Gardening Problems and Solutions

What's growing in your garden?

By Podcast Team, Alyssa Warner, Audra Trosper and Ana Skemp
Published on May 23, 2024
article image
Adobe Stock/Barbara Helgason
Lush and organic community vegetable, fruit and herb garden in summer.

In Episode 218 of Mother Earth News and Friends, hear from fellow gardeners on their gardening problems and solutions, and glean some new gardening practices for yourself. Alyssa Warner, Audra Trosper, and Ana Skemp discuss their garden layouts, gardening goals, challenges in the garden, and tips for what works for them (and what doesn’t) when cultivating their plants. We hope it inspires you to try some new things in your garden!

Scroll down for our episode transcript, and scroll to the bottom for our show-note resources!

Gardening Problems and Solutions Transcript

Jessica Anderson: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining us today for this special video podcast episode of Mother Earth News Friends. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.

Alyssa Warner: Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us for our “Right Garden for You” webinar. My name is Alyssa Warner and today we’re joined by Ana Skemp and Audra Trosper, and we’re gonna, we’re real gardeners, farmers, and we are talking about our gardens and why they look the way they do. Welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Audra Trosper: Thank you for having us. Yeah, sorry. I don’t normally sound like this, issues right now, but next time I’ll sound better, I promise.

[00:01:00] What Can a Garden Look Like?

[00:01:00]

Alyssa Warner: Well, we’re excited to hear about your garden. Let’s start by talking about what our gardens kind of look like. So I’ll go first. So my name is Alyssa Warner. I’m the event production assistant here at Mother Earth News and Ogden Publications.

My gardening background is that I come from a family of generational farmers, but I grew up in a city. So I’ve really only started growing in my adult life. I consider myself to be an intermediate, organic, no till gardener. I grow in Zone 6. 5. My garden’s in the suburbs. I have a 500 square foot in ground garden in full sun with clay-dense soil.

I garden with my chickens, and my favorite plant to grow is mustard greens because they go in the earliest, they come out the latest, and you can put them in everything.

What about you, Audra? What’s your garden look like?

Audra Trosper: I’m Audra Trosper. I’m the lead editor of Goat Journal Magazine. I also have a, grew up in a family of generational farmers on both sides. But I did grow up moving around a lot. My dad was a contractual design engineer with the big aircraft [00:02:00] company. So we went everywhere. I didn’t actually start gardening until my adult life The first time I gardened was with my mother at her place actually for a little bit And I was afraid to eat the stuff that came out of it because I had never eaten garden food before. I immediately, you know moved on beyond that as we grew and I would consider myself an intermediate. I’m not a beginner, but I obviously don’t know everything.

Right now I garden organic, mostly no till. I don’t really till at all. I kind of loosen the soil. But I garden in raised beds right now for a variety of reasons. I am 6b as far as the Zone Hardiness Map goes with the USDA. Right now I have six 4×8 beds and two 4×4 beds. And then soil type, of course, was previously the lawn, because we have raised beds now, so it is a mix of bagged garden soil, amended as needed with like cow manure and topsoil, peat moss, whatever we need to work in there, compost, to help keep it [00:03:00] going.

I do not have any animals that go in the garden. My chickens are fenced out of the garden, but I do have a compost pile so that stuff can be moved over as needed to the garden. My favorite plants to grow, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, all of them. I love them all. I have a lot of fun with canning and gardening and growing so that’s my garden.

Alyssa Warner: Awesome. Thank you, Audra. And what about you, Ana? What’s your right garden?

Ana Skemp: So, I garden in the country. I just started gardening as an adult as well. I have a 3, 500 square foot garden. And I do a combo of homemade raised beds and in ground gardening. I consider myself an intermediate, but I also like to remember that I’m still just a beginner because it makes me brave enough to try things and experiment.

Every year I focus on something different, and this year I’m really, really excited about growing beans. So I have a bunch of different varieties of pole beans in the ground. And we have a big family, we have six kids. And my kids love more than [00:04:00] anything else sweet peppers. So yesterday I put in 50 sweet pepper plants and I’m hopeful to have hundreds of peppers.

We do, we have a lot of livestock on the farm. So in particular, I use a lot of composted horse manure in the garden. And also in the sheep overwintering area, we use composted bedding that goes into the raised beds and the, the in ground areas as well. And in terms of gardening with animals, when everything is done for the season, and I pull out the last of the fall greens, I do put my sheep in here to kind of clean everything up, and I also let the chickens and the ducks run through.

Alyssa Warner: Awesome. And what’s your Zone?

Ana Skemp: We are 5a now. We just transitioned with the recent changes in horticultural, horticultural growing Zones. We used to be 4 and now we’re 5 technically, but May 15th is my last spring frost date, so.

Alyssa Warner: Oh, that’s much later than ours. That’s a month later than ours. Wow. And of course we actually have a fabulous article that [00:05:00] includes a discussion about the changing USDA gardening Zones. If you are wondering if maybe your garden might have changed Zones recently.

What about Ana, the, the larger scope? Your garden is about you said 1500 square feet. What are the things you do in your area?

Ana Skemp: So it’s actually 3500 square feet.

Alyssa Warner: That’s so many more than I said.

Ana Skemp: And one of my biggest challenges is keeping on top of it. But one of our really big goals is that we want to raise a huge percentage of our own food. But it’s a lot to keep up with, in particular with the weeds. So I’m trying to think of the larger areas this year. We have a ton of tomatoes, peppers, potatoes winter squash. Right now there are a ton of greens. Cucumbers. I do a ton of canning too. Zucchini. I just put it in a bunch of leeks yesterday because I think they’ll be delicious in soups.

[00:05:51] Setting Garden Goals

Alyssa Warner: Awesome. So many things. So many things. So let’s talk about our garden goals because everybody, [00:06:00] everybody wants something a little bit different, I think, and I think what you want from your garden really should dictate what your garden looks like. For example last year, my gardening goal was to, was to save more on my grocery bill than I spent in my garden.

So that way, it’s like a wash, right? It’s like I didn’t spend any garden money. As long as I didn’t spend that money, I saved that money in the store. So that was my fencing, my seed cost. I didn’t count my own labor. But I, I did count seeds, fencing, any equipment that I had to buy, all went against the ledger of what I did buy at the grocery store.

And I think the reason why I actually saved more at the grocery store was not that I used to buy so many grains. It’s that my diet shifted because what I had available to me was mostly what I was growing. So honestly that, replacing a lot of The like pre [00:07:00] made, ready made food, a lot of the excess protein that I would buy from the store in my diet, replacing that with greens and tomatoes and other things that ultimately helped me save my, save money.

What about you guys? What did you want from your garden last year?

Audra Trosper: I don’t know. Probably the same thing. I just, every year I like to can. We make, we can tomatoes, we can salsa, we can pickles, you know everything that can be canned, it’s canned. We eat tons of fresh vegetables. I mean, since my kids were little, we’ve been gardening. They used to love it when they were little. They’d be out there helping plant, harvest, whatever. And like, once we were harvesting potatoes and my middle son was, you know, I don’t think he was like six. And he was like, “We’re digging up groceries, Mom.” And I’m like, yes, we are. I mean, he just had, they have so much fun. And so it’s, it’s just about producing for the household, something healthier.

Sometimes, yeah, could I maybe get it cheaper at the store? Maybe. I could probably get my eggs cheaper sometimes too, cause I have some pretty expensive free eggs. But it’s not about whether or not it’s [00:08:00] cheaper. It’s about whether or not it’s healthier. And that’s how we’ve always looked at it, is how healthy is it? Because obviously if it comes straight from the garden to the table, it hasn’t had that nutritional loss from from shipping and whatnot.

So, my goals with my garden now are just expansion, you know, and because it’s, it’s expensive to get raised beds going. So we’re doing them like two beds at a time, and we’ve we’ve been through a few iterations of raised gardening right now. And the raised beds are what we have discovered is the best for us.

We’ve tried garden bags and a variety of other things and they just didn’t work, didn’t work. You know, all the hype on the internet about this bag. Tomatoes in it, and it does all this great stuff. Maybe in other environments it does. Out here, it just seemed like they just dried out too fast. And the tomatoes were never happy. And none of the fruit, none of the produce was happy. And it just didn’t work, so. Ours is just expanding and improving each year, so.

Alyssa Warner: You guys remember those upside down tomato bags? 15 [00:09:00] years ago, I had an uncle who didn’t have a lot of lawn space, but had a, a clothesline right outside his door. And they converted it to upside down grow bags. And some were super humid all the time, like Honolulu, where I grew up. It was great. And I do remember, like, huge amounts of, like, upside down tomatoes.

Ana Skemp: That’s fun.

Audra Trosper: Out here where we’re arid, though, that kind of stuff, it just, it didn’t work. I mean, we get so much wind and everything that just, it just seemed to suck the moisture out of the bag.We were doing so much heavy watering and it just wasn’t, didn’t seem to keep up with it.

Alyssa Warner: And correct me if I’m wrong, Audra, y’all are, y’all are in a suburb, like, outside of town?

Audra Trosper: I, I’m in a teeny, tiny little town that doesn’t even have a stoplight. We’re a wide spot in the road, and we are surrounded by pastures, cows, cropland. The nearest city of [00:10:00] any size has 5,000 people, and it is 30 miles away, so.

Alyssa Warner: So you really, really get a lot of wind.

Audra Trosper: A lot of wind, yeah. We’re out where central Kansas starts to bleed into western Kansas, kind of on that line.

Alyssa Warner: And what about you, Ana? What’s your, what was your garden goal last year? Were you able to accomplish it?

Ana Skemp: Last year was challenging for us. We had an extreme drought that persisted through most of our growing season. And I was really stubborn to use a bunch of irrigation because I’d never had to before. So I really had to think carefully about what I was growing, when I was starting it, and how heavily I was mulching to retain the water that we did get.

So I let some things completely go last year, like a mid-late season of beans I just had to let go because I would have had to water to get them to germinate. So my goal last year was to be flexible and to appreciate what did do well. Like our, we had, a huge tomato harvest, and we are [00:11:00] finally down to like our last few jars of tomatoes now without buying any from the store. So that was, that was exciting.

So last year we focused on flexibility. The potatoes did great. I didn’t get much of anything in terms of like fall greens, so I tried to just appreciate the ones we did get in the spring. And this year I’m, we’re getting, we’re, we’re still, I think, in just a moderate drought, but it’s way better and we’re getting nice, gentle, regular rains. So I have put in more beans than I’ve ever grown before to make up for it. And they’re all germinating and looking great. So I’m really excited about that.

Alyssa Warner: Well, that’s fantastic.

Audra Trosper: It’s just funny, because where I’m at, irrigation is always a thing. Like, we have to water all the time. There’s never a time we don’t. I mean, last year we did get quite a bit of rain for a little bit, but, you know, going into the summer and stuff, you have to water here.

Alyssa Warner: Our summer was particularly rough last year. Although I do remember, like, we got no rain, no rain, no rain. I left for a week to go help out at the fair in Pennsylvania, and [00:12:00] it rained the entire time I was gone. And I came back and everything was overgrown. Because the only squash I got last year was the week I was gone and unable to harvest it. My chickens ate well.

[00:12:14] Long-Term Garden Dreams

Alyssa Warner: So what about our garden dreams? What are your far off garden goals? Like, in the future what is your pristine, perfect picture of your garden?

Audra Trosper: Probably about at least 10 more beds, raised beds. I don’t know, maybe I’ve taken over the town. Every yard is raised beds, you know.

Alyssa Warner: Raised beds as far as the eye can see.

Audra Trosper: Yeah. So mainly just expansion. You know, making sure the paths between the beds were wide enough. Getting things set up for things to properly grow. It all takes time.

Alyssa Warner: Do your beds, do they have a bottom to them, or do they go straight into the ground?

Audra Trosper: We actually lay down landscape fabric heavily underneath them. And then we put cardboard down. And then we put all the stuff on top so that that helps. We have some very [00:13:00] tenacious grass out here. In addition to things like bindweed or whatever that we got to worry about. So we have to be very heavy with the trying to keep stuff from coming up into the beds. Even then we still get grass and stuff trying to set up. My bed with my squash and stuff in it right now, I’m really happy to work on the grass that has settled in there.

Alyssa Warner: I know we do have a really fantastic course by Leah Webb about raised beds and soil health. So if any of y’all are curious about other ways that you can maintain your beds, I’ll leave the link down below to Leah’s soil health and raised bed building course.

What about you, Ana? What are your far off, one day garden dreams?

Ana Skemp: So I’m super lucky that we have been gardening in the same spot for over 15 years now. And my favorite, favorite thing that I’ve done is incorporated perennials into the gardens. Just because the stuff that you get to harvest with so little work is wonderful. So expanding my perennials always. And then a big year, a big goal for this year is we do [00:14:00] have, because we’re living in the country, we do have like deer and rabbits and woodchucks and everything else that will come nip my little cabbages and beans. So we have our fence posts in, our corner braces in, and we have woven wire to stretch around the garden that will keep some of the wildlife out. So not having to worry about wildlife nipping my little plants is a huge dream. That and perennials. All the perennials.

Alyssa Warner: Yeah, there seems to be almost nothing that I can do to keep rabbits out of my garden except grow enough that I still have plants after the rabbits have had their fill.

Audra Trosper: Interestingly enough, we don’t have too much, we have rabbits in the yard, they don’t get into the raised beds much. When we used to plant in the ground, I, cause I had three boys, and I would start seeing things get nibbled, and I’d like, “everybody to go pee around the garden.” And so they did, and we wouldn’t end up with rabbits in the garden.

I was like, “oh, I want you peeing around the edge of the garden.” They were happy to go. “Mom told us to go pee outside, this is great,” so, you know.

Ana Skemp: I have [00:15:00] raised buds right next to in ground beds, and the rabbits, like they don’t want to come into that little step into the raised bed. And the damage in the in ground is always worse than the raised buds. And my raised buds are not like high off the ground. They’re like 8 inches, 12 inches, 6 inches. They could happen, but they choose not to as much. Yeah.

Audra Trosper: Interesting. Yeah, ours are 12 inches deep. So.

Alyssa Warner: That’s really interesting. I guess that’s kind of like my fence around my garden. ‘Cause my chickens basically, our entire yard because I’m in a suburb, is fenced in. And my chickens kind of just get that space. So I had, my fence is more to keep chickens out of my garden, unless I want them in there.

That reminds me of like, I have a wobbly fence. I’ve got like a really wobbly chicken wire fence because that deters the chickens more. They’ll, they will hop up and pester my neighbor for snacks onto my much [00:16:00] higher, much sturdier fence. But the wobbly fence makes them feel like, “Oh, I don’t know. This is only 4 feet tall, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

Audra Trosper: I sometimes I think the rabbits, least around here, because of course it’s quite flat out where I’m at. They just hop around normally. They’re not really expected to hop up into things. And I just don’t think it really occurs to them as much to jump up into the beds.

Alyssa Warner: I think my garden dreams, like my far off goals, I would love to reduce my lawn space and add more growing space. Perennials sound nice, but like, what if I was turning some of my front yard into slightly more productive space? We made sure we didn’t, you know, find a home with an HOA so that we could put things in our front yard. Heat off my windows with some tall growing plants sounds fantastic.

Audra Trosper: See, I have perennial areas, but they’re herbs. Like I, I mean, we do have some like irises and stuff because I like flowers. But we have all kinds of herbs and whatnot all mixed into our perennial areas. [00:17:00] We have rosemary and cilantro and parsley. Lemon thyme, regular thyme, oregano. I mean, it’s we’ve got it growing, tons of it out there. Echinacea, variety of other stuff, and lots of mint. We have both catnip and regular mint. And we did have chocolate mint, but I’m not sure what happened to it. So we need to reestablish that.

[00:17:22] Midroll Ad: Upcoming MOTHER EARTH NEWS Webinars and Courses

Audra Trosper: Thanks for joining us for our “Right Garden for You” webinar. Join us on June the 19th at 1 PM central for our “How Does Your Garden Grow Update” webinar, where we’re going to talk about gardening methods that we tried for the first time this year, including different tomato trellis ideas, pests, weeds, and harvest progress. But if you can’t wait till then and you’re hungry for more Mother Earth News webinar content, we do have the “Janice Cox Natural Beauty at Home” course coming out on the 14th of June, where you can see how Janice Cox [00:18:00] creates beauty products out of her grocery items, as well as a webinar from Dalia Monterroso, who discusses how to keep your chickens healthy even in hot summer weather.

For full access to our library of over 400 videos and webinars, become a member and subscribe to Mother Earth News Magazine, the original guide to living wisely.

[00:18:19] Gardening Problems and Solutions

Alyssa Warner: Thank you for chatting about your garden goals and dreams. Let’s talk about something a little more sticky. Let’s talk about like challenges. What did you folks have to consider when you first started your garden or this iteration of your garden?

I’d love to hear about barriers to growing in your space, obstacles, challenges that you are still dealing with today. What was hard for y’all?

Ana Skemp: So when I started, everything was in ground and it was impossible to keep up unless I was tilling every year, and I didn’t want to do that for the long term health of the soil. So, I switched to no-till raised beds, [00:19:00] but I also didn’t want to spend a bunch of money on either the lumber or the metal or the prefab ones. That wasn’t in our budget at the time when we were gardening.

So, I ended up doing a bunch of homemade raised beds where it’s essentially like if we have a big tree down in the pasture, we hack it into 8-foot lengths and 4-foot lengths and build somewhat rectangular beds and fill them with soil and compost. So that’s been a good solution for me. I’ve gotten a lot of free stuff off of Facebook Marketplace over the years. I always, I love the gardening stuff, the free gardening stuff. So I’ve grabbed that.

And then the other big challenge for me is just keeping on top of the weeds. Because of the size of my garden, that’s pretty significant. So the, the way I try to tackle that is no matter what’s going on in my life, I get out and I literally weed every seven days, even if it’s teeny tiny and it doesn’t seem like it needs it, I prioritize it. And then it actually gets done, and I stay on top of the weeds.

Audra Trosper: For us, one of our biggest challenge now is, well, cost of lumber to build [00:20:00] beds and whatnot. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of stuff in our Facebook Marketplace out here for that kind of thing. You’d think there would be, but there’s not. So, that’s kind of our challenge.

We did have a huge in ground garden that we did every year. And we tilled every year because that’s what you thought we, back then, that’s what you did. You tilled in the spring. And that’s when the bindweed came. Bindweed makes gardening very difficult. And it takes over everything. It climbs everything. Strangles everything. The more you till it, it’s a hydra, so you cut it into pieces and it grows more heads and it’s happier and you get more bindweed.

And so we were cultivating lots of it. If we could have somehow commercially produced that, we would be rich probably by now. So we had to back up and do something different. We couldn’t keep growing our garden there. We had to get the bindweed under control. So we started out, like I said, we tried the garden bags, and we tried a variety of different garden bed ideas. And what seems to work best for us is the 4×8 [00:21:00] beds. They’re 12 inches deep. My husband makes them, he gets the big, you know, 12 by however long, I don’t know, they’re 8 feet long this way. And you know, they’re 12 feet deep or 12 feet, 12 inches deep. And it’s, it’s expensive soil wise to get them set up and everything. So that’s kind of a challenge for us. But we don’t have much of a choice. I mean, we have to do something. I can’t give up gardening.

We started figuring out how to do it better and so we’ve been working on that. And it’s taken a while. Like I said, we tried for, I think, three different years with the garden bags, just thinking, okay, well, maybe we didn’t do it right this year. We’ll try it next year, you know, and it just never seemed to work out. So we started doing different things. But I mean, keeping up with the big, what we used to do is because we had a newspaper here in town, and they always had extra newspapers. So we would go get the newspapers. And we had our in ground garden. And we would wet them down and we would lay them down in between all the rows and the plants, and we would get old hay for really cheap, last year’s hay that [00:22:00] people didn’t want anymore. And we would spread that out, we wet it down, spread it out over all of the newspaper, and we wouldn’t really have any weeds growing up, except for bindweed, which can grow up through anything. It can go underneath sidewalks and come up in new places, so, but it kept a lot of the other weeds down, so we were able to actually not have to spend a lot of time weeding out in the garden. It made it really easy to walk between the beds, I mean, between the rows and everything. It was really nice.

And it would take two, three days of all of us, there’s, we’re a family of seven with my parents here. And my parents are with me. So they would come out and help, all of us out there working, kids and everybody, to get this whole garden covered. But it, it, you know, it mulched it, we didn’t have to use near as much water, and it kept the weeds down and it helped. But you know, sometimes bringing in the hay, I think also brought in more bindweed. So it was kind of a catch 22. So now we really can’t, we can’t use that anymore. Of course, for the raised beds anyway, but yeah, the bindweed was really a [00:23:00] problem.

Alyssa Warner: I feel incredibly fortunate that that’s not something that I’ve stumbled onto in my garden yet, the bindweed. I think it’s coming. I can see it like on the horizon is what it feels like. I can see it starting to pop up in areas where my chickens have killed the grass. So I just got to keep that out of my garden as long as I can.

Audra Trosper: Break it off at the soil, throw it away. Don’t let it, don’t leave it laying on the ground, it’ll try to root again, it seems like. And if you break the roots, it just, like I said, you’ve created a hydra and you’ve got more.

In the old garden area, there are still, it still will pop up in areas because the seeds last forever. And the roots go horribly deep, and I mean, it’s uniquely, it’s perfect for this area. If you don’t want anything other than bindweed growing. Yeah.

Alyssa Warner: I know for us are, it sounds like we had a kind of a hybrid of a lot of your problems, which is honestly, makes me feel better, as someone who kind of just launched themselves into this project.

We didn’t, [00:24:00] we wanted to have access to cheaper, better tasting, more nutrient dense food that was harvested at the peak of ripeness. I’m very spoiled. I grew up in Hawai’i. I’m from, the Island of O’ahu, and we have amazing farmers markets with local produce, and it all tastes like it was harvested yesterday.

You can ask farmers for stuff that you want at the next farmers market, and if you’re there to buy it, it’ll be there for you. Like, we have an amazing farmers market culture at home. It’s very affordable. It’s very nutritious. It’s wonderful. And it’s not always the experience I’ve had living on the mainland, and grocery store produce does not stack up. I feel like our grocery store produce here is pretty lackluster.

But like, those were our wants, but our biggest barrier was honestly, just money to get started. We needed money to put up fencing and money to get starts because [00:25:00] a good growing lamp is not cheap. I was very, I’m very grateful, I was gifted one. So now I can start being on seeds next year.

But, like, part of why we grow in ground is because we couldn’t afford to do raise beds because lumber is so expensive. And if you have just moved into a space where you can garden, you might not have tools. I don’t live close to family. If I did, I’m sure I could have borrowed the tools, but I knew no one when I moved here.

So a lot of the quote unquote “mistakes” we’ve made, or a lot of the ways that we do things that are a little suboptimal are really born out of like the necessity of having to keep things cheap and easy and fast. Although I have also learned that if I don’t get rid of all of the weeds, if there’s weeds that I’m willing to live with, they keep my soil from drying out. So I’m not too, not too worried about them.

[00:25:50] How to be a Successful Gardener

Alyssa Warner: So all of these challenges considered, what do y’all think is the element that has most greatly enabled your [00:26:00] success?

If you’ve got one, not to give you a stumper question, I can, I can start. Working here, honestly, it was the thing that made me so successful so quick. I went from knowing nothing about gardening. I could kill mint. In fact, I have several times killed mint. I was very, very bad at this. But now my neighbors who have been lifetime gardeners approach me and ask me questions. I’ve had people in their cars stop in front of my house where I have all my seeds started and they’re sitting outside in my driveway stop and ask what I’m doing and how I got my seeds to look like that, what’s growing, how can they also do it? Do I have advice for the problems they’re having in their garden right now? And like, I could never have gotten to this spot without having so many experts to look to in my workplace. Y’all are so cool. [00:27:00]

Ana Skemp: I love both of those, Alyssa. It’s funny because I, there’s so much inspiration in those, the magazines. Like recently I read an article about using, so we have really abundant, like lemon balm. I’m sitting in my garden, so I’m actually looking around me to see what’s big right now. Horehound. Just some herbs that have gotten gigantic, and there’s a really fun article about when your herbs get too big, just cut them and lay them at the base of your other plants as really nice mulch. So a lot of these herbs tend to be really mineral dense, and you need to get them out of the way anyways, because perennial herbs tend to get huge.

So that’s a fun thing I’ve started doing. And then my other thing is just keep, keep trying. Gardening is full of failure. It’s forgiving. You can’t fail quite in the same way when you’re raising animals. But when you’re raising plants, you try again. If your beans fail, just try again in seven days. It’s okay. Try again the next year.

Alyssa Warner: That’s definitely good advice. Because I think with especially those calendars that you can [00:28:00] look up because you can look up anything online nowadays. Someone will tell you, you have to do it in this way in this time. And I don’t, I think you’re right. I think it’s okay to plant things a little bit suboptimally because having any at all is better than giving up on it.

Oh, and I’ll have that article linked as well, how to use your herbs as mulch.

Ana Skemp: Also, if you think about something I love to think about too, like, is it too cold to plant these, whatever it is, but if you look at the cost of a packet of seeds and you compare that to like a single bunch of greens at the grocery store, like the longer I do it, the riskier I get, and I’m like, you know, this packet of seeds cost me maybe $3 and that’s how much a single, single bunch of kale would cost me. So I’m going to go ahead and put those in, or lettuce or whatever it is. And sometimes they get nipped by the frost and sometimes they thrive and you get your own fresh food a couple weeks early and that’s such a fun challenge too.

Alyssa Warner: Yeah, I’m thinking of my neighbor who put his tomato plants in well before I felt [00:29:00] comfortable putting mine in because of the last frost dates. And he already has tomatoes on his plants. They were like way too high and I’m like, no, I should have done it.

Audra Trosper: I have tomatoes on my plants. I have some like this big, I have a pepper. I could almost pick off one of my pepper plants right now.

Alyssa Warner: Oh my goodness. And you put yours in probably a week after he did his.

Audra Trosper: Yeah.

Alyssa Warner: And I was like, maybe I should do mine. I have so many extra starts. This is why we start so many seeds. We don’t have to expect them all to go into the ground. We don’t have to plan for them to all go into the ground, but it’s great to have extra so you can take those chances.

Ana Skemp: And then give the rest to your lovely neighbors, right?

Alyssa Warner: Yeah, yeah. And I’m actually bringing, I have a seed tray of peppers that I started from a local seed company that I’m going to give away to some of my neighbors and a few of my coworkers, because they all germinated and I did not expect that. Did not expect them to be so successful.

[00:29:54] Favorite Gardening Practices

Alyssa Warner: Okay, last question, and this is like hot take time. I want to hear your [00:30:00] gardening hot takes. What do you do in your garden that is not best practice, but works out to be best for you?

Audra Trosper: Well, we were discussing the plastic mulch. I’m using plastic mulch this year because I do need something to help hold in moisture because we do have a lot of wind. And we don’t always get a ton of rain in the summer and we have to do watering. And I read, I was actually doing some research on it and they said that the red mulch, the red plastic, actually encourages better fruiting and whatnot in tomatoes and peppers and stuff. So my tomato beds and my pepper bed have the red mulch on them.

I haven’t put it on anything else yet because I haven’t really figured out how to work it into like, green bean beds with like my rows and stuff. So that’s, this is me learning, my first year doing it So far, I like how it’s doing in the tomato bed and upper beds as far as keeping moisture going and stuff. It’s again, probably not best practice because it is [00:31:00] plastic mulch. But at the same time it’s just like there’s a roll out sheet of plastic. I was thinking like, I don’t know, like, you know, wood mulch only in plastic when I first heard of it. So, you know, it was kind of an educational process for me. And, but at the same time, it’s also conserving a lot of water, which is, you know, something that’s rather important when you’re in a more arid environment, so.

Ana Skemp: Mine is related to weeds too. So I am sitting here looking at a row of lambsquarters coming up between my beans and my mustard greens, and I probably will not get to weeding it. So what I’m, we have about 25 horses on our farm and we have a ton of compost. So I am probably, instead of weeding, I’m going to smother those weeds with a layer of compost. And they’ll probably just go away. So sometimes I just smother my weeds with compost, like 12 inches of compost.

Alyssa Warner: That’s a lot of compost.

Ana Skemp: And it works.

Alyssa Warner: Yeah. [00:32:00] I know ours is actually, mine is related to compost. One thing that’s nice to have and that I see a lot of plans for are compost bins to make sure that you have fresh compost that’s all the way broken down all the time.

I have, there’s a hole that was in the ground at my house that just existed when we moved in. And I just started dumping kitchen scraps there. Chicken bedding there. Little tiny sticks that are probably small enough to break down. And I just have a hole that I fill until it’s a pile. And then in the fall, I put that pile in my garden.

It is ugly. It does not look nice, but it is functional. And my chickens turn all of my compost for me. And I put everything in there. I put dog fur in there. We have a Great Pyrenees who creates a whole second Great Pyrenees twice a year when I brush him. We put everything in that, in that pile.

Ana Skemp: [00:33:00] So we raised fiber sheep and goats and a lot of the wool we do turn into yarn, but a lot of the scrap wool is beautiful mulch too. Like the stuff that’s like too dirty or matted or has burrs or whatever. So I have lots of composted manure and also random sheep wool as compost in my garden.

Alyssa Warner: It all breaks down. It’s what is, what is that? Protein?

Ana Skemp: Good stuff. I want to try your hole compost now. Sounds promising. It’s fun because my kids would love digging a compost hole.

Alyssa Warner: Awesome. Well, that’s, thank you for joining us today. I had really a lot of fun talking with you guys. I love getting inspiration. There are things that I would not consider to be like barriers or problems that I now know to look for because I got to have some great conversations with you guys.

And also. Like it just feels good to have someone who has the same problems in their garden. You’re not failing because you have weeds that you can’t get to.

Ana Skemp: We all have weeds.

Alyssa Warner: Or if you think that your tomatoes didn’t start exactly the way you wanted. [00:34:00]

Audra Trosper: Exactly.

[00:34:01] Podcast Credits

Jessica Anderson: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast. You can also email us at Podcast@OgdenPubs.Com with any questions or suggestions.

Our podcast production team includes Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner.

Music for this episode is “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod.

The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.

Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.

Meet Our Guests for Gardening Problems and Solutions

Alyssa Warner

Alyssa Warner is a former city kid who played too much Harvest Moon, and wound up living the quiet suburban homestead life in the Midwest. She enjoys sharing eggs, crafts, and baked goods with her neighbors and learning new ways to make things better and cheaper than store-bought. She believes TTRPGs will save the world, and is counting down the days to her next trip home to Hawaii to visit her family.

Audra Trosper

A coffee-loving squirrel brain whose superpower is forgetting where she put her phone while it’s in her hand, Audra is the Lead Editor of Goat Journal and a published author and avid gamer. She has an itsy-bitsy, in-town hobby homestead (tiny town but still a town), where she raised dairy goats for over a decade, has maintained a flock of backyard chickens for 20 years, grows a vegetable garden, and cans the produce from it. When she isn’t wording (in one way or another), gaming, or caring for critters, she is thinking up some new project for her husband to build.

Ana Skemp

Ana Skemp is a mother, a farmer, and a maker at Deep Roots Community Farm in Wisconsin. She raises grass-fed beef, KuneKune pigs, Icelandic Cross sheep, Pygora fiber goats, ducks, geese, and chickens. In the summer, the farm is opened up to local school kids for educational programming. Her family recently became the next generation to tend the family apple orchard.

Additional Resources

Check out some of our upcoming webinars and courses:

“Is It Too Hot for Your Chickens?” with Dalia Monterroso

“Natural Beauty at Home” with Janice Cox

“How Does Your Garden Grow Update” webinar


Our Podcast Team:
Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, and Alyssa Warner
Music: “Hustle” by Kevin MacLeod

Listen to more podcasts at MOTHER EARTH NEWS PODCAST.
Check out the MOTHER EARTH NEWS Bookstore for more resources that may interest you.
Go to the MOTHER EARTH NEWS video page for an opportunity to see some of our podcast guests on camera.

The Mother Earth News and Friends podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.

Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.

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