Living Natural First Fall Gardening Seminar

John, Rebecca, and Sabino from Living Natural First spoke before a large group gathered at Wells Brothers in Plano this morning to help people learn about Fall Organic Gardening.  It is a rare and valuable opportunity to be able to ask gardening questions to these three folks!  I did lots of listening and note-taking, and will share what I learned here.  By the way, they handed out free copies of the Living Natural First magazine (which I somehow have remained ignorant of until now). You can subscribe to have it delivered to your house.

Here are my notes:

• Test your soil.  Use Texas Plant and Soil Lab!  (there is lots of controversy about the results from different soil labs, but I’ve never heard any negatives from using this one)
• Onion sets are great to plant right now, but no one in DFW sells them.  They are easy to plant from seed
• Planting carrots:  Don’t plant closer than recommended.  Sabino plants by broadcasting seed, then thinning as they grow up rather than trying to space seeds properly.
• Sabino says DO NOT plant tomatoes deep.  The deep roots wind up being too deep and the plant won’t grow until a new root ball is formed up near the surface.  He says tomatoes will do best when planted at the same height as the nursery had them planted at.  He also says DO NOT pick off leaves, they are needed by plant to shade itself.
• Reminder that almost all of the soil biology and chemistry is in the top 2″ to 3″ of soil.
• When the subject of spider mites came up, the response from John, Rebecca, and Sabino was that you should be spraying your plants once per week with compost tea.  Every week, the whole growing season.  Apply the spray just before sundown.  Rebecca likes to add orange oil, John likes to add liquid seaweed to his.  The reason for the strict once per week regiment is to break the lifecycle of the pests.  They are often easy to control at their early stages, very difficult at later stages, when they are usually noticed.
• Soft Rock Phosphate
• important for getting blooms
• if too much nitrogen is available, then phosphate usage is hampered.
• Phosphorous is ‘locked-up’ in our soil.  It can be made available by lowering pH (note from me: which is impossible to do long term because our soil sits on limestone) or by increasing biological activity.
• Can buy product with added dry molasses that encourages biological activity, increasing phosphorous availability to plants.
• recommended adding rock phosphate to compost pile – it doesn’t ‘go away’ like nitrogen does, binds with carbon and is available to plants when compost is used
• doesn’t burn plants – can be added to hole when a transplant is placed in garden
• Horse Hay / Horse Manure – caution that much of hay used to feed horses is treated with broadleaf herbicides that remain in the material for a long time and will kill your plants.  Use the bean water test to determine if what you have is usable in your garden.
• Microbes and Fungus are ‘territorial’ – so inculcation products have limited usefulness.  (if your soil is dead, they they are useful, if your soil is alive, they won’t help)
• Fungi helps plants that are under stress – not useful in a greenhouse or where plants are healthy
• Focus on feeding the soil instead of adding microbes and fungi
• If compost stinks, don’t buy it – tip from John
• Weeds
• worst thing to do for weeds is till them – it kills the growing weeds, but stirs up 100’s more weed seeds that will start growing soon
• use mulch
• use 10% or 20% vinegar
• Watering
• 62% of the water used in the DFW area goes to watering lawns
• in 2010 Plano used more water per capita than any other city in the US
• water infrequently (lawns in DFW are going every 2 weeks in this record heat if their roots are trained deep)
• water plants increasing further away from stalks to promote large root systems
• determine moisture content down in the soil, where the roots are, not on the surface
• Sabino says you want your plants to grow slow, not fast.  Do not add nitrogen fertilizer to start with, only when the plants start to set fruit.