Grow Like a Pro with Joe Gardener! We sit down with PBS and Podcast Star Joe Lamp'l

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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

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[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]

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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

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

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

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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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

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

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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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

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

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

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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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

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[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

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[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?

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[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.

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[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.

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[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,

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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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

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

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[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.

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

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[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.

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

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

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

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[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,

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[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.

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[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?

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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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

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

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[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

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[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

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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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

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[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.

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[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

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[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

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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

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[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.

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[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

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[00:57:25] We'll

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[00:57:27] G

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

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