353 It's All About the Soil (for a Successful Garden!) Artwork

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred

Tips for beginning and experienced gardeners. New episodes arrive every Friday. Fred Hoffman has been a U.C. Certified Master Gardener since 1982 and writes a weekly garden column for the Lodi News-Sentinel in Lodi, CA. A four-decade fixture in Sacramento radio, he hosted three radio shows for Northern California gardeners and farmers: The KFBK Garden Show, Get Growing with Farmer Fred, and the KSTE Farm Hour. Episode Website: https://gardenbasics.net

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Garden Basics with Farmer Fred

353 It's All About the Soil (for a Successful Garden!)

August 15, 2024 • Fred Hoffman • Season 5 • Episode 55

Today, we talk with Kevin Marini, a community education specialist with the University of California Cooperative Extension, about the topics of soil and successful gardening. We talk about the pros and cons of using native soil versus commercial soil, the importance of improving native soil, the use of bagged mixes in raised beds, and the role of organic matter and fertilizers in gardening. We also touch on the benefits of mulch and the importance of proper watering techniques. Overall, the conversation emphasizes the importance of understanding and improving your native soil for successful gardening.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Smart Pots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go!

Previous episodes, show notes, links, product information, and transcripts at the home site for Garden Basics with Farmer Fred, GardenBasics.net. Audio, transcripts, and episode chapters also available at Buzzsprout.

Pictured: Home Made Seed Starting Mix

Links:
Subscribe to the Beyond the Garden Basics Newsletter https://gardenbasics.substack.com

Smart Pots https://smartpots.com/fred/
Dave Wilson Nursery
HeirloomRoses.com (with the FRED discount link)

Other links mentioned in today’s podcast:

Farmer Fred’s Ride for the Kids. Donate to help the Sacramento Children's Home Crisis Nursery
Beyond the Garden Basics Newsletter, Aug. 16: Tips for Growing Rhubarb in a Hot Climate
Good quality soil moisture meters
Soil Sampler Probes

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All About Farmer Fred:
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https://gardenbasics.substack.com

Farmer Fred website:
http://farmerfred.com

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Farmer Fred Garden Minute Videos on YouTube

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353 It’s All About the Soil TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred:

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred is brought to you by Smart Pots, the original lightweight, long lasting fabric plant container. It's made in the USA. Visit SmartPots.com slash Fred for more information and a special discount, that's SmartPots.com/Fred.

Welcome to the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast. If you're just a beginning gardener or you want good gardening information, you've come to the right spot.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SOIL, Pt. 1

Farmer Fred

A few weeks ago, our next guest spoke at Harvest Day at the Fair Oaks Horticulture Center. It was well-received. He talked about nurturing soils and bagged mixes for better plants. In other words, you're going to have a garden. Should you use your native soil or should you use some commercial soil or a combination? What do you do? What do you look for? How do you do it? Kevin Marini is our guest. Yes, he is a community education specialist with UC Cooperative Extension, long-time Master Gardener supervisor for Nevada and Placer counties, and he's also a certified arborist. And Kevin, that's a great topic, about planting the ground in your native soil, or do you maybe do everything in containers or raised beds with bag mixes? Or do you throw bag mixes on top of your soil and plant in that? Well, there's a lot of ways to do it. But you got to be careful of a lot of things.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, I think, one of the things that's happened over the years, I managed these Master Gardener programs for two decades. And the one thing that I kept hearing over and over and over again is, “our soil is terrible. It's horrible. I'm not going to plant anything in that,” right? And so there's this kind of idea out there, definitely amongst newer gardeners for sure, that our native soil just isn't able to actually grow great plants. And it's horrible, it's terrible, and it should be avoided. Well, that couldn't be more untrue. That's just our native soils may have some issues that need some mitigation measures.

Kevin Marini:

But by far, it is a great bank account of mineral nutrients that's sitting there that has just been growing all sorts of native plants without any problems whatsoever, right? Without any human intervention. We know that there's some amazing things about native soil. There's easy ways to improve it. So that's where I came up with the idea about giving this talk and really talking to people about the difference between growing in native soil versus these purchased mixes. And I should be clear here that when I'm talking about purchasd mixes, I'm talking about nothing that is soil, right? You cannot buy soil in a bag. That's usually shocking for people to hear. But it is true.

Soil, real soil is mineral based. It comes from rock over millions upon millions of years. So rock, time, microbes, and it creates the soil. And so you just don't have that situation in anything that you buy. That's a manufactured product, mostly filled with mined ingredients, believe it or not, which is also quite shocking. And I want to say right up front that even though I'm a cheerleader in a sense for growing in native soil, I do believe you can have success with all these types of situations, like you say. Maybe some people are putting their compost pile on top of soil and growing in their compost pile. I've seen people have success in all sorts of weird circumstances. So I'm not saying that you must do it one way, but I do think it's important to understand what you're growing plants in.

Farmer Fred:

I totally agree with you. I remember way back when, when we bought 10 acres in Herald, California, it was bare. It was a house on 10 bare acres.

Kevin Marini:

Wow.

Farmer Fred:

A blank canvas, that was my first thought. That's why I wanted that property. “Wow i can start from scratch”, and i planted and planted and planted and i was swearing at that clay soil all the time. We had a party out there maybe 10 15 years later and it was it was pretty much an oasis by then. I had planted trees from seed even. And hundreds of those grew. i was telling a guest at the party, “it's hard to grow in this clay soil here.” And this guy says, “Look around, look around, look around at all the plants here. I don't think so.”

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, yeah. You proved that, it was worthwhile. It was worth the effort, right?

Farmer Fred:

And clay gets a bad rap. You just have to learn to basically surf with Mother Nature when it comes to clay.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah. And up here in the foothills, where I was running these Master Gardener programs, even though, like you said, Placer goes all the way down to (the former rice fields near) Lincoln, there's a lot of clay soil. There's a lot of clay soil filled with rock in the foothills. And so I understand how people immediately kind of look at the native soil and think this can't be what I'm expected to garden in, right? When you put in a shovel and it bounces back at you, you can't help but go, this can't be right. But there is a “but” here. And that is, like I tell people, there's all these nutrients in there. There's this bank of nutrients that you can withdraw from for the rest of your life, the rest of your kid's life, the rest of your grandchild's life, it has been accumulating for so long. And it's just sitting there waiting for us to take advantage of it. The big problem is how do we open it up? How do we bring in oxygen to this native soil? How do we bring in life to this native soil? Oxygen is the first step. And how do we bring in organic matter? And all of those are related, but what's crucial about our native soils is improving it. Yes, but once you improve it, you can get true sustainability versus in a purchased bag mix or a purchased bulk organic matter mix blend. You're tethered to that. You're tethered to that situation. You're always going to have to replenish in that case, right? You're never going to achieve some mountaintop sustainability with bagged mixes, with raised beds filled with organic matter. You're always going to be replenishing, replenishing, replenishing, and I would say fertilizing, fertilizing, fertilizing. And we can get into that deeper if we'd like.

Farmer Fred:

Well, not to mention watering, watering, watering.

Kevin Marini:

Oh, gosh, isn't that the truth? Some of these raised beds, you know, I've heard Master Gardeners report to me that in the summer they're watering two, three times a day.

Farmer Fred:

Well, yeah, in a heat wave. Well, like I was telling you earlier, before we started, that it only dawned on me in the last couple of years that these raised beds that I've been gardening in for 40 years or more are really nothing more than large containers and have to be treated as such, especially their drainage patterns, which is very narrow. When using drip irrigation, instead of using in a four-foot-wide raised bed, instead of having maybe three lines going all the way across the bed, I'm now up to five lines going across because of that watering footprint, might only be eight inches or so. Whereas in your native soil, if it's a clay soil, that watering footprint could be 18 inches wide.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah. that's a really, really good point. The more you can expand those drip systems in those raised bed situations to water more surface area, you're going to get better coverage down below, right? Yeah, absolutely.

Farmer Fred:

But there's a lot of tweaks that you can do along the way, too, to help make the water spread.

Kevin Marini:

Absolutely. And I think one of the things that I always talk about is this organic matter. And most gardeners know what organic matter is, but some don't. And so I'm going to talk about this for a little bit here. So, what I usually tell people is that you rarely find a commercial farmer creating raised beds, right? You rarely find commercial farmers growing in containers, right? They generally use native soil for growing crops, right? Right. Why? Because, number one, it's expensive. It's expensive to buy all these products. It's expensive to build a raised bed, line it with the gopher wire, fill it full of material, set up your drip system. All of a sudden, one four by eight raised bed is the price of all the produce you're going to be growing that season, right?

Farmer Fred:

Well, that's not the point for the home gardener.

Kevin Marini:

No, no. I mean, that may or may not be the point for some, for sure. But what I'm saying is there's a lot that goes into it as opposed to like the way I was introduced to vegetable gardening in native soil. Just pop a cucumber seed in the ground and water it a little bit and then it grows and you give it some liquid feed here and there, and that's about it. And so in native soil, it's unappreciated in the sense that it can really be an easier way to get started because of the cost factor. But of course, there's that improvement factor that is the big barrier. In native soil, it's going to take some time to get your soil really, really nice and crumbly and really productive versus when you go purchase that material to put in your raised bed, that material to put in a container, you really have immediate results, right? Yeah.

Kevin Marini:

We used to say in the Master Gardener program that whenever someone built a brand new raised bed, they had a bumper crop the first year, and then the second year was a sophomore slump. And it's generally because of what we just talked about, which is you have to replenish those beds. It's all organic matter and it goes away and it's used up really fast. And so, replenish, replenish, replenish. And because it's mostly all organic matter, it's a dynamic environment. That means that it's really hard to know when nutrients are going to be available for those plants, which lends itself to using fertilizer in container plantings. And like you said, raised beds are just big containers for the most part. And so, I really recommend replenishing the material every season. And number two, using fertilizer in those situations to guarantee that there's available nutrients for the plants.

Farmer Fred:

All right. Well, let's talk about fertilizers then. Is it organic fertilizers? Is it chemical fertilizers? Is it balanced fertilizers or is it single nutrient fertilizers?

Kevin Marini:

It's unbelievable when you go to a nursery and go down the fertilizer aisle. I can imagine. I know a lot about fertilizer, and I'm still overwhelmed. I can't imagine not knowing anything about fertilizer and going down one of those aisles and trying to make sense of all the things you just said, all the different kinds. And plus, of course, you have to match it to what you're growing. Okay, so the fertilizer that you may use for an ornamental shade tree is going to be very different than the fertilizer you used in your raised bed to grow corn, right? So the nutrient requirements of what you're growing have a big part in which fertilizer to choose. I tend to want to use organic fertilizers over chemical-based fertilizers because they have other benefits besides just the nutrients that they're delivering to the plants. They feed the microorganisms, they break down over time, and so they release nutrients then over time. It's very difficult to over-apply or burn plants with organic fertilizers. I tend to fall into the organic fertilizer camp, but I also do agree that there are circumstances where using a slow-release chemical fertilizer like, say, an Osmocote, would make sense in a big wine barrel where you're growing peonies. So I do think there's a space for each, but I tend to prefer the organics.

Farmer Fred:

And there are organic slow release fertilizers that are that are very good and they take their time. And we should explain exactly what we mean by slow release. Is it water that activates them or temperature that activates them?

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, well, they're both in some cases, because in the organics, if without moisture, you're not going to get the microbes active and breaking down those materials. So you definitely need moisture. You definitely need some temperature in some cases, like having some organic fertilizers in cold, wet soil doesn't allow for that to be used efficiently. And then, of course, there's some fertilizers, chemical fertilizers are actually coated, right, with a polymer to make it break down very slowly.

So there's different mechanisms in regard to the slow release. But the one thing to think about when we're talking about a container, you have this container sitting on your porch with a plant in it. And when you're using organic fertilizers in there that break down slowly and release nutrients slowly, you have to remember that you're potentially watering that container daily, right? Especially during the warm season. And so, nutrients get leached out of those container mixes even with the use of organic fertilizer. So watering and watering and watering daily and daily is slowly moving some of the benefits of that organic fertilizer out of the root zone, out of the container itself. I have read some good research on the benefit of using a product like Osmocote because it is less prone to leaching in those types of conditions because the coating keeps it from breaking down quickly or getting leached out. So there is a possible benefit to using those types of products in containers that are going to be just watered every single day. Does that make sense?

Farmer Fred:

Well, as our friend Debbie Flower says very often, fertilize weekly, weakly. Which means cut the dosage in half, but apply it more often.

Kevin Marini:

And that's another thing I talk to a lot of people about is using liquid fertilizers and using that as part of your watering routine. Like you say, bring the dosage way down, but do it more often, and just make it part of your watering routine so that you know that there's available nutrients for those plants all the time. So I do think that's another great technique.

Farmer Fred:

I am amazed at the success that one of your cohorts in Central California, farm advisor Jeff Mitchell, has accomplished down at Five Points in Central California in demonstrating to farmers the value of no-till and cover cropping to improve yield, to improve moisture levels, to improve penetration of moisture. And it's catching on.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah. And I think, again, that goes back to native soil, right? So, it's not that you couldn't use those certain techniques in a raised bed, for example, but the benefits to our native soil seem to outweigh the benefits when you're growing in almost complete organic matter. Like I was mentioning before, you have these clay soils or rocky soils, and by growing those cover crops, those roots are breaking that up, they're bringing life into the soil, and then the biomass of the roots decomposing in there is adding more organic matter. And by not tilling the native soil, you're letting the soil structure form and develop and mature and become sustainable over time. So I agree. I think that some of the result from no-till and using cover crops and mulching, it's unbelievable some of the results you can get. And some of those techniques you can use in your backyard raised bed, but maybe you do it a little bit differently. Maybe you're not. Maybe you are using a little bit of tillage in the sense of a fork or a shovel, because some of those raised beds, if you're not doing winter gardening or anything, they really can compact more than you would think over the winter. Right. You kind of develop that crust on top and you really need to break it up when you replenish that material in the spring.

Farmer Fred:

Well, you know, it does that if you are topping the soil with ground up leaves from your oak trees in the late fall.

Kevin Marini:

Oh, yeah.

Farmer Fred:

When you put those leaves in a trash can and weed whack them into little pieces and then spread them over your raised beds in the wintertime four or five inches deep, what is there in spring? Just the nicest looking soil and worms.

Kevin Marini:

And that is replenishment. It's just a different form of replenishment, right? So instead of going and purchasing the mix, you filled your raised bed with and replenishing it with that mix, you can add organic material, raw organic material, leaves and things like that in the wintertime, let them break down and replenish it in that mix. So i agree there's lots of different ways to replenish. You just have to replenish. Because if anyone's ever seen the level of a raised bed in just one year it usually drops three to four inches. There's a reason for that.

Farmer Fred:

Well yeah and that's also true in smaller container plants as well. The level drops as that organic matter finds its way to being smaller particles. i really like the idea that more and more people, instead of yanking out their tomato plants and their pepper plants, more and more people are just cutting them off at the base and leaving the roots in the soil to spend the winter.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, makes a lot of sense considering all of those microorganisms are all over the roots and why yank them out, number one. And then, of course, yanking out the root disturbs all of that structure you're trying to build. And it's easier for us too. It's one little cut and you compost the top, it's good. It's perfect. All around, it's great.

Farmer Fred:

That's one thing we didn't mention about mulching, is that mulching is a top layer.

Farmer Fred:

You don't have to incorporate it. In fact, you shouldn't incorporate it in the soil. You're just piling it on top. It doesn't get any easier than that. Yeah.

Kevin Marini:

And we look to nature for that lesson, right? If you look at all of these trees and plants growing in native soil outside your window, How are they doing that? Well, nature has a system, right? And that system relies on all the material that's deposited on top of the soil at what we call mulch. Nature has been doing that forever. And that is what all those organisms churn through and create all the nitrogen, for example, and all the nutrients that get replenished. There's a system for it. We just need to mimic that system in our own home gardens. I think that alone, if people just utilize mulch, like we've been talking about it, that alone would go a long way for sustainability of these soils.

Farmer Fred:

You don't have to sell me on that. That's very true. Compost is interesting, especially the more we're learning about the microbiology of the soil. And you looked at the bagged compost products. And if you read the ingredients on most bagged compost products, the first words are “forest byproducts”. Well, what are forest byproducts? Is it leaves? Is it wood? Is it hardwood? Is it a compost, that is better suited for woody plants? What about for annual herbaceous plants? What's the best compost for that? Probably green waste.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah. It gets really complicated when you start looking into the nature of all of these bagged products. In our regular potting soils, we have perlite, vermiculite, peat. Those are all mined products. Beyond just mining them, we have to then process them. And I mean, if somebody at some point does a carbon footprint of one bag of potting soil, it would be astonishing, I think. And then you get to these other products that are not potting soils, they're soil conditioners, or they're a lot of times they're marketed for raised beds. And you're right, they're just pure forest product. And so there's a lot of byproducts from the forest industry that make their way into these bags.

Probably the biggest one is decomposed fir bark. When we harvest fir trees, we don't use the bark in the lumber operation, obviously. So all that bark that gets stripped off of the trees gets utilized in these bags that we buy at the nursery. Okay, so that's one source of the forest products. But there's chipped up wood. Sometimes you open up a bag of compost and you see wood finds in the whole thing. And it's like, well, how could this be compost if I can actually see chunks of wood in here, right? So, I always tell people compost is fully broken down. Mulch is not broken down. So, I never refer to mulch and compost as the same thing. I think of them as two totally different things. Even though you can apply compost on the soil surface as a top dressing, I still consider it a compost application, not mulch, right? Coarse mulch actually inhibits weed seed germination. By putting compost on top of the soil, you can grow some really nice weeds.

Farmer Fred:

Yes, you can.

Kevin Marini:

Yes. Right? So it's a very different product. And so a lot of times, like you say, when you open up these bags that are supposedly compost, they still have recognizable stuff in them. And I think I think that's just because of the way it's produced as a byproduct of industry. Luckily, here in California, we're very fortunate to have an enormous supply of compost coming from our municipal composting operations. In Placer County, for example, we have a real cutting-edge facility in Roseville that composts not only landscape yard waste, but also now food scraps. And the initial reports back that I'm hearing on the compost coming out of there is that it's really high quality. They're doing a really good job. I can't say that from a personal perspective. I haven't used it. But some of the reports I'm getting back says this is really good stuff. And so to have that at our disposal at an economical price is great.

Farmer Fred:

Municipal waste turned into compost, for me, raises a red flag. And I worry about grass clippings that are being composted and those grass clippings at some point have been treated with weed and feed products, which have a persistence of five years or so.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, there is some worry, some concern about this municipal-based compost. And, gosh, you'll probably remember better than I. I want to say it was in the year 2000 in Sacramento, there was the clopyrilid scare where people were buying compost, municipal compost, applying it around their plants and their plants were dying. And they did find out there was this clopyrilid herbicide residue that had persisted through the composting process and it was, in fact, killing plants. So, this is not something that's just made up. This is documented. So, there's a genuine concern there. At the same time, we have to remember that the composting process and the operators have improved.

They're using more science to manage these large composting operations than they ever have before. They're doing more monitoring than they ever have before. Our lab testing of these products is testing more things than before. They're doing it more often. There's a little bit of a bump in confidence, I guess, I have just based on those things. I'm not saying that all the products are created equal. We know that's not true because every compost is different in a sense from batch to batch. But I think they've gotten better at the process. And I think that there's some real good use for municipal compost. It may not be in your vegetable garden. Maybe it's in your landscape area or in a little sloped area where you're trying to get some ground covers established or something like that. I do think there's a use for it.

SMART POTS

Farmer Fred

I’ve been using the Smart Pot Compost Sak for a few years now, and it is coming in very handy for amending or protecting the garden soil year round.

I like to amend my planting beds before putting in any of the seasonal crops or improving the bed before I plant, anytime. One of those ingredients that gets worked into the soil in my raised beds is compost.

And, making up the bottom half of my Smart Pot Compost Sak right now is some of the richest-looking fine compost I’ve ever seen, made from last fall’s oak leaf collection. Yep, it’s beautiful leaf mold. The design of the Compost Sak, with a little help from Mother Nature, turned those shredded leaves into beautiful, ready to use compost. And I use some of the existing leaves that haven’t broken down near the top of the Compost Sak as a few inches of mulch, year round.

The Smart Pot Compost Sak is a large, 100-gallon fabric bag that is lightweight yet extremely durable and lasts for years, and can hold 12 cubic feet of pure compost. This rugged fabric is entirely porous, containing many micropores that allow for air circulation and drainage. The fitted cover is a flexible plastic top designed to increase heat and help manage moisture in the mix, accelerating the composting process.

Smart Pots are proudly made 100% in the USA. Smart Pots are available at independent garden centers and select Ace and True Value hardware stores nationwide. You can find the location nearest you at their website, smart pots dot com slash Fred, where you can get 10 percent off your Smart Pot order by using the coupon code, fred. f-r-e-d, at checkout from the Smart Pot Store.

Visit smartpots.com slash fred for more information about the complete line of Smart pots lightweight, colorful, award winning fabric containers as well as the Smart Pot Compost Sak. Smart Pots - the original, award winning fabric container. Go to smart pots dot com slash fred.

FARMER FRED’S RIDE FOR THE KIDS

Farmer Fred

On Saturday, September 28th, I’ll be riding my bike. “Well, what’s so unusual about that?” you might be asking yourself.

September 28th is the date of the Sacramento Century Challenge, a 100-mile bike ride along the Sacramento River that starts in downtown Sacramento and heads south to the Delta farmland region and back.

And yes, 100 miles is part of the challenge, as is the bike I’ll be riding, a heavy, steel-framed Surly Midnight Special, that, by the way, is NOT an e-bike. Adding to the challenge will be the route’s pothole-filled river levee roads, as well as the ferocious headwinds that are usually in your face on the way back to Sacramento.

Making it even more of a challenge, I’m helping out the Sacramento Rotary Club raise money for the Sacramento Children’s Home Crisis Nursery.

The Sacramento Children's Home Crisis Nursery is the only program of its kind in Sacramento County and directly prevents child abuse and neglect by supporting families with small children at times of crisis. The nursery allows parents to bring their children ages newborn to five, for emergency hourly or overnight care during difficult times, with the goal of keeping families together and reducing the number of children entering foster care.

We are calling it “Farmer Fred’s Ride for the Kids”, and we will have a link in today’s show notes with more information and how you can donate to help out The Sacramento Children’s Home Crisis Nursery.

So, how about it? Maybe pledge 10 cents a mile (that’s $10) along with a hearty, “You go, Fred!” Or a more generous one dollar a mile ($100), to give me the mental endurance for this all day ride. At my age, I’ll take my time, thank you, and enjoy the farmland scenery.

Again, please support Farmer Fred’s Ride for the Kids. Look for the link in today’s show notes, or at FarmerFred.com. Your support will help provide a safe place for local small children in need.

Thank you for your support, let’s go!

https://www.justgiving.com/page/fred-hoffman-1723683653132?utm_term=GzewG4KyZ

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SOIL, PT. 2

Farmer Fred:

Let's talk a little bit about mulch because mulch does go a long way to improving your soil. And I know your colleague down in Ventura County, Jim Downer, who I think he's the king of mulch. I'm pretty sure he's the king.

Kevin Marini:

A great guy. He does. He does more articles at the home gardening level and talking about compost and mulch and young trees more than I've seen other environmental hort advisors do. So, yeah, he's been incredibly productive and a great resource. Yeah.

Farmer Fred:

And when it comes to mulch, in his analysis of different substances used for mulch, he finds it difficult to not like chipped and shredded tree branches, tree parts that come from your local arborist who has a chipper shredder machine and incorporates those different sizes into a mulch that allows quicker breakdown of the smaller pieces, yet bigger pieces to maintain on the top of it. Yeah.

Kevin Marini:

No, I think he's right on with that as well. I think we probably are both familiar with the Washington State University extension horticulturalist, Linda Chalker Scott. She also is a huge proponent of arborist wood chips. When tree guys are out there filling up those trucks, they're usually a blend of some dead stuff and some live stuff. And so what you end up with in the back of their truck is a chipped material that kind of begins to break down and kind of begins to compost. If you've ever had a big chip drop of 15 yards of that material in your front yard or your driveway, it'll start to steam. After 24 hours, it will start to steam a little bit, starting to break down. And that's a feature that we want for mulch, is that it is beginning to break down so that it's going to improve your soil quickly over time.

A lot of the mulch that's purchased is kiln-dried. So a lot of the wood chip mulch that people buy, is bone-dry. And it's, like you said, more uniform in size. In many cases, it's dyed, colored brown or orange or whatever. Or black. Oh, yeah. And it just doesn't have the same characteristics and the same feature that the wood chips have, the arborist wood chips, where they break down more quickly. Yeah. And at the same time, gives you all the benefits of mulch, too, of keeping weeds down and keeping moisture in. Yeah.

Farmer Fred:

The day when that pile arrives in my driveway, I call it Christmas. To me, it's like saying, “we're going to feed the soil today”.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, it's funny because both my daughters would tell you, now they're grown, they would tell you growing up that I was a mulch hunter. I would go around and I'd see these piles in the front of people's yards and say, hey, do you want that mulch? And many, many times I'd come home with a truck full of mulch. This was kind of before the chip drop days, whereas now you can really get those chips delivered right to your home pretty easily. You just have to be ready for the quantity that you're going to get.

Farmer Fred:

Well, the more the merrier, in my mind. But anyway, mulch goes a long way to amending what you think your bad soil is. I think one mistake a lot of people make when they're planting in their yard and they're planting in their native soil. But they think, ”OK, I'm going to put in this new tree or this new plant in here, but I'll just fill the hole with this bagged product and the soil will be a lot better.” What's the downside of that?

Kevin Marini:

That is one of the worst things you can do when planting a tree. And the reason why is because you are completely subjecting the tree roots to a situation where it has all of this crumbly, fertile, compost-like material in the hole, and its roots just spin in that material rather than going out laterally and getting established in the native soil. And so, there's been a lot of research on this. And so you never, ever want to just take out the native soil, replace it with organic matter and plant in that completely.

If anything, you can add a little bit of compost, but minimally. I think Gordon Mann on your podcast said 10% to 15%. I think that was the percentage he was suggesting. I think that's a good rule of thumb. You can add a little bit of organic matter to backfill the planting of those trees, but do not just replace the native soil with these bagged products because it ends up in the long term being the worst thing for those trees. They've also looked at trees planted from containers versus trees planted bare root, and there's a big difference there. So the same thing happens with trees sitting in the nursery in containers, in that container mix, that nice stuff. The roots just go round and around and around and around. And then you pop that out of the container, put it in the ground, and they continue to go round and round and round and round. And they lead to early death, a lot of times, of these trees.

As I mentioned, some of these horticulturalists, like Jim Downer, like Linda Chalker-Scott are starting to do research on what if you wash off all of that nursery media and plant these trees bare root? Well, they get established much faster in the native soil. They seem to have more health early on and better long-term outcomes. I'm totally with you on that. Do not replace that native soil. If it's horrible, you can add a little bit of compost in that mix, 10% to 15% in the backfill, but then use mulch, mulch, mulch on top to improve it from top down over time.

Farmer Fred:

I think the other downside, too, to filling a hole with a bagged product is the flow of water. If it rains, if your sprinklers come on, the water is going to be, if you remember osmosis from high school biology, water flows from a greater pressure area to a less pressure area. Well, the less pressure area would be that new soil. So all the water is going to go from that heavy clay into that hole. It's a sump, basically, that's going to be muddy.

Kevin Marini:

And I've actually seen this occur in a raised bed situation where somebody has plopped down a four by eight raised bed, a foot tall, right on the ground without any mixing of the ground with what they're going to fill it with. It’s just right on the hard ground, and then they fill it full of this blend. I can't even call them soil blends because it makes it sound like they're using actual soil. So I just call them organic matter blends. And so you put that in there. And then I've actually gone out and put a fork in a situation just like that and have seen standing water at the interface of that material and the hard ground below. It will be bone dry in the top three, four inches of that material in the raised bed. But then as you go down to that interface, there's standing water. And so that's kind of exactly what you're talking about with this situation too, is not only does the water flow back to where it has this fluffy organic matter in the hole, But also, it tends to be almost a basin created by the actual native soil all around that that just holds the water in there. So it's like a double whammy. The water's flowing there, attracted there, and then it stays there.

And you can actually have standing water in some of those situations.

Farmer Fred:

It seems to be a very popular topic in the questions from listeners these days about that interface between a raised bed and what's below. Some people are wondering, can I just plant it over my Bermuda grass and be happy? Or just build the raised bed on the Bermuda grass and fill it and be done with it? Should I put sticks on the bottom of it?

Kevin Marini:

Oh, goodness.

Farmer Fred:

And the problem, I think, is that this is the influence of hugelkultur or permaculture or something like that. I understand where they're getting these ideas, but you still need to have that water flow. Where's the water going to go? Always ask yourself that question. Where's the water going to go? Absolutely. And I guess the way to get it into the existing soil bed is either till it in or work in a couple of inches of that new stuff with the existing soil.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, yeah. And that, exactly is it. You got to improve it a little bit, right? Well, you got to create some channels, some oxygen, some openings for that water to penetrate and actually get absorbed. Yeah, so that is a big deal. And I think it's also an underestimated problem in our home gardening endeavors. And related to how much we overwater plants, a lot of times we don't realize that that water is in there, but it's down there and it's sitting there and our plants are actually suffering from too much water. I know in these heat waves, a lot of people tend to water for the sake of it being hot rather than water for the sake of the soil being dried out, right? So you can kill plants with kindness. And I think overwatering, at least in the Master Gardener program, we deemed overwatering to be the number one problem in home gardening. And this goes back to what you were just talking about. How do you replenish the stuff? How do you build these beds? How do you situate these materials so that you're maximizing water usage while being efficient with water?

Farmer Fred:

Well, among garden talk show hosts, I can tell you that if you answer any question with the phrase, “you have a watering problem”, you'll be right 95% of the time.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, I get it. It's amazing how much it relates back to irrigation, for sure.

Farmer Fred:

I think the key is for people to find out what that moisture level is down at that interface level at the bottom of your raised bed and the top of your existing soil. So get yourself a soil moisture meter with a good long probe on it, maybe 24 inches long, and see what the moisture level is down at that level. And certainly, if you see water along the surface, outside your raised beds, then you've got an issue.

Kevin Marini:

That's a great point, Fred. If you see water on the outside of that bed, it's just sitting there and seeping out. Great point. That's an immediate sign that something's going on. Something's not right. So in the forestry world, because I'm an arborist and I also do some work out in the forest once in a while, they sell soil moisture meters that are expensive. They're in the $100 range, and that's expensive for a moisture meter. But they actually are more reliable and more durable and have a longer probe, in most cases, 18 to 24 inches. And so, I want to contrast that product with the very inexpensive moisture meters you buy at the nursery that may not be so reliable and durable. I do think it's important to have full disclosure here and say, I have gone through many, many cheap little moisture meters that I didn't find to be reliable or durable. So it's worth it if you're a gardener and you have fruit trees and vegetable gardens and native plant areas, whatever, you invest a little bit and get a real high quality soil moisture meter.

DAVE WILSON NURSERY

Farmer Fred

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BEYOND THE GARDEN BASICS NEWSLETTER - GROWING RHUBARB

Farmer Fred

Hankering for a fresh rhubarb pie? In the next edition of the Beyond the Garden Basics newsletter, we try to answer the question, can you grow rhubarb in a hot climate? Rhubarb tends to die back in the heat, which is why you won’t find it grown very much in warm to hot summer areas of the country. However, we delved into the work of noted plant breeder Luther Burbank at his farm in the Santa Rosa California area, back in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And it turns out, he was very successful at growing rhubarb in an area that has its share of 100-degree summer days. Unfortunately, all his rhubarb developments were lost, bringing an end to what was becoming a significant agricultural crop in California. But the California Rare Fruit Growers did some research, and found out where Burbank got the original varieties used in his hybridization experiments. And that has brought some hope for those gardeners pining for a backyard rhubarb plant in areas that have lots of summer heat.

That’s what we will delve into in the Tuesday, August 20, 2024 edition of the “Beyond the Garden Basics” newsletter, which is on Substack, Growing Rhubarb in a hot climate. If you’re not a free subscriber yet, go to garden basics dot substack dot com and sign up. Also, you’ll find a link to the newsletter in today’s Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast show notes. Thanks for listening, and reading!

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SOIL, Pt. 3

Farmer Fred:

I will have a link in today's show notes about my favorite moisture meter, and you're exactly right. It's like $100, but I've had mine for about 20 years, maybe longer than that.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, and I'm so impressed by the reliability. You know, I always tell people it really helps to calibrate your moisture meter. And what I mean by that is you take it out of the package and don't just say to yourself, well, it's zero to 10. So 10 must be soaked and zero is bone dry and five must be perfect. I tell people, get a container with a plant in it and soak it, saturate it, then put the moisture in it and read it. And in my experience, it's usually eight or nine.

Farmer Fred:

Oh, that's scary.

Kevin Marini:

Right? And so it's like, oh, okay, eight or nine is really wet. You start calibrating it by putting it in different situations and you learn that it's not necessarily zero to 10, right? You may actually be looking at a two to eight type situation from dry to wet. So that's what I mean by calibrating your moisture meter. Basically what I mean is get to know what the reading really means by using some other ways to check, right? So, we mentioned Steve Zien earlier, a local horticulturalist, and he always talks about using these soil profile tools. What else do they call their tools? Soil probes. And that is a great way to kind of figure out your moisture meter too. So, you take a reading and then you use the probe to say, oh, yeah, that's exactly right. That's dried down right about there. That's what this is saying. It's at six. And so early on, I used all the tools at my disposal to get the best possible picture of soil moisture. And I recommend that for people, not solely just use one thing all the time. Sometimes it does make sense to stick your index finger at the top of the container, right?

Farmer Fred:

Yeah, the soil probe or soil augur is a great tool. There is nothing that requires batteries or electricity or a technical reboot for it to work. It's basically metal, usually stainless steel or chrome, and it's usually 24 to 36 inches long with a T-handle at the top made out of metal. And you plunge it in the ground and about halfway or maybe a little bit greater or lesser than halfway, is an opening on the side. So when you plunge that into the soil, give it a quarter turn and then raise it back out, there's going to be a soil sample at that point where that side opening is. And you can feel the soil. You can see how wet it is for yourself.

Kevin Marini:

Yeah, and that's a nice backup to using that moisture meter. Once you do that a few times, you get a feel for the numbers on the meter, you can rely on it and understand that number a lot better. So I always recommend, hey, the only way you're really going to know is to look at the soil down there and see how far that hour watering actually went down into the soil, right? Right. The moisture meter is going to help you in some regard, but sometimes you just have to use a shovel or a soil auger and see how deep that water went.

Farmer Fred:

Yep. And it's much easier working with a soil probe or a soil auger on a raised bed than it is on, say, hard pan.

Kevin Marini:

Absolutely. Absolutely. No doubt. No doubt about that. In our wonderful foothill soils, you know, we also have these things called rocks that get in the way a lot.

Farmer Fred:

Yeah, the official trowel of Folsom is a handpick.

Kevin Marini:

Exactly. Yep. That's exactly right.

Farmer Fred:

Kevin Marini is a communication education specialist with UC Cooperative Extension. He's also a certified arborist. And he recently moved into a new UC position teaching landscape defensible space or firescaping. Do you realize that something like 45% of residents in California have their homes in a fire-prone area? That's scary. So one of these days, we're going to be talking with Kevin Marini again about creating a defensible space around your home. And it's not just California. These wildfires are breaking out all over the place. And it's not necessarily just in the foothills or in the mountains. It's wide open prairies and scrub areas that where these fires are taking off and going. And you need to know some tips to protect your home. So, Kevin, we'll do that down the line.

Kevin Marini:

That sounds great.

Farmer Fred:

All right. Kevin Marini, thanks so much for explaining soil to us today.

Kevin Marini:

Hey, no problem. Thanks for the invitation and hope everybody got some new information or at least it reinforced some information they've heard in the past.

Farmer Fred

Garden Basics with Farmer Fred comes out every Friday. It's brought to you by SmartPots and Dave Wilson Nursery. Garden Basics, it's available wherever podcasts are handed out. For more information about the podcast as well as an accurate transcript, visit our website, gardenbasics .net. And there, you can find out about our newsletter, Beyond the Garden Basics. And thank you so much for listening and your support.