[00:00:00] Eric Goranson: It's around the house,

[00:00:06] Joe Gardener: but for next year, if they're gonna go, Hey, this rest of the summer, I'm gonna get ready

[00:00:11] Joe Gardener: for spring. Yes. Figure out what you like to eat first, you know, grow what you like to eat. Like, like, um, I'm not, I'm not an eggplant lover. I'm just thinking about that. Cuz I'm looking, I I'm looking at my big garden right now and I grow eggplant cuz it's a beautiful plant to grow, but I don't get really excited about the harvest part so I don't give it as much attention as I do my tomatoes, which are my, you know, my ultimate thing.

[00:00:34] Joe Gardener: And yet. Yeah. And yet they're not that easy to grow. You know, people talk about, well, just grow some tomatoes and you know, sometimes blind luck will help you have some awesome tomatoes, but along the way, especially if you live in a hot, humid area, like I do, there's a heck of a lot of diseases and challenges and bugs and things that want your tomatoes too.

[00:00:51] Joe Gardener: So to your point is grow. Think about what you want to eat. First of all, when it comes to remodeling and renovating your home, there is a [00:01:00] lot to know, but we've got you covered. This is around the house.

[00:01:06] Eric Goranson: Welcome to around the house with Eric G and Caroline B. This is where we talk home improvement and gardening today every single week.

[00:01:14] Eric Goranson: Thanks for joining us. Hey Caroline.

[00:01:17] Caroline Blazovsky: Hello everybody. Welcome.

[00:01:21] Eric Goranson: This is gonna be a lot of fun today. We have got a legend in the studio. If you're a podcaster, you've probably caught the Joe Gardner show out there. If you love television, maybe you caught him on growing a greener world. Joe Gardner Joe. Lampel welcome to around the

[00:01:39] Joe Gardener: house.

[00:01:40] Joe Gardener: Ah, man. Thank you so much. I love it. I love being here. I appreciate the invitation and I am ready to talk gardening or what, whatever else you wanna talk about. I'm ready. we love it.

[00:01:49] Eric Goranson: Excellent, good. Excellent. Well, you, it, it, you know, we're in the middle of July right now. We're in July. It's kind of starting to get to that time of the year where.[00:02:00]

[00:02:00] Eric Goranson: It's not like you're starting gardens right now. Typically you're, you're maintaining and this is the time where people go out on vacations and yeah. What are some of the seasonal things you're seeing right now in gardening, in, you know, kind of this mid, mid, late July time of

[00:02:14] Joe Gardener: year. You know, Eric, one, one of the things that I've noticed this year here, where I am in Atlanta, Georgia, but our audience, our students, they're all over the country and beyond, but we have office hours every week with, with some of our students and we get a sense and a pulse of, you know, what they're going through right now.

[00:02:32] Joe Gardener: We're all talking about the weather and the heat and the, either the lack of rain or the excessive rain, but all blended in there is the. And so no two years, the, the bottom line conclusion that we had, you know, just a call today was no two years are the same and this year is unlike any other in the, in the heat.

[00:02:50] Joe Gardener: And so it's kind of like triage or survival mode more than anything else right now, as we come into mid-July, uh, it's crazy with the heat, you know, just trying to keep the [00:03:00] plants alive and it's not like. And because this year's so unique, it's not like we've just got a lot of experience with this excessive heat and what to do about it.

[00:03:08] Joe Gardener: And, you know, there's nothing we can do about the weather anyway, we can't change it. So we just gotta try to figure out how to get our plants and our tomatoes and our stuff that we're waiting for it to ripen to the point that we can get it before mother nature takes it down. Man. We fought that I

[00:03:20] Eric Goranson: live in the Pacific Northwest.

[00:03:22] Eric Goranson: So I'm up here in Portland, Oregon. Last year we had that. I mean, it was late June. We had one day, it was 116 degrees. It just, you know, baked everything. My rhododendrons looked like I'd put 'em in an oven. You know, nothing was happy up here. And this year's the exact opposite. You guys have the heat. We have had record rains all the way up through June.

[00:03:42] Eric Goranson: We still have probably had just a handful of 90 degree days. Haven't gotten up into the hundreds like we did last year in June and it's, it's a cool year for us. So it's crazy how across the country, you know, Carolina will be sitting there, dying over there in Jersey and I'm out here going, I got my [00:04:00] heater on.

[00:04:01] Joe Gardener: Oh,

[00:04:01] Caroline Blazovsky: our Jersey tomatoes. They're frying up right now. We've got 90 degrees and yes, it's like a hundred percent relative humidity every day. Oh, I try to tell Eric, Joe, you need to tell him that we do ha we are a garden state in New Jersey though. He doesn't even believe me. He thinks we're not . We do have some luscious, luscious stuff going

[00:04:20] Joe Gardener: on here.

[00:04:22] Joe Gardener: Yeah, you can't beat the Jersey tomatoes. I will say that mm-hmm , we've been up there filming a few episodes and, oh my gosh. Uh, you, the, you get the garden state name, uh, honestly, it's it's you deserve it. It's some good stuff up there, but you know, right now it's like walking out into an oven is what it's like for a lot of us.

[00:04:37] Joe Gardener: Yeah. And it sounds like that's the way it is for you, Caroline.

[00:04:39] Caroline Blazovsky: Mm-hmm I did some blueberry picking, uh, last weekend. Eric made fun of me cuz I came back into the studio and my mouth was like so purple and my teeth were days and I'm. Why is it? So maybe you can explain this, Joe, why is a blueberry? You eat it in the grocery store.

[00:04:55] Caroline Blazovsky: It does not turn your mouth blue, but you go out blueberry picking in this like luscious, organic, [00:05:00] like farm of all blueberries. And my teeth were so blue. Is it the nutrient, is it what's

[00:05:05] Joe Gardener: going on? You know, that's a really good question, but you know, why is, why is, um, a lot of the stuff we get in the grocery store, uh, represented as what we like a tomato.

[00:05:16] Joe Gardener: Let me just turn the tables on you just a little bit. And maybe there's a relation to the blueberry story here too, but the, the way that I think about it all the time, and the big thing that got me was, was, uh, I was reading, uh, I was reading a. And the author of the book was following this, this flatbed, this semi truck that you know, was open, open topped.

[00:05:37] Joe Gardener: And he saw all these green orbs in the back of it. And it's like, he's like following it down. He's in Florida, he's following it for miles. He goes, what are those green balls? And it finally one fell outta the truck and it rolled down the road. And he, he, he followed the rolling thing down the road and when it stopped, he pulled over and got out and looked at it.

[00:05:55] Joe Gardener: And finally he picked it up. He realized it was a tomato . So this truckload [00:06:00] of these round, like Cub balls, only green Cub balls, where tomatoes destined for grocery stores all over the country. And as it turns out, he, from that, he wrote a book called tomato land and he did investigative reporting on the tomato industry because the majority of the tomatoes that we buy across the country off season are come out of Florida.

[00:06:17] Joe Gardener: But here's the thing that I'm getting to, and that is the quality control specs on those tomatoes includes uniformity of size and, and travel ability, you know, the ship ability and the durability and all that. But there's not one item on that checklist about flavor. And so you get 'em to the grocery store.

[00:06:35] Joe Gardener: They're green, they're as hard as a rock you gas 'em with nitric oxide. And eventually they turn red, but they don't have any flavor. And the color is kind of induced. It's. Brought on naturally . And so, anyway, all that to say, that's why you get a flavorless tomato, you know, off season in the grocery store and maybe why.

[00:06:56] Joe Gardener: The blue that look blue in the grocery store. [00:07:00] Don't aren't maybe they're not really blue. maybe that's an artificial thing. well, it's

[00:07:04] Eric Goranson: true. I mean, you know, I've been around, I grew up in Eastern Washington, so we had a lot of food processing plants, and you start looking at a lot of the stuff coming in, depending on what they're doing, but it's like there's waxes and polishes and all these things that are going on, things like apples and yes, and all that stuff out there that is not on your tree or plant out in the back.

[00:07:23] Joe Gardener: Yeah. And there's the dirty dozen too. So there's that list of 12 crops that are, um, so sprayed with every kind of pesticide and chemical possible to keep it alive and pest free and get it to the grocery store. That by the time you get it, I mean, you better wash the heck. better wash the heck out of it.

[00:07:41] Joe Gardener: What's the worst

[00:07:42] Caroline Blazovsky: for you consume it. What's the worst, Joe, like I always thought the apple was the worst.

[00:07:46] Joe Gardener: I think strawberries are the worst. If I recall, I was afraid you were gonna ask me what's on that list, but I think strawberries are really bad. Peaches are really bad. Mm-hmm um, those soft,

[00:07:55] Eric Goranson: those soft ones where they have a, a layer out there to really [00:08:00]

[00:08:00] Joe Gardener: protect soft juicy ones are the really bad ones.

[00:08:02] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Yeah, I think they had

[00:08:04] Caroline Blazovsky: a recall on strawberries recently. Right? So we're seeing, I mean, and maybe this is a question for you. We're seeing a lot of salmonella outbreak. We're seeing a lot of this mysterious stuff happening. Is that a pro a product of gardening? Is it a product of not cleaning the vegetables, bringing them in and then them being contaminated?

[00:08:19] Caroline Blazovsky: I mean, is there any, is there any truth to any of that?

[00:08:22] Joe Gardener: Well, I think the, the root cause of that oftentimes is in the irrigation, in the field mm-hmm and where that water's coming from. And, you know, that pro that bacteria, those pathogens can find their way into the water supply and onto the plants. And there's also pathogens that live in the soil that can be dangerous as well.

[00:08:40] Joe Gardener: And the water can cause them to get up onto the foliage and into the fruit or up through the roots, into the plant and therefore transferred into what we eat. And so, uh, you know, it's. Try as they might, you know, they do everything they can to try to avoid that, but sometimes it's just beyond their control and it's, it's unfortunate, but [00:09:00] we find out the hard way when somebody gets sick and um, and then they have to just.

[00:09:04] Joe Gardener: Trash, everything that they, you know, was in that supply chain, gardener flights. I've seen

[00:09:09] Eric Goranson: this. When I, when I grew up, we had a bunch of those federal hydroelectric projects where they put the irrigation out, across, you know, in our states out here. And they're basically just big, wide open trenches filled with pumped in water, out of a river or a lake.

[00:09:25] Eric Goranson: Yeah, the problem is, is the water when it starts out is really cool clean water, but by the time it goes past the feed. With the cows in it and through the, the apple orchard and the corn and everything else. And there's plain spraying by the time it comes out at the other end, which could be 10 or 15 miles later, it looks like brown, green, sewage water coming out there.

[00:09:47] Eric Goranson: And that's just because of all the stuff that's caught along the way.

[00:09:52] Joe Gardener: No question about it. And just the fecal matter for the wildlife that may find its way into the watersheds or the aquifer that [00:10:00] merges with the water that was used to irrigate the crops. And that's, that's my point. I mean, it, you never know where it's ultimately coming from or how it got there, but it does.

[00:10:08] Joe Gardener: And there's so many pathways for that to happen. Yeah.

[00:10:12] Eric Goranson: When I was a kid, we'd always have that. You had two water systems in the house that we had. You had the irrigation water in that, and you know, you're 10 or 12 and you're getting a drink outta the hose. And my moms running out there. No, don't drink that.

[00:10:23] Eric Goranson: Get it's water, you know, so that's, that'll probably explain why a growth third arm or something later on in life.

[00:10:32] Joe Gardener: Yeah. You always wonder when you, when you come up on those Picketts or something, and there's a sign by that says not potable water, don't drink it, drink. You know, you wonder how many times you come up on those things where you've drank the water from it.

[00:10:42] Joe Gardener: And somebody just didn't have the sign where there should have been that sign. But exactly here we are today. And we, we live to tell about it. I don't know what it's gonna hit, but

[00:10:50] Eric Goranson: anyway, it anyway. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I wanted to ask you just on a, on a professional level here, before we dive into gardening, how is it to.

[00:10:59] Eric Goranson: A [00:11:00] podcast, you know, like this and then do TV as well. Cuz you've also got that big TV show going across the country.

[00:11:05] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Well, you know, my, my real love is audio. And so, um, that's, that's always been my thing, even as a kid, you know, you got your started off with your tape recorder and then it goes to, we did the podcasting became a thing.

[00:11:18] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Yeah. Eric and I were

[00:11:19] Caroline Blazovsky: the same. The FCC license at 16 are high schools. Like we had radio stations, so, oh, that's so agree with you a hundred

[00:11:26] Joe Gardener: percent. Yep. Yeah. I, and here's the other thing about audio? Um, you know, you're, you're in their ears when somebody's listening to you, it's intimate because they have to, they have to visualize, you know, they're hearing you, but then it's kind of like reading a book, you know, I almost like that sometimes better than the movie, because you're reading the book, but then it's up to your minds, your imagination to visualize what you're reading and just like with audio, you hear the voice, but then you're trying to picture what that person looks like and the setting and the background.

[00:11:54] Joe Gardener: So to me, it just, it, it, it engages. A lot of your senses that I don't think [00:12:00] VI audio, I mean, video does, because you're just seeing it. You don't have to really think through it cuz it's all right there in front and center in front of you, but audio. Yeah. That's just so real. So theater of the mind, I love it.

[00:12:10] Joe Gardener: Mm-hmm there we go. So anyway, that was, that was, you know, in podcasting came around around 2008 and I was an early adopter there. I had, you know, I was, was right on top of that. Uh, but then. Television. I was wa you know, all the time I had my love of audio and I that's never left me. You know, I'm watching the gardening shows and, uh, had never been on television before.

[00:12:30] Joe Gardener: And, and then an opportunity came along. Somebody contacted me cuz they heard, I knew my stuff with horticulture and DIY network was starting a new gardening show and they had everything mapped out except the host and they knew who they were looking for, but they did a national search. And, uh, somebody got the, uh, the email that then was forwarded to me and said, you need to contact this producer.

[00:12:50] Joe Gardener: You're the guy they're looking for. They just don't know it. Amazing. And. Long story short through a big national search, uh, in many, many weeks, uh, I was the one that eventually got picked to [00:13:00] do that. And, uh, it was crazy cause I was thrown out. That's amazing. Yeah. I was thrown out into the field and my, my Levis and my.

[00:13:09] Joe Gardener: Golf shirt or whatever it was. They wanted me to wear. And, and for the next three years, I, I lived out in a garden, teaching people how to grow food for that series called fresh from the garden. And it was supposed to only be one year in, in 26 episodes. They loved you, but the show was going so well. It, it went to three years and 52 episodes and they wanted to keep it going.

[00:13:29] Joe Gardener: If I. Could talk about stuff we hadn't talked about before, but by the time you do 52 episodes, you've talked about everything you could possibly grow and eat. So we were, we had to retire the show, fortunately though the TV opportunities continued from there. So that's, that's a story. You're a star. There you go.

[00:13:45] Eric Goranson: That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. It's you're really good. Yeah. It's it's cool. And, and going to TV, that's a whole, you know, people that have done podcasting and audio stuff, it's a whole different world. When that camera turns on that you have to, it's a whole new bike to. [00:14:00]

[00:14:00] Joe Gardener: It is. And, and the way that, you know, the everything's so regimented with a time, like I remember DIY every, every, a roll, every on camera speaking thing was time to the second.

[00:14:11] Joe Gardener: And I mean, you couldn't be a second over or second under cuz when they all pieced it together and fit in the commercials, it had to be exactly that. But the thing about TV that really help with the podcast is. Making sure that I was telling the story or, and thinking about putting myself in the viewer or the listener's perspective.

[00:14:28] Joe Gardener: Mm-hmm so if I'm the host asking the questions on my podcast, I'm thinking the whole time. Well, what is the listener wanting to know right now and asking the questions because. Somehow television got me thinking that way. You know, how do you tell that story in a concise period of time, even though you had the visuals to do it, you really have to be tight with your segments because you only have so much time to do it.

[00:14:50] Joe Gardener: So you, you have to really think through communicating that. And I guess I just applied that into podcasting and, and it's, uh, it's, it's really made our podcast. [00:15:00] Top the top gardening show out there. So you're crushing it out there. Eric. Eric's

[00:15:04] Caroline Blazovsky: good at doing that too. The two of you Eric's excellent with timing and he does a lot of video.

[00:15:10] Caroline Blazovsky: so, uh, he's really good at that short blue. He's done tons of TV too. So the two

[00:15:15] Joe Gardener: of you kudos. Yeah.

[00:15:16] Eric Goranson: Nice, nice, nice. Yeah. You know how it goes? It's just like, all right, let's go. You know, and, and sometimes, you know, I'd much rather just roll versus scripted personally, you know, mm-hmm, , I'd much rather just, I know my stuff, I know what I'm talking about, but sometimes they want to get that stuff dialed in.

[00:15:30] Eric Goranson: So you have. You know, one minute and 58 seconds to knock something out, then it's then you have to start thinking backwards.

[00:15:37] Joe Gardener: but don't you think, Eric, when you, when it's live and it, and it counts, you know, there's not a Doover, it's like you, you're sharp. You're on your game. Cause you know, it's got, you gotta make it count and it's just somehow you channel all of that inner talent and it comes out and you nail it.

[00:15:52] Joe Gardener: You have my secret.

[00:15:53] Eric Goranson: That's my secret. seriously. When I, when I'm, when I'm recording, everybody called me one take, cuz I always pretended in my head that it [00:16:00] was

[00:16:00] Joe Gardener: live. Yeah, then I then yeah, because then I don't go, oh, let's do that again, you know? Yeah, yeah, no, you let yourself off the hook. Right, right.

[00:16:10] Joe Gardener: That's cool. I, I, I, I, I relate to that because, uh, you know, I was doing a bunch of those morning shows the today show and good morning America when you're out there, live on the Plaza and it, there is, there are no do overs, you know, and it three minutes and no, and you gotta nail it. And, uh, and those never made me nervous.

[00:16:28] Joe Gardener: And I always look forward to 'em and I always, I always felt like I was doing, I was at my best on those versus any of the. Prerecorded stuff. And there's a good rush with that stuff too. Yeah, there is. I

[00:16:40] Caroline Blazovsky: like a live too, like the questions I do a lot of serious radio, but I love live. Right. So if they throw people out there asking me questions, just off the cuff, that's where I thrive.

[00:16:48] Caroline Blazovsky: And I love that.

[00:16:49] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Well, and you know, I think the audience loves that too, cuz it's real. I mean, you're, you don't have time to think up an answer or have a do over and you're just giving your answer as [00:17:00] in the moment on what you're thinking at that at that time and, and. People are hearing the real you, you know, and I think, uh, we don't get enough of that these days.

[00:17:09] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Yeah. Excellent.

[00:17:10] Eric Goranson: Excellent point. Well, let's steer back into gardening for a minute. I know Joe everybody's out there. I don't think there's a person in the United States right now that are looking at food prices at the grocery store saying, wow, this feels like a really good deal right now. that are going, Hey, maybe gardening is good for me to start thinking about that.

[00:17:27] Eric Goranson: Uh, maybe that patch of grass in the backyard could better be used instead of me mowing it every year. Maybe I need to. Put some raised beds and stuff back there. Yeah. Where should someone kind of start? I know it's late this season right now, so maybe it's not the best time to, to go dive into that. But for next year, if they're gonna go, Hey, this rest of the summer, I'm gonna get ready

[00:17:47] Joe Gardener: for spring.

[00:17:48] Joe Gardener: Yes, figure out what you like to eat first, you know, grow what you like to eat. Like, like, um, I'm not, I'm not an eggplant lover. I'm just thinking about that. Cuz I'm looking at, I I'm looking at my big garden right now [00:18:00] and I grow eggplant cuz it's a beautiful plant to grow, but I don't get really excited about the harvest part so I don't give it as much attention as I do my tomatoes, which are my, you know, my ultimate thing mm-hmm and.

[00:18:11] Joe Gardener: Yeah. And yet they're not that easy to grow. You know, people talk about, well, just grow some tomatoes and you know, sometimes blind luck will help you have some awesome tomatoes, but along the way, especially if you live in a hot, humid area, like I do, there's a heck of a lot of diseases and challenges and bugs and things that want your tomatoes too.

[00:18:26] Joe Gardener: So to your point, Is grow. Think about what you want to eat. First of all, cuz you're gonna be more excited to grow that cuz you're gonna be looking forward to the harvest. And so that's gonna lead you to pay more attention to it. But what I always try to tell people who are kind of new at this is like, you're gonna be so.

[00:18:43] Joe Gardener: Wanting to hit the ground running and dive in with both feet, cuz you know, you're gonna get the bug mm-hmm . But if you overdo it early, you're gonna burn out really fast. Cause it's gonna get hot and it's gonna get humid and the bugs are gonna come out and you're gonna think, and the weeds are gonna show up and it's like, this isn't that fun.

[00:18:59] Joe Gardener: But if [00:19:00] you, if you pace yourself, You don't bite it off more than you can choose. You can always expand your garden and you can add to it. But I don't want people to get overwhelmed because if you do it right, the garden's gonna take off. And then all of a sudden you're gonna be looking at this jungle out there, and you're gonna be thinking about it as work rather than fun.

[00:19:15] Joe Gardener: And then you're done. And it's like, it was, you're a one hit wonder, and I don't wanna ever see that happen to people. So I like, I like to encourage people to just pace themselves and then find the right location first, cuz most of the edible stuff needs full sun and uh, That helps a lot. It's not total low requirement, but it will help your success tremendously.

[00:19:34] Joe Gardener: You,

[00:19:34] Caroline Blazovsky: you hit the nail on the head. That is such good advice to our audience because during COVID mm-hmm we did our first garden and Eric will tell you how big was the garden, Eric? It was Jor. It was literally a quarter

[00:19:45] Eric Goranson: acre. It's like a quarter acre garden out there. Ah, yep.

[00:19:48] Joe Gardener: Yep. Yep. Now for

[00:19:49] Caroline Blazovsky: two years I did it.

[00:19:50] Caroline Blazovsky: What happened two years? I did it. Yeah. And we grew everything. Yeah. I had a green thumb. I have to. But then I burnt out because it was so big. Yeah. And this year I said, that's it. I [00:20:00] can't do it. I don't have time to do it this year and see it was bad. Yep.

[00:20:03] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Um, you're not alone. That is so common. And, and I.

[00:20:09] Joe Gardener: Uh, you know, all I know these days is just growing a big garden, so I don't know how to go backwards on it. but for those who had the option and don't even like you did here, you are, you know, year or two later. And that is such a common story. So anyway for you and everybody else, that's listening, uh, if, if you haven't started or you're thinking about maybe someday doing it again, just.

[00:20:32] Joe Gardener: Back off on, on the volume that you you're doing and just build on it from build on your success slowly. Uh, and I think that'll, that'll change things for you

[00:20:42] Caroline Blazovsky: going into the fall. Joe and I have so many questions cause don't let me take over, but Eric knows, I love gardening and I have so much gardening questions going into the fall.

[00:20:51] Caroline Blazovsky: What are some things? Can we plant some things, if you did wanna start that are gonna do well, maybe pumpkin.

[00:20:57] Joe Gardener: Not sure. Well, pump pumpkins have [00:21:00] like 120 day growing cycle. Yeah. So those need to be in the ground now, but let me just tell you fall for me is my favorite time. You know, if it wasn't for tomatoes, I don't even, you know, I'd probably maybe try to take a summer off and just look forward to fall gardening because all your leafy crops, you know, your spinach, your broccoli, your cabbage, your lettuce, your kale, your brussel sprouts, uh, your arugula, all of.

[00:21:23] Joe Gardener: Great green leafy veggies that won't grow in the heat of the summer. Mm-hmm thrive and fall. And some plants even do better with a kiss of frost on them, like the brussel sprouts and the broccoli and all and beets and all of these things just get sweeter as they have an opportunity to grow out through some cold weather.

[00:21:43] Joe Gardener: Not to mention for the gardener. You're not sweating. You're not dealing with humidity. You're not dealing with the pest and diseases. Smart. It's a really sweet opportunity. And I tell people that don't garden in the fall, you're missing the best opportunity. The opportunity there is to grow some of the most amazing food without all the pain and [00:22:00] suffering of summer

[00:22:02] Caroline Blazovsky: so you can do it.

[00:22:03] Caroline Blazovsky: We can do it. See Eric, it's not too late for you with your cool temperatures.

[00:22:08] Eric Goranson: Well see, but I I've got some weird stuff that I want to grow next year that I'm gonna, and I have challenges at my house, cuz I live here in I've. 350 year old fur trees around my property. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah. I have only, probably a 15 by 15 foot area.

[00:22:26] Eric Goranson: That's in the yard. That gets three quarter sun. Yeah. But it's not full sun, so it doesn't get morning, but it gets, you know, afternoon, evening sun. So it's pretty decent. That's kind of my little area I

[00:22:38] Joe Gardener: have to work with. Yeah. And Eric, the thing about that is, and this is something for anybody who has either limited space or limited sun grow bags or containers and grow bags to me are like the easiest thing ever.

[00:22:49] Joe Gardener: Cuz they come in all different sizes at the end of the season. You just fold 'em up or stuff 'em in a box or a bag and put 'em away. And uh, they're the they're super portable. They have handles. They're not as heavy as a big [00:23:00] clay terracotta pot. It's just basically synthetic fabric. And uh, you can put 'em anywhere.

[00:23:05] Joe Gardener: So in your little 15 feet area, Three quarter sun. You're gonna grow your leafy crops, your lettuce, your fast growing things, your spinach, all of that stuff that you know, we talk about, you know, Caroline, back to the blueberries and stuff, and nothing taste as good as the stuff you grow at home, the lettuce, the, the broccoli, none of that stuff is gonna be sweeter ever than what you grow at your house and case in point, you know, my kids aren't big vegetable lovers, but.

[00:23:33] Joe Gardener: When they taste stuff that comes from the garden compared to what we tried to make a meat from the grocery store. There's no comparison. They actually look forward to amazing. Isn't it? Garden. Yeah. Yeah. So

[00:23:42] Eric Goranson: my goal for next year and I'm, I'm calling it right now, so I it'll force me to do it for next year is to have, uh, some San Marzano.

[00:23:51] Eric Goranson: Oh,

[00:23:51] Joe Gardener: tomatoes. Yeah. Now, are you gonna, are you gonna, can em, and preserve them and make sauce with them too? Or what are you gonna do with them? Yeah, yeah. Cause my

[00:23:58] Eric Goranson: wife's Italian, so it's, you know, [00:24:00] okay. I wanna get the real deal if you know what I.

[00:24:02] Joe Gardener: Sam. Marzano's like the best one for that. So, yeah, Joe, you would've laughed.

[00:24:06] Caroline Blazovsky: When I, when I did the garden for two years and we planted tomatoes, everything came up. I had, I don't even know 30 plants of tomatoes that were in full bloom. I, I don't know if it's just Jersey, it was Jersey luck for sure. And people were like, I can't believe you did this on your first go. And I'm like, yeah,

[00:24:24] Joe Gardener: It was awesome. And so did you end up with all so many tomatoes? You didn't know what to do with

[00:24:28] Caroline Blazovsky: oh my God. And thank God like someone in the house makes sauce because it was like we had, so, and I, it was incredible, but I wanna talk to you about something, which I found interesting my first year doing it.

[00:24:39] Caroline Blazovsky: I came out and I would check on the plants every day and they were doing fantastic. And I saw, I. I went out during the morning, came out in the afternoon and the plant, the tomato plant, which was probably like the size of my shoulders. Right. I'm like five, two. Uh, so it was like short. Okay. I look and I go, where did my plant go?

[00:24:57] Caroline Blazovsky: The plant was gone within four hours that it looked [00:25:00] had something had eaten at. And I'm like looking around and we had a fence that was an eight foot fence, and I'm like a deer had to have come in and eaten this thing. And I'm like looking around, looking around it I'm an amateur. So I had no idea. And I, and I go in, come out now it's like maybe three hours later and the next plant totally demolished gone.

[00:25:19] Caroline Blazovsky: And I'm like, oh my God, what is going on? So I call some people and they come over and they show me these horn worms that were so big. They were those giant, like, they look like caterpillars, Eric, but they're like about, I don't know, half an inch around never, they look like aliens. I filmed it for YouTube and it was my, or my, uh, Facebook.

[00:25:39] Caroline Blazovsky: And that got the most views out of any video I'd ever put on. And they ate the entire bushes in like an hour. They're like prehistoric, they, that, that a horn

[00:25:47] Joe Gardener: worm, right? My right. That's yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's the tomato horn worm in the tobacco horn worm. They're closely related. They look very much the same, but they have that horn on the back and they're big fat green things and, [00:26:00] um, they will decimate your tomatoes.

[00:26:02] Joe Gardener: That your plants overnight pretty much. They'll just take it down or in your case, it sounds like during the day two hours, it was like

[00:26:07] Caroline Blazovsky: two Eric, if you saw this, they have like an alien face and they come out and they're like, they have teeth and they're like,

[00:26:14] Eric Goranson: it's stupid. Wow. Yeah. Wow. We don't have those out here that I've seen at least that I've ever run

[00:26:20] Joe Gardener: into, but maybe not.

[00:26:22] Joe Gardener: Yeah, that's okay. They're, they're, uh, they're very active here, this, this year in my garden, but here's the thing, Caroline. I don't know if you saw this, but if you left them alone or you missed one and you didn't notice it, and then you walk out one day and there's that horn worm and it has all these little, what looks like rice grains stuff on its back.

[00:26:40] Joe Gardener: They're cocoons. There's a, there's a, there's a. Parasitoid wasp that lands on the back of the horn worm. They can sense the, they can sense the presence of the horn worm through a, um, through, um, volatile chemicals that the plant emits to let the parasitoid [00:27:00] wasp know that the horn worm is on the plant. It comes and lands on the back of the.

[00:27:03] Joe Gardener: Worm lays eggs into the worm, the eggs hatch inside the worms, the larva eat out the inside of the worm. This is kind of gross, but it's nature. Yeah. It's nature eats out the inside of the worm, the non-essential tissue first, cuz they don't want the worm to die cuz it's their food source. And then they pate by forming little cocoons.

[00:27:21] Joe Gardener: They bore back out through the back of the horn worm in little tiny cocoons that look like grains of rice. And in a, in about a week later, those grains of rice, they bore out the top and they are new paras. Parasitoid wasp to go out and do the pest control for you. So my story, my point is IST there ever amazing.

[00:27:37] Joe Gardener: See that on the back of your horn worm, that horn worm is done. It's not gonna, it's done eating, it's dying. Yeah. And you've got all these, these new soldiers to help you in your fight against future hornworms.

[00:27:49] Caroline Blazovsky: It's so crazy though, because awesome. They desimated. No. They decimated before I could even get to them though.

[00:27:55] Caroline Blazovsky: They were like, I had to do something. We had to find them all and take care of them because they were [00:28:00] gonna eat everything. It was

[00:28:01] Joe Gardener: insane. They are voracious. There's no doubt about it. Voracious

[00:28:04] Eric Goranson: is a good word. That's wild. Yes. That is wild. Well, one of the things that I've always jumped on with people, you know, doing raised garden beds, cuz you know, that's always been a, a, a big thing over the last probably.

[00:28:15] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Decade, at least that I've seen is I can't tell you how many times I walk into people's backyards houses, whatever. And. I get over there and I'm like, you know, you shouldn't have built those at a railroad ties.

[00:28:26] Joe Gardener: Right. Um,

[00:28:29] Eric Goranson: And those are some things you gotta be really careful with the old ties, cuz those things are

[00:28:34] Joe Gardener: jam packed of

[00:28:35] Eric Goranson: CSOs.

[00:28:36] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Which is the chemicals in that can be horrible when

[00:28:39] Joe Gardener: they reach out CSO, the EPA just flat out says don't use 'em uh, if you're growing food, don't use 'em but that was the thing, you know, they were they're they probably still are big with landscape. Retaining walls, but they're also so ubiquitous people were able to just pick 'em up and use 'em for their raised beds.

[00:28:55] Joe Gardener: And it was an instant raised bed garden. Yeah. And I get that, but what they're not [00:29:00] thinking about is, like you said, they, the that's bad new stuff, man. And it can, it can, um, It can get into the soil and then get drawn up. And you just, you just don't want that in your body. No

[00:29:11] Eric Goranson: way. Not at all, not at all that, uh, the, the chemicals in that is brutal.

[00:29:15] Eric Goranson: And on top of that, if they were used railroad tides, you also had all the oils and stuff that were coming out of the trains and, and all that other stuff. And, and, and all the, you know, that the hazardous materials that are on that. And, uh, yeah, no sense, put that in your, in your food source, especially when you're trying to grow something that's clean, healthy, and, and better than what's in the grocery.

[00:29:36] Joe Gardener: Um, yeah, I mean, there's a, we, there's a whole list of things that you probably shouldn't use for your material when you're on your raised beds, such as cinder blocks, because as fly Ash and fly, Ash has all these heavy metals in it, which can then find its way into the food supply. If you. If you chip it away, you have to pulverize it for that to happen.

[00:29:55] Joe Gardener: So if it, if the it's intact, you're fine, but like tires, I mean, a tire garden is a [00:30:00] kind of a novelty, cute thing. And, uh, it's easy and portable and all that. And who doesn't have, you know, some access to tires somewhere. Yeah. Not hard to find, but, um, but you know, that rubber is not really what you, that tire rubber is not really what you want to grow your food in.

[00:30:16] Joe Gardener: No, there's a lot of

[00:30:16] Eric Goranson: chemicals in that. And then, yeah. And when those things get broken down, all those little rubber pieces end up coming off and ending up in the soil. Yeah. Cause eventually that rubber breaks down as it gets old, it gets kind of flaky and crumbling. No sense to have that in there as

[00:30:29] Joe Gardener: well.

[00:30:30] Caroline Blazovsky: Correct. I have so many questions for Joe. So what are you doing with your garden as far as herbicides and, and what do you do? Are you organic? Do you use yeah. Certain things because sometimes you have to mm-hmm like, what is the rule? I think that's exciting to hear about.

[00:30:44] Joe Gardener: Okay. That's a, um, thanks. So glad you asked that question.

[00:30:47] Joe Gardener: So I am an organic gardener and I do, I have, I have very, very little chemical use in my garden. I don't use any. Herbicides. And so I'm not as far as weeding, you know, herbicides are [00:31:00] used to kill back living tissue. And so that would be weeds and, and I've got, you know, big garden with a lot of, uh, mulched pathways, but I just bend over and pick up those weeds every so often.

[00:31:11] Joe Gardener: And it's, you know, if you keep up with it and that's easier said than done often times than, and that's why your trim,

[00:31:16] Caroline Blazovsky: he's very trim and good looking because he is weeding and stays in shape. Cuz it exercises your bones and

[00:31:22] Joe Gardener: your muscle. I'm telling you to me, weeding is in, I, I do it early in the morning when I'm listening to the bur, I don't even listen to podcast when I'm weeding, cuz I just do it early in the morning in the birds and all that stuff.

[00:31:32] Joe Gardener: And after a rain, the weeds come up really easily. So anyway, no herbicides pesticides for the various insects that will attack your garden. Now let me just let people know, you know, there. Of all the insects out there that we're ever gonna come across. Uh, if I ask people, what percentage did they think are actual pests?

[00:31:49] Joe Gardener: You know, the ones that are gonna do damage to your plants, the number is only about, you know what I'm gonna ask you guys. What do you think it is? Uh, what percentage of all the insects do you think are causing damage to your [00:32:00] plants?

[00:32:00] Caroline Blazovsky: Well, I had the horn 3%. I had the horn worm, so I don't know. yeah.

[00:32:04] Joe Gardener: So horn worm scared me.

[00:32:07] Joe Gardener: Eric nailed it right off the bat. It's it's no more than 3%. So if you do the math, that means 97% are either beneficial or neutral. So that's one reason right there. Why we don't wanna go out and spray to kill one minuscule, small percentage when you have all these other insects that are potentially beneficial and here's something else people need to know the number one way that you increase your pest problem is to spray with pesticides.

[00:32:30] Joe Gardener: And the reason for that is most of the pest. Have developed a tolerance for a lot of those chemicals. So if you kill them off, they're able to reproduce and come back quickly in mass, because what hasn't built up a tolerance are the beneficial insects that were probably in your garden at the same time.

[00:32:48] Joe Gardener: And the pesticides cannot differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys. So anything they land on their killing, which means we take out all the good guys that we're keeping our pest in check or could have been. But now they're [00:33:00] dead and the pests are coming back in force without any competition.

[00:33:03] Joe Gardener: So you just made your situation worse. So I don't use pesticides because I have a really biodiverse garden with a lot of. Uh, flowers and things that bring in beneficial insects and the OID wasp and all of those things that are gonna go out there and do my pest control. And then I just I'm out there every morning when I can be looking for any threats.

[00:33:22] Joe Gardener: And if I see them like caterpillars or horn worms eating my plants, I'm gonna pull 'em off. And, um, if you can stay ahead of the problem and I always use the word being proactive. If you can be proactive and looking for diseases or pest and catch it before it gets to become a big deal, you. Pretty much stay on top of it, which means you don't have to resort to these chemicals.

[00:33:42] Joe Gardener: That can be pretty harsh.

[00:33:44] Eric Goranson: Nice. Well, I I've got a tomato question for you. Brilliant. What is the best way to support tomatoes?

[00:33:51] Joe Gardener: Oh, that's always a challenge for me. Good. Okay. You guys, when you get a chance, Google ultimate tomato cage. Okay. Because I created this [00:34:00] cage back when I got sick and tired of trying to figure out the best way to support tomatoes and, you know, the, the standard stupid cone that cost five bucks.

[00:34:10] Joe Gardener: That's what I used the cone, the metal coat hanger wire. I mean, it's not even sturdy. Yeah. And, and the thing is if we grow these indeterminate tomatoes, which are the ones that keep growing and they grow and they grow. It's gonna outgrow the car. It comes, it's actually gonna outgrow anything. Yep. But, but, um, the I, so I use Eric, I use a livestock panel, which you get at a tractor like tractor supply or a farm supply store.

[00:34:32] Joe Gardener: They're 16 feet long and they're about five feet tall. But if you get some bolt cutters, I, I did a post on my website at Joe Gardner about it and showed people how to make 'em. Let me just tell you, people go nuts over 'em. I that's, they're brilliant stackable at the end of the season, they're made outta galvanized wire, so they're not gonna rust.

[00:34:50] Joe Gardener: They, they look good. Anyway, there's your answer. And um, people go nuts over it. I gotta tell you they love 'em

[00:34:58] Eric Goranson: they about 18 or 24 inches [00:35:00] square and just big square and

[00:35:01] go

[00:35:02] Joe Gardener: up, right? Yeah. They're square. They're they're two. Yeah, there's square. There, there are two pieces that you may cut. Bend into an L shape and you put 'em together into a square and they're, you know, however tall you wanna cut 'em to, but mine are about six feet tall.

[00:35:14] Joe Gardener: They're sturdy as can be. Cuz I, they, they stick into the ground and they're not going anywhere. And then at the end of the season, you just take them, you pull 'em up and they stack because they're they're square, you're able to stack 'em on top of each other. You're not a cone that you're trying to stack.

[00:35:28] Joe Gardener: Right. right. Or a big round. Poop thing. Yeah. So, so check it out and I'm telling you you'll never go back. Uh it's it's pretty awesome, dude.

[00:35:39] Eric Goranson: Brilliant. brilliant. You think about it. It's like what, how come we got this far without somebody doing that? Right. I mean, that's, I struggled with cones forever in trying to deal with that.

[00:35:53] Eric Goranson: And didn't matter if I got like the super expensive heavy wire one that was powder coated. They

[00:35:59] Joe Gardener: all just [00:36:00] suck. Yeah. well, I was the same way, Eric. That's why I did that. And, and the reason there, I will say, you know, forever people have been using the concrete reinforcement wire. You buy it by the roll at the box store and it cost 120 bucks and you can make a bunch of wire round cages out of them, which, you know, they're, they're good, but they rust.

[00:36:20] Joe Gardener: Like in the first year and they don't last that long, cuz the spikes will break off because they've rusted. And then at the end of the season, getting back to my point of storing them, you can't unroll 'em and flatten 'em out. Cuz they have that memory. They just want to go back. So they're hard to store and you have all these rounds storing everywhere.

[00:36:36] Joe Gardener: Storing

[00:36:37] Caroline Blazovsky: was the biggest, have so many cones of the, the cones everywhere. Yeah. The stainless, whether they stainless steel, I guess that go all the way up and they're great cuz they last, but they're you gotta have a lot of space to store.

[00:36:48] Joe Gardener: Yeah. And so your happiest day will be, uh, when you store your tomato cages and they just stack on top of each other.

[00:36:55] Joe Gardener: And I've got, I prob I think I've probably got about 70 cages [00:37:00] and, and the footprint is about six feet wide and maybe five feet tall. Yeah. Out.

[00:37:07] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Yeah. That is. That is awesome. That's game changer

[00:37:11] Joe Gardener: on tomato. Yeah. It's a game changer. Yeah. And I was this, it was at, you know, they talk about, you know, necessity as the mother of invention.

[00:37:18] Joe Gardener: And that's why I thought, what am I gonna, because I live on a small farm, we've got five acres. And so these livestock panels are around for other reasons. And I thought, sure, I was looking at those one day and I said, man, those things are sturdy. I bet I could do something with those to help support my tomatoes.

[00:37:31] Joe Gardener: And it just started it just. I'm not very, I'm not an engineer or anything like that, but it just, I thought, well, I need it to be this high and I need it to be this wide. And how do I bend it to get there? And next thing I knew I had my cage and I'm like, oh my God, this is

[00:37:44] Caroline Blazovsky: ultimate DIY. See you fit right in and

[00:37:47] Joe Gardener: do it yourself.

[00:37:49] Joe Gardener: Yeah. Yeah. That is great. And, and if I may, those cages can be used for all kinds of things. You can grow squash up them, you can grow [00:38:00] peppers up because the cage makes another cage. The piece itself can make two cages. One's big and one's small, but that's perfect for your eggplant and your peppers are all these other things.

[00:38:09] Joe Gardener: And then 1,000,001 uses you end up realizing that they have a lot of potential in the garden. So just try it and see, you'll see what I. So, how did

[00:38:20] Caroline Blazovsky: you get into gardening? How did you end up here? You need to tell us like, this is,

[00:38:24] Joe Gardener: uh, okay. I grew up in Miami and I was the youngest of four boys and my next oldest brother was five years older than me.

[00:38:31] Joe Gardener: So when I was eight years old and he's 13, he's like, he don't wanna hang out with an eight year old. So he's off doing his thing. So it's me and dad on the weekend. And dad's out there cutting the grass. He's the weekend warrior, right? Not a gardener, but the guy that likes to have the. Driveway and the clip, you know, the lawn looks good and all that.

[00:38:47] Joe Gardener: So I would just follow him all weekend. And one Saturday, and this, I remember this is why I can tell it, like I do. Uh, he went in at the end of the day, he'd done all his work and everything looked great. And I still had a lot of energy and I'm running around the yard [00:39:00] and I end up running by one of the plants he had just.

[00:39:02] Joe Gardener: Prune and looked really good. And I broke the branch, broke one of the branches on it, and I thought, so I didn't wanna get in trouble. So I thought, what am I gonna do? Not that he would've cared, but anyway, stuck the branch into the ground right by the base. And I covered it up, you know, with the soil. And then I just, you know, Hoped I wouldn't get caught and he never noticed, but anyway, I went back by that plan about, I don't know, two months later or something like that.

[00:39:26] Joe Gardener: And I re I remembered, oh my God, I that's, this is one I broke the branch on, but where where's the dead plant or where's the dead branch? I couldn't find it. But what had happened is it had rooted and it had started putting out new, new growth. And it was, it blew my mind. It was like, this is too cool. And.

[00:39:43] Joe Gardener: Today. I think that's the moment in time I became hooked on horticulture is what I say. That's so amazing. And from that moment, Eric. Yeah. Yeah. Caroline had never stopped wanting to know more about how stuff grew and I started growing everything and I've never looked back. How cool is that grew up? [00:40:00] Like I did I, yeah.

[00:40:01] Joe Gardener: Yeah, it was.

[00:40:03] Eric Goranson: Yeah. I'm the oldest of four boys. So I'm the oldest of four boys with three younger brothers and had the weekend or your dad. So, yeah. Cool. I can understand where you're at there. Absolutely.

[00:40:13] Joe Gardener: Yeah, yeah. But I love it because you know, like I said, early on no two years are the same, so you're always.

[00:40:18] Joe Gardener: You're always wanting to understand why it's different this year. And so I love that part about it. I love the science behind it, and I'm just in awe of how cool stuff is when you understand like the tomato horn worm and the cut moth that lays its eggs. And I was like, that stuff blows my mind. And there's the more you start inquiring about things like that, the more you realize there's a lot of that stuff out there and it just, it's so interesting to me and I just can't get my head around it all, but that's, that's why I love it so much.

[00:40:46] Joe Gardener: It's never boring. No,

[00:40:48] Eric Goranson: no. And we've had our challenges out here and on the west coast, cuz you know, a couple summers ago we had an issue with people's gardens and everything else is we had smoke for weeks on end. That was like fog. [00:41:00]

[00:41:00] Joe Gardener: Oh, yes. And so,

[00:41:02] Eric Goranson: you know, the, the, the wineries were having problems, cuz they were worried about how the smoke was gonna impact the skins.

[00:41:08] Eric Goranson: You know, we'd get a, a little mist of rain come through and it would wash all that particulate matter down on the plants and then we'd get, it was a really interesting time watching what was coming outta your garden, what was coming outta the wine, what was coming out of all that stuff? It was fascinating

[00:41:22] Joe Gardener: to.

[00:41:23] Joe Gardener: Exactly. Exactly. And that was a unique year too. So there you go. Not one you'd wanna repeat if you could avoid it, but nah, man, no, that was

[00:41:31] Eric Goranson: not fun, but uh, no, it was interesting to watch and, and how some wineries had great wine coming out and some had maybe not as great as what they normal would've and it just, just because of smoke in the air.

[00:41:43] Eric Goranson: So it's, it's fascinat. Just seeing how that changes

[00:41:46] Joe Gardener: stuff. Yeah, it is.

[00:41:48] Caroline Blazovsky: All right. I've got the, I've got the question to test your soil or not test your soil. What

[00:41:54] Joe Gardener: is the answer? Yeah, absolutely. The answer is to test your soil and you don't need to do it every year, but you still do it. You should do it about [00:42:00] every two years.

[00:42:00] Joe Gardener: And here's, here's one of the main reasons why people. You know, we hear about fertilizer and nutrients and of course plants need it and we need it. And we think, well, you know, if some is good, more is better, but with plants, you can, you can basically kind of pollute your soil or kill off the, all the biology in the soil because manmade fertilizers, which are full of great nutrients also have kind of salt base to them.

[00:42:26] Joe Gardener: And when you're put so much of that into the it, a lot of that can just build up and. Healthy soil oftentimes has the nutrients that the plants need already. But if you add on top of that, more of that, that can be too much of a good thing, and that's not a good thing. And so that can cause adverse impact on your plants and they can, they can, it can promote disease and it can actually reverse its growth cycle.

[00:42:51] Joe Gardener: So. Say that because if you know the condition of your soil and the nutrients that are deficient because of the soil [00:43:00] test, you can know what to add in the quantities that you need to get it. Right. But the other thing that's the soil test does is it tells you what nutrients are in your soil, so that you don't blindly add nutrients that you don't need to add, which can exacerbate your whole natural rhythm of your soil.

[00:43:17] Joe Gardener: So. Yes. Do the soil test, not only to find out what you need, but to find out what you don't need. So you're not adding stuff that can actually make it worse.

[00:43:26] Caroline Blazovsky: Is there a place that you recommend testing the soil that offers the best

[00:43:31] Joe Gardener: information? It, I, I, I like to support your county extension service because they offer soil tests through the state university system.

[00:43:39] Joe Gardener: The land grant universities usually have a really great soil lab and for a nominal fee, it might be around averaging $15 a year. Or $15 a test, you can get a really comprehensive report and probably for you Carolina, it's Rutgers mm-hmm . It is. And they've got a great program and a great report, and it just tells you all that stuff.

[00:43:58] Joe Gardener: And the nice thing about it is [00:44:00] you, they send you the kit or you, whatever they get, you get the bag and the instructions and the collection device, and then you just mail it back or whatever, but. Like you tell 'em, Hey, I'm growing blueberries this year and I wanna know what kind of soil to make ideal for blueberry growing.

[00:44:15] Joe Gardener: And so by telling them what it is, you wanna grow, they'll dial in the specifications for creating the best soil for blueberries. That's cool, which is a really low pH. Right. But if you didn't tell 'em that and you're just like, I wanna grow tomatoes. Well, that's a different kind of a treatment for. Soil.

[00:44:31] Joe Gardener: So that's what a soil test will do for you. But these days you can also go online. There's private labs and for 30 bucks you can, you can buy online kits and those reports are just as good. And in some cases a little bit better, cuz they can give you organic recommendations or synthetic or both, depending on whether you're an organic gardener or just a regular, you know, non-organic so, um, Soil test is, is a, you just need to do it and, and it'll help you be have [00:45:00] better crop.

[00:45:00] Joe Gardener: Or, or whatever it is you're doing. Yeah. I got a

[00:45:03] Eric Goranson: question for you on that. Talking about soil. So in my area here, we have a lot of recycling and stuff cuz we're heavy recyclers up in the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. And our yard waste goes in and it goes into the, into, you know, the, the different municipalities, but they make compost out of it.

[00:45:19] Eric Goranson: Right. And you know, that can be used by many gardeners out there. But how do you know that you're getting what you need with compost? Because a lot of times, right? It's just, depending on, what's showing up at the, at the recycle place

[00:45:33] Joe Gardener: to turn into compost, man, you, you, you really, you nailed a hot topic. So, so all these trucks are pulling into the tipping station and they're dumping out their yard debris and their, their landscape waste and all this stuff.

[00:45:48] Joe Gardener: And, uh, some of that may include. Chemicals that have been put down, maybe not so much in the home environment, because although they're using herbicides, they're not so persistent. They don't last more than [00:46:00] a few weeks when they've been exposed to UV light. So they break down quickly in, in a composting environment, but then on a commercial scale with farmers, for example, and I don't even think in your state, Eric, this.

[00:46:11] Joe Gardener: These, these chemicals are allowed, but there are some that are, that are so literally persistent. They don't break down like in farm fields where farmers are, are growing out, uh, forage crops like hay. Yeah. They'll put down a chemical in many states, including mine that will kill the broad leaf weeds in that.

[00:46:30] Joe Gardener: That field, but it'll protect the grass. So all you're gonna end up with is pristine grass and no weed. So when they're harvesting the hay, you got really nice hay, no weeds are in it, but it's because this chemical killed off all the broad leaf weeds, but the chemical is in the grass. It just hasn't impacted the grass.

[00:46:46] Joe Gardener: So now you feed it to the horses, the horses poop it out. You, you compost it for a long time. You got this great stuff that you wanna put in your garden. Um, but that chemical is still as active. Two years [00:47:00] later, composted as it was the day the farmer put it down in the field and now you put it in your garden soil and it's killing your plants.

[00:47:07] Joe Gardener: And this is a big problem. And the problem is there's no really way to police that, you know, cause yeah, these tipping stations say, well, we, you're not allowed to bring this in, but how do you police every truck that comes in with maybe a little bit of that, because here's the scary thing. Those herbicides are potent down to parts per billion.

[00:47:28] Joe Gardener: And I'm talking about four parts per billion, five parts per billion. How do you even get down to that number? So, anyway, uh, that was a long way of saying it's it's, um, It's an issue that you need to think about and to your point sometimes, and hopefully all the time, the municipalities that offer compost to consumers are testing their finished product, and they're analyzing it for persistent herbicides and harmful materials, like heavy metals and things that you [00:48:00] would not wanna put into your garden soil.

[00:48:02] Joe Gardener: So you gotta ask for that. Sometimes they publish it and it's just there, but most people don't know to look for it and you need to ask for that. Um, but I always want people to just learn to make their own compost, cuz that's the only way you can really know for sure.

[00:48:14] Eric Goranson: We have a popular compost here that comes outta the zoo.

[00:48:17] Eric Goranson: Yeah. So it's all the animal waste outta the zoo that goes into that. And it is the kind of the zoo manure compost, but man, people love that around here. Yeah. They, they fight for that stuff

[00:48:29] Joe Gardener: as they should. That's that's amazing stuff. That's um, that's what you want is, is that the stuff they call zoo do or is that yep.

[00:48:35] Joe Gardener: Another pretty much. Yep. That's amazing. Yeah. The thing, like with our, at our farm, we've got the horses and we've got the goats and the chickens, but our horses eat that hay that has that persistent herbicide because you, we can't even find hay that is organic around here, cuz it's expensive to grow that out.

[00:48:54] Joe Gardener: And not many farmers are doing that. Uh, and so although we have. Amazing [00:49:00] piles of manure that have been composted that I would love to use in my garden. I can't, because I know it's got herbicide and the reason I know it, a few reasons now, but the first year I moved to my farm, I already knew about this problem, but I said, well, I've got this huge pile of composted manure for my horses.

[00:49:17] Joe Gardener: I'm gonna use it in my new garden. And, um, even though I warned, warned everybody about. I still did it on my own garden and I ruined my soil for four years. Ooh. Because of that. Yeah. So I learned the hard way, even though I knew better, I still did it and I was stupid. But you know, that's the thing about gardening.

[00:49:34] Joe Gardener: You learn from your mistakes. I call 'em opportunities, learning opportunities, but you never forget 'em and that's one, I will never forget. Joe. And a lot of those,

[00:49:41] Caroline Blazovsky: I don't wanna go in the weeds on this, but I'm so fascinated by this conversation in weeds. I I'm an environmental consultant. So my job is to find all these lovely things that people end up, you know, using and end up in our environments.

[00:49:56] Caroline Blazovsky: And so I was one of the first people in the country to test for glyphosate in [00:50:00] homes. And so what I found was that glyphosate, which, you know, is an Heric. People have access to it at, you know, a garden center or even at, you know, your local box store. Yeah. They utilize it. It actually gets airborne. As we're talking about in these little, you know, PBS, right.

[00:50:16] Caroline Blazovsky: These very small amounts and it actually ends up in your duck work in your HVAC system. And so I was fortunate to be one of the first people in the country to test for this and to discover. And so when people use these on their lawns, on their walkways and their garden, wherever they're using these, they become not only a detriment to the environment and your, and what you're growing, but to you and they end up in your home.

[00:50:39] Caroline Blazovsky: Huh? So my question is, why is it that we know these things, right? We know that this is not the way to go. We know that we can grow things without it. Why are we using these things in the first place, in our gardens, in our food chain and, and the such

[00:50:54] Joe Gardener: man, I love that question in. I kind of think the answer comes [00:51:00] down to the fact that people hate weeds more than they care about more than they think that risk of getting into their bodies to the point that it's gonna cause detriment right.

[00:51:13] Joe Gardener: Is a thing answer. I just think, yeah. I just, I just think the, the weeds had them thinking, I hate them so much. I don't care what it takes and, and, you know, it's. You know, why do we smoke or drink or do what we do that we know isn't healthy for our bodies? Why do we eat those things that we know? You know, aren't great, but we do it anyway because.

[00:51:35] Joe Gardener: That outcome that we get from, the thing that we wanna do is greater than our inner sense of policing our own bodies. Mm-hmm and, um, I think, I think that's it. And do

[00:51:45] Caroline Blazovsky: you think it's marketing that they've trained us so much to hate a weed? I mean, cuz really what's the downside to a weed, right? I mean it looks ugly.

[00:51:53] Caroline Blazovsky: It kind of messes with your garden, but outside of that, we're trained to think it's this terrible.

[00:51:58] Joe Gardener: Well, that's a good point. And you know, the [00:52:00] real definition of a weed is just a plant outta place. . But back in the day, uh, you know, bonds. Grass seed for in the consumer market just had Clover seed in it and stuff like that.

[00:52:11] Joe Gardener: Mm-hmm and that was just the way lawns were until somebody realized, well, gosh, you know, we could make people think that the Clover's a bad thing and give them something that could kill that Clover in the lawn. So they just have SCU.

[00:52:21] Caroline Blazovsky: I love Clover. Don't you? I grew up with Clover my lawn. Like it's just a natural thing to my lung.

[00:52:27] Joe Gardener: If, if people have Clover in their lawn and they, and they allow it to bloom, it's amazing how many bees and, and native pollinators mm-hmm native bees are actively taking, uh, pollen from the, uh, from the blooms. It's incredible. I have, my grass is Clover cause I don't use the herbicide. Yeah, me too. So funny.

[00:52:48] Eric Goranson: Yeah, I've got, I did, I did Clover here. I've got my front half. I'm gonna be redoing the whole front of my property. I've got a, a half acre and it was just, it was just all nauseous weeds and stuff that was growing up [00:53:00] around the, around the forestries. It was just all junk stuff up there. And I went through and cleared out with an excavator and got rid of all that stuff and, and knocked it back.

[00:53:08] Eric Goranson: But I needed to going into the Portland winter to be able to control the dirt and soil. Cause I didn't want it all running off. I planted red Clover up there and it

[00:53:17] Joe Gardener: was awesome. Yeah, no, that's my, uh, my, one of my team members did that, her whole lawn. She just seeded red Clover and she's got a red Clover lawn and her wildlife is going nuts.

[00:53:29] Joe Gardener: That's nice. It's, you know, she's got the best garden she's ever had. Yeah. And, and Caroline, back to your question real quick about, you know, making the marketing and people thinking about, uh, how. Weeds are really bad, but I think people just want a quick fix. And so having something that they can just go out and spray and be done with it is easy and, you know, it's fairly cost effective.

[00:53:52] Joe Gardener: And then the weeds are, they, they can see that the weeds are dying, you know, a week later. Yeah. And they're done with it versus pulling it, or, you [00:54:00] know, not cutting your grasses low and dealing with a higher lawn or, you know, trying. Do something that may be a longer process to reduce the weeds or just learn to live with 'em I just, I just don't think as a society or as a mindset we're there yet.

[00:54:14] Joe Gardener: And then you've got the HOAs that say, Hey, your lawn's got too many weeds in it. There's that terrible. So there's a lot of forces at play against. Allowing a few weeds in our lawn and the social pressure to have a weed free environment. Keep up with the

[00:54:29] Caroline Blazovsky: Joneses. Yeah, no, there you go. Go have some weeds.

[00:54:31] Caroline Blazovsky: People trust me. Don't go use these herbicides and pesticides. There is a direct correlation to your health. So mm-hmm, just do what Joseph

[00:54:39] Joe Gardener: says.

[00:54:41] Eric Goranson: Well, Joe, we're starting to run out of time here, cuz this is gonna be the fastest hour. We do. Let's talk about you for a little bit on the, on the different ways that people can track you down, cuz okay, you're on it.

[00:54:52] Eric Goranson: Just about anywhere

[00:54:53] Joe Gardener: out there I am. Uh, Joe gardener.com is the website where we've kind of as our hub [00:55:00] for information and there's links there to, you know, our, our YouTube channels and our podcast, of course, and Instagram I'm at Joe gardener. So any, if you can. Remember Joe gardener. And I say it that way because you gotta spell it.

[00:55:13] Joe Gardener: Right. J O E G a R D E N E R gardener, not gardener, you know, there's an extra E in there. Um, but, um, I'm, I'm most active in social. I'm active on Instagram mostly. And I'm trying to, I, I like to post there just because it's easy and, um, it's great teaching opportunities and the format's good. And I like nice pictures.

[00:55:33] Joe Gardener: So I, I gravitate to that and, um, I respond to most people, so there's that. And the online gardening academy for those that really want to go deep on a particular gardening subject, like learning to grow epic tomatoes or beginning gardener fundamentals, or managing pest diseases and weeds. We've created courses where people can, um, learn pretty deep on those subject matters.

[00:55:54] Joe Gardener: So that's Joe gardner.com/learn to learn more there. Nice. So those are, and then the, the television show, the last thing [00:56:00] I'll say is growing a greener world, a national show on PBS is. It's called growing a greener world. And we ha we're in our 13th season. And we travel all over the country to tell the stories of other people doing really cool things for the planet, through gardening, with, uh, while light lightning, their environmental footprint, which is really important too.

[00:56:19] Joe Gardener: I like that. Nice. And then you've got some books and stuff. Don't you? I do. I, I have two books out and my newest book is coming out in two months. It's called, uh, the vegetable gardening book, your complete guide to growing inorganic vegetable garden from seed to harvest. And I'm really pumped about that one, cuz it's good.

[00:56:35] Joe Gardener: That's it's nice. It's that's it's comprehensive. Yeah, and it's out there for presale now. And, um, and I hope people will check that out. Cuz if you wanna learn how to grow food, no matter where you are in the process, if you're brand new or you've been at it a long time, this Infor there's a lot of information in there that you will learn.

[00:56:53] Joe Gardener: Uh, so. That's that's fun.

[00:56:56] Eric Goranson: Yeah. We're gonna have to bring you back and talk about that when the books came. Okay. You're the details [00:57:00] of this is our you're.

[00:57:01] Joe Gardener: You are our guardian. Let me, I'll be your guy. I'll be, we love it. This is fun. Fun for me. good. Right? I did too.

[00:57:07] Eric Goranson: This is awesome. Well, Joe, thanks for coming on today, man.

[00:57:10] Eric Goranson: We really appreciate it. And uh, so nice having an easy knowledgeable guest like this it's uh, this, this is, this is

[00:57:17] Joe Gardener: really. Awesome. Well, I enjoyed it too. Eric and Caroline. Thanks for having me. And I I'd love to come back anytime. So just say the word.

[00:57:25] We'll

[00:57:25] Eric Goranson: do it. All right. I'm Eric

[00:57:27] G

[00:57:27] Caroline Blazovsky: get those gardens ready, everybody.

[00:57:29] Caroline Blazovsky: And I'm Caroline B

[00:57:31] Eric Goranson: and you've been listening to around, around the house