make vegetable soup, whatever. But I've only ever heard of making bean soup because apparently I live in a shelter.

Well, that's what I think.

It's ham.

Ham and bean.

Yeah, ham and bean soup. But no, you could use it and just make a potato soup with ham in it.

Whatever.

There's a whole bunch of recipes out there. I haven't quite decided what I'm going to do. So I took the hamble and threw it in the freezer and figured I'd do it on one of these days when we have cold weather again. It's spring now, I guess. At least it appears to be between yeah, it'll get cold again.

I know it will. But January is coming.

Yeah, but I know it seems it feels kind of like spring right now.

Yeah. It's still below 30ºF so it's like you can still eat soup, drink soup, eat soup, put potato soup. You got to invite me off a potato soup.

Okay.

Potato soup is not Bob's.

I have a really good potato soup. Not one that uses a hamble and just a potato soup that's like kind of a cream of potato type soup in it so good, I make a big old crock pot full of it.

See, Bob doesn't like potato soup, but I grew up with potato soup because it would feed because I come from a large family and you could feed a lot of kids. We grew, I don't know, I think it was a quarter of an acre of potatoes.

Wow.

Every year. Yeah, it was a lot of potatoes.

Yeah, that's a lot of potatoes. Yeah, that's the one thing. Squash and potatoes are the only thing that my parents grew. And they had a large garden. We ate fresh out of the garden. And my mom didn't do much canning of anything. I mean, maybe she would do like, a brine pickle. Like Brian, she called them Virginia chunk pickles. And they sat in a croc, and you dumped the brine off, put fresh brine on it for like, 14-15 day process or whatever. For someone who doesn't can, I thought that was weird, but boy, those pickles were really good. I wouldn't eat them today. Well, if I eat them today, I would not put the food coloring in because they put food coloring in them to make them red and green because she did them for Christmas. But we did not can anything. My grandma did. Her mother did lots of canning, but my mom was a freezer or fresh type person. She didn't can much of anything. And so potatoes, we always had potatoes and squash throughout the winter and maybe onions. Other than that, we ate fresh onions. She never canned tomatoes. She never can green beans, any of that stuff.

That was also interesting that her mom did. So she was probably like, no, I'm not doing that. And then here you are trying to relearn.

Because I really didn't learn any of that. When I learned about canning, I learned in home economics classes in high school. That's where I learned how to can. My grandma never really canned when us kids were around. Not that she I mean, she lived 3 miles out of town. We were pretty close, but when we were there, Grandma's focused on us, and she was not doing those things, and so I didn't really learn anything like that from her. But she had the best canned pickles and the best canned soup.

I wish I could learn to make pickles. I can't make a pickle for my life.

Yeah, neither can I. I've tried different things with the pickles, trying to use tannins and stuff, and we had a vineyard out here using grape leaves and stuff, and it does help, but I.

Have never really figured out how to tan them.

Yes. Now, if I go and I go to Walmart and I buy the Mrs. Wages bread and butter pickles or whatever, I can get a good pickle that way.

But, yeah, there's chemicals.

I'd rather do it from scratch, and I just have not found the thing that works. This year.

I have refrigerator pickles. They're pickles, but they're in the refrigerator, and they say they will keep a year the recipe that I used, and I've been pulling out from them all.

Year, so are they dill pickles, bread and butter pickles, sweet pickles. What kind of they're kind of a dill pickles.

You remember when that time that I stayed up all night, I couldn't sleep, so I got up, made pickles? No, they're those pickles yet.

Oh, okay.

I was thinking about freeze drying them, but we've never got that far, and actually, some of them I dehydrated.

How did that turn out?

They were the spicy ones.

Okay.

And then I've read in freeze drying groups that you should rinse your pickles before you dehydrate them or freeze dry them because it takes some of that vinegar, because they were really strong vinegary taste.

When I die, I would guess that would just intensify, but they were good.

But you did just a few at a time.

I would imagine so. See, now, I saw on one of the freeze drying groups on Facebook, somebody who did pickles. She did dill pickles. She had two jars, like 80 ounce jars of dill pickles, and she dehydrated them, and she got them into with a guess, with maybe a pint.

I think I made it. Do you see that?

And she's like so now she can put that on her hamburgers and not have a soggy bun from the from the pickles on your burger. I was like, that's almost genius. But they did talk a little bit about vinegar and the freeze dryer and how sometimes that affects the pump. But it might be something we might want to play around with a little.

Bit through the manual a little closer.

Yeah, because that would have been for the harvest, right? And I think she had a harvest. Right. But that might be kind of interesting to do. I was like, Pickled powder sounds kind of good to me.

Pickle powder on popcorn?

Oh, yeah, that would be really good one.

Now you think about pickle potato chips. I love vinegar, you know, pickle and vinegar potato chips.

Yeah. Oh, that might be really good.

Oh, Christmas. What's in your kitchen?

We were on a handball and we've got on soup and everything. Anyway, but that's about the only thing that's unique that's happened in my kitchen. I did try a new recipe for Christmas cranberry cake or something like that, that's over there on the island. That was pretty good. It's a little heavy, so you don't want to eat a lot of it. Boy, I tell you, talk about the sweet and the target tart together, because those cranberries are in there straight, and they're put in whole, and boy, you bite into one of those and it's super tart. But then you got the heavy butter cake because it was like three eggs, a cup of butter, two cups of.

Sugar oh, my goodness.

And flour. And that made a 9x13 pan. That's good.

So you red mashed the cranberries?

No, I did not. I just dumped them in there, and as I stirred them, a couple of them broken type of thing. But I used fresh, unfrozen cranberries. It's a good cake. It's good, but it's very rich and very heavy. And so you can't eat a whole lot of it. Goes really well with coffee, but that'll be a keeper. But I would only make half the recipe next time for us to eat because Madison won't eat it. So it's rich and I and it's a lot to eat.

Yeah, see, that's why I don't bake a whole lot, because our son Ben, he'll eat it then. Still, if it turns out that he or Bob doesn't like it, then it's like, I don't need that.

Yeah, no kidding. But I tried that. That was the one new recipe that I tried to hear, and I tried that after Christmas. Actually, I just made that probably a couple of days ago, but other than that, not a whole lot going on. So now let's hear a word from our sponsor.

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And now we're back today. I thought we had discussed this a little while ago. You said it is seed time, garden planning time. Yeah. Okay, so we're at the end of December, and if you are a gardener I am not. I dabbed a little bit, but I really haven't seriously gardened for several years. So we're going to let you kind of take the lead on this one because you have a lot more experience. First of all, you've been gardening a heck of a lot longer than me.

I think my first tomato plant I planted in my house in Glenwood. I was probably 24, 25, and now I'm like, yeah, it's been a few years.

arden a whole lot until about: 2005

My garden, take what you want.

So that's where I'm coming from. And I only dabbled with seeds one year where I tried to raise my own tomatoes and peppers and that type of thing, and that did not work well for me. I am not there is a knack.

And you do need some equipment to make that work, right?

And so for a few years, I ordered from a company called Tomatoes Plus. I think it was in fact, they still get the catalog, and I think I got seedlings from them and that was a really good deal. You were able to get some of those heirloom varieties, varieties and that type of thing. It's just that you had to order like six of them or whatever at a time. So you had six plants of the same one. That was the only downfall for it.

If you're doing a smaller garden, if.

You were doing a smaller garden, but I really like that company and still get their seed catalog.

Oh, I. Might have to steal that from you.

Well, you have to take it out of chastity's hands because, man, at the minute that seed catalog comes, she absolutely loves that seed catalog. And she's disabled. She functions at about two years of age, but for some reason she loves the tomato and pepper catalog. She absolutely loves that catalog.

That's just so funny.

But that's a great company. I've always gotten a really good product from them. I think you were going to concentrate.

A little bit on I was going to come at it from somebody from the point of somebody that's wanting to learn to garden.

You've got like 30 some years experience, and so we're going to tap into.

's like, okay, chalk it up to: 2022

Maybe that's just not a good spot for tomatoes.

But I've grown because I have six four x four boxes, and so I rotate every year because I deal with a blight issue, which is a problem for tomatoes. So I'm on a three year rotation. So it's been three years since tomatoes were there, and they grew awesome three years ago. So why? I don't know. The only thing I can think is I put different products in it. I grew onions in it last year. So was that the reason? I don't know. Or didn't I put enough compost in there? There's all those factors. It's a guessing game unless you're going to have your soil tested yearly. And I've never had my soil tested, so I kind of just kind of.

Wing it on that test.

I fly by the seat of my pants a lot.

Okay. All right, let's start with okay, so if I am new to gardening, what's the most important thing I need to know?

You need to think about where you're going to put your garden. And if you can think of it early enough, you kind of need to scope out sun. You need sun and water to grow anything. And so you want to get the spot, if you can, that has the most sun in your yard. Of course, south spot would be awesome. That has sun from east to west would be great, too. Ideal. I get a lot of sun in the morning time. Then I have a block of time in the afternoon where my neighbors trees shades it a little bit, and then I get more later towards evening, and then late evening is shaded again by the neighbors on the other side's tree. So you kind of got to scope out where your best spot would be. And then you got to come to the point. If you're going to garden, you're just going to have to figure out how to garden what you have with what you have. And if you don't have big enough spot, if you're confined in a space like I am, or as I've aged, I've downsized my garden, you might have to do container gardening. Or if you're in an apartment building and you have a balcony, that container gardening. You can get a lot of stuff off out of a container if you do it right, or if you have to research and learn and always be willing to learn. It's like, okay, this didn't work. What do I need to change? You're always tweaking it, trying to figure out how can I get a better crop out of what I have? That's what I'm doing. Because I'm in town, limited by my yard space and physical limitations as I'm moving towards 60. And so I have raised beds now and I'm doing some more container gardening. So it's up off the ground so I don't have to be on my knees as much as I used to. That makes sense because being on the knees anymore, my flower beds are still ground level, so I still get down there, but it's like but anyway, light and water are your most important things, I think. When you're looking at your spot, then how much space do you have, what kind of size of garden? And if you're a new gardener, go conservative.

I was just going to say, so how do you figure out how big of a garden you need?

I would always say if this is your first year garden, go smaller than you think you want. Because if you go too big too hard, you're going to burn out. Unless you have a partner that is willing to take half of the load from you. Because my husband, he would till and he goes, it's all yours, honey. So weeding and everything, canning, picking, that was all my deal. And he's tried a few times over the years to get me to not garden as much because actually I said, can I put another bed here? And he's like going, do you have time for that? And I'm like, no, but I still want another bed. So be realistic and be realistic with your time, too. Your time and energy. If I was starting a garden at 58 that I am now, would not be as ambitious as I was in my 30s when I moved to this house. I used to have a 20 by 40 in my backyard, even in a small I think we have two lots there in our town, but I took almost all my whole backyard to make a garden.

I was going to say, because I've been in your backyard, that would have.

Taken up we have a storage shed. It was from the storage shed to the property line was my garden and all the way up to I have a propane tank back there, too. So everything that was from that west of that west and south of the propane tank and the storage shed was my garden. And then Bob, finally, I got to talk about square foot garden. He goes, yeah, we'll make it smaller. And then I talked about it's getting easier to test your soil. There's kits that you can mail order. I know Redmond Real Salt. I use a lot of that. And they have. I learned from Geo Winger prairie homestead. She did a soil test with them, and so you can mail order from them and take your samples and then ship it, and they analyze your soil for you. Thinking about maybe doing that this spring, if timing works, because then you really know where you're at with your soil.

What you need to amend it to make it grow better.

Tomatoes or grow whether they lower, whatever she was, she was low in nitrogen or whatever, but because there are certain.

Plants that take a lot of isn't it tomatoes that take a lot of nitrogen? I I don't know, but I know some of them.

I know, like your onions and garlic, they're heavy feeders. Your onion family leaks and stuff, they're heavy feeders, so they take a lot out. Now that I say that that might have been why my tomatoes didn't do so well, because they put them in.

An onion bed and your onions maybe depleted some of that a year before, and you just didn't put it all.

I put in there last year was your compost. Rabbit comp.

Yeah, because we got rabbit, goat, llama and cow out here and horse.

Yeah, I think I put rabbit in there, maybe. Yeah, I'll test I should probably test.

You probably should, whether you get time to do that or not.

en we first did raised bed in: 2008

Would probably not going to happen.

No, it's not going to happen. My husband would be like going, you're taking your garden now, you can go.

To the farmer's market.

It's like, no, I'm going to keep my guard until I die. But then once you get a spot picked out, then you want to start sit down and plan it's like, what do you want to grow? You got to find out what growing zone are you in in the United States? The USDA has this all mapped out for us all. You have to go, you can go to the Farmers Almanac and punch into your zip code and they will tell you what growing zone you're in. We're in four B, and basically that tells you how cold you're going to get in the wintertime, what's the coldest it's going to get in the wintertime, whereas we can get down to negative 30 and negative 50 wind chill. And so you need to plant plants that can survive that.

If you're going with something that's some.

Things like asparagus are perennials. And so you need to have an asparagus that will survive that. I don't know if there is asparagus that wouldn't but then I was watching a YouTube video this week, Artichokes. You can grow them and they're a per annual.

I have heard that or read that.

But I think it's zone seven. And so they would not survive. We'd have to grow them as an annual.

That does make a difference. Sometimes your perennials somewhere are not up here. There's a few things that grow up here, like rhubarb, asparagus, trying to think of anything else that come back. You were testing, what did you test? You got fennel, right?

Fennel.

Fennel behind, yes.

And it had started resprouting. It got cold, killed it, and it was growing back. And then I had been out checking my propane tank and I noticed the.

Bunnies had chewed it all off, those little stinkers.

And so they had chewed off the top of my garlic, too.

Yeah, that's garlic, not, that garlic isn't perennial because you plant yeah, you plant it. You have to plant it in the fall.

Yeah, you just plant it. It takes that many days, the maturity date, it takes 100 and some odd days, but it survives the winter.

That's true, because you planted in the fall and it gets in the ground.

Normally there's some some kales that I have done that planted a fall kale crop, mulched it heavily. It wasn't in my raised bed, it was on in ground. And then I mulched it heavily and covered it in the spring. I just pulled the mulch back and there it was. And so I had kale right away, but it did bolt really quick. Once it got warm enough, it was done.

Yeah, I suppose, yeah, I mean, I know there's a few things out there that will survive if you take the precautions. I remember I planted I made the mistake of planting was it mint? In my garden? And it took over. Oh my gosh, I had mint coming. It just kept coming and coming and coming all over the place.

I had so much. You probably still have it up there, but then there are herbs that are perannual, chives, sage, mint. I don't know if lemon balm is or if it just sees itself, but I don't ever notice it's flowering here in my garden. But it comes back every year. I always think it's not, but there comes and terragon. I planted terragon thinking it was an annual. It comes back every year and it produces.

And it produces, yeah, I like those kind of plants. That's why I rub our out here, because I don't have to do anything with it. We have raspberries out here, too, but they're behind a fence, and I forget that they're there until after the birds have eaten them. And so I don't see them on a regular basis, and so I kind.

Of forget I have that out of mine. I can be that way.

But yeah, strawberries come back. Raspberries not all raspberries. There are some raspberries that are zoned for warmer climates than ours. So when you're here, you need to pay attention, because even if you're at Walmart buying something, sometimes it's not zoned for here.

You have to read the tags.

Yes, you have to read the tags.

I've done, or go to a local nursery that the people know.

Right. You do need to pay attention to that. Knowing what zone you're in is really.

Important because the other thing the zone gets you is it gets you how many frost free days you have. So it'll give you your last frost in the spring and your first frost in the fall, and then do your math and figure out how many days you have that are frost free. So technically, I did the math. I've never did this. Somebody I watched a YouTube video yesterday and he said that, and I'm like, oh, I've never done that. We have technically 148 frost free days. Now, I would say that would be because that's going off. They say our first average last frost is May 4 or fifth. But I don't ever plant anything frost tender that early. Like my tomatoes don't go out until Memorial Weekend, end of May. Yeah, I don't put anything out like tomatoes and peppers. I don't put those out until the end of May because I have done that mid May and went away for Memorial Weekend and came home and we'd had a frost. Those things you learn, you learn as you grow. Ask or you find a local gardener that has a little experience under their.

Belt because it is different everywhere, actually.

And it can be different from out here because I had a friend that was a master gardener. She lived 3 miles east of you here and she says she had there's more peat soil out here, so your soil drains quicker. And because of that, frost affects your ground different or your plants different. I would not have known that. I would have thought all of Kirkhoven Swift County was all the same.

But it's like not, it is not. They're once again, probably the importance of testing your soil, testing your soil, what you have, what your soil type is and that type of thing. I know we have sandy loam soil out here and so our crops grow differently. I'm thinking field farming crops, wheat and that type of thing, those things grow a little bit differently. But I know that knowing those frost dates is really important, especially if you're growing something that takes a long time, like watermelon, for instance, something like that.

Where you onions, onions are 100 days minimum.

And I know there's some watermelon that are shorter than 90 days, and that's something that you could plant here. But you can always get a jump start on that too, by starting your seeds or starting with a seedling or a plant, which seems to be real popular. I noticed that walmart and stuff, now they carry started plants for all kinds of things like zucchini and everything. I'm like, really? My mom always threw zucchini seeds in the ground. We just grew it that way or whatever. But you can grow you can buy just about every plant started already.

I was always in the impression you never start cucumbers and stuff in the house because they don't like to be transplanted.

Right, that's what I thought, too.

And I might think if you're going to do that, especially if you live in a place that has a short growing season and you're going to start those inside, I would put them in a pot that you don't have to take them out of, be it a peep pot or decomposable type. Yeah, I can make newspaper pots. I have a thing, a little wooden thing that I can make newspaper pots with. I would put it in something like that so you wouldn't have to plant.

It in the ground as is and not worry about it. Oh, that makes total sense.

Yeah, I don't know if they'd get as much transplant shock or not. So your growing date links how many days you have that are what is your growing season to learn what your growing season is because then it looks at do you want to have an 80 day tomato or do you want to go for 45, 50, 60 day tomato? Pepper. How long do peppers take? Longer. Then you got to look at how much do you want to grow. Okay. You know how much space you have, how much do you grow? Do you want to do you want to grow and eat fresh like you did as a kid or do you want to grow so you can eat fresh and can if you're a newbie? Be realistic.

Seriously. If you get like six tomato plants and you grow them right, you will have tomatoes coming out of your ears.

And you may not like August anymore.

Yeah, exactly. And it seems like for us, the tomatoes are coming in August and it's the hottest time of the year for.

Us in a hot kitchen.

So think about that when you're or.

Do you take a vacation? I did list this year we took a two week vacation. That's when you went in and picked for me. There was no canning and so I kind of purposely picked a later tomato because I knew that it would push it past our vacation. And then if you're picking out your plant, what you want to grow, you want to look at how much space do you have. You're talking about growing watermelon. That takes a lot of space wise. So if you're in for I do not grow watermelon. Part of it is because of our growing season is not long enough for the space that it takes. And what you reap from that space, I don't think it's worth it because I grew like two or three watermelon plants, it took up a huge amount of space and I got two watermelons that was not worth my space and time, in my opinion. And then I grew pumpkins a couple of years and you want to talk about a space hug? I probably planted one plant and I bet it took up and this is when I was still on ground, I bet it took up a quarter of my garden and actually branched out in the grass, but I probably did probably get ten pumpkins off it. And that was at the time when the kids love to carve them and it was great, but when they got past that stage, it's like, no, I'm not growing. Actually, my husband got tired of mowing around that.

Yeah, probably because cucumbers can spread like that too. But cucumbers keep producing. You keep them picked, they keep coming back. So you can keep harvesting where pumpkins are like squash or cantaloupes.

I do cantaloupe a couple of years and I'm like, oh, and I got to quite a few cantaloupes off it. But you have to watch them closely and not knowing the ripe signs, I would lose them. I would think, oh, no, it's not ready. It's not ready. And then next time I go look, and it's, like, falling off and it's covered in bug.

Yeah, I really think melons are I.

Think it takes a knack.

Yeah, I think it takes a knack. Or you need to there's a huge learning curve there, especially growing them in our environment where you have that shorter season. Because, I mean, I've picked up watermelon from the farmers market, from the local people who grow here in the western part of the state here, and their watermelon is awesome.

Actually, there's a place in South Dakota, forestburg.

Yeah, they have a watermelon festival or whatever.

Yes. I think it's north of Mitchell. I lived in Mitchell for five years, and awesome watermelons. There's a place between here and where they just south of Marshall that they will sit up and sell tomatoes and potatoes and whatever, and I've chanced it, and I was like, oh, yeah, forest burger melons. I'll take two.

Yeah. I think there's a whole learning curve, and I don't know how much the soil factor comes to play on that, but you always do have the option of vertically gardening, too. You can make your vines go up.

Which I did with your I do that with my peppers and my peas. Your cucumbers and my beans. Or your cucumbers on it. Yeah, my trellis. My cucumbers are on trellis, too, because they do some will. I have to keep them trimmed up because they will grow and get on the ground, and my husband will come along and trim them for me, or my son will come along and trim them with the lawnmower. Anything on the ground is fair game. And then in the planning stage, you've got to plan out your space. I'm like so I have a four by four. I have four x four boxes. I have drawings, and I've spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what I can companion plant. That's another aspect. There are so many what plants you can plant by each other that will help each other grow or not hinder them. There's a book, it's called Tomatoes and Carrots, but it's about companion planting, not a book that I don't know if I own that book or I think I've owned it and given it away.

Yeah. Companion planting is something I did out here to help my garden produce better.

And to get more out of your space. One I know is like tomatoes. Tomatoes and lettuce. You plant them at the same time, but the lettuce is done and picked by the time the tomatoes come up and take over the space. And onions. Onions, ones that you can plant around tomatoes. I have to have that all written down. I don't have it in my mind. There's charts that are out there on the Internet that you can kind of look at and kind of get a feel that there's ones that don't like it.

You don't want to put them together at all.

That's another aspect. And if you're a newbie, don't try to have like, I've got to have this all figured out. Sometimes if you're a newbie, you just need to put it in the ground and start there. And you'll learn as you go.

And make sure you plant something that you like to eat. Don't try something that if you don't like tomatoes, certainly do not plant them.

But if you're like into peppers and you want to make your own hot sauce and stuff like that, go for it. There's plenty of things out there that you can grow that you like. Don't grow things you don't like. And then there's things that you got to think about, too. Yeah, you is that when a plant should grow. You have your cool seasoning crops, your peas, your kale, kala, robbie, your cabbages, your brassica families, they're cool seasons. They like the spring, and they like the fall. Whereas your peppers and tomatoes, they are hot seasons. They want it warm and hot to produce. So you got to think so you like tomatoes and peppers, like it hot. And then radishes. Radishes will do good.

Okay, so tomatoes and peppers, love it hot.

Radishes and lettuces and kales like a cool and so you got to look at they will grow great when the spring ends, but once it starts getting warm, they're going to go to bolt and go to seeds. And so then you won't grow them in the summertime, but then you can grow them in the fall. You can do a fall garden of the cool season crops again. And so that's a whole another aspect that could be another podcast about spring and fall gardening.

Some of this down and get into.

A little bit more. When I was making this outline, I'm like going, oh, my gosh, I could talk for hours, which I probably have already, but not quite. Oh, let's talk about we were talking about where to buy our seeds. Where have we bought our seeds?

Yes, I was just going to say maybe we should point in the direction of some of the seed companies that we have used in the past or have found interesting or know some friends who have used because like I said, I don't garden really out here. For me, the seeds we buy are the ones that go on the acreage out here, and you buy quantity. Yeah, we're growing for the cattle and not necessarily for our own family consumption. I mentioned before, I ordered from this tomato. I think it's called tomatoes plus. I think you can get seeds from there, too, but I always ordered their seedlings. Those always have worked well for me. I have ordered from gurneys and Burpees. And now, not necessarily would I order from them again. But I believe those are the companies my mom used. I could see back in the 70s, they've been around forever.

And they were actually from South Dakota, I think.

Could be. But you can get a lot of those at your local Walmart, your hardware store, whatever, menards. And you probably can get them cheaper there. But I do know that I've ordered bushes, like blueberry bushes. I believe I had ordered maybe a gooseberry bush. Some of those things came from those that I've ordered in the past and we have growing out here on the farm, because I'm really kind of a perennial person. I like to be able to put it in the ground and it just comes back and I harvest, and then we forget about it and it just comes back the next year. But I do know a lot of my customers, my milk customers who come here to the farm and what they grow. A lot of them are gardeners and bakers, heirloom seeds, and their website is.

Rare seeds.com you would think would be Bakers Creek, but it's not.

I was going to say that is really one of the best ones that I've always heard about. I've never ordered anything from them.

I have ordered from them a couple of years ago, I did. They have a huge I mean, their catalog is, I don't know, 300 pages or something. So they have a lot of varieties, a lot of heirlooms. You're looking at that, we should talk probably about the type. There's different types of seeds.

Yeah, I was just going to say I was talking that's okay, let's go over the seed companies and then we'll talk a little bit about what the different terms are when it comes to types, heirlooms and all this kind of stuff, because people are very confused about that. So let's talk about the okay, so.

Where have you ordered seeds from? I've done rareseeds.com. Bakers.

Baker.

Then I did high mowing organic seeds. And then this year I'm planning to order from Mijardiner.com. He has a YouTube channel, and his seeds are $2 a pack. As a general rule, unless there's something special about him, they're $2 a pack, which is a screaming deal because like, Johnny's Seeds is another one. I know Johnny Seeds are a little more expensive, but I have heard rave reviews on one of the garden channels, YouTube channels I watch. She loves Johnny Seeds because the back, the information they give on the back of their seeds is outstanding, she says about when you should and how you should plant a plant. They give you a lot of information on the back of their seeds.

Well, other things I know about Johnny Seeds is that they're actually employee owned, if you're looking for that type of thing. Quality, the quality. And you're looking for a company that everybody's got everybody's invested in, if that's the kind of company you want. To support. I read that all their seeds are non GMO. And so if you're looking for that.

Type of a thing, now, here's a little caveat to that all commercial. You and I could not buy GMO seeds from a seed company if it's only commercially that can buy GMOs.

I'm not sure on that. Our stuff is all organic out here. And so that labeling there. I do know that there are certain gardening type, if you want to say backyard gardener, that type of thing, that there's not a lot of GMO GMO type seeds out there. But I do know that Johnny Seeds also pushes organic heirloom seeds and that type of thing. And for some people, that's very important.

Especially if you're into seed saving.

Yeah, for most your average gardener, most of your seeds are not a GMO seed. Well, anyway, I know, but you're looking at your GMO stuff is mostly for your commercial, commercial, big growers type thing.

Then you got hybrids, basically. And a hybrid is not necessarily bad. It's like we're all hybrids. I'm German and Irish. We took two nationalities and put them together. And so that's what a hybrid is. You got this tomato plant had this characteristic, and this one had this characteristic, and they put them together and let them pollinate. And then you get that this is the baby.

That has nothing to do with being a GMO. They are not genetically modified whatsoever.

No, they've just cross pollinated. If you want to produce that same tomato, you want that same baby tomato next year, you can't save the seeds from the baby tomatoes. You got to go back to mom and dad and have them that seed again. Those companies, they grow those plants and pollinate those plants to get the baby plant that everybody loves. And so that's your hybrid. Or they do it for disease resistance. So I have late blight in my garden. A lot of times I try to grow heirlooms, but I struggle with it because of my blight issue. Try to buy seeds that are blight resistant. And sometimes that's hard because you don't always get the best flavor from those type of seeds. And I am trying to do more heirlooms. So heirloom is another types and heirlooms is all heirlooms means is that it's been around for centuries, been around for a long time, that you can plant this plant, raise it up, you can take one of the ripe tomatoes, save it and plant it again and end up with the same type of plant again and again.

Been here for generations. That's what Great Grandma grew. Great great grandma grew. So it'll be the same every single time.

Because then they talk about open pollinated types. I kind of look at open pollinated and heirloom are kind of the same thing in my opinion. They open pollinate and then they produce pretty much the same seed heirloom. It's been around for centuries. And if you're looking to save seeds, to be able to save your own seed and plant it the following year, you want to lean towards the heirloom or the open pollinated so that it's a true seed when you go to plant next year. And seed saving is a whole another podcast.

If you do try to grow a plant from a hybrid, if you save those seeds from that high bread tomato and you plant it, you do not know what you're going to get. You will probably get a tomato.

You'll get a tomato, but you don't.

Know what characteristics yeah.

Will it have more of my it's like when mom and dad got together and they made me and they got together and made my other five siblings. We're all different. We all look different. We kind of look the same, but we're all different. And so that's the same thing. When you come back and you plant that hybrid, you can plant it. You can save the seeds and plant it. You just don't know what you're going to get. And if you like to roll the dice and see what you can go for it. If those are the seeds you have, go for it.

That kind of tomato is better than no tomato if that's what you got.

an and picking back up. Since: 2020

Probably especially something that's a rare or.

Yes, a rare or an heirloom, you want to buy it as soon as possible. You don't want to wait till March because it will be gone. Because I did last year, I ordered from High Moyne and there was a couple of varieties that I never they finally canceled my orders because they could not get them from their suppliers because they can't grow everything. They have suppliers that ship into them, I'm sure. And they couldn't get their seeds of certain varieties. And so it's like I had to go to be a plan b. And so hence why I was buying early. And so within the next couple of weeks, I will finalize go through my seeds. It's like, okay, I think I need tomato seeds or whatever. And so I will look at that, and I will have it ordered by the end of January.

You start all your crops then from seed? Besides probably onion.

No, I'm going to try this year. I'm going to try to start my onion seeds. But normally I've bought plants from our local nursery. We have a wonderful garden center in Wilmer. And so I bought my plants from there. Or I've done onion sets. Some gardeners turn their nose up at onion sets. But I'm like, if that's what you've got, that's what you've got. And actually, if you want to grow because if you're going to save onion seeds onion seeds. Onions are a biannual plant. You don't get flowers until the second year. So if you want to save onion seeds, you have to grow onions this year. And then you have to save some of them as onion sets and then grow them next year. Then you could save the seeds.

I did not know that.

If you want to grow to save seeds, that's another space issue. You need to have only one type, or you end up or you're going to be making your own hybrid. Because if you have, like, tomatoes, if you want to save tomatoes, I can only have one type of tomatoes because I will end up with a hybrid. So I don't have enough space to put between the two varieties because it's a huge space. You're talking I don't remember how many yards is 50 yards or something so that you won't get across pollinating because your bees and stuff are going to cross pollinate from the neighbors. My neighbors two houses down has a garden. They're going to come over, and they're going to pollinate my plants. And so you're going to get cropped.

Little stinkers, huh?

Yeah, we want those little stinkers. Because then there's another crop that I don't grow corn because I don't have space for corn. You have to have a big enough plot, wide enough and deep enough for them to self pollinate, or you have to go out there and pollinate yourself.

Yeah, sweet corn is that takes a lot of space. That is a kid.

I go to the farmers market and buy my sweet corn.

We got some really good sweet corn producers around here.

Yes, we do. We have lots. You have no problems finding sweet corn around us, fortunately. So the next step, so once you figured out where you're going to get your seed, what you're going to grow, then you're going to have to look at are you going to start your own seeds, or are you going to buy starts? You're going to buy plants at your nursery or a big box store, but be careful at big box stores. I think that's where I got my Blight, because the first couple of years I didn't have Blight. But then it was as I got into gardening and I was buying young family, money was tight, one income family. Then we started a business, money was really tight. And so I was buying at a big box store and I think that's where my Blight came into my garden.

Yeah, I suppose you always take that chance when you're buying a plant.

You don't know how a plant was growing or what their conditions if they ran into and then if you are buying from a big sock store, check your plants out. Are they wilting? Check them out before you bring them into your garden. You really don't want to be bringing something into your garden if you're going to do it. And if you're going to start your own seeds, that's another whole podcast again, because it's not just stick it in dirt and hope for the best. Because like you said, you've tried and it didn't work. There is a knack to grow on your own seeds. You need equipment and space.

I was going to say to weigh the amount of equipment. If you're on a budget, you might want to start with your plants for like tomatoes and peppers, stuff like that. Maybe not so much for cucumbers or some of those other plants. You might want to just start with seed in the ground. When it comes to tomatoes and peppers and those type of things, those plants are relatively cheap at the store.

They really are. Yep, they are.

Yeah. They're not really that expensive in it.

And as long as you're not looking for a special variety, it is much cheaper to buy them from even a local nursery or from a box store. But it's when you wanted to get into special varieties, is when you really look at or if you're doing quantities, if you've been gardening for years and you're one of those people that are growing 50 to 100 tomato plants and I'm just rolling my eyes at you going, Why? Unless you're stalling them, that's a lot of work, that's why. Because you need to have heat to get them germinating, but then you need to cool it down so that they don't grow too fast.

Yeah. And then there's a whole lighting thing.

And that's getting easier with lighting because of Led. So there's equipment and stuff that you need and yes. Is it economically feasible if you look at this as a hobby? People spend all kind of money on a hobby. But if you're looking at this, this is going to save me money and feeding my family to come, then you've got to look at way out the pros and cons of starting, because it's a time commitment, too, because once they're growing, you are watering, checking on them daily.

Sometimes it's easier to have a nursery do that for you.

It is you pay somebody else to do that work for you if you don't want to do it yourself. But it can be done once you have the equipment. If you're looking at it as a long term thing, then yes, because the more years you do it, the more economical it comes in the long run.

Exactly.

But as a beginner, I say don't start. Learn how to garden first before you learn how to start seeds.

That makes sense.

I think that's good advice, because my first year well, no, I got advice from somebody that'd be gardening for years. He told me how to start my seeds, and it worked out great. And talk about being ambitious. I grew 170 tomato seedlings that first year. I was giving away tomato plants, you know, the Avengers. I only at that time, that's when I still had my big inground. I I only needed about 30 tomato plants. So the math, there 170 -30, it's like it's not going too. You need tomato plants I was given away here.

But you were successful with raising the.

One he told me to do. And then I'm fortunate. We live in a 100 year old house, and we have the old fashioned hot water radiators. And that is my seed starting spot, is that you put them on there, they are warm consistently, and the seeds just boom, and they sprout quickly. And then I promptly plunge them down into my 55 degree basement to slow them down.

Yeah, that makes your situation a little unique.

Yes, I have a unique house, and so everybody would be the same thing. There's many things to look at, and that's where you do that's another research. That's another rabbit hole. Branching off on learning how to start seeds years later, I've watched enough YouTube's going, oh, that's neat. I think I'll try that. If you're going to start your seeds, you got to look at when that's the back of the seeds packet is where you get that information. It'll tell you how many weeks before your average frost date. That's where you need to know your frost date and what zone you're in. And so that's awesome. I do have an app that I use. It's called Ctime. And you plug in your crop. Now, I have a lifetime membership. They have different levels, and they only have lifetime membership available at certain promotion times. I did it way back two years ago when they were launching, they were trying to raise money to start this app. They had a form of it, but it was like you put in your crop and then it would tell you when you should start it. They advanced it much more now. And so I was part of that fundraiser, and so I bought a lifetime membership. And so I really love it. And I do have a referral code for them that I will get, and we can put on the show notes and then you talked about growing vertically if possible. And then another aspect of garden is succession planting.

Yes.

Which is one of the things I love about this app. I have opt my succession planting game with this app because you will plug in like radishes. Radishes is a 40 day plant anyway.

One of the fastest ones.

And so it'll tell you when to plant it, and it will tell you a projected harvest date. And so you can plug in. Okay, so this radish is going to be done in the middle of May, and then you can plant your other one right then, and so then you can plan out. Okay, it's going to start getting hot here, so I don't want to plant radishes here. So you can plug in something else. So it helps you to figure out, okay, my radishes are done. What can I plant there to keep my space using?

Yeah, and it also probably allows you to not have so much garden to take care of, too, where you can reuse that plot again.

Whereas I do beets in, so I do like two I got two managed beet crops, succession plants done last year. And then I planted a fall one, and I didn't get much out of them because somebody should have pulled them much earlier. And I didn't realize how much frost would damage the tops that stick up out of the ground because it totally nailed the green because I was going to bring them out here for your bunnies. And I went out and looked, oh, frost kills those. Okay. And then the tops, the top of the beets got cold and they got kind of mushy on the top. So I cut half my beats and I got enough to make a pan and that was it. So it was kind of a waste. But yet it's like, okay, you still learn sideways. I either need to cover them or I need to be more diligent. That is an issue I have.

But yeah, I mean, I mean, I remember my mom and dad doing that succession planting because we did sweet corn, and dad planted sweet corn every two weeks he planted so that we would have sweet corn throughout the late summer.

Into the fall or whatever.

And I mean, we ate a lot of sweet corn because mom didn't can or freeze any of that. And so we had supper was corn, was corn for months. That's how we did it. I know mom did that with her lettuces, too. She ate a lot of lets out of her garden and she would have several different rows going at a time. Because this one was now we need to harvest from this one, because this one has to recoup or whatever. Because lettuce is one thing that does come back until it gets too hot.

And spinach is the same way. Cut and come. And then there's the lettuces that you can treat as a cut and come back. Or you can let them go to head. There's two types. There's some that are just leaf lettuce, and then there's some that you can eat it as leaf lettuce or you can let them go ahead.

Yeah, mom always had leaf lettuce. I didn't like the leaf lettuce, but she ate a lot of it.

Well, a lot of times people that don't, when you don't like it, leaf lettuce is because it's getting too hot.

I always said it tasted better no matter what.

If you get it growing in the cool season, it's not as better. It's the heat that makes it better.

I don't know. She always grew I don't remember even what it was.

Yeah, my mom and dad, too.

I remember let us and she always made some kind of sour cream dressing.

Or whatever, which my mom was. Mayonnaise. You guys wouldn't do mayonnaise.

We wouldn't eat mayonnaise or sour cream. But anyway, we're off on a little bit. But yeah, that getting the most out of your garden space. You can figure out that I can see where that app would be just awesome for helping you like, oh, I need to put some more radishes in, or I need to whatever. I need to use that for something else because now we're in the hot season and I need to grow something.

And so part of this app is that it has a journal. Last fall, I can go back and look what day I planted my garlic. And it lets you import photos, too. I took photos of it. Those photos that we put on our Facebook page, they are in my garden journal. And so I can see where I planted them. I don't have to go, okay, did I plant them here and they didn't come up or what?

That handy. Plus, you can look back and go, okay, I know what I grew, and it was successful or not successful.

I didn't use that to the fullest last year. So I want to be more diligent. Try to be more diligent with it this year. Another thing is, in the app, they have what they call seeding. When it says seeding, it means starting to plant your seeds in the house if you're going to do that. Or they have direct seeding and then they have transplant, so they have a to do list, too. So once you enter your crop, you pull up your to do list by this week, and it's telling you what you should do this week because they even have, like, cultivate, so it'll tell you to go cultivate, which is irrelevant to mine because my raised beds are pretty much besides mixing in fresh compost. They're ready to go picking out a few dan and lion leaves that are growing there. I know now because I don't spray, so I have those dandelions free growing in my boxes in the spring because they were babies in the fall, and then they're coming out. They're hoping to release it after January 1 layout so that you can either if you have a drone, you can take a picture with a drone, or I'm hoping you can use Google Maps so that you can get the layout of your land, and then you can import that somehow into seed time. And then you can go, okay, I have this box, this bed right here. And so like in this quadrant, I'm going to have my tomatoes. I'm going to have my beets. And I'm not sure how, but from all the videos I watched of it, that's what it's going to be is that you can say, okay, here's my beets. You can take this crap, and this crop is in your calendar where you've planted your radishes, and you're going to say this radish, radish number one is going to go in this spot on this layout plan is the impression that I'm getting. So I'm hoping that I can do that with my flower beds, too, so that I can go, okay, I have my lemon balm here. I have my chives here so that I can know because sometimes I'm not always good. It's like, okay, that's a yarrow plant. Which yarrow plant is that I may have saved the tag from it, and I may not have saved the tag from it.

And you think you can remember, and then you don't.

Yeah, I know I yeah, no, I know I won't remember now because I know I have a sage plant. The variety I have no idea what the variety is. No, I think I may have bought that sage plant or lavender, I'm thinking, I know I planted lavender plants there, but I have no idea what the variety is.

Oh, that would be nice to know. So you can keep track of that. And it's all in one place. It sounds like it's pretty awesome app, you know, maybe a little high tech for somebody who's maybe first starting out, but still how organized could be.

Well, actually, they offer a free account. Actually, you can go there now. You can get a free account. And actually, their free account used to be limited to, like, seven varieties of vegetables. But now because of the economic climate that we're in right now, they have opened that up, and you can enter as many type of varieties as you want in the free account.

So the free account is limited to a point, because, like, the free account.

Is not going to have that layout plan. It may have the journal, it may not, but it may be just help you with it's. Like, okay, you're going to start you want to start tomatoes. It's going to tell you by your zone, by your zip code. It'll tell you you need to start your tomato seed plants inside March, whatever you need to plant your radishes.

So it's a good starting point.

It's a very good starting because I use the basically when I started using it three years, maybe four years ago, that's all you could do is you could plug in tomatoes and it would tell you when you should plant them out, when you should start your seeds, and when you should plant them outside. And I use that like that for a year.

Sounds like the program is quite a useful tool even for a seed and gardener like yourself.

Actually, from listening to the webinar that I listened to a couple of weeks ago, there are commercial gardeners, I would say a commercial farmer market type person, that they are using it to help them plan out when they need because they want this as succession planting. They want to keep and they want to get their crop in as early as and on the right time. And so there is a few people in there. That's what they do. They use this to plan out. But now they're looking forward to that. They can tell what they're going to go here there with the layout plan.

For someone who's a visual person needs to see that plot, so to speak, and see where that would be.

Because, yeah, I do that on paper the last couple of years and I've done. Okay, but I'm hoping this helps me to refine that a little.

Even after you've found a really good.

Gardening app there that is just about this is a basic list. These are things to start with. Do your research. I know only a small part and I've learned everything. I'm a self taught gardener. I grew we had a huge garden when I was a kid. I hated it. And so now that I actually garden is totally amazing to me. I've learned everything as I go, and I've learned it from reading books. And then once there was Internet, because when I started gardening, there was no Internet. There was books, books from the library. But now you have YouTube, you have fellow gardeners, and then you have Facebook, whereas I like that Facebook where you can get somebody's opinion.

And that's what it is, it's an opinion.

And you still need to do what you want to do. You can say, okay, this is what this person does here. But that's not like set in stone and that you have to do it that way. Take their advice and they have a little knowledge. And so you try it and if it works for you, fine. If not, you move on. And that's how I used to plant. I've gotten a little more picky as I've gotten older. Is that if you planted it and it's growing, yay. And if it didn't, darn, let's try again. I didn't even think about it. Animal pressures on your garden, too. That's another thing that you got to think about too. If you're going to garden, where are you? You've talked about that in your animal issue out here? It's because of your animal.

Because of our animals. We got poultry out here. Chickens love a garden. Deer, I really don't know if I've ever had deer problems, but rabbits, yeah.

Rabbits are my big issue.

Rabbits are huge. Not that we have domestic rabbits, but we also have wild rabbits out here. My chickens. It's hard to fence chickens out of a garden.

You have to have almost as tall enough fence to keep deer and chickens out.

And then, of course, we have goats out here.

They would eat anything.

And goats, I don't care whatever that prize is that you want the prized tomato plant or if it's a pepper plant or whatever, that's the first thing they will eat. If they get out, they will ignore everything else and go straight for whatever is most precious to you. I don't care if it's a rose plant or what. And so I don't have a lot of stuff out here, just that's one of my other reasons. And then we do once in a while, if we need to, our cattle actually graze around our house. Yes, cows will eat that too. Everything is certified organic out here, including my yard. And so if we need to graze it, we graze it, and they will also eat my garden.

Where is your apple trees? Got a fence around?

We fence off our apple trees to make sure that the animals do not get to them, whether they're domestic ones or they're wild ones. But yeah, that is a huge thing is in raccoons love a garden. You had something eating your little what was it?

Seed?

What did you put in the ground? Was that what was it? Because you said I had to plant it again. Was it beet seed? Something was eating your seeds and we thought maybe was squirrel or chipmunk or something. And you said you planted it the next day that was all dug up.

Yeah, that happened.

I don't remember what it was.

That's happened a couple of times. It's like the the rabbits eating garlic tops. I'm like, I would not have thought or rabbits eat my raspberry bush off. I didn't have very many raspberries because the rabbits mowed them down around.

And we've lost apple trees out here due to the rabbits. So our trees are actually wrapped now.

That's another consideration. What kind of animal pressures are you going to have in your space?

Because they find that stuff. They like the good stuff, too. Okay, so I think we've probably covered enough for today. We will probably revisit the gardening thing because that is a big thing for you. And for most homesteaders, that is a thing you garden and because you probably can, everybody does. But gardens, and like you said, gardens are coming back. People are are realizing that our supply issues with when COVID hit it made a huge difference and it's still affecting us today. Yeah, I had somebody here the other day who said their cousin's furnace went out in their house. They can't get a new one. There's nothing out there to replace the furnace. And so they're heating with electric heaters right now. If that can happen there I wasn't.

To the stores right before this big storm we had just last week, but I had seen pictures of stores that they were just cleaned out because it was before Christmas and there was a big storm coming in. And so, like, people I don't know if they just panic moderately well, and.

Then when you have the weather issue, then they can't even bring anything in.

That's probably the other issue is that they couldn't receive stuff so they couldn't.

Stock yeah, they can't stock it either because of the weather.

Off on another tangent here, but I.

Think that we'll talk about seeds and planting things as we go because I.

Will probably start late January, February planting my seeds, onions, and parsley. You need to start early.

That's good to know.

That was my list. I know it's on your list.

That's probably covered everything. We'd like to give a special thank you to Picosupply.com for sponsoring our podcast.

So until next time, put some key for on it.

Thank you for listening to The Homestead Podcast's latest episode. Your hosts, Carol Radtke and Jamie Kappes are two gals homesteading. To learn more, go to 2galshomesteading.com or the Two Gals Homesteading Facebook page at facebook.com/2galshomesteading. Editing, audio production, and marketing of the Homestead Podcast is the responsibility of MediaTrendsX. The Homestead Podcast is an audio product of MediaTrendsX, a limited liability company based in Minnesota, USA.