In the spirit of springtime, Easter, and by popular demand, we welcome back three of our all-time gardening, homesteading, and animal husbandry greats to jam as much information and useful tips in two hours as humanly possible. Keep your bloodline clean, and your hands dirty! Expert recommendations: Grapefruit Seed Oil for family and flock Broadfork for tilling soil Earthworm castings for soil supplementation El Pajarate, traditional Mexican morning drink! Bumper: Homegrown by the Zac Brown Band Break: Mitt Land by Heidrun (DJ Mitgartner) Close: Message in a Bottle (remix) by 3Lau Support Ash Sharp's wife and daughters: https://www.givesendgo.com/SupportingPSharp Support Sam Melia's family: https://www.givesendgo.com/sammelia Support Judd Blevins in his recall election: https://secure.anedot.com/blevins4enid/donate Buy a David Irving book for yourself, a friend, or a political prisoner: https://irvingbooks.com/donate/ And for the love of all that is good and holy, write to a prisoner: https://Justice-Initiative.net Go forth and multiply. Support Full Haus at givesendgo.com/FullHaus Subscribe to Surreal Politiks. And follow The Final Storm on Telegram and subscribe on Odysee. Censorship-free Telegram commentary: https://t.me/prowhitefam2 Telegram channel with ALL shows available for easy download: https://t.me/fullhausshows Gab.com/Fullhaus Odysee for special occasion livestreams. RSS: https://feeds.libsyn.com/275732/rss All shows since Zencast deplatforming: https://fullhaus.libsyn.com/ And of course, feel free to drop us a line with anything on your mind at fullhausshow@protonmail.com. We love ya fam, and we'll talk to you next week.
For tens of thousands of years, our ancestors sustained themselves, their families, and their tribes by hunting, fishing, foraging, and growing crops from seed to harvest.
That vital tradition, repeated endlessly over countless millennia, has unquestionably left a mark on your genetics, regardless of whether you're an urban bugman or an experienced backwoodsman.
But for far too many of us, it is a lost tradition among so many others as driving to the grocery store has become our primary source of sustenance.
Since moving to the country a few years ago, we here have slowly and incrementally returned to tradition, as it were, trying to add some new production or competence each year, from fruit trees to potatoes to chicken.
It's not glamorous and it's not always fun, but it is damn rewarding, possibly life-saving down the road, and has even brought moments of transcendental bliss, especially when the kids get involved and help out.
And it's why every spring for a few years now, we've brought you a gardening or homesteading show of one kind or another.
If you learn just one thing from us and put it into action, it'll be worth our time.
So in keeping with tradition, we welcome back not one, not two, but three members of our brain trust in these matters to help you and your family gain new skills and joy.
So, Mr. Producer, hit it.
Lay back and smell the sun, warm up the Georgia pie.
It's so good to be taking it easy.
Why would I ever leave?
Cause I know I got some good friends that live down the street.
Got a good looking mama with her arms around me.
Here in a small town where it feels like home.
Welcome, everyone, to Full House, the world's most useful show for white fathers, aspiring ones, and the whole biofam.
It is episode 182, and I am your aspiring egg bear and host, Coach Finstock, back with another two hours of stuff that is frankly more important than interpreting the news.
No offense to guys who do that too.
Before we meet the birth panel, though, huge thanks to Charles, Cadias, Derek, Rusty, Knickerbocker, and a couple of nons for their kind support of the show.
And if you're as tired of hearing those names of those Samaritan scoundrels as I am, give them a break and hear your own pseudonym and lights by going to givesendgo.com slash fullhouse.
And with that, let's get on to the birth panel and our very special return guests.
First up, when we started this show in April 2019, almost a full five years ago, he thought Green Thumb was some kind of dope fiend marijuana reference.
And now he grows his own greens without remotely approaching pot.
Sam, welcome back.
Thanks, Coach.
Yeah.
It's because of this show that we have gotten into farming or growing things anyways.
So I really credit the different guests we've had through the years.
And just like you say, if you can learn one new thing, try one new thing.
That's what it's all about.
So I will be all ears on this episode.
We are getting ready.
to plant some things, but spring has not exactly cooperated.
We had a snowstorm the other day.
So I hope that we'll turn the corner with some better weather here.
Easter's coming right around the corner.
That's right.
This weekend, big guy.
And yeah, it makes me happy to think of you out in the garden, you know, where as you wouldn't have been before.
And we've said before, we'll say it again, the time to experiment and figure out what you're doing and fail, even if you fail spectacularly, is now when the grocery store is stocked.
The sky may never fall, but it might.
And even if it doesn't, it's still rewarding.
It's still worth it and still healthy and an activity.
And it's one of the best hobbies at minimum.
It really is.
It must have been about four years ago, or maybe it was even after the first one, where we started growing lettuce, you know, and we actually put it in our salad or, you know, combined it with some store-bought things.
And there's certainly nothing better than that.
So we do want to get into some new things.
So I have some questions for our eminent guests here.
It's really, we're lucky to have these three guys all together on one show.
Absolutely.
I'm really excited they are too.
They wouldn't shut up in the show chat.
They're already bouncing up.
Burning content.
Garden nerds.
All right.
Next up, I'm not exactly sure what it is our goat guru does every day, but he is damn good at it.
Our trusty producer, Rolo.
Welcome back, buddy.
Hi, thank you.
Anything at the top?
You got a stack of questions?
Are you going to be in passive listening mode this show?
The latter.
Okay.
Very good.
We'll get right to it then.
And on to our specially cultivated panel of experts.
Yeah, I know.
I'm going to have a lot of garden metaphors in here, probably in random order.
First up, if I had a random question about anything related to homesteading, he'd probably be the first man I go to.
I described him as a jack of all trades and the teaser for this show.
And hopefully he doesn't disappoint.
Tech from the Folkstead.
Welcome back, my friend.
Oh, man.
So glad to be here again with you guys and with the guests we have today.
There's going to be a lot of good topics.
It's going to be really good.
Absolutely.
How are you and the family?
And I assume you're still at it and you got your hands full with more projects than ever before.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah.
No, the family's great.
We've been doing really good.
And I had some health issues that kind of slowed us down last year that I've alleviated.
So now I'm really, really kicking into gear and expanding the property and expanding our growing areas for the gardening and nailing down the animals.
Good.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I think we have, if not all of the growing zones represented on the show, we definitely have Upper Midwest, West, South, Mid-Atlantic, et cetera, covered.
So all of us have some unique experience in our local biomes, I guess.
And yeah, we'll get to it shortly after we go through the necessary.
So next up, from hogs to hens, from horses to heifers.
If I had an animal husbandry question out of Leftfield, he would be the first one I go to and unquestionably have an answer.
He single-handedly made onions and socks cool again.
Hans, welcome back, buddy.
Thanks for having me, Coach.
Absolute pleasure here.
Yeah.
We'll go around to see what you guys are working on.
But anything exciting out in the fields yet this spring?
We're getting bees this year getting put packages installed in the hives.
And I mean, it's just, it's been cold.
I'm waiting for the grass to start growing.
Do you ever approach a spring and think, ah, maybe I'll take this year off and not do so much work?
Oh, no.
No, never had.
It's always more.
Not an option.
Yeah.
I almost intentionally have not gotten kraken yet this spring.
Partial excuse, my left knee, but also I wanted to make the audience feel better.
That was totally my motivation in case they haven't gotten kraken yet.
All I've gotten is potting soil and planting soil.
And I've gotten my greenhouse ready, but I have not put a seed in ground yet.
So if you're listening to this and you're getting anxious because it's March 27th as we go to tape, do not be.
There's still time.
And that brings us to our next guest, who I remember the last time he came on.
He said, don't freak out.
You still got time.
It's still early.
It was probably March last year.
And he is the dirtiest of our special guests.
He's often spotted out in the wild mud wrestling, but it's just him in the mud, reveling at it, looking at it, studying it in his fingers.
He has a one-man love affair with the plant world, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
Mitt Gartner, welcome back, buddy.
Hey, but you know what?
I beat him two out of three.
So that was pretty good.
Has it been a year already?
No, it's good to be back.
It's good to be back.
Yep.
Just wrangling the soil and trying to stick things in the ground.
But I'm honestly, I'm a little bit behind myself because, yeah, I'm dealing with some bees.
So too bad I can't move the bees over to you.
Who was saying that?
Was it Hans?
Hans has the bees this year.
Yeah, because I got too many.
They're like in a shed over by where my garden is.
And they've always been there, but I've developed an allergy to them.
So now when I go out there and they usually get stung a few times a year, but now like my arms swell up and I'm worried I'm going to get stung in the face.
So I got to, I'm waiting.
The bee guy's going to come out and take them out.
He'll save them and stuff.
Yeah, but I have the gear.
I have all the gear, but even with the gear, I usually get stung with it.
So now I'm like, I can't risk it.
So yeah.
Oh, so this is not, it's not just a bee infestation.
You were raising bees for honey and then you developed an allergy to them.
Talk about unintended.
Well, it was an infestation that I let just stay around because they were good.
They were by my garden.
I got good pollination and stuff, but now, yeah, now I'm allergic to them.
Sorry, buddy.
Yeah.
We're going to talk about that in the second half.
We don't know if everybody's going to stick around for the second half.
I want to talk about like the outbreak of cancers and maladies.
I've consulted with some of our medical brain trusts separately.
And clearly, Mitt Gartner is suffering from the quadruple quintuple vax there, developing an allergy to his treasured bees.
All right.
Let's get cracking.
And let's just go to text first.
We'll stay in the order that I randomly introduce people.
Tex, you took some time off.
You know, you're recovering from whatever it was.
What's going on on the homestead now?
And what are you looking to add or improve or upgrade this year?
Ideas for the audience or just some of the routine loving care that's required?
Well, we the last year we spent we spent some time building the soil.
You know, that's the good part of having the animals is you get a lot of manure that you can compost.
So our soil isn't very good here.
So I spent last year doing that.
So now we're actually getting into some planting.
Got some cucumbers, some lettuce, some, what else we got?
My wife has a whole list of things that we've started and started planting.
I have a question about the manure, if I can interject.
Is that something you could use it right away?
Or I heard you have to like condition it or let it like aerate or something.
Well, it depends on the animal you're getting it from.
Oh, okay.
You know, obviously chickens, chickens, theirs is way too hot and you can't put that directly on your plants.
It'll burn your soil, you know, burn the plants.
Yeah.
It's overfertilized, but that's why I'm a big advocate of rabbits.
Even if you don't have the fortitude to put them in the freezer, just having them there for your kids to play with and then collecting their droppings is the best manure you could put on your plants.
You could put it directly onto the plants.
So like I said, even if you don't have the fortitude to put them in the freezer, which I fully advocate you should, they still have a byproduct.
And then they're a great way to recycle a lot of the stuff you're not going to eat from the garden and then turn into great nutrients you can put right back into the garden.
So now I remember you very vividly advocating for rabbits last time, Tex.
So if you're not planning, if you're just like, look, I'm not going to be slaughtering rabbits, do you have to cage them or will they actually stay in that beautiful rabbit fortress that you shared with us last time?
If you create the conditions, they'll hang around.
Oh, yeah.
Well, obviously, like I do communal rabbit habitat building where they're a lot more free than you do in cages.
Some people advocate for cages over, you know, that's a larger rabbit argument within the rabbit community that doesn't have a control.
But in either one of those scenarios, you can easily collect their manure and put it and deposit it wherever you need it to be.
And they're going to build soil for you.
But obviously rabbits are going to generate a lot.
So if you're trying to build out a garden, that's not going to generate your soil.
That's going to be more like a fertilizer.
So you'll need some other way of building up compost to build yourself some soil.
Because I know that that was addressed in the questions like, hey, what about soil?
You know, I live in a terrible area.
Well, make your own soil.
That's really the best answer for that.
And yeah, Mitt Gartner actually wrote an entire article about how to make his special sauce.
And I'll admit, I was like, oh man, that's a lot of work.
That's a lot of ingredients.
I never did it.
Sorry, Mitt Gartner.
We'll get to it.
And Sam, to the manure question too, in past years, I haven't done it recently, but you can literally just get bags of, I did manure and hummus.
I forget if it was combined or in separate bags, but you can just buy a bag or two of that stuff because I know you don't have a ton of space.
Probably a few raised beds.
Yeah, you just, you know, just mix it in there unless that sounds crazy to any of the guys.
Well, and you can, all you have to do is look on Craig's list if you think I'm crazy.
People are giving away horse manure every day.
You just literally got to go get it.
They give it, they're like, hey, horse manure, come shovel it.
And they got it in giant piles at their horse stalls and you just go and get it for free instead of going to the store and paying for manure.
Manure and roosters never pay for either of those.
Never pay for either one of those.
I got some lessons learned on the damn chicken farming for later in the show.
But let's go.
Thank you, Tex.
Oh, and I'm sorry if I missed it.
Anything new or exciting that you're doing this spring?
Really for us, like my project this year, more expanding the available area on our property that's been overgrown.
And so now that I have, you know, I'm in better health and I have my tractor functioning again, that's where I'm really expanding and making more usable spaces and kind of future projects out one or two years out.
Not necessarily at the moment, but it's exciting every day to see the progress.
Yeah, you like George W. Bush out there, brush cleaning.
I remember that from the W years, his photo ops out there, clear and brush down in somewhere down Texas.
And definitely later on, text, let us know, you know, since you are in a hotter, drier, perhaps poorer soil environment, some of the things that you grow that are hardier that do better for our Godforsaken desert dwellers or whoever else is listening to the show around the world, I might add.
Now, let's get on to Hans real quick.
Hans, you welcome new brown life into your family this spring.
I know, and it's not because you went down to Haiti to adopt a black child victimized by congratulations on the new life, though.
Seriously, yeah, we had two brown calves and then a brown goat, but we did have two white goats.
Oh, we're still waiting on the other two to drop.
So we'll see what color those turn out when they drop.
And I know you're raising cattle for beef.
Do you have a milk cow too?
And what are you doing with the goats?
Yeah, we got two milk cows, and those are actually the two that had calves.
The other two are our beef calves aren't due till June and July.
And then the goats, the two were waiting to have their kids are dairy goats, but the other two were meat goats that had theirs already.
And I suspect that you have a bigger animal operation.
Well, probably more so than Mitt Gartner for sure, maybe for techs.
Remind us roughly how many acres you have and managing work, family, and animals.
And I suspect you're not going on long vacations too often.
Yeah, no, we got 38 and a half acres, almost 40.
So, and then no, we don't really go vacation very much.
Maybe a day here and there, but no, no long trips anywhere.
Your kids are probably trustworthy and old enough that if you and Wifey wanted to get away, they could hold down the homestead.
I suspect.
Do you think they could hold it down, or they still need mom and dad around to manage?
The older two definitely could.
I mean, right there, but the younger two and the fights between them might not go so well to deal with all that.
Sure.
And I love whenever talk of Bitcoin or stocks breaks out in the chat, Hans is always like, I invest in meat stocks on my own property.
Anything new or exciting that you're working on this year?
And second question, so new and exciting.
And if everything shut down and went to hell, could you survive on your property?
And is that an objective of yours?
Or is this, you know, it's a little bit of both.
You're selling some meat, you're eating some of it, et cetera.
So, yeah, we're planting elderberry and honey locusts and mulberries this year.
We're trying to get some shade and stuff out in the past year.
I mean, you can survive on meat.
So if everything collapsed, I mean, we could probably at least last a couple years.
We buy hay right now.
We could make a lot of our own.
We could, we, if we downsized our beef, we could probably probably be all right if we for a while at least.
Just standing.
Yeah, but I mean, we've got thousands of between all the animals from the poultry all the way up to the beef.
We've we can probably last quite a while as long as you can back them in the garden.
Yeah, the thought the thought occurs, you know, having built out just a little bit here, not bragging at all.
There's way more that I could and should be doing, but got six hens and maybe a source of milk and a moderate green thumb.
You might be hungry and you're not going to be living high on the hog, ha ha.
But, you know, it doesn't take too much to get seriously self-sustaining, if not entirely.
I think that's fair to say.
Yeah, you, I mean, you can do a lot.
I mean, we, I mean, probably 85, 90% of the food we eat comes off the property here.
That's impressive.
Yep.
Yeah, despite our efforts, 90 to 95%, I'll admit, probably still does come from the grocery store here.
But no shame because that's getting a little bit smaller every year.
And I don't know if you guys couldn't see it behind me, but I got, we're at the point now where we're backed up on eggs and that means gifting.
We're not in the point of selling them yet.
You see tons of people around here with their little side of the road signs saying farm fresh eggs, X dollars per dozen.
Thank you for the timekeeping, Rolo.
We do have to get cracking.
And with that, thank you.
Thank you, Hans.
We'll come back to you for sure.
Elderberry, honey, locust, and mulberry, which is a good segue to our true green thumb.
I mistakenly introduced him as a master gardener.
He clarified that that's a technical term that he has not yet acquired.
But Mitt Gardner, you're behind schedule, which is okay.
That's good for the audience to feel better.
But anything new and exciting that you're working on this spring?
Well, I just re-upped on my chickens.
So went down to the feed store, bought like nine more.
I still have some from previous generations running around.
They're adults, obviously.
And yeah, so my plan with these guys is to basically set up like a micro pasture like rotation.
So I'm going to do a poly tunnel and they're going to kind of grow up in this poly tunnel and they're just going to shred all the weeds that are growing and stuff and peck everything down and obviously poop in there.
And then what's a poly tunnel for the audience, please?
So a polytunnel is like when you when you find the plastic over like a like a half half circle and it's a tunnel and it's a you know this queen type plastic greenhouse greenhouse plastic.
And so it's basically a little greenhouse, but I'm going to do it higher up.
So I'm going to I'm going to put in the T-posts and like a rectangular shape.
Then I'm going to run the I'm just going to use PVC because it lasts a few years.
I'm going to PVC for the ribbing on the top and then drape the whole thing in the greenhouse plastic.
And the inside is going to have the fencing around it, the chicken wire.
And they're just going to kind of live in there and just tear it all up, the ground anyway.
And then and then I'm going to build another one as they're destroying that.
I should say, tilling up the soil.
And then so I'm going to move them into the next one.
And then when that one's done, I'll plant into it.
And I'll just kind of go around.
And once they're big enough, I'll just turn them loose and put them out back.
But they'll kind of weed for me.
They'll get rid of a lot of the bugs.
And that's kind of the, I just, it's kind of more an experiment.
I already have another system that I like to do for planting my normal garden, which I have going as well.
But this is for more like an expansion because I have some room for it.
So I figure I could do like six of these polytunnels.
By the time they run through all six, they'll probably be big enough to run around on their own.
So and then I'll just sequentially plant them as I go through the season for things that I want, you know, later in the year.
So, I mean, the whole thing is, it sounds like a big operation, but each polytunnel area is going to be basically like eight feet wide, 12 feet long.
And then the next one is going to be right after it.
So I can just scoot them into the next one.
And so I'm glad you mentioned that because sometimes when you guys get really rolling and excited about these things, it sounds overwhelming or daunting.
And I put myself in the audience shoes and they're like, they're not, they're going to get scared off.
They're not going to build a poly tunnel.
But once you get out there in the sun, and you know, most of the supplies for this stuff are pretty cheap, you know, build one poly tunnel or give it a shot, even if you fail.
Who cares?
You got, go for it.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Like each, each polytunnel at most is like 10 T posts.
And then you got some whatever 20 foot long runs a PVC pipe.
And then you use those for the ribbing and stuff like that.
It's not too hard.
It's like, I'm sure you could, you know, go on YouTube and look it up.
But yeah, so that's kind of the plan.
That's more of an experiment.
But I have my garden going and I'm not too worried about, you know, as far as like getting a late start because the system I'm doing now is like, basically, I can go from planting to like several sets of true leaves on a plant with like it's creating its own shade,
you know, basically within maybe three weeks because, which sounds very fast because I'm using like, I basically what I do is I take like old water bottles, like one gallons and stuff like that.
I'm cut off the top of them and I'll cut flaps in the bottom of them, kind of make it like some ventilation.
And when I do my beds, the only place that, the only place where the sunlight actually hits the soil is inside that thing and everything else is covered with straw.
So those things kind of exclude the, and I plant inside of them, obviously, and I water inside of them.
And so like those exclude the bugs out of there because one of my big things out here is like the pillow bugs and the earwigs, which normally are good.
They break down a lot of, you know, biotic material in your soil, which is good, but they'll go after seedlings when they're, when they're young and vulnerable.
So those things exclude those and it creates obviously a small greenhouse effect.
And then when you water in there, you can actually fill up that container a little bit and it'll push the water really deep into the root zone.
So it'll, it'll promote really deep root growth specifically where that plant is.
So the prep work is a pain and the watering is also takes a little while.
But other than that, I'm not doing much weeding at all.
I don't really have to worry about the bugs because by the time they grow into that container, I pull it off and they're, they have all their chemical defenses up and they're, and these bugs are not usually an issue anymore.
So I'm glad you mentioned like, go ahead.
Sorry.
No, I was just going to say I'm glad that you mentioned the relatively rapid time that you get your seeds, you know, from seed to viable plant because that was our game changer to use a cliched hackneyed phrase from last year, which we had an old pump house that totally rotten.
And we actually, it was a hand pump that we ended up dropping a pump into to deliver water to another structure.
And then we were able to get a hose connected to that too for absolute awesome watering of a nice big sunny space.
But what that did was it just gave us the real estate because in previous springs, I was just screwing around with Jiffy pods and they were like up on top of the china cabinet.
They were in the windowsill, like it was a mess.
And this enabled us to get an earlier start with more space and with bigger pots instead of, you know, Jiffy pods work.
Don't let me discourage you from that.
Absolutely do them if you're tight on space or you're a beginner.
But just having, and anybody could probably do this if you've got a sunny open spot on your property, whether you make it yourself or buy one, just getting your greenhouse gives you way more real estate, more temperature control, allows you to plant a lot more stuff, get an earlier start.
And my only conundrum is, of course, it's still going down well below freezing or below freezing into April here.
So what I did last year was I just ran an extension cord out there and put a little heat electric heat tower and set it to the lowest setting, which I'm not happy about burning that electricity, but it worked.
They all survived and none of them froze.
Yeah.
Yep.
We're going to geek out on animals for sure and get Texan Hans back in here.
But while we're with you, Mick Gartner, the sort of gardening 101, I wanted to revisit briefly for people who have never really done it before, aside from digging a hole and putting a flower in it or something like that.
I suspect, correct me if I'm wrong, for the rookies out there, people getting started this spring, that perhaps their best bet would be to construct some simple raised beds and buy a raised bed, you know, just get cedar wood from the lumber store if you can, or just any non-pressure treated wood, correct me if I'm wrong.
Dump some garden soil in there, even if you buy the plants from Home Depot or whatever and pop them in there to get started or raise them from seed.
Are raised beds a good starting place for people to grow vegetables in their backyard?
Well, I mean, it depends.
I mean, if you got good soil in the ground and it drains well and you're able to control, you know, obviously how much the water is pulling in there, the temperature and stuff like that, you can just do it right in the ground.
One of the main things with that is obviously if you have like rabbits or gophers or something like that.
But yeah, the raised beds are nice because you're not leaning over as much.
It's a lot tidier looking.
People like it, like the look of it.
And yeah, you could backfill it with your own soil and you know what you're working with.
But, you know, if you just want to get started and you don't have too much of like gopher pressure or whatever, any other kind of burrowing rodents or anything like that, you can just go straight into the ground, just amend that and just have at it.
You're going to be weeding and stuff, but there's ways to control that if you want to add the extra.
Do raised beds help prevent like Jew tunneling?
Yeah.
Raised beds with bloody mattresses.
Yes.
What is the Jew of the garden world?
Is it the vole?
Is it the groundhog?
I don't know.
Go ahead, Sam.
Sounds like you have a question.
So, you know, we're kind of in an urban setting, so we don't have a compost bin or anything like that.
What is a good alternative?
I've heard about or read about mushroom compost and soil that contains worm casings.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, if you don't have the space to do your own composting, and I know some places with like HOAs and all that, they don't even, they'll, you know, they'll get on your case about it or whatever.
Like just, you just buy that stuff in because the chances are if you don't have room to do the composting, you probably don't have a whole lot of room for like a full on garden either.
So at that scale, you could buy things in.
You're just, you're better off buying things in.
Yeah.
But definitely worm castings are great.
I mean, they have tons of beneficial microbes to them.
They're the soil chemistry wise, like everything should be available.
The only thing that'll start throwing that off really is like if your water is kind of alkaline from like a lot of minerals in it or something like that.
So you could test that out.
But yeah, city water.
This is something I could buy at the store.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Like worm worm casings, worm castings.
You could buy those at any garden store should have them.
Especially if they have the worm eggs in them and some live worms, that'd be great.
And yeah, any of those garden stores should have them.
Sometimes they have them at Walmart and stuff like that.
It kind of depends.
And does mulch prevent weeds?
It can if it's thick enough.
So you got to lay it down thick.
If you just got a couple chips on top, weeds are going to come right through it.
But if you're buying.
if you're buying your own soil from the store, it should be mostly weed-free.
There might be a few in there that you got to pluck out every once in a while.
But that stuff's turned and cooked basically to where like it's the only thing that's alive in there is the soil microbes and there's no plants living inside that soil.
So like, yeah, like, but if you want to mulch to prevent weeds, you're going to need to either lay down a lot or you're going to need to lay down a like a pretty much impermeable barrier, something like newspaper or cardboard or something that's hard for like a seedling to get up and grow through without getting all leggy, at which point you can just pull it out because it's super leggy and thin.
And so you either got to go real thick on the mulch or you got to lay down a bear and then maybe drop some mulch on there so it doesn't look weird.
Like you got newspaper in your garden and it'll kind of help hold down.
Yeah, we do the, we have some big pots that we put up on cinder blocks, you know, so that's, that's what we, that's what we work with.
That's what we, that's the scale we can handle right now.
Yeah.
Every year I wish go ahead, Tex.
Yeah.
I was going to say with the, I noticed you mentioned mushroom compost and you got to be a little bit cautious with that because some people advertise mushroom compost and really it's it's more mulch and you'll end up with that same mulching effect with your plants will get stifled.
So just be cautious with not overdoing the so-called mushroom compost.
Okay.
Very good.
Yeah, that's a thing.
Every spring, Sam, I wish that I bought like there's never enough mulch.
And even and I definitely agree with Mitt Gartner.
Like I never lay it on thick enough to be a total weed preventative, but it looks really pretty to start with and it does help retain some of the moisture.
And so like even a little bit helps, even if it's not a panacea.
Well, that one thing about that is like if you're mulching with wood chips or something like that, I actually like to put a flat barrier down, something like cardboard, generally like a thin cardboard, and then put the mulch on top because the mulch will start easily migrating into the soil.
And as the mulch breaks down in the soil, it'll start robbing nitrogen from the plant.
So because wood requires nitrogen in order to break down.
So it'll rob it from the plant.
And then during that crucial period, you might not have it when you need it.
So when you have something flat like a newspaper or cardboard, it prevents that infiltration of the wood chips into the soil as much.
And yeah, that cardboard will be robbing a little bit of nitrogen to break down, but it'll take basically the whole season before it allows the wood chips to start entering into the soil.
So that's why I like it.
For me, the wood chips just look nice and then they go into the soil for the next year, basically, when I'm letting it rest.
But yeah, mostly it's just the flat barrier.
And the only place where the soil is showing is where I have my plant.
So then my plant can monopolize all that soil that no other thing can grow in.
There you go.
In other words, listen to Mitt Gardner.
Don't listen to me, Sam.
Let's go to Tex and Hans for any other beginner tips or motivation here.
My couple quick ones off the top of my head are absolutely like there's nothing worse than being over eager planning outdoors.
And then you get those late frosts in April or even early May and you get screwed and you basically have to start over again.
So definitely pay attention to not just the guidelines, but also that 10-day weather forecast to see if you're really in the clear before putting.
Yeah, how do you know what the first or last frost is?
My mama always said, never plant something before Mother's Day.
Now that's New Jersey.
You know, your location may be well before or well after Mother's Day.
But, you know, you can look at the 10-day forecast and look at, I mean, you can just go to any website, not any website, but you can plug in your zip code and it'll give you the average date of last frost.
I actually did that this year, which is late April or early May here.
The farmer's almanac.
The farmer's almanac is your friend.
We'll kind of help you with a guideline.
But I also, I kind of stifle or stifle out my seedlings to where I'm not planting them all at once.
I'm putting them out.
And that way your harvest are, you know, camel humped out.
And that way you're not hard, you know, you don't have all your squash coming in all at one time because, you know, half of it's going to rot at that point, right?
You want to kind of stagger those things out a bit so that your harvests are good.
And then, hey, if that frost comes, hey, I only lost this little bit of plants, but I got plenty in the backup.
Hey, I'll plant some more to kind of cover that, what I lost in the front of the season.
Very good point, Tex.
Yeah, we often think like we have to do everything at once, get it in, you know, set it and forget it.
Of course, you got to maintain it and stuff like that, but you can stagger these things.
And I've been pleasantly surprised.
There's always something in June or maybe even early July where I'm like, I really wanted to plant this.
I stick it in and you'll get something out of it.
It might not be ideal, but you're still learning and getting something out of it.
Hans, any heartbreaking stories of failure or success from, you know, for the intro audience that's out there?
I mean, yeah, I've had, I mean, trees die.
I've had calves die.
I mean, I've had, I mean, nothing ever goes perfect every time.
You know, I mean, sometimes things go bad, but you move on and you go through and you learn and you just keep going.
So yep.
Yeah, you know, something I wanted to failure.
Go ahead.
Something I want to say about the frost thing.
I mean, where I'm, it doesn't get as cold as where you are, but, you know, not all frosts are created equal either.
So it's like, you know, sometimes if it's just a quick frost right before the sun comes up, maybe it finally dips down that low or something and the frost isn't sitting on the plant as much.
A lot of plants can handle it depending on the plant.
You know, obviously look it up, but like what they could handle.
But like one thing I like to do in areas where I have had to deal with a lot of frost was like I'll keep a I'll keep a cachet of like large, relatively large rocks and I'll position them.
Usually if it's the winter time, I'll position them on the north side.
So that way the plant is kind of leaning on them.
And then I'll set them right there, like right where the base of the plant is, even if it's a tiny plant.
And sometimes I'll put rocks all around it and the rocks will like absorb some of the sun's heat and it'll kind of protect the crown of the plant.
So even if the tips die, the crown of it might survive.
And I'll do that sometimes.
And it actually does work quite a bit.
Like I don't get the frost like you guys do, but you could you could try that.
I like to use granite, but maybe if you got some darker ones out there, like, I don't know, some of that sweet flavor.
Yeah, exactly.
I've used that to support seedlings, but I never thought about the heat retention aspect of it early in the season.
Thank you, buddy.
If we could, let's move on to fruit trees because that's something that virtually anybody can do, except for our apartment and condo dwellers.
I think we address, you know, getting those boxes on your balcony started.
So we'll skip that.
But fruit trees, and this one's one of my quote-unquote selfish questions because over the past four years, every spring, our local, I think they call it a conservation district, offers all sorts of saplings for dirt cheap.
So I've gotten apples, cherries, plums, apricots, peach, and most of them have survived and grown reasonably well.
However, I've gotten nothing but some scraggly apples to date, more suitable for horse than man.
So fruit tree planting principles, pruning, soil, fertilizer, all that stuff, over to any of our three experts for vital fruit tree cultivation tips, please.
Who wants it?
Hey, Hans, yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead, Mick Carter.
Yeah, Hans was telling me about the trim and the branches, and I didn't quite capture everything.
But go ahead, Mick Cartner, and then Hans.
Oh, just a quick one.
I know that, like, if you hit the apples with like, I don't know if you get fungus or anything like that.
A lot of times the fungus funguses are, yeah, they're transferred during the bloom period.
So one organic method is to spray them with a copper fungicide during, you can do a sulfur one too, either way, but do it while they're blooming and it will knock a lot of the blooms off.
But the ones that you have will produce fruit that are larger because if you set too much fruit, each individual fruit is smaller.
So you want to go for quality over quantity.
So a good time to hit them with the copper or sulfur fungicide is when they're full bloom.
And it'll help prevent the blight, but it'll also help prevent like crappy fruit set.
So yeah.
I have noticed the rust on the leaves in past years and have used a spray.
I forget exactly what it is off the top of my head, but and it's it's made a noticeable difference.
It at least stopped it and in some cases reversed it.
And just a little inspiration motivation for the audience.
I bought a self-pollinating Home Depot peach tree before that actually started giving real edible, delicious peaches within it was like the second year.
So it does not have to be a long wait necessarily.
Hans, you had some pruning tips for me that I haven't internalized yet, also because the trees are just barely blooming.
But go ahead.
Yeah.
If you prune them back in the wintertime when they're dormant, then they still have all that energy in the roots.
So they come back more vigorous in the spring.
And then if you get water sprouts that come up straight up, you just cut those off anytime.
Those are rob your tree.
And then if your trees branches are growing pretty vertical, if you can take like a piece of hose and put it over a wire so it doesn't cut into the tree, and then use like a cinder block if the branches aren't too stout yet, they're still flexible.
If you bend those out more horizontal, you'll create it'll send a signal to the tree and it'll induce fruiting.
So you'll get fruit earlier if they grow out more horizontal instead of vertical.
I know the ones you're talking about, the sort of nasty runners that grow vertically, absolutely got that one.
But is early spring too late to do serious pruning?
Could I damage the trees by cutting them back now or still time?
If they're already green buds, I wouldn't cut it back.
No, I'd wait until it's dormant and just write the year off.
But when they're still completely dormant, that's a good time to cut them way back and then Have all that energy still in the roots.
I mean, you could probably cut them back now a little bit, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't prune heavy.
No major surgery.
Yeah.
One thing I remember reading in the Bible, it said when the tree starts to grow and the buds appear, you pinch them off because then you it makes it wait till the next season and the trunk of the tree gets stronger so that it could bear more fruit later.
Yeah, your uh your flower buds, not your leaf buds, but yeah, yeah.
Uh, if you pinch off that early in the growth when they're the first year or two, and you don't let it set fruit, it'll it'll grow, put more energy into growing the tree instead of trying to put that energy into the fruit.
And there's a lesson in there, too.
It's like you have to wait, right?
This is our low time preference as white people, you know, that you have to wait for the tree to get stronger and then it will produce more fruit later.
You know, reminds me of the story of these uh missionaries were trying to help these niggers and uh they gave them some pigs, you know, and they said, Okay, the pigs are pregnant now and they're gonna gestate this many months.
So, we're gonna come back and we'll show you how to raise the piglets and this and that.
So, they come back and the niggers had killed the pigs already, you know.
That just goes to show.
But one other question while I'm still talking, uh, we were talking before the show with the cameras on, and you saw that I had this beautiful lemon tree here.
And somebody said about, oh, you could uh uh order some, get some mail order pollen or something to uh pollinate it because it's it doesn't have any flowers, it doesn't have any fruit because it's uh well, it's just the tree we have.
My uh, one of my sons he got it when he was very, very little, and now it's very, very big.
It it's it's even bigger than it looks on the camera, you know.
And uh, so what can I do there?
Is there anybody could give me advice?
Uh, well, it would need to have the blooms before you could pollinate it.
So, with that side of it, yeah, I'm not sure it's probably a light thing, or maybe it's just it doesn't get uh like a temperature variation.
It's maybe it's confused with what the seasonality is because it's inside all the time, yeah.
No, no, no, we put it up as soon as it's summertime, and it's got grow lights on it now, yeah, yeah.
I mean, if it gets blooms, you could probably get some mail order pollen and then get a key tip and just dab them all, and you'll get some fruit set.
But um, what's the tree, or you could take it with you down to the local arboretum and let it uh make friends with the other tree while you're down there.
Yeah, say, I'm gonna leave you two alone for a minute.
For real, getting freaky, I got some I got some chicken and duck stories from the uh boom boom section, but uh, text, you're you're growing uh coconuts and palm trees and uh all sorts of nuts down there in your tropical paradise, right?
But, serious question in a dry, arid climate, you got any trees giving you any goodies?
Um, well, you know, I think that's a little confusion by people on Texas that Texas is a desert.
Um, I actually live in a very green, I'm in East Texas, so it's much more green.
Uh, um, and golf, yeah, I have 100-foot-tall pecan trees, and uh, so there's lots of that's going on.
But the trees we've planted since we've been here, we've got apples, peaches, pears, uh, we've got lemons and oranges, uh, plums, and they've all taken off rather well and been doing very good.
And very similar to what you were saying is I got some pear trees from, I think I got it from tractor supply because there was at the end of the season two years ago, and they were just they were like five, ten bucks a piece.
I'm like, yeah, I'll take all of these.
Late fall, late fall, guys.
Just count trees, put them in the ground before it gets too cold.
And then, yeah, and we had fruit the next season.
They already had, you know, they weren't very good.
They were still, you know, they look like crap in there because they were small.
But then the next season after that, which was this last one that just passed, they had a ton of just amazing pairs all over them.
We made some pear preserves, still have a few sitting on the shelf.
Amazing.
And absolutely.
These are cheap trees on the discount rack.
Amen, brother.
Let's move on to chickens and ducks, probably the best entry-level animal addition to your burgeoning homestead or rabbits, perhaps.
A couple lessons from me real quick.
We only have, well, we now have five hens, but I guess I'll start first with safety.
We had the raccoon massacre last spring, summer that they found a way into the rafters of the coop and picked off one.
And then we tried to seal it off with the chicken wire and they got through the chicken wire and killed off the rest.
Total disaster.
So this year we literally just walled it off with wood and had a real dog on the property that's coming and going at all hours of the night.
After that one raccoon that appeared, whenever it was, we've had no issues with predators until the other day we found a decapitated hen laying in the middle of the field, did some homework.
Who the hell takes the head and leaves the body?
And a hawk was the most likely culprit.
And lo and behold, the other day I heard a ruckus coming from down in the valley and there were only two roosters out in the field.
Everybody else was making noise hidden and the hawk was up in the tree.
I gave a quick holler and the hawk flew off.
It was our retarded Cornish Cross who I salvaged or spared from culling for some reason.
He just sits in the sun and eats food all day, totally oblivious.
And then the alpha rooster was out there sounding the alarm and ready for war.
Now, you cannot kill birds of prey legally, and we do not suggest you do that.
So right now, I'm at the mercy of the chickens being fast enough to hide when they see that hawk and the roosters doing their job.
We made the big mistake and guys told me it was coming and I was prepared for it by doing straight runs last spring.
So we still have a skewed rooster to hen ratio.
You really only need one rooster, probably for a dozen hens.
We've learned that lesson.
Yes, of course, you can kill the roosters.
We have done that.
It's not particularly pleasant.
And I'll just be honest, it's not particularly delicious, although we have eaten them.
So if you're shopping for chickens or ducks, I don't know if they do pullets with ducks, but basically if you get pullets, that means they're all hens.
If you do straight run, you're getting a mix.
And it was actually close to 50, 50, maybe slightly more roosters, but you can always get roosters for free.
And because we have too many roosters and too few hens, the poor hens are fairly worked over by this point.
And there's even been some homosexuality, which brings me to the ducks.
We have one male mallard, one female mallard, and two female pecans.
And the female pecans have mounted the female mallard.
It's absolutely bizarre, weird, but we get giant duck eggs from them.
They stopped during the winter completely.
The hens were laying inconsistently throughout the winter, but the ducks stopped and they're rocking and rolling now.
And with just six, now five hens, that is more or less enough eggs to feed our family of five.
But priorities, safety for the flock.
And another semi-unpleasant surprise is, let's be honest, I'm buying about a $14, 40 or 50 bag pound bag of chicken feed.
Not every week, but at least every two weeks.
And that does add up.
We've got some pretty expensive eggs here.
Over to Hans Tex Mitt Gartner on the chicken or duck.
Oh, and the other thing on ducks is if we didn't have the stream and the ponds, I don't know how we'd live with the ducks because they morning to night, they want to be in the water.
They're in water.
Their crap is disgusting.
And they really are like scaredy cats.
Like as much time as I've spent with the ducks, they still think that I'm about to come and kill them, even though I haven't touched them.
On the contrary, I've been nicer to them than the chickens.
But we love the ducks too.
They're totally entertaining the way they waddle, the way they're in the water all the time.
But yeah, sorry, I chewed up way too much time there crowing about my own chicken prowess.
But over to you guys for chicken, ducks, tips, any ways to save on feed and keeping them safe and all the rest of it.
Well, I'll definitely say that a big problem with having too many roosters like that, obviously, there's the inherent problems, but when you have a hawk problem, the roosters are so busy fighting each other for control of the flock, especially with such a small flock that they're not as capable of doing their job and defending from the hawks.
Like we have a rooster here, beast.
He's killed six hawks and now we no longer have a hawk problem on our property.
So do you think what were the hawks coming for him and he just like spear, you know, basically shooting?
No, I saw him.
No, I saw him.
They were going for tens and he just jumps up and he's he's got spurs on him longer than my pointer finger and he just rips them all apart.
Their bones are hollow.
So if the rooster can ever get a hold of them, they're toast.
That's awesome.
What breed is that?
He's a Rhode Island Red.
Oh, yeah.
Those guys are monsters.
Yeah.
And he's older too.
So he's really, he's got some years on him and a lot of experience.
And yeah, he doesn't mess around.
We had a serious because, like I said, I had these huge 100-foot trees around here.
We had a very serious hawk problem when I moved in.
And they don't even nest here in these trees anymore.
He's he's ran them off.
And so we no longer have that problem.
Every once in a while, we have the raccoons, but that's where the dogs come in and proper shelters.
But yeah, I would definitely say, Coach, you got to expand your flock or you need to call your roosters.
Probably both.
And you'll have a lot better luck from the predation.
So that's my input on that.
Hans, how about you?
Any heartbreak from the coop?
I don't know why I keep coming to you for like tales of heartbreak or whatever.
You know, any tips.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The geese seem to help with that too.
If you had some geese in, they seem to keep things away.
And then also, like our creek dries up in the middle of the summer, and we just take those cheap kiddie pools from Walmart and we fill them up around the outside of the garden.
And then every day or two, we'll dump it into the garden and then just move it on down the row and around the outside of the garden, move it to the next little area and fill it back up.
And that helps fertilize the garden and helps with the duck mess and keeps them happy.
Yep.
Good stuff.
Go ahead, Sam.
A real newbie question, but how often should one water their plants?
I mean, really?
Just depends on the rain.
Yeah, as often as you need to, as often as you need to.
You don't want it to ever let it get like dust dry or anything like that.
You know, when it starts to get to where it's like, if you ever left, you know, your coffee, you didn't change your coffee filter after like two days or something.
Yeah.
You see what the grounds look like about that?
And then I'd water again, you know, like you don't ever want it to get dried out, but you also don't want it to be, you know, sitting water.
That's the main thing.
Well, sitting water will, that's anaerobic, no oxygen in there.
It starts killing roots and creating bacterial problems that thrive in anaerobic situations.
So that's like the opposite of what you want.
Yeah.
Well, you read these terms that I'm not sure what it means, like they'll say an inch of water a week or something like that.
What does that mean?
I mean, that's all that all depends.
You know, how much is the sun pulling out of the soil?
How much is the sun and the air pulling out of the plant?
You know, you just kind of play it by ear.
And that's why I'm big on covering the soil around the plant, not just for weeds, but also so that you know the sun beating down on the soil isn't heating up wet soil, which would be bad because then you start getting funguses and stuff, like spores like hatching essentially and starting to take over inside your soil.
So yeah, you want to keep the soil cool and moist, not really wet.
And yeah, that's like it kind of depends.
You want the plant pulling all the any water that's coming out of the soil, you want the want to go through the plant.
And if you want to, you know, like use your water wisely.
You know, I'm out, I'm out west, so that's the way I think, but you guys might have a different story because you guys probably get a lot more rainfall than we do out here.
So right.
My boss at the garden center, Sam, once said, or he just said, you want to water them deeply and less frequently.
So, you know, rather than like doing a daily, you know, little covering the soil, making it look nice on top, water those, you know, imagine that you are the rain.
You're giving them a nice deep rain and then giving them a break to let all that water soak in and not all the time.
That's exactly that's exactly right.
Like sometimes even when I don't use the, like when I have the upside down water containers, I'll sometimes fill those things up with water and the water will just like, it's so heavy in that one spot, I'll just push the water real deep.
But sometimes if I'm not using that, I'll take an old, you know, what are those plastic pots that the plants come in and I'll cut out like the top ring, maybe, maybe like 16 inches down, basically just cut off the bottom.
And then I'll stick that in the soil.
And then that way I could fill that thing up all the way to the top, even if it's like almost to the top of the plant.
And then that way it'll just push the water real deep down right where the roots are.
And that's it.
It won't be all over the place.
And, you know, it's basically like a sturdier version of like when you dig out a little, you know, like berm around your plant, you know, but this way it's plastic and the water, it forces the water in that one spot.
So yeah, exactly right.
You water deep and water infrequently, but just don't ever get it like dust dry.
Don't ever let it get like to where it's like, there's no moisture in there, you know?
Make encourage those roots to roots to grow deep.
Tex, did you, did you want to hop in there?
I thought I heard you.
Yeah, well, I was just going to say that I think, you know, Sam's looking more towards potting plants, obviously, being in a more urban environment.
So I think the scales are a little bit differently because you don't have the ground to drain into.
You don't have natural moisture and you don't have as much sun contact.
So I think with those things, there's a lot of tips that people do when they grow in pots, like putting rocks or some kind of gravel or something in the bottom to put a layer at the bottom to kind of have a water pool that sits there.
And then the roots will grow down and they'll suck from that a lot more and you'll have to water a lot less.
You'll still have to water, but they kind of have a backup reservoir.
I think When you're planting in pots, you kind of got to look at it a little bit differently than planting out, even in raised beds is differently than just in the soil.
And so that's it.
I was just saying, like, you really need to define when you're looking at how to water plants, what are they in?
What kind of environment?
Yeah.
And Sam, I wanted to add before too, for you and for people who might have limited outdoor space, I suspect there's got to be a corner on your property where you can dump grass clippings.
And not that you should necessarily always collect your grass clippings, but grass clippings, rakes.
It doesn't have to be a big pile, just a couple stakes and maybe some netting around there.
That's what my dad did in the backyard.
He would always just toss it with a pitchfork and he, you know, you could reach your hand in there and it was warm in there.
You could feel it starting to break down.
I suspect you could probably, you know, start your own small compost pile.
Just be careful if you put too much food in there.
It'll get, you know, get funky and rot and always only plant matter.
On chickens and plants, this is going to be the first year that the, you know, the first year they were pretty timid and they stayed really close to the coop, plus they were smaller.
Now they are free-ranging the entire property from dawn to dusk, which is awesome, including for the natural alarm clock.
But they are going to be a nightmare in my garden, I suspect.
And I suspect I'm going to have to at least low fence off, even if it's just chicken wire or some cheap plastic crap around all of my beds.
Does that sound consistent with our chicken pros?
Yeah, absolutely.
Actually, that brings me back to another point I was going to cover with you on your chicken feed question you had earlier.
Yeah, please.
When they're free-ranging, like my birds, I have 100 plus birds on my property.
I'll stop counting at 100.
And outside the wintertime, I don't feed them.
They just free range and, you know, they pick a little bit of food from the other animals, but and our eggs are the best eggs you're going to ever have.
So I don't think now they'll eat it if you throw it on the ground.
Yeah, yeah.
If you throw it on the ground, they'll go after and eat it.
But I think, you know, as you're getting out of wintertime, you're going into the springtime in the summertime, start thinking about, hey, these birds need to be doing their job rather than just, you know, feeding from me.
So maybe thank you for that.
Tally and back to feed and save yourself some money.
Yeah, we wean them off of that.
But yeah, I mean, they absolutely do go wild.
I toss bird seed and leftover pot, you know, any, anything that seems like it's edible.
Definitely look it up.
I've been surprised.
They will literally not touch the things that they're not supposed to eat.
At first, I was throwing citrus peels down there like a moron, but I haven't killed any.
On the contrary, it's been a pretty good run of things.
We have a lot of audience questions to get to.
We're already in an hour, so we'll do those in the second half.
But before that, I wanted to ask you guys if you had experience for the for the health Nazis in our audience, we love our health Nazis, ladies and gentlemen.
The brassicas are big.
They advocate for those big time.
Cauliflower, broccoli, Brussels sprouts.
And I have never really tried any of those.
But if, you know, they seem like something that absolutely cabbage, kale.
Do you guys have any tips, lessons learned from growing brassicas, brassicas, whatever?
For me, it's where I am.
Those are more like winter crops.
Plant them like in the fall.
They could take some light freezes and stuff like that.
So, and that's what they do best because, you know, out here in the summertime, it's so hot, they'll stress.
And when those kind of plants stress, they'll bolt, which means they'll throw up a flower and they'll just try to go to seed as fast as possible.
But generally, that's not what you want because you want to eat the vegetative parts of the plant.
You're not trying to eat the fruits of it.
So like, yeah, that's, that's how it is.
Like, if it's going to get too hot, you think it's going to get too hot, but you just don't want to grow them in the summer.
Say uh, keep them in the shade a little bit and uh, try to get some that are more stable, because if, once they start bolting, you know something like a cauliflower or uh broccoli, you know that is the flower of the plant.
So it sounds like that would be optimal, but it's not really, because you don't want those little flowers to start opening with petals and stuff and it just ruins the whole thing.
So yeah, so what i'm hearing is those really like for most of the audience say in, you know, Mid-atlantic or whatever.
Those should really be the first things that you do, and I, you know, we we had this discussion last time.
Mitt Gartner and I had really good luck with transplanting things last year, even the carrots and some of the stuff that you know you don't have to or you shouldn't.
Um, but for those cabbages kales broccolis, etc.
Direct sow, or can I start them in pots?
Uh, I mean, I direct sowing, i've done, i've done all that stuff, so i've direct sowed the seeds.
Uh, i've had good luck with um, you know, buying the, the six packs of stuff, of carrots or whatever, and then just sticking them in the ground.
You get a bunch in.
In a six pack you get more than six of them.
You get like I don't know, like six per little, six pack piece, so you can do a bunch of them.
But um honestly, like i've been letting my, my um carrots usually what i'll do is my the best plants in my garden.
I won't pick, i'll let them go to seed and then i'll just let them go to seed and then i'll collect some of the seed and a lot of the rest.
I'll just shake it out where I might want it next year and this year I had like so many carrots come up it's I don't even want to touch this bag because it's just full of carrots.
So like um, that's kind of how I like to do it.
I i'm more of, like i'm trying to go more hands off, just because I feel like you know um, I spend a lot of time in the garden when i'm gardening and i'm trying to get it to where it's just doing its own thing on its own.
Like I do the same with like arugula you know, arugula is a brassica and that's one of my favorite comes back every.
It's a great perennial.
Yeah, those that will seed itself every proper yep yeah yeah, it's just a continuing like weedy annual and like it's totally yeah, it's awesome.
So I, with that kind of stuff, or like a radish, i'll try to let some of that stuff go to seed where it is and if it's doing good, i'll just bang out the seeds, like right there, wherever it's sitting, and then the next year it'll come back and I don't even have to sow it, so like that's my optimal way of doing it for sure.
But I I think, aside from that, like best success is like when I actually go buy a six pack of, like carrots or something and I just go do a row, put them all in a row and then do it like that and that's pretty good, no shame yep, the quick and dirty, just buying them and putting them in the ground.
Uh, let's go to HANS AND TEXT before the break anything before the break that you want the audience to hear this spring as they get cracking.
Uh, anything that you had in your list that we haven't touched on yet and of course, we got more time in a second.
Yeah well, you were talking about your garden I, you need to get electric poultry net and uh, fence charging.
That's going to be your best bet to keep the chickens out of your garden.
Uh see, last year when I for my big potato my biggest plot is where I do the potatoes every year and I actually cut trees down in the woods and sized them and augered the earth and I put these posts up and I never, my cheapskate ass, wasn't willing to go and buy all the fencing and like the metal posts and stuff like that, so it looked like Stonehenge in my garden.
I just had these giant tree trunks sticking out around the garden because the chickens were still not adventurous.
So then, when they finally started to get in there and peck and make a mess, we had this old, cheap orange plastic uh, guardrail thing like you'd see on the side of a ski slope or a construction site, and I ended up just stapling that to the posts and that that actually kept them out hot.
Now I i'm sure that what you're advocating is more effective, but lest the audience be discouraged, just some cheap ass ugly plastic.
Now it looked like hell, let's be honest.
But it did work to discourage them last year maybe, maybe not this year, and they'll get in.
Thank you for that, Hans text.
Anything before we go to the break?
Um no, I definitely agree with the poultry nets and i'll say that my property I you know it's surrounded by probably a two and a half three foot fence and the chickens never leave the property.
They they're pretty adherent to fences.
They could easily get over for some weird reason.
So it's, it's not that hard to keep them out of the garden.
And if there's one thing, you clip their wings.
Sorry text, do you do you clip their flight wings on for that, or they just don't do it?
I, they just don't do it.
I've never clipped any of my chickens wings.
No, for the audience I just want to say that I thought perhaps that having the you know, twice daily at least responsibility of living creatures under our ward was going to become a hassle or a thorn in my side and, on the contrary, like it gets me out of the house every morning around or just after sunrise to go down there, let them out of the coop, give them some feed, say hello, see what's going on.
Uh, usually every afternoon I go down there or have the kids go down there to check for the eggs and uh, one of the beauties of living in the country is that, you know, I can now send the kids down at dark.
One of them is competent at driving the utv now and say nope uh, please go down there and put the chickens away, bring a flashlight, go looking for any eggs.
And we've also had easter egg hunts because uh, when we leave the big shed open uh, some of the hens will go in there inevitably, sneak in a corner, and we've found piles of five or six eggs that we had no idea were there, and most of them almost all of them have been good.
We did find one older pile this spring when we had a couple streaks of 70 degree days and they had in fact gone rotten.
So you literally have real easter egg hunts, speaking of easter egg coming up on your property, because they don't always want to go into those nesting boxes to uh, deliver their golden treasures.
Um, let's go to the break, guys.
Thank you so much.
Uh, time has flown by barely scratched the surface, as usual.
Um, I suspect you guys are okay with hanging around, if you, if you got to go, we'll say goodbye on the break uh, but I believe that we agreed that, Mitt Gartner, who delivered the wonderful Black Magic SS guest music from a previous appearance, has the TV this break.
It's over to you, buddy.
What are we going to be hearing?
Yeah, it's going to be Hyderun.
They're Swedish country band.
And I think some of the members were in like kind of like a RAC-ish kind of band before, but I'm not positive.
But yeah, the song is called Mitt Land.
So yeah, enjoy it on.
Amen.
Get going out there in the garden if you're not going to listen to the second half.
Take it from all of us.
It's worth it.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back
to Full House, episode 182.
I believe it is.
That was pretty damn good in the first half, if I don't say so myself.
And as Tech said, we barely scratched the surface.
We didn't get to any audience questions in the spare minutes we had during the break.
Hans suggested fermenting my chicken feed to make it go longer.
Basically stick it in a big bucket or trash can, add water, maybe some bread or some old cereal, leave it out in the sun, more or less, mix it every once in a while, like a witch's brew.
And then when it looks like oatmeal, more or less, sample a little bit, see if the suckers will eat it.
And then text let us know that if you do not have grapefruit seed extract in your home and in your medicine cabinet for your fowl, then you are doing a grave disservice to your family and you should be hanging your head in shame as I am right now.
And I've added it to the notes to look up this special elixir for you all.
We're going to get cracking here since we got so much more to get to, including the audience questions.
And I got one or two more things to geek out on, if you'll allow me the indulgence.
But we got some nice notes from the audience, including New White Life.
And I wanted to go to Antlers.
First, Antlers has been a friend and a fan for a while.
And he just let us know the other day that reading the first half of Mein Kampf and listening to Full House made me a father of two before it was too late.
Hopefully he didn't stop reading Mein Kampf.
Maybe the second part.
I really, you know, I've never heard that one.
Love the first half, the second half.
Total trash.
Whatever.
Maybe it's volume two.
I don't get it.
And then got another super kind note here.
Hey, been meaning to write an email into you guys, but I kept putting it off.
Wanted to let you know that I feel you're directly responsible for adding Blue Eyed number five to our brood this fall.
Bonus, his wife decided not to get her tubes tied.
So we will hopefully be headed to Sam territory sooner or later.
I'll send pics when I figure out the metadata thing.
I think Telegram removes metadata, but do your due diligence, pal.
And I didn't write his name down, which probably means he wants to remain anonymous.
Thank you so much for letting us know that, buddy.
And Alpini, Alpiney, as he prefers, says, first time listener from Canada.
I'm a father of young white children and I'm sick of the Judeo system.
I love the show and how you bring a family vibe to it.
Found you on Telegram.
See you next one.
Victory or Valhalla.
Thank you, Alpiney.
I see you there in the comments.
Chiming in.
Appreciate it.
Wanted to give New White Life congratulations to Knox.
It was, I think just after last show, he let us know that they were approaching baby DEF CON 1 and they did indeed deliver their second beautiful baby.
I forget if I think it was a girl, but one of our pals, if you remember the guy who we gave kind of a hard time about for not being excited about the diaper changing and all the rest of the stuff, huge, huge congratulations to him.
He and wifey did indeed welcome their first.
And he said, coach, I wasn't really serious about like being totally hands-off, but we may or may not see them soon.
He was, he actually did, he expressed interest in my wife and I doing sort of like a pro bono consult, you know, checking out their gear and, you know, seeing how baby's coming along, which they're going to be totally fine.
These are alpha humans.
But I, yeah, I'll be making sure.
Maybe he needs a little less in changing a diaper and, you know, swaddling and all that stuff.
But congratulations to our pal.
And I won't even give a sock name since we did give him a hard time.
But, you know, I thought he was serious.
Perhaps he was covering his ass after we roasted him pretty ruthlessly and savagely a couple of shows.
But regardless, congratulations to Knox, our pal, Antlers, Alpini, all you guys.
It's awesome.
So with that, let's get on with it.
This is another selfish question, but I think it's very relevant for the audience.
I've got one beautiful piece of my property that's got space.
It gets sunlight almost all day long, gets a lot of rain, and the soil, it's native soil.
It's not bad.
So, what I've done is just done half-ass, it's almost just like borders.
I cut down trees, put them around, and I've got, you know, giant rectangles, et cetera, where I've done tomatoes, potatoes, separate, of course.
And I want to expand it this year.
But what I've been doing is literally just roping the kids into a chain gang, getting shovels and turning over the native soil, which is pretty clay, breaking up all that grass and all the weeds, and then supplementing with store-bought garden soil, always the cheapest mass Walmart brand produced as possible.
But it's worked.
We have gotten production out of there.
Not okra was a total failure last year.
Peppers were meager, but man, if potatoes and tomatoes don't grow there with just a little bit of soil supplementation and sunlight.
Question being, I really cannot just keep cultivating new land with a shovel and sweat as much as I do enjoy it.
So I'm interested in getting a tiller or a cultivator.
There's battery ones out there for like $150.
Obviously, you've got more industrial gas-powered ones that are probably heavier duty.
Do you guys have experience using tillers?
And for the average home gardener, amateur homesteader, how much power do they need?
How big do they need to be?
Tillers and cultivators have at it.
Are you talking about the Secretary of State?
That's no, he was the, he was a mere tiller's son.
But unless Blinken has a tiller reference, I think Hans said that was a good one.
Or, you know, I don't want to pick on you guys.
Tillers, geek out for a little bit for everybody.
So, I mean, go ahead.
Go ahead.
I was going to say, I've used Hans.
All right.
Go ahead.
I've used electric gasoline and character powered tillers.
But I mean, for what most people are doing, and actually most of the time, I don't even give out the tiller.
I'll just use a broad fork.
You can turn all that stuff over pretty easy with just a broad fork.
And they're what does a broad fork look like?
I know what a shovel is, and I know what a pitchfork is, but I don't know what it is.
A fellow man of culture here with this broad fork.
Thank you, sir.
It's got a bunch of tines, really long tines, and a big bar across.
And it's got two handles.
You hold on the handles and you step on it and use your weight to push it in the dirt.
Okay.
And you just lean back with the handles and it breaks it all up.
And you just move to the next section and just stomp it in and lean back and just keep going.
And it's pretty easy.
It's a little, I mean, a little bit of work, but I mean, you're not.
I don't worthy or better than a shovel.
Well, it's also the broad fork is really good for not necessarily destroying the natural ecosystem under the soil.
It's really good for just getting a light turnover and allowing oxygen to get down in there to let the natural soil thrive.
If you use a tiller and really turn it over, you're destroying that natural ecosystem in there.
And then the soil has to rebound from that.
And that could be detrimental.
Tilling in your first, when you're kind of building a bed isn't necessarily as bad because you're trying to, you know, get that soil loony enough that you can use it.
But once you've got an established garden, I would never put a tiller back in it.
You go when you need to, when it starts to get compacted, like he's saying, going with a broad fork just to kind of loosen it up a little bit to aerate it is all you really need.
Good stuff.
Broad fork for the established bed that needs a little bit of rejuvenation, but a tiller is more socially acceptable when you're working with virgin territory.
Good stuff.
Mick Gardner, you agree?
Mick Gardner just uses his fingers for everything.
He is anti-tool.
Yeah, I use my teeth.
No, so I mean, I've used the only time I really use tillers is like when I'm putting in like sod.
That's about it.
But yeah, if you got super compacted soil and like you said, when you're first establishing the garden and stuff like that, and maybe a lot of clay that's compacted, like then, I mean, if you're only going to use it that one time, just go rent one because, or borrow one from a friend or something.
Because you don't need to go buy that thing.
It's just going to sit there and collect dust and then you're just going to sell it at like three years on offer up.
So like, yeah, just go rent one.
It's not that expensive.
And you could tell it behind like probably a Honda Civic.
It doesn't weigh that much.
So it's like, yeah, that's what I would do.
But I agree.
Yeah.
Once you get the garden going, you don't want to start.
You don't want to disturb the soil any more than just like opening up a spot to stick the new plants in.
And that's it.
Good, good call on renting, big guy, too, because when we first got this place, you know, there's all sorts of algae on the side of the house.
And I was thinking about buying a big gas-powered pressure washer.
And it was like 30 bucks for 24 hours to rent like a heavy duty steel pressure washer.
Did the job perfectly, returned it.
Totally worth it.
So I will look into renting a tiller for the virgin soil.
And I'm certainly going to buy a broad fork from Tractor Supply or from Ace.
One more geek out personally, because this is getting into audience questions.
Sam's got a bunch in his stack.
And I know our special guests have stuff they want to get to too.
But somebody asked me to explain why ramps are so delicious.
And if you asked me that a year and a half ago, I would have no idea what the hell you were talking about.
I'd think it was like skateboarders chewing on plywood or something.
But last spring, we were just driving through town.
And what do you know?
There's a pickup truck on the side of the road that said ramps for sale.
And I had no idea what it was, but my wife did.
So we stopped 10 bucks for a big plastic bag full of these gorgeous early spring half onion, half garlic-esque delicacies.
I ate probably six or seven of them just straight out of the bag without even washing them.
I'm kind of like that.
I figure a little bit of dirt is good for your system.
And we planted, sorry, we used most of them for eating.
And then I stuck to Sam's pots and to not overlook pots as a really useful thing.
As they were starting to wilt and we were kind of ramped out, I stuck six or seven or eight, whatever, in a big black pot and stuck it on the side of the house.
And I forgot about it.
It was sitting out there all summer.
You know, they died back and out there all winter long.
And I was starting to get going the other day.
And I look over there and I said, holy cow, virtually all of them came back with big, beautiful green ramp shoots coming up.
And they love sunlight up until it starts to get really hot.
They're used to when the leaf cover comes over from the trees, then they die back.
So we're going to have our own homegrown ramps out of the garden.
And Hans was helpful enough to say, don't eat them all, you damn indulgent fool.
Go put them out in the woods in a place that they do well.
And then you're going to have ramps for years instead of buying them under an overpass, like a shady drug deal in the hood.
So I don't know how local a delicacy that is, but ramps are delicious, a seasonal thing.
And if you can get them out in your garden, go for it.
Sam, over to you, top of your stack question.
And then we'll try to get to these pesky hoi polloi with their questions.
Sammy, baby, did I cut out?
You're muted.
I'm sorry.
I'm very sorry about that.
I thought I hit it.
You mentioned about planting tomatoes.
And again, to the perspective of the newbie, what's the easiest way to plant tomatoes?
I mean, I like to do everything from seed.
Okay.
But yeah, everything from seed, but if, but if, because they're cheap, like I think I mentioned that on the first episode I was ever on.
But yeah, they're super cheap in seed form.
And if you don't want to buy a packet, you can get them out of a.
an actual heirloom variety, like an organic one that you find in the store.
Organic, you know, it's not genetically modified.
And generally, I've never seen a genetically modified heirloom.
So that's cheaper to get them in the actual fruit and just save the seed.
But, you know, but those like six packs or whatever at your garden center or Home Depot will do just fine, honestly.
Okay.
All right.
That's good.
Sam, Sam.
Yeah.
Go ahead, guys.
Yeah.
Texan Hans, please have at it.
I was just going to say the tomatoes are probably the easiest ones to grow.
So you shouldn't have much problem with those.
It's kind of hard to mess them up to start them at least.
Once they get going, you could definitely mess them up.
But to get them started.
Well, you need a trellis, right?
You need a trellis for the vine.
You do need to grow on something.
Yeah.
And it doesn't take much, take a piece of fence or, you know, you can craft something out of popsicle sticks.
They don't have that much weight.
You know what I mean?
You don't need to really overthink it.
You just want to keep the weight of the fruit once it starts to bear from just weighing the plant all the way down because it'll do damage to it and the fruit won't grow as well.
Ah.
Okay.
Very good.
Sam, you're more northern like I am.
We just planted ours today down in the basement with the grow life.
We start them in little pots and then we transplant them out once it gets warm.
So and Sam, I was just going to say, you know, a lot of people talk about you shouldn't plant them over and over again in the same spot, but I got to say to Texas point that they're easy.
You know, I've planted tomatoes in the same raised bed now for three or four years straight and every year, like bumper crop to the point where they're growing up and shading the window.
And it doesn't even get full sun.
But they, you know, they like, they like as much sun as possible.
They do like a lot of water, but, you know, deep and not too often.
And yeah, whether you buy them at the store if you want or go for the full experience, start them in pots or even little jiffy pots.
We've had good success with Jiffy pods with tomatoes, other stuff, not so much, and just stick them in a windowsill until it's time to transplant.
Well, yeah, go ahead.
One thing I will suggest when you do plant them, Sam, is if you get a plant that's whatever, like a six-pack or whatever, a pack from Home Depot, and you want to, you want to plant that, you could plant tomatoes actually deeper, like, and it actually helps, like, if you plant them beyond the crown, the crown is where normally the roots meet the kind of like the little stump coming up from the ground.
Like that's what would be the crown, but you could plant the tomato deeper.
Just you want to pinch off whatever leaves and, you know, don't bury it with the leaves, but pinch those off first and then bury it.
And it'll actually start throwing roots out of the, out of the stock of it.
And you'll get a lot more roots.
So by the time it's bearing fruit, it's got a lot more resources to pull from.
And you can do two seeds, two seeds per, even per jiffy pod.
You're kind of hedging your bets in case one doesn't germinate.
And when two come up, you can try to delicately separate them.
Or I've even put them in together as like frickin' frack.
And I don't, I haven't followed them that closely, whether they both grow in tandem or one becomes the alpha, the other the beta, or, you know, et cetera.
But, you know, the seeds are so cheap.
You know, you don't just have to put all your hopes on one seed in one pot or one pod.
Feel free to double up.
Go ahead, buddy.
I think you had another one.
Well, we had a lot of good luck with sage and basil last year.
This year, we're looking to go with thyme or rosemary, maybe.
So, you know, we're trying new things.
One thing I did learn is herbs come from leaves and spices from the seed.
There you go.
One thing I learned is you don't want to eat rosemary directly.
That is very unpleasant on your stomach.
Well, I went out to dinner with my wife a long time ago and there was a big rosemary sprig on whatever it was, salmon I was having, and I ate it to her horror.
She was like, what are you doing?
I said, well, if it's on my plate and it's green, it should be edible.
And damn, my stomach hurt rather than that rosemary.
Be careful with your stuff there.
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Just something I was thinking about with a lot of the, we're talking about transplanting from indoor, outdoor, if you live in a much more windy area, when you're growing your plants inside from seed, you know, under lights or whatever, it's not a bad idea to get some air moving in there so they get used to, they build up that wind defense a little bit, you know, better.
A lot of people completely cut them off like in a closet and then they stick them outdoor and the first wind, they're all knocked over and they don't, they don't do as well.
So it helps build up the trunk strength of the plants that they can have something flowing on them.
Stick a fan on them?
Yeah, you don't want, you don't want them to get too cool, but you, you want them to kind of build up a tolerance to wind at a young age or they'll they can they can suffer from that later on.
That's a pro hack.
Yeah.
We we usually just every day or two, you just take the back of your hand and just kind of brush it across the top of them.
That way you don't have the wind like blowing on them from a fan, but you're getting them used to like kind of leaning over a little bit and snapping back.
You kind of just gently brush your hand across the top of them and that that gets them used to that that wind movement kind of good stuff.
Let's without further ado, I keep teasing the audience that respectfully submitted their questions.
Nick said, how serious should I take those plant hardiness zones?
You know, you see, you see it, they're all on the back of the seed packets with the map of the United States and the zones and the things.
Who wants to tackle that one?
Plant hardiness zones.
That's a Mick Gartner softball.
Season.
I mean, I take them with a grain of salt.
I know some people swear by them because I like to, maybe it's a little more advanced or whatever, but I like to research stuff if I don't know what it is.
So I'll kind of look it up, look where it came from, and I'll just usually try to mimic whatever it's naturally adapted to.
And a lot of these cultivated plants, you know, like you, when you research like when they're really firing off and doing their most business, like, you know, you can kind of time it better according to your own season if you know it.
So I'm a bit nuanced.
So that's the way I see it.
I'll milk like a microclimate.
If I got a little thing going where maybe it's midsummer and it's super hot out here, but I got some shade on a northeast corner or something, then, and I know that's not going to get direct sun except for in the morning and like in the, in the, when the sun is setting, then I'll plant something particular there.
So I, I, yeah, I'm very nuanced about it.
And as far as planting goes, like, um, if, if I think it's going to freeze or if it's too cold, then I'll just protect it, you know, like same thing.
Like I'm always just trying to like manage the local climate of whatever plant it is.
The closest I can get it basically to optimally what it would be like in a greenhouse or something, like climatologically, like light-wise, temperature-wise, moisture-wise, airflow, things like that.
So I'm a bit nuanced, honestly.
That's how I look at it.
I'm a bit of an optimist, probably.
Well, I think those are much more advanced, right?
Versus the hardiness zones are really good for beginners.
Like when you're first starting out, stick to the things in your zone.
Once you get the toolkit and know your plants and have the skills like he does here, definitely microclimates are something to really think about.
Your property is not all the same and that whole zone is not the same.
You know, there's millions of different microclimates within that zone.
So you can grow from a beginner.
But in the beginning, stick to those just so that you're not setting yourself up for failure.
Yeah, that's probably the better answer.
Go ahead, Hans.
I generally go plus or minus one zone.
Like, and I'll, I'll try it.
And it's a, it's a test and it's something that I'm willing to count as a loss.
I'm not counting on it.
And if it does good, then I'll go with it.
And if it doesn't, then I'd already pretty much written it off as a loss as an experiment if it's out of the zone.
But generally plus or minus one is my tolerance.
And I would just add that the only thing that I really pay attention to when it comes to that stuff is they usually give you a two-month window on the back of those seed packets when you want to, you know, plant the seeds, April, May, et cetera.
And I always just try to stick to that.
And if I'm a month after a month or hold off for sure, just in terms of getting started, but experiment.
The seeds are so cheap.
If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.
Lesson learned.
You got it.
All right.
This one from V really feasted on my magnanimous offer of questions from the common man.
And he says, I've been dabbling in garden gardening for several years.
I mainly focus on potatoes, but I seem to always not do so great on harvest.
Where I live, it's warm year-round with mild winters.
So they can honestly be grown almost all year round.
Can you talk about harvest, when, how, and how to process the collected taters?
I could tackle that, but I, you know, I'm still a relative potato rookie.
Any potato pros want to take that one on.
Don't be shy.
I don't know.
I just, you know, when the, I'll, my amateur stab at this is, you know, my experience is they will build, they will build a big, beautiful green canopy.
And if I keep the chickens and the deer away from them, it will stay that way.
I keep them really well watered.
I just use a sprinkler out there.
And then once they start to die back, then I'm starting to pay more attention to them.
And when it looks like they're really brown, I honestly, I just yank very gently up on the stem and I'll get a bunch from that.
And I'll do that throughout one square.
And then I'll very gingerly get down there with a shovel or even a hand trail with the kids and just bring buckets.
And there's loads of them.
But that's just my basic.
I've had great potato success and I just put the damn seed potatoes in there and hole.
And other people are like, you dumbass, you should be cutting them up to be getting a bigger yield, but we're not at starvation point yet.
Any other potato tips for V?
I think you nailed it right there.
I think that's kind of perfect indicators.
It's still my heart.
I'd say the only thing I'd add is to pinch off the flowers if he's getting a bunch of flowers.
Yep, pinch off the flowers.
That'll put more energy into the tubers.
I think Coach has done his 10,000 hours on potato now.
Oh, I'm so proud here.
I've gotten a pretty word from the experts.
You could be working off blood memory too, though.
It's probably a mixture of both.
No, that's pretty much it.
I mean, yeah, you just kind of feel them out.
I mean, I never go and just start harvesting everything.
I always kind of test one thing.
And if one looks good, then I'll start, I'll keep going with the rest of it.
So, yeah.
And they're a nightshade.
At one point, I literally Googled, can I eat potato leaves?
And boy, am I glad I Googled that before sampling one out in the garden because they're a poisonous nightshade in the leaves.
But I'll be damned if the deer, the deer will come and decimate my potato leaves if I don't protect them.
That's when I ended up putting up that giant orange, hideous net, not just for the chickens last year.
If he's getting a bad yield, I don't, maybe it's the climate.
Maybe he needs to put a little fertilizer in there or supplement the soil.
I mean, literally all I've been doing is doing that, you know, turning up the soil and then dumping a ton of garden soil in there to make it a little bit easier to work with because the native soil really requires a lot of breaking up.
But it could just be compaction, really.
I think a lot of people don't think about the potatoes can't.
Yeah, they need room to grow and they're only going to dig so far and they're going to put so much energy into trying to dig through tough soil that they're not going to be able to fruit as well.
Yep.
Looser soil, the better.
And of course, you can pile them up.
I don't know if that was the Hugan culture, Hugin piling, but yeah, you could just Google Google.
Google, who's on first?
And there was a famous, I don't know if it was a TikTok or whatever, but a guy who just like dumped a bunch of mulch and grass clippings and like stuck seed potatoes in there.
And then he just had like bountiful, you know, experiment.
Well, that's the, well, that's more like the roost out method.
There you go.
Yeah, just the piles of hay and just throw the potatoes in there and they go.
And a lot of people do have good luck with that.
Yeah, just to create the hooga culture is where you put the logs in and create the garden over the top of it so it's naturally feeding into it.
That's a whole other thing.
Yeah.
The roost out method.
I've had hit or miss success with roost out.
It depends on your climate.
And that's really the big thing is your climate and the amount of rain you get.
It seems to work better in kind of Midwesty kind of areas.
I'm more tropical, lots and lots of rain.
So it doesn't work as well here.
And what do you guys think about putting the whole seed potato in the ground or cutting it into thirds or quarters, you know, per where the eyes are sprouting for a bigger yield?
You'll get a bigger yield.
It's, you know, it's about, like you said, you're not at that point of starvation if you've got plenty left over.
And the thing is, are you buying the seed potatoes or are you rolling them over from the previous year?
If you're buying them every year, then get the most out of them, cut them up, and then that way you'll have something to save and roll over to the next year for your seed potatoes.
Yep.
For me, I literally didn't have enough space last year for the full 30.
I think it was a 30-pound bag for like 30 bucks from the little local joint around here.
And V had a second question.
I've been using a drip irrigation system for a few years for a small backyard garden and containers.
It's worked okay.
Any recommendations, brand style, et cetera, for irrigation?
Lazy bones.
Just get out there with a watering can.
No, I'm kidding.
Mitt Gartner, were you the one who said that irrigation is Jewish or irrigation systems?
Yeah, they were literally developed in Israel.
So you're just being really Jewish with the water at that point.
So yeah, drag a hose.
Dragging a hose around, yeah, it's a pain, but also at the same time, you're spending time in the garden.
It's forcing you to look at the plants.
And while you're out there, you're doing other stuff and you have complete control over the amount of water.
You can flood irrigate it with some precision.
And yeah, I'm, I like the hose.
But, you know, if you want to go on a vacation or something, that's when the drip irrigation system is nice.
But in that case, I just use a soaker hose on a timer.
So.
Yeah, I messed around with a drip hose once, but it gave me more anxiety.
I was worried that I was either wasting water or I was going to totally drown those suckers.
So I'm generally using a watering can, literally just standing out there and spraying them, or I will set up a sprinkler in the middle of the summer to soak them in well.
Obviously, when you're watering your plants, this is important for Sam too.
You want to do it early in the morning or when closer to sunset so that you're not getting all that water on the leaves.
And then the sun comes and basically is like just burning off the water and burning the leaves.
Can I just say, coach, how great it is having this group of guests here that like you, you ask a question and I'm like, yeah, I got an answer for that, but I'll wait.
And then they say exactly what I was going to say.
And I'm just like, oh, that's so great.
I love it.
Amen, brother.
Well, how about you?
You got a bigger operation in Hans too.
What do you guys do for irrigation?
Well, I tote around hoses.
Jason point.
I totally have a total, you know, or I'll say, you know, I have teenagers.
So it's like here, carry this bucket of water.
Or, you know, yeah, I agree with the fact.
The reason I was going to say that the getting out there with a watering can or tote around a hose is exactly that.
You get to actually see your plants.
Go look at them.
So that way you're really doing, you're doing a health check on them and it's just healthy for you mentally and physically.
And that's kind of part of the process too.
I love the natural exercise part of it and soaking up the vitamin D and you know, aside from the bugs, like it's mostly all joy.
Go ahead.
It takes some minute to water stuff.
So, you know, you could let the hose run while you're out there pruning and you're harvesting or cleaning something up or planting something else nearby.
So you're killing a few birds with one stone usually.
So it's not that big of a deal.
And investing in the future.
Yeah, I'm always out there.
I'm always out there collecting things for the rabbits to eat.
So it's all the kind of all at the same time.
Here I'm watering and, oh, here's some extra things I need to clip off these plants.
You know, it's just feed for the rabbits that, you know, it's a circular process.
And I've dropped a couple F-bombs over crappy watering cans too, you know, where the like the little thing at the end like cracks or comes off and you got half the water pouring out and half of it sprinkling or it cracks down the side and you got water running down your pants.
So, you know, it's not like there's expensive watering cans, but you might want to invest in an actual metal one instead of the cheap plastic stuff you get from any store.
Sorry if I cut somebody off there.
Moving on, Electromechanical Eagle says, are you willing to grow some things in pots and bring them in during the winter?
I guess willing and able is the full question there.
And I'd say, absolutely.
We have just regular house plants that we put out on the deck during the warm months and the attractive ones that are worth taking up the space in here.
We bring inside and keep them watered, give them a little bit of light from the window.
They'll survive.
I had a very pleasant surprise.
And I think the answer to what if something dies off, then I think you can probably just leave it outside as a general rule, like those ramps.
But we had a beautiful large pot of strawberry plants that didn't actually give us big strawberries last year, but they still look pretty green come November.
So I brought them inside, gave them some sunlight and kept them very lightly watered throughout the winter.
And sure, there was a lot of brown leaves, but they're basically ready to rock and roll right now.
So I put I put them outside.
So strawberry, I think, is a classic example of that.
But for you guys, you know, you bring what kind of crops or plants do you bring indoors in pots to save throughout the winter?
No, strawberry, you shouldn't have to.
You should be able to leave that out, Coach.
Your stuff again.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So we have like, you know, quote unquote, wild strawberry for sure.
But this was just a beautiful pot that I, you're right.
I could have put it in the ground, set it and forget it.
And in this case, I brought it in.
So maybe a bad example, but it lived well in the pot over the winter.
But yeah, edibles that you bring in.
Obviously, Sam's infamous lemon plant gets a point that you could literally bring in trees into lemon tree.
Excuse me.
Well, it's a worthy experiment then, Coach.
Like you should see if you get an earlier harvest on that strawberry you move in and out of the house.
Because if that's the case, I mean, maybe it's worth it if you want early strawberries.
Sure.
But yeah, I mean, for me, it's herbs.
Like I like herbs and I just keep them in the kitchen window.
So I'm pinching off of them and then they start to look pretty peckish by the time like spring rolls around because I've been beating them up the whole time.
And then I put them out in the sun and they go gangbusters.
Yep.
What do you guys like for a generic fertilizer?
Obviously, there's different stuff for different plants, but is Miracle Grow a Jewish trick or is it actually a wonder drug?
Okay.
Go ahead, Texas.
No, I just heard that.
I've heard bad things about when they do the tests on the fruits that are grown in Miracle Grow, that they've got some nasty chemicals in them that actually make their way into the fruits that you probably shouldn't be using.
Yeah, those are great for houseplants, but not necessarily for edibles.
Obviously, I mostly just use like I use the worm castings and the rabbit droppings.
That's my fertilizer.
I don't buy in fertilizer.
How often should I fertilize?
Well, it depends on the size of the container.
If you're outdoors, it's really when you start seeing the signs in the plants of lack of nutrients.
A lot of people say yearly, but if you've got really fertile soil, you don't need to.
It's very situational dependent.
For tomatoes, I tried to ask Sam, there's a product called Tomato Tone.
Now, that may be a trick too, but relatively cheap.
And you can just grab a handful of it and lightly sprinkle it around the plant.
You know, you don't want to totally kill it and just dump a bunch of fertilizer right at the roots, but just, you know, sprinkle it, percolate it around like a little fairy godmother to give it a little bit of boost.
But go ahead, Nick Gardner.
Mick Gartner, you've got a fertilizer tail for sure, I thought.
Or is that Hans?
My bad.
Oh, no, I was just going to say like, I was going to say, like, I usually try to fertilize everything ahead of time, like before I prep the bed or wherever the planting area is.
You know, I'll throw in like chicken manure before I plant like a few weeks ahead of time, like the composted chicken manure and usually maybe some like bone meal or something that breaks down.
And if I have rabbit rabbit poop, that's the best because it's like the original slow release pellets, like takes a while.
And put those three things in, you're probably not going to need to fertilize.
But if you do, I usually do my any secondary fertilization during the growing period.
I'll do as like a liquid fertilization, in which case I'll use like fish emulsion, liquid kelp.
And, you know, you can do liquid bone meal, liquid blood meal if you need to.
But, but generally, you don't even need to do that.
As long as you fertilize at the start, like you don't really need to go towards the end of the year, in my experience.
Yep.
What do you think about?
You know, I've seen a lot of people have good luck with making themselves like fertilizer by just pretty much a liquid compost and they add in fish, you know, and all that type of stuff in there.
And it stinks to high heaven.
But people swear by it of making pretty much swamp water that they go in and do liquid fertilization with.
What do you think about that?
Yeah.
I mean, the compost tea, I don't really do it because I don't have an aerator and I haven't went and bought one, but you have to keep it aerated when you mix it because you don't want, again, like you don't want an anaerobic situation in your compost tea.
But I'll throw some compost in there and I will mix it just like a little bit.
But for the most part, I'm just doing like the fish emulsion, the liquid kelp meal, and a little bit of molasses as well.
Like the you want sugars to kind of activate the soil microbes, get some activated real fast.
The oxygen and the sugar makes them go crazy.
But yeah, I'll throw some compost in there.
Like worm castings are good.
You can throw a little bit of worm castings in there.
I have a lot of beneficial.
You're just kind of like inoculating and rejuvenating the soil microbes that might have died off in the past few months or whatever as the soils have been like heated up or dried out or whatever.
So yeah.
So I like in the spring, I'll put all the manure from barn, like the cow and goat and everything out before we plant.
Like, but the rabbit manure, I'll like to put that in a burlap sack and then put it down in a big trash can full of water and let it all leach into that water.
And then I'll use that as a liquid fertilizer.
It's basically like a rabbit manure like tea.
Like that works really well.
You got to taste it first to make sure it's ready, though.
No, no, you don't taste that.
You don't drink that tea.
Yeah.
You can drink it, I'm still waiting for my Osage, Osage orange trees to grow, Hans.
I, you know, I did, I did dig that trench, but it's a real, like the perfect spot where I wanted like big, nasty, thorny trees to grow.
I have to check it out.
I did it last year.
I didn't see any germination probably because it was just too far from the house and I didn't water it properly properly.
They probably got to pass through the winter too before they'll start to germinate.
Yep, could be.
They probably need that cold.
Too soon to write them off for sure.
I can't remember if we were on mic or maybe chatting before the show, but the chicken manure for fertilizer came up.
And I think I heard that if the plants are already growing, you don't want to just sprinkle chicken crap on your beds.
But perhaps you can use chicken poop to fertilize your beds before planting.
Did I get that right?
Correct.
Okay.
Yeah.
If you can, if you can preset it in there and kind of, especially if you till it into the soil, mix it in really good.
And so it's naturally composting in there.
You definitely don't want to put it on plants when they're growing.
It'll make it, you know, it's a hot fertilizer versus cold fertilizer, you know, and it will burn your plants up.
It's just too rich.
And most of my chicken crap is in the coop on pine tree shavings.
Would that be a problem?
Or is that kind of a nice combination to get some pine tree shavings plus the chicken crap?
You growing blue?
Yeah, The pine's not so good for a lot of things.
Right.
But, but blueberries.
Blueberries, though.
All right.
Yeah.
They like high acidity.
So, yeah.
How about blueberries?
That was a question from Chad, I believe.
Blueberry tips, they love acid.
We've got a couple blueberry plants that we get a handful of berries every year.
It's kind of like, ooh, I got one.
Here you go.
Like, you know, bringing in like a little treasure.
But when I see them in South Jersey, there's just massive rows of sunny fields with blueberry plants and the big, huge irrigation monster machines.
Sunlight, acid, and a lot of water is my understanding.
That's pretty much it.
A higher acidity soil and lots of water and sunshine, and they do pretty well.
All right.
Water has an interesting one here.
And I almost wonder if he misspoke.
He said, what stuff is worth growing if my soil is absolutely not arid?
So really moist soil, I guess.
Buying all potting soil and pots boxes to plant in adds up.
True, but it's not that expensive for one guy to, you know, I don't think I ever spend more than a hundred bucks on garden soil, maybe a little bit more on potting soil.
I was a very important lesson.
I bought potting soil last year for starting all my seeds, and I was kind of nervous because potting soil will have a lot of roots and kind of chunky stuff in there.
But I'd guess that nine out of 10 seeds germinated in there.
But I guess water is looking to save.
Water, ironically, is asking about his not arid soil and the cost of buying all that soil and stuff for gardening.
Well, again, it goes back to how much soil can you produce.
Yeah.
Or, I mean, you don't, if he has raised beds, you know, like basically you do it kind of like a Hugel Hugel culture to where like you fill the bottom with like old logs and sticks and leaves and crap like that.
And then you put the planting mix over the top of that.
And then that way it's kind of filler and those things will start collapsing and breaking down and building soil beneath where the root zone is.
And as long as it's not green and it's older brown leaves and stuff like that, you're probably not going to get any like, you know, gas buildup or whatever, like methane from it breaking down too bad.
But yeah, that's kind of like the basis of like what Hugel culture is.
You just throw a bunch of old rotting wood in the bottom and then you, and then that's kind of like the back, the filler and it acts as like a sponge and like also a, it harbors, you know, a lot of mycelium and all kind of beneficial funguses and microbes and stuff like that.
So yeah, that's what I would do.
Just throw in all the logs and old wood you could find and then and then put the put the soil on top of that.
Sure.
It's a great nutrient source.
Yeah.
And it's a great nutrient source for your plants to be able to reach down and get what they may need that they may be deficient in within that upper soil level.
Yeah.
And you don't even have to when you're burying the logs, you can just put the native soil on top of the logs and until you get it kind of flat and it's kind of stable.
So you're not just like dumping all the nice potting mix or whatever that you have, the planting mix, like in and it's just going through the filling up the gaps in between the logs.
You could use just the native soil for that and then put the put the planting mix on top of that.
So that's one way to basically cut like at least half of the cost of your soil that you're worried about.
But if it's not arid and you get a lot of water, then you might want to throw some sand in there too, which is also cheap and sometimes free if you get it out of like a riverbed or something.
I was going to add for coach over here buying soil, especially because you've got the space and where you're at, you should be able to easily save a ton of money by just go get a dump truckload of soil.
Like, you can get good soil rather than go and buying it bag by bag at the box store.
Um, you know, that's for the suburban guys for guys like you.
Just go get a truckload.
Yeah, I got a guy for gravel because with the long country road not paved to my house, about once a year, I'm calling up the old quarry to come lumbering down.
And those big trucks, uh, they double as a tree service too.
They're very good at clearing out all the branches hanging out over my road.
But good point.
That is something that I just haven't, you know.
I remember actually living in the suburbs, there was often like a municipal mulch pile where if you were willing to just drive your pickup truck there, you could fill up the whole damn back of your pickup truck or whatever with free mulch.
I haven't found that here yet, but I haven't looked as carefully.
And yeah, just have I could just hell instead of doing a cultivator and trying to grind up all that, you know, native, kind of compacted, clayish soil, just hell.
Yeah, give me a big black tar stain on my on my field and go from there.
Good point.
Um, that's another real quick.
Sorry, um, no, so on the on the big community mulch pile, um, pro tip, you guys, whenever those mulch guys are coming down or the tree trimming guys are coming down, literally just flag them down and say, Hey, when your truck's full, come dump it right here.
They will thank you and do it for free and dump it wherever you want because that saves them from having to get rid of it.
And they'll come and bring you as many truckloads as you want for free.
Man, what are we looking?
Is that an Osage orange there that you're growing, Hans?
Or it's hard for me to tell the picture.
Looks like something down in your grow lights in the basement.
I think you're muted, Hans.
If Hans just sent a picture of something.
Oh, yeah, that's a lemon.
Lemon.
I got a lemon down there, too.
There you go.
Sam would have recognized that.
Well, yeah, there you go.
If anyone is like me, they did not remove every single leaf from their front yard or backyard either in the fall or over the winter.
And you're looking out there in the spring now.
And of course, they will break down eventually.
Should people be like using the leaves that might be in their beds or around there and maybe literally just getting the kids to crumble them up and sprinkle them into the soil?
Or are they better removed and put into a mulch pile?
Well, it could be dual purpose.
You don't want to put too many into your bed because they'll kind of choke it out as well.
They do work well in a light layer for that same cover crop kind of thing where they're holding in the moisture and keeping the soil moist.
But it's definitely, if you're trying to build soil in the planting seasons, at least it's better to, you know, at least half compost them before trying to bring them into your garden.
Good stuff.
V also asked about apps.
Are there any garden apps, plant apps that you guys use regularly that you'd recommend?
Sounds like the pros probably don't use apps too much.
Yeah, when in doubt, I just Google something, but go ahead, Tex.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was just laughing.
No, no, I don't.
I've tried in the early days.
I tried all the apps.
They were absolutely useless.
I just, I like, I like jalapeno poppers.
The twice made two.
Yeah, I just use, if I need to do planning, I literally just pull out the spiral notebook and use a pen and write it down.
I get books that I reference from, Google things.
The apps have never been that much help.
For me, I could see how an app would be helpful if someone actually made a good one.
But everyone I've tried, they're just so difficult to navigate.
They don't make much sense.
And it just adds another layer of work that you're going to have to keep up with.
Yep.
Important thing that we perhaps discussed in the past, but haven't yet on this show is grow what you like.
Think about the money that you spend at the grocery store, cucumbers, carrots.
We go through a lot of bell peppers.
And I've never really honestly had good success with, you know, I suspect it's pretty hard to grow a big green or red or orange bell pepper like the grocery store.
We've gotten them, but they've been a lot smaller.
But convene the family.
Go ahead, Hans.
Yeah.
No, that's not hard.
And peppers are perennials if they're grown in warm climates.
We do dig up peppers and put them in pots and bring them in the winter and then replant them.
So for your big bell peppers, you'll do better the second year if you dig that up and you put it in a pot, keep it down in the basement, and then replant it in the spring.
That is, that's excellent.
So that's a case where, because I haven't had good luck either, you know, transplant, I've grown them from seed and transplanted them and they've done all right.
But maybe that's, I'll put the peppers in big pots, big, rich soil pots on the deck, and then consider moving them either into the greenhouse or the basement, like you said.
Fritz chimed in just before the wire, just under the wire.
I'm out of raised bed space.
We'll make more lazy ass.
Just kidding.
I'd love to hear if any of the lads have done the five gallon bucket potato farming.
I bet Mitt Gartner has some sort of bucket potato bucket farming.
I've never done that.
I was putting them on the ground, but I haven't done the bucket farming with the potatoes.
But yeah, I've like I've stacked tires before just like four tires.
I'm going to try it in here.
And it did work.
So it's kind of similar.
But other than that, I've only done them in the ground.
So go ahead.
Well, I've done buckets.
Five gallons is too small, though, for me for that use.
I think the smallest one I grew it in was kind of one of those tubs that you would use to like ice a keg in.
You know, that's kind of the only kind of common reference I could think of.
Like, I don't know how many gallons is.
It's probably like 25 gallon like tub.
It'd either be something you'd have in your kids' room for them to throw their stuffed animals in or you'd ice a keg in it, really.
Like I got it from, I got a few of them from Walmart and I had really good success with those actually doing the stacking the soil up a little bit as it first starts to grow and pretty decent harvest.
I could tell that they were stifled for room, that the plants wanted to grow more.
And that was kind of holding them in.
But we did get harvest when we didn't have the space to plant in the ground.
So it does work and it's very minimal effort.
So why not?
Yeah.
Sam, I don't know if you guys like cucumbers, but that's probably my all-time favorite because I love cucumbers.
They're easy to grow and they will grow like a vine.
They definitely need something to climb on.
You could plant them like right at the base of your house on the sunny side.
Just drop some soil, you know, drop some garden soil down there, put the seeds, you know, maybe an inch deep, keep them watered, and then you'd be shocked.
You'll have free, essentially free cucumbers all summer long.
And then that's also a good entry into canning, which I've been terribly derelict on getting into canning.
I certainly have my glass jar collection, but you just put them, put them in some vinegar and add some salt and spice in there and jar them.
Hands down, my single favorite crop to grow, cucumbers, then tomatoes.
Potatoes personally, I love them, but I tend to get a lot of guff for growing too much.
And then I'm giving them to the UPS guy and the neighbors and they're like, thank you.
And the other thing, yeah, go ahead.
I think we're going to try carrots and tomatoes this year.
Ooh, carrots are a little bit challenging.
You got to make sure you got a nice, loose.
I shared a picture of my horrific, gigantic, thick, gnarled carrots, which I ate because I like chewing wood.
But yeah, they are tricky.
I guess people real, people love to give advice on gardening and guys were chime in on the carrots.
Soils too tight and maybe even add some sand in there, a loamy, loamy soil for carrots.
I don't know what loamy means, but I think the Sam.
Yeah.
Hey, if you're growing carrots, grow radishes too.
Okay.
You grow radishes with your carrots.
And by the time your carrots won't be grown up, by the time your radishes are ready to be picked, and then you just pick the radishes right out and then let the carrots grow up behind them.
Just sow them at the same time.
Okay.
And for the listeners with young kids, radishes are the perfect starting crop for your little kids and their high time preference because they are always the first to sprout.
I mean, you're talking days from putting those seeds in there.
Now, they probably won't want to eat a single shred of them because they are, they do have that spicy taste to them, but really fun.
And I just snack on the radishes straight out of the garden.
Nobody else wants them here.
They're my little snack sustenance when I'm out there.
But grow what you want to eat, what you're excited to eat, what you spend the most money on at the grocery store.
And the other thing, and my father-in-law said this, he's like, tomatoes are a perfect crop because they are expensive at the grocery store and they're easy to grow and they will absolutely taste better with just the barest minimum of care at home and making sure you have good soil, because everybody's gotten those waxy, flavorless tomatoes, not just at McDonald's, but you know that they have on the shelves, unless you go to the more you know greenhouse grown stuff like that.
But we are almost out of time here.
It's 1230 a.m a.m on the East Coast and tomorrow's friday.
I uh i'll thank everybody before we uh land this puppy, but I wanted to go around again to text Hans and Mitt Gartner for anything we haven't touched upon uh, or that you wanted to relay to the audience before we start to wrap this up.
And Hans, we barely, we barely talked about cows and and goats and crops like stuff like that.
You know, i'm sorry it's that the.
The reason for that is that it's a relatively smaller part of the audience that has the gorgeous luxury of the space to do that.
But go ahead, go ahead, Mitt Gartner, please hop in.
Oh, I was gonna say I was looking at the picture of Of Hans's citrus.
He's, you know, if he's not that far away from Sam, maybe he could bring a citrus over there.
You got a little play date.
first yeah we got the first feds meeting feds citrus edition what's your favorite thing to grow mid-corner what What should everybody try to grow spring?
I mean, I love the smell of tomatoes and stuff.
I can only eat a few of them because I start like, I think the Lily allure to them.
So like, but I love to grill them.
And that's to me, that's like the most marked, like it's everything like tomatoes.
Like, I like tomatoes because I'm looking around.
I got too much freaking juice on me.
And like, that's where it's like, it's not, it's not, it's not full as gross like a tomato.
So that's probably my favorite.
But honestly, the radishes are the main thing for me because like radishes in the arugula, you can't buy either of those in the store that have any fur.
So if you want to be able to burn, like you got to grill them.
And there's nothing, there's nothing that can replace that.
I've never bought one in a store that has the burn of a homegrown radish before.
Yeah.
And the great, the greens are so awesome.
And you'll spend a lot of money on lettuce and stuff like that.
We've had beautiful romaine lettuce, Swiss chard.
Just eating Swiss chard straight out of a garden is damn delicious, good for you.
And yeah, it keeps you going when you're out there hauling your hoses and your water buckets around.
And one more from me, selfish.
I've never grown sweet potatoes, yams before, more or less, same process as regular potatoes?
No.
More or less.
Not at all.
No, not at all.
Finally, some disagreement.
There you go.
You got to take shoots.
You got to plant from shoots rather from seeds.
It's from seed potatoes.
It's a whole different.
It's a similar process, but they are different.
Once you put them in the ground, they're fairly similar.
Okay.
Yeah, I agree.
Once you get them in the ground, they're pretty much the same, but the starting process is slightly different.
So you can't.
So you can't just put a sprouting potato or a sweet potato in the ground?
What's the difference?
No, you pull off the slips that start to grow on them.
They pull right off.
And then you plant those in the ground.
You don't plant the whole root, but when it starts to sprout, that piece will pull right off.
Okay.
It's a really good fun experiment for the kids, too, because he's saying you can put them in the ground, which you totally can.
But it's really cool.
When you pull them off, you can start the rooting process.
It can be like a little experiment for the kids.
Like, all right, watch the roots.
Let me know when the roots start.
And then, you know, transplant them.
And it becomes a family process.
Amen.
Well, Tex, over to you, buddy.
What did we not cover that you think we should have?
Briefly, but as you like.
Well, I was going to kind of get into a little bit more of the advanced grafting and stuff, but we don't have any time for that.
We'll have to schedule that for a later day.
I know V was asking about that.
I think we covered a lot, actually.
We missed a lot.
There's a lot left on the table, but we did definitely cover a lot.
I think so.
Thank you, buddy.
Hans, over to you, big guy.
If you want to talk cows or goats or anything here, real quick, or whatever's on your mind.
I'd just say, I mean, no matter where you're at, just try something.
Just start, even if it's just some herbs in a windowsill, just start something, learn some skills, and give it a chance.
Try it.
If it fails now, you're not really out at anything, but at least you learn something and just give it a try and see what you can do.
Yep.
I was not fibbing in the slightest when I talked about that ancient connection that we have to all that stuff.
It is in your blood.
It's in your gene code.
It's somewhere lurking in your brain.
And even if you don't think it is or you think you'll be horrible at it, it's not brain surgery.
It's damn rewarding.
It gets you outside, even if it's out on your damn balcony.
And there's, it's, it's a simple but serious life joy and also something that can be rewarding with the kids, teach them the value of hard work and being that cultivator.
You know, you treat your plants a little bit like you treat your kids.
Sometimes you just let them coast and do their own thing.
Other times you really got to give them attention, fix things that are wrong, help them grow, give them a little bit of additional nutrition, supplementation.
Treat them like your little plant babies, as gay as that may sound.
Go ahead, Sam.
Well, and you've heard, you've probably heard this kind of a legendary thing like Jews cannot grow things, you know, so that's that's like where we come in.
You know, and it makes me think of the Bible story, you know, Cain was cursed from the land, like he couldn't, he couldn't live off the land.
So his descendants, they don't live off the land.
If you don't live off the land, what do you do?
You live off people, right?
So I think that that describes them pretty well.
Makabutz, muckabuts, yeah.
I wanted to mention too, I put a picture in the channel there where we are.
And maybe you could put it in the show notes for people that listen to the show.
They might look at this braided palms that I put.
We just had Palm Sunday a couple of days ago from when we're recording now.
And so me and my family, we got the palms and we braided them.
So that's a little bit adjacent to our topic here.
These are palm fronds.
At the church, they'll give us palm fronds or even olive branches with the leaves on it.
So perhaps somebody will enjoy that.
Growing up, Sam, my mom had a cross on the wall.
And this time of year, of course, around Easter, she would always get a palm frond and drape it around it.
Yeah.
Well, and then the palm fronds from now next year will become the ashes for Ash Wednesday.
So it, you know, just goes year to year.
Beautiful.
Yep.
And I am going to drag the kids to Catholic Mass on Easter.
I say drag.
I shouldn't say drag.
I am going to bring the church.
Lead them.
Lead them to it.
Yes.
There you go.
You know, I'm going to be a little bit more hands-off, but I want them to experience it.
The grandeur and perhaps the teaching.
Joy.
A little bit of grandeur, a little bit of tedium, a little bit of joy.
We'll see how they take it.
Well, I won't get into who's who on the religion question.
But, you know, they're different people and they've expressed different interests in it.
And we're generally not church going folk.
But I'm doing it this Easter Sunday.
Mitt Gartner is about to give me Odin's stink eye.
Just kidding.
Rolo, anything on your mind before we wrap this up, big guy?
Thank you for riding with us.
I know you're not feeling great tonight.
Or any questions?
You need any help or you just want to get the hell out of here?
Oh, I need lots of help.
Sure, true.
I had in the show notes in case we burn through all of our topics.
I wanted to talk about the cancer up swing in cases in younger people and why that all might be.
Obviously, we had the massive epic Francis Scott Keybridge collapse in Baltimore from the Indian crew and perhaps female local pilot.
And there was a massive, I think it's up to 140, 145 Russians dead at that crop city hall.
My goodness.
Yeah, those Tajiks were dumber than a sack of rocks.
And whoever you, yeah, that was certainly, oh, they admitted as much.
Somebody was using them, whether it was quote unquote ISIS or the Ukrainians or perhaps higher up the food chain.
Unclear, but we're going to have to save that or let other people cover it better because I am damn proud and damn grateful to our special guests, to our audience for the questions they submitted.
And to you, dear listener, for, you know, sticking with us.
And again, this was audience requested.
I always worry that, oh, we've covered that already.
Go back to that episode.
But we literally got probably dozens of requests for more gardening shows, more homestead shows.
I think this is one of the most important shows we do, really.
I agree.
And Hans or yeah, Hans and Tex both said that they would be more than happy to answer questions.
So if you have one, drop them in the comment zone and I'll all four of them or you can DM me on Telegram.
Always email the show, fullhouse show at protonmail.com.
Easiest way to keep track of them.
We'll pass them out to the experts.
Shame on Mitt Gartner.
His silence means that he is not willing to help anyone else.
One night only.
I had to charge you for that.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, gentlemen.
Just kill me.
Rolo's just saying, just kill me.
I feel bad for this guy.
I think it's syphilis.
It's got to be syphilis.
Well, that's my clinical diagnosis.
He did talk about that wild date some weeks ago.
I know.
Yeah.
Well, all right, fam.
We love you.
Thank you so much.
Whatever you do, get out there and try something.
Worst case scenario, what do you do?
Go to store, buy soil or buy plant and give it sunlight, give it water, and ideally plant it somewhere where it's most likely to do.
Do your homework first.
Takes two seconds.
When to plant, where to plant.
Does it like sun?
Does it like partially shade?
Most things like a ton of sun.
And remember to plant what you're interested in.
And by all means, get the kids involved.
Get dirt under your fingernails.
It's also a good tell when the kids need their nails clipped is when their fingernails are dirty because I see them out of the corner of my eye.
I'm like, oh, you're not going to school like that tomorrow.
We're cutting those suckers.
Anyway, we love you, Fam.
We'll be back next week for sure.
Sam, shame on me.
I didn't release your damn, it's not your damn autobiography, but I just dropped the ball.
No, no, it's your damn autobiography, Coach.
Yeah.
Yeah, we got to get that out there.
No, absolutely.
We'll get it out there.
I'll put that one out straight.
And the article, right?
Maybe halfway out.
And the article.
Well, you narrated.
The article's already up on the website.
You narrated.
Yeah, you narrated the article.
I don't want to bother people.
The RSS feed.
That one will be behind the paywall at surrealpolitiques.com and use full house all one word as a reference code to get a discount.
And yeah, thank you guys.
Bless you and your families.
We love you.
We'll do this again next spring at latest.
You're all welcome back anytime.
And I'd love to talk stuff other than just plants and animals and homesteading too, because it's not like you are one trick ponies.
All right.
Closing music.
Let's see.
I don't think Tex had a recommendation.
Sam, did you have another one there?
Otherwise, I can pull one out of my hat.
Go ahead, coach.
I really didn't think about it.
All right.
Very good.
This is totally discordant with gardening, but I've always loved the song Message in a Bottle by the police.
Everyone's heard it.
I mean, that guitar riff, the vocals, it's probably one of the greatest rock songs of the 80s, if not of all time.
And a lot of times, what I will do is, if you've heard something so often, you go looking for a techno remix.
Sometimes they're absolute audio abortions straight into the trash.
And normally they are.
But I found this gem, which is by Blau.
And just a brief, spectacular update on Message in a Bottle with just a little bit of drum and bass in there.
I sent it to our pal regulator who likes that monstrous genre.