Foreign. Hello, and welcome to Live like the World Is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host for today, Brooke Jackson, and I'm here with Propaganda by the Seed. By the Seed. For the Seed. Of the Seed. To the Seed. They're going to correct me in a minute as to which one of those it is. We'll find out. But first, we want to give a shout out to our. What do you call them? Those people who pay for the things that we do here. Oh, wait a minute. No, we don't do that here. We do that at the end of the podcast, we give a shout out to our Patreon supporters who are the reason this podcast exists, because we are an anarchist podcast and part of an anarchist podcast network. And so rather than having ads that pay for things, we have human beings who support our work, human beings like you who are listening, who we are very grateful for. But we also like to celebrate the other anarchist podcasts out there, especially those on our shared network, channel 0 network of anarchist Podcasts. And so we're going to put in a little jingle right here for one of those other fabulous, rad, cool, awesome podcasts. I know the kind of pain you're feeling, Alex. I once had it myself. You some kind of doctor? No, Alex, I am Magneto, and I have come to offer you sanctuary. Hello. This is our jingle for our podcast, the Grounded Futures Show. This is the show where we discuss topics ranging from climate change to identity to how youth can gain new skills to thrive amid current and ongoing disasters that we are collectively facing. We are your hosts, one Gen Z, Liam, and one Gen X, Carla. And we think we all deserve to thrive now and not in some distant utopian future.

Yeah, but that's in the future.

Oh, I hate the future. Yeah, we're with Bolin. Grounded Futures is a larger project, so check that out [email protected]. Welcome back from that lovely ad from another podcast on our network of anarchist podcasts. We do love our network very much and are grateful to be a part of them. Let's get into the meat of today's episode. So I am here with Propaganda Book by OF four to under around the Seed. Say more. Introduce yourself, my friend.

My name is Aaron. I'm the host of Propaganda by the Seed, another podcast on Channel Zero Network. And we focus on all things plants, especially unusual plants often. And we like to interview people who are huge nerds about plants. So I'm happy, happy to be back on Live. Like the world is dying to Talk more about plants.

I love it. You're my people, for sure. I do a lot of, do a lot of plants and planting in my life. But today we're specifically going to talk about kind of spring gardening and getting your, your spring garden ready. So this is, this will come out roughly early April. So we want to be thinking about what we should be up to right now. And we're going to talk about different agricultural zones as well and how this affects them. So just for the audience real quick, we're looking really at North American agricultural zones. So if you're around the world somewhere else and happen to know how you relate to the North American zones, then translate this into your language and apologies for those who it might not apply to. Please listen anyway because we love our listeners. But so agricultural zones in North America, we've got, that goes from zones 1 to 10. And it's roughly like zone 1 is like northern, northern Canada, and zone 10 is, you know, the tip of Texas and the bottom of Florida and stuff. And they're kind of in bands as you go. But look up, look up a map of it to find out what your hardiness zone is. I'm in roughly zone 8 or 9 or so. Aaron, what zone are you in?

I'm in 5A.

5A. Okay. So if you're in, go ahead, please.

Oh, and, and these hardiness zones, they're determined by the coldest it gets in the winter. So they're, they're most useful for determining what plants are going to survive a winter. Great for that. And when, when we're thinking about spring prep. Perhaps even more important than these hardiness zones is your last frost date.

Yeah.

Which you can find quite easily on the Internet by searching for last frost date. And then there's usually for, for North America, you can usually use a zip code to look it up. But I'm sure other countries have similar resources for that.

Is the last frost date at all correlated or consistent with the hardiness zones or.

Yeah, they, they definitely correlate, but they're just kind of different. Like a cold zone, like three or four is going to have a later last frost date always. But a, like, coastal place like where I live in Maine is going to have a significantly different last frost date than like a Zone 5 region in the upper Midwest.

Okay. Okay. So that is, yeah, really important to know. And the reason I mentioned zones is that, you know, if you're going to the store and you're buying, you know, a pot to plant in, a pot to transplant or looking at Seeds. It's often listed in terms of hardiness zones as to where it's sort of appropriate to plant or replant, that kind of thing. That's not the only measure that gets used on packaging, but that is often one. So it's good to know sort of your hardiness zone from that perspective. And then, yeah, definitely last frost dates, which are interesting right now, not to get off on a whole climate change tangent, but, you know, the last frost dates have. Have changed a bit over time. I certainly know that here where I am Pacific Northwest, you know, we'd normally be in the point here in early April of there's potentially still a last frost to come. But I can tell you just based on the way this winter and now early spring are going and the last couple of years that we are, we are very likely past our last frost date here by the time this gets released anyway. So those things move around a little bit too, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. The. Our last frost hasn't moved that much, but in just the last 20 years, our first frost in the fall has shifted by almost a month, which is just absolutely terrifying sometimes. Very convenient from the perspective of growing things. But, yeah, shit is fucked.

Yeah. Especially if you're in an area that's like yours that has a shorter growing season. So me and my fortune of being, you know, zone 8, 9ish, that means for a longer growing season as opposed to a zone five and certainly as opposed to zone, you know, three or four.

Yeah, totally. So, but, yeah, we're like a month away from, from the last frost here and we actually just got like 4 inches of snow yesterday, so. So it still looks very wintry here.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. And it got down to freezing as we're recording this here in, in late March. It did get down to 32 to freezing last night, but that's. It's going to be very unlikely that that happens again or even very much at all. So. Yeah. Anyway, so this is sort of a. I would say we're aiming at spring planting 102, not 101. Like 101 might talk about how to plant and build garden beds and planters and different kinds of options and stuff. And we're going to kind of pass over that and assume that you, the listener, you know, already has some sort of garden space or planter or, you know, planting box or something. Maybe you haven't used it in a while, but you're sort of already in possession of that and maybe perhaps have done a little bit of planting before, tried it out before and aren't, you know, a complete, you know, 101 novice to this just but a step up a 102. So maybe you haven't planted in a while or just need some reminders or what have you. So let's about. If you're in a colder zone like yours, you know, a three, four, five kind of a zone, what should folks be focused on right now for. For getting ready for their. Their planting. Nice.

So I would say if you're gonna start any annuals from seed that you would want to transplant, now would be a great time to be getting those going. Some veggies that really benefit from an early start like that would be like alliums, onions, leeks, those need to get started pretty early. Celery and celeriac, both are like ones that are just. They're just so tiny, delicate babies that if you direct sow them, they usually don't have enough time in a northern climate to really do their full thing. And then by the time this comes out, it would probably be good to get stuff like tomatoes and peppers going indoors. And we could, we could talk a little bit about growing seedlings indoors.

Sure, absolutely.

So the biggest hurdle for growing seedlings indoors is adequate light. If you have a really sunny window, that actually is usually enough. But a lot of people don't have a sunny enough window or enough space to grow the seedlings they want to purely on natural light.

And by sunny enough, does it have to have sun like the whole, the whole day long?

Pretty much, because you lose a lot of sun intensity just coming through a window. So I would say like a unobstructed south facing window is kind of what you need. The kind of window where if you had a cat, the cat would want to like bask in that bright sunlight. That's. There you go. I'm seeing a lovely gray or black cat on the video here, listeners.

I've just brought a cat down who's trying to eat my microphone stand and introduce some annoying background noise. So we'll see if he can be. We can be calm here so that.

That like nice, bright, intense light will grow healthy seedlings. But if it's, you know, obstructed by buildings or trees or whatever, or if it faces a direction other than south, if you're in the northern hemisphere, it's probably not going to be quite bright enough. And an indication of not bright enough light is you get seedlings that are small and weak and they tend to be really tall and skinny because they're like reaching for the light. So if you're, if you've tried growing seedlings in a window and that's kind of what you're getting, you might want to consider some artificial light. And LED grow lights have gotten really

cheap and small too. You can, you can get one that'll go over just a, like, even just like a little six by six kind of seedling planter. Yeah.

So LEDs are usually the way to go because they're cheap and they're pretty durable. And if you accidentally break them, they don't release gross mercury vapor and all that nice stuff. You can use long tube fluorescent, like shop lights. If you already have those or can easily get them for free, they do work quite nicely. And with both of these lights, proximity is really important. You want that light just a few inches away from the seedlings and that's how you're going to get like a lot of light intensity without using tons of power. Like, if you had a gigantic, very powerful light, it could be several feet away and, you know, kind of spread out across the area and still be very effective. But with these inexpensive lights that also conveniently don't draw a ton of power. They just have to be really close.

Okay. Now, Aaron, what if I have a little greenhouse, just like a cute little, like, I don't know, 4x4 5x5 little baby greenhouse. Is that a place that I could start some seedlings in a cold zone right now?

Yeah, absolutely.

Is it going to get enough light?

I mean, that depends on where you know. As long as it's kind of got unobstructed sunlight, that should be great. Something you want to watch out for is a greenhouse will get warm during the day and cause seeds to germinate and start to grow, but they tend to not be very insulative, so they can still get really cold overnight. So it's worth spending like five bucks on a thermometer that will tell you what the overnight low was so that you can more easily monitor that. Because if you have something like tomatoes or something in your little greenhouse and it's regularly getting below freezing at night, they might start to grow and be doing great. And then you get a particularly cold night. And even inside that greenhouse, it might freeze and kill all your seedlings. So just being aware of like how cold it tends to get in that space and acting accordingly. It's especially if you don't have a ton of seedlings in there. It's pretty easy to bring plants in and out of the house. And so if you check your forecast and it's like, oh, it's going to be 15 degrees overnight and my greenhouse is going to freeze solid. Then you know that you need to bring those seedlings in. And if you look at the forecast and it's like, oh, it's going to be 40 overnight, then they can just stay there.

Okay, that sounds exhausting. So hopefully that's not going to continue forever because having to do that thing every day sounds tedious to me.

Yeah, it's not ideal and I try to avoid that, but I know people who. We'll do that with like 20 trays worth of seedlings.

Yeah, Gardener's being honest here. This is our honesty corner. If that sounds tedious to you. Yeah, it is. That's okay.

Yeah. I mean, it's all about scale. And like, you could also put a heater in that greenhouse to prevent it from freezing. Or if it's just like a little cold frame, which is kind of like a mini greenhouse often made of like, scrap wood and an old window or something like that, sometimes all you need to do is throw an old blanket over it and that provides extra insulation and make sure it doesn't freeze overnight. So there's lots, lots of different things that could, could work for that. Another thing about growing seedlings that can go wrong is if they're totally indoors, they're not experiencing any, like, wind or anything. So it can be nice to just give them a little, like, physical movement because that is the stimulus to, like, grow strong stems. And that can be as simple as just brushing your hand across the top of them. Or you can, like, set up a fan near them so that the wind blows on them. And that just makes it a little bit easier to make that transition from being indoors to being outdoors. And that, that transition is called hardening off and is a, an essential step of, of transplanting seedlings that maybe. I guess we could talk about that next. Does that make sense to talk about that one next?

Yeah, yeah, before we, before we jump fully into that next. Just timeline wise. So you started your seedlings. So this, this hardening that we're gonna do is that, you know, a couple weeks later, is that a month later? What's our kind of timeline on that?

So it depends. Hardening off is usually going to come around your last frost date. If you're starting seedlings indoors, you generally want to wait until your last frost to set them out. And how long they've been growing indoors really depends on what species they are. So the things that are real slow, like onions, might be a couple months Old and tomatoes might be like a month old. And if, you know, there's stuff that I wouldn't normally bother to start indoors because it just grows quickly off, off the bat, like squash, say. But if you wanted to start those, you might only start them like a week or two before your last frost date.

Okay. And so if you are listening to this and you're currently in one of the warmer zones, like my zone, you may be at or already past your last frost date and could, in fact, could you would, you know, you probably wouldn't plant them in the ground yet if you're still maybe at risk of a last frost.

Yeah, yeah. You, you, you'd want to wait until, until your last frost date has passed

and then put them in the ground.

Yeah, there are, there are some things that you can plant before your last frost date. Like peas are a great example of something that's just like so cold tolerant and loves to grow in early spring that you can totally plant them before the last frost, not by a lot, but like a week or two.

So if you're in a, if you're in a mid hardiness zone right now, you know, 7, 8, 9, and you are sort of at or just past your last frost, you're, you're probably good to plant peas and very soon good to plant start. It sounds like some squash and certainly a, you know, a 9 or 10, you could be planting those if you're past your frost.

Yes. Yep.

Okay, cool. So, you know, depending on what zone you're in, as you're listening to this, if you're in a colder zone, we're talking about, you know, some indoor seedlings would be the things to plant now. And if you're in a, in a warmer zone, you can actually start direct sowing things. Although I imagine that there's probably a little bit of soil preparation that you want to do in there before you plant seedlings. So let's talk about that a little bit because obviously if you're in a colder zone, that's something you're going to need to be doing in another month or so before you transplant your seedlings. And if you're in a warmer zone and you can direct seed now, you want to make sure your beds are ready. So garden beds, boxes, you know, area in the ground, whatever. So what should that look like in terms of sort of prepping the ground?

Yeah, so before planting, I would normally kind of look for large chunks of debris, kind of last year's dead annuals or anything that kind of accumulated over the Winter. And a lot of times that stuff can kind of. If it's, if it's like dead plant material on the surface and it doesn't have any indication of disease or pest issues, like if it's really gross looking or the plants died of a disease, you want to get rid of that. But if it's just like, oh, this plant was killed by the cold, then it can kind of just stay as mulch. If you want to kind of feed the soil, a nice layer of compost is, is always a nice prep. I like to kind of assess compaction, which you can usually do by just kind of taking one shovel full of soil. And if it's nice and fluffy and easy to work, then compaction is probably not an issue and you probably don't need to disturb the soil.

How deep are you looking at for compaction? Like, do you just want a couple, couple inches that are nice and loose or do you need to be like a foot down this loose?

The more you have, kind of the better because it just gives you more soil that's available for the roots of the plants that you're growing to kind of get into. Okay. If there's some sort of artificial limiting factor, like the bottom of a raised bed, then it'd be great to have no real compaction down to that level. If, if you're working straight in the ground, you could potentially go deeper trying to figure out what, what is the sort of limiting factor is, is a great thing to do. And you know, at some point it's, it's a good idea to just dig a hole and see what's down there. Because if there, if there is compaction that's easily remediated, that's kind of the lowest hanging fruit of gaining more soil depth.

Okay.

So if, if you have like a couple inches of nice topsoil and then there's just like a layer of compaction that you can break up, you might have gained, you know, 100% more soil just by breaking up that compaction. Okay. And there's two, like, very easy ways to break up compaction. There's mechanical, which means you take a shovel or a fork and you break up the compaction by physically moving it. And then there's also this idea of bio tillage, which is where you use plants to break up the compaction. So if I wanted to break up some compaction using plants, what I would do is sow something like daikon, which is a type of radish or a forage radish, and I would let Those plants grow as big as they want to grow, which might be as much as 12 or 14 inches worth of taproot. And then I would just let them die and rot in the soil. And, and everywhere that that taproot breaks through the compacted layer of soil, it's not only going to break up the compaction, but it's going to leave like kind of this core of rotten taproot. So you're adding carbon to the soil, you're feeding all the living organisms that live in the soil and you're physically breaking up the compaction. And that can be a really nice way to kind of restore a growing area that's become compacted.

Does that create any risk of introducing disease or pest into, into your soil by having that, you know, rotting food?

Typically no.

Okay.

Actually some kinds of radishes are, can, can be helpful for getting rid of soil borne diseases.

Oh wow.

And there's a few factors going on there, but a lot of soil borne diseases exist like especially in anaerobic environments, so environments with low or no oxygen. And by doing that sort of bio tillage, you're letting more oxygen into the soil and hopefully reducing the likelihood of those types of soil borne diseases.

That's really cool. I'm in the process of sort of some unlearning and I imagine other folks are maybe this way too, depending on if you grew up gardening at all, where you know, the, the beginning of the growing season was, you know, getting out the little tiller and really grinding up all of the soil that was there and getting everything out of it that may have been left in the winter and then covering it all in a fresh layer of usually manure based compost and maybe mixing that in a little bit. And so I'm still definitely learning about what kinds of things are actually beneficial to leave in the soil. You know, the kinds of things you can mulch with like leaves and whatnot. And so that's really cool about the radishes. That's the thing that you can actually use to nourish the soil.

Yeah. And tillage can, can be a useful tool, especially if you're trying to like break new ground, like remove like lots of weeds and stuff like that. That's another thing I wanted to mention of like spring prep is are there plants growing in that area that you don't want there? Untilage would be one way to like knock those back if there's just a few of them. Doing a really thorough hand weeding before, before planting new stuff can be very helpful and Then there's also a technique called sheet mulching that I have found to be very effective.

Tell me more.

And sheet mulching is where you use newspaper or cardboard to smother existing plants so that you can plant new stuff there.

Okay. And then this time of year, like, you put down the, you know, newspaper cardboard this time. Okay. All right, cool.

Yeah. Early. Early spring is absolutely ideal, and you can do it well into the summer. It's. It's not as effective if you do it in the fall, because what tends to happen is if you cover up plants in the fall, they go dormant, and then they're just kind of chilling over the winter, and. And the sheet layer degrades over the winter, and then they just come up right through it.

Okay.

Now or very soon, plants are going to be, like, busting out of the ground trying to grow. And if they encounter this barrier, then they get smothered pretty easily. And you can either do that as, like, a prep for later and just leave it alone. But I am generally not that patient and would prefer to just, like, poke a hole in the sheet layer and plant directly through it. And I find that to be the best option also, because not only do you not have to wait a long time, but then you have this layer of cardboard or newspaper that's really suppressing weeds a lot for usually about one season. So you get this much lower maintenance area once you sheet mulch it.

Okay. So it's like you get your bed with whatever little bit of prep you need to do it, and then cover it and say, a sheet of cardboard, and then you cut a hole in the cardboard where you want to put your seeds or your plant starts that you have. Am I understanding that right?

Yep, that's correct. And if you're transplanting, you just have to cut a hole and make a little indent in the soil and go ahead and put your transplant in. If you're direct sowing, like, let's say, a row of carrots through a fresh sheet mulch, I've found it works much better if you make a pretty good furrow, like, you know, a sort of groove in the soil that's a couple inches deep, and just fill that with fresh compost. Because if there's. If you're bothering to sheet mulch, it's probably because there's a decent amount of weeds. And if you just plant. If you just cut a hole straight in the cardboard and direct so straight through that, the weeds are probably going to find their way through that. That opening and get Going before whatever you're trying to grow. So just giving them a little bit of room with a little bit of fresh compost is that.

And that's on top of the sheet.

Then what, what I would do is cut through the sheet and like dig out a tiny bit.

Okay.

Of a row and then fill that with compost and direct seed into that. And that works quite nicely.

Gotcha. So how do you know how big of a hole to cut? And I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be like pedantic, but I'm imagining. Okay. Whenever I plant squash, I leave a lot of room in the bed for squash. Right. Because the plants will grow big. But in the meantime, then I'm fighting a bunch of weeds in my, in my above ground planter as the, as the squash are starting to come up. And so this sheeting idea sounds amazing of, you know, I don't have to fight those, those weeds because while I'm waiting for the squash to kind of get big enough to take over the space and drown them out. But I need to make sure obviously that I, that I have a big enough hole for the squash or whatever else it is to, to grow and get water to it. And that's going to be different for different plants, I imagine. So how do you know there's sort of an ideal or.

I would say there's a, a pretty wide range that, that could work, but probably between like, you know, 1 and 3 inches. So if it's, if I was planting, like, let's use squash as an example, I would probably cut a hole that's like four inches, like a four inch circle and put like three seeds in it. And those seeds would come up pretty crowded. Like they're going to be close to each other, but there's going to be lots and lots of room for the roots to grow underneath the cardboard. And then as they grow up, they'll kind of spread out to fill the space on top of the cardboard and you'll have only this tiny area that you'll need to weed.

Okay. And that gives enough like, adequate room for, you know, the. It's not a trunk, but you know what I mean when I say the trunk to get bigger and also to get enough like water and such into that space.

Yep. And it's also worth mentioning when you're putting down a couple of details about sheet mulching. Lots of cardboard has plastic tape on it or plastic glue. It's nice to remove that so you don't get lots of plastic in your soil. If if you're doing a big space or a lot of sheet mulching, bike boxes or appliance boxes are really nice to use because they're huge and they tend to be stapled together, so you don't have as much plastic mess to deal with. And also you want to be sheet mulching soil that's, like, pretty wet because especially with big pieces of cardboard, you are going to be negatively affecting, like, water penetration into the soil.

Okay.

But it also, like, really, really reduces evaporation off the soil. So as long as it goes onto soil that's, like, nice and moist, it's usually great. But if the soil's really dry when it goes on, then it can be hard for it to get adequately rehydrated for plants to grow once there's sheet mulch on top of it.

Oh, okay. All right. That's very good info. Very good info. And this is you'd use sheet molding and probably any sort of hardiness zone whenever it's time to actually be planting. Right? Yeah, Specific. Okay.

Yeah. No, I think it works in lots of different places. And there's. There's some place or there's some circumstances where it doesn't work. Well. One is, like, steep slopes. It can be really hard to get it to stay on the slope and not just, like, slide away. Another one is there are certain annoying plants that are virtually immune to sheet mulching, specifically quack grass and Japanese knotweed.

Okay. I don't think those are problems where I live, so tell me, tell me a little more about those.

So lucky.

Well, we've. We've got our own fun things like bindweed and thistle that. That are pains in the butt here.

So, yeah, at least with the thistles we have around here, sheet mulching works awesome on those. Bindweed is hit or miss, depending on which bindweed you're talking about, because, like, so many common names, there's like, 10 different plants that are called bindweed. But quack grass is a weedy rhizome spreading perennial grass. And the reason it's impossible to sheet mulch is the terminal bud that's on the end of the rhizome is, like, right, razor sharp. And so it just pokes right through the cardboard. When you try and sheet mulch, it knocks it back a little bit, but it tends to come back through sheet mulching pretty aggressively. And Japanese knotweed is just extremely difficult to do anything with. And so it just tends to rise, dome up through it, or if it's, you know, if you put a heavy enough layer on, the rhizome will just hit that and just run sideways and then pop up at the edge.

Okay, gotcha.

But for, like, turf grasses and most. Most weeds, sheet mulching can be very effective.

Okay. Yeah. Nothing's. Nothing's ever the solution for everything.

Totally.

That's good. Okay. So that's sort of. We talked about what to do here, like, your first sort of spring steps. I think in all the kinds of zones and those that are in a colder zone, you've kind of. You gotten lucky here and got to hear about sort of first and second steps to do. But we can talk a little bit more about the. The next steps after that, if you want to. We won't go too much further for y', all, because we're really just wanting to focus on what to do for the spring, what you should work on right now. And. And then maybe we can talk, Aaron, to coming in again in a couple of months to talk about, you know. You know, now that your plants are growing and healthy, what do you. What should you do next? But we're gonna stay focused on just the first couple of steps here. So seedlings, if you're in a colder zone, direct seeding possible. If you're in a warmer zone and some amount of bed prep. Yeah. So what's. What comes next after that? If you've got your, you know, little seedlings starting to come up out of the ground or you're. When you're ready to transplant. See seedlings. Talk. Talk to me about that.

Yeah. Hardening off is an important step that comes between starting seedlings indoors and putting them in the ground outside. And seedlings that have been started indoors often look great. And if you put them directly outside, they are, unfortunately, tender little babies that any sort of thing will kill immediately. And the. This is just like they've kind of grown up in this environment where it only shifts a few degrees between night and day and the light is not super bright, and there's no wind, and then they go out into the real world, and all of these things are totally different. And basically, you just need a few days, ideally about a week, to slowly introduce outdoor conditions. And basically, you just want to take them while they're still in pots and put them outside in the kind of growing conditions where you're going to be transplanting them for like, an hour on day one, and then you bring it back inside, and then the next day, maybe it's like an hour and a half or two hours, and it's it doesn't. You know, there's not, like, a formula you have to follow, but it's basically a little bit outside the first day, and then a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more until you're leaving them out all day, and then you can plant them.

Okay.

And it. It is ideal if you put them outside for the first couple days in not direct sunlight. Because actually, sunburning seedlings is a really common mistake, because growing under, like, an LED grow light or in a window is really not the same as, like, the full UV blast of, like, a bright, sunny day. So you can put them out in full sun if there's even a little bit of cloud cover. But for those first two, two to three days, it might be nice to put them in, like, partial shade if it's, like, a bright, clear day.

Yeah. Okay. You can sunburn your little seedlings. That's adorable and very sad, and I wish I were a graphic artist, because that makes me want to draw something.

Yes. All living things have, like, a lot in common, it turns out. And, yes, we do. Even though we're not super close related to plants. There's some, like, very, very obvious, like, similarities of, like, oh, they got too much sun, and Nara got sunburned.

Yeah. In my indigenous culture, we. We tend to refer to other living beings as the more than human species. So that includes plants and animals as the. As the more than human things that are living out there in the world.

Yes. Many. Many of our problems are shared in common.

Yeah.

Ranging from the mundane as a sunburn to unfortunate forces destroying our biosphere that we all share.

Indeed. Okay, so not sunburning your plants. Is there an ideal time of day to do that? Like, midday is the best time to let them out in the yard for an hour or two or anything like that?

I kind of do it whenever I get to it. It doesn't really matter. That, like, intense sunburning thing is most likely gonna happen at midday. So if, you know, if you've got tender little babies that you're just putting out for their first hour in the real world, maybe not in the middle of the day, but morning or evening, whatever, you're just trying to ease them into those new conditions.

Makes sense. So let's say you're one of our many good friends who works a job, like perhaps a nurse, and is working 10 or 12 hour shifts, maybe three, four days in a row, and so getting them out there in that progression is a little harder, at least, you know, for a full week. Maybe they've got more days off or whatever to do it. But is there any sort of alternative way of hardening or things that they can use to sort of help with that process, even though they can't necessarily be home to be moving plants in and out?

Ooh, that's a, that's a good question. Yes, A, a alternative way to do it would be to set them out in a shady spot and then move them into a less and less shaded location. So there might be like the north side of a building in the northern hemisphere is going to be like pretty much shade all day. So you could, as long as it's not going to freeze, you could set seedlings out there all day and they wouldn't really get any sun and they'd probably be pretty sheltered from wind and that would be a pretty safe alternative. And then maybe after a day of that, maybe they might move to like the east side of a building where they would get some morning sun. You get like morning sun. But then by noon they'd be kind of in the shade of the building and afternoon they'd be totally in the shade of the building.

Okay. Yeah, so there's some, there's some workarounds for. It doesn't have to be exactly this or that.

Yeah, totally. And the greenhouse also is, can be a nice hardening off opportunity. Greenhouse plastic or glass tends to cut enough uv. And greenhouses, there's usually not a lot of wind in. So going from all the way indoors to a greenhouse can be an intermediate step as well.

Okay, gotcha.

If you have that piece of infrastructure.

Right. And, and greenhouse is an interesting term not to get off on too much of a tangent here because you know, greenhouse gets used a little bit as a catch all sometimes for the kind of plant growing structures that people talk about. But in fact, greenhouse is something very specific and there are many different kinds of things. So you know, you might get one of those sort of metal framed shelves with the green coverings that you can close all the way around. And those are advertised as a quote unquote greenhouse. But they're more like a little plant growing shelters. You know what I'm talking about, Aaron, when I, when I describe that, and those are, you know, those are more popular. I know my mom had used those when she lived in a more northern, colder climate to help with getting seedlings started too. So what, when we say greenhouse, we may or may not be talking about exactly the same thing that y' all are thinking of. So we just want to put, put that out There, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And there's lots of different sort of plant focused structures that can, can be useful for this sort of thing. Ranging from that like basically shelf with a covering to a cold frame which is usually, you know, kind of a wooden frame with a clear lid on it, to a hoop house which is like an sort of arch based, often covered in like sheet plastic and on, on up from there.

Right. And that's the one that I feel like most commonly. Like if you're out driving about or whatever and you go past a farm and you see those hoop houses, lot of people go, oh, greenhouse. And actually technically it's not. That is not a greenhouse, it's a hoop house or it's a shade house. And it's actually kind of a fairly different structure and purpose. But anyway, sorry, I work at a farm in the summer and, and we sometimes get a little, we not meaning me get a little pedantic about the terms there, but in terms of like telling people what to do with their, with their growing, you know, it is, it is different. So the little like green structure thing I was talking about, I remember one of my mom's techniques for hardening it off was to like roll up the bottom of the opening side of that a little bit at a time or on certain days maybe have it all the way open for a bit. So it's like three quarters surrounded with that, the, the covered side aimed towards the southern facing and then maybe the door part open as part of the hardening process. So if you've got something outside like that, hopefully it comes with some instructions to tell you a little about that. You can certainly also look up sort of the hardening process that might go. Unless you object, Aaron, in any way.

Nope. Like what, whatever it, you know, kind of whatever works to make those, those shifts happen a little bit more gradually is, is all it usually takes.

Okay then, last question. What happens? What happens if you don't harden off those little seedlings and you just go straight from inside your house and you pluck them in the ground? Are you totally going to ruin and lose all your plants?

I have done that many times.

That can happen. That's a real risk.

And I have ruined many plants luckily. It's like a bad thing to plant out unhardened off seedlings. And it usually will set you back. They often don't die. So more common is like all the newest, most tender growth will die back because it gets wind burned or sunburned or just damaged to the point where it dies and then you'll get like, regrowth from a lower growth point.

Oh, wait. So actual last question. If you buy plant starts from, you know, say, a farm, or if you go to a, you know, a Lowe's or whatever, and you. And you get some plant starts from there, is it safe to assume that those have been, well, hardened, or should you do some additional hardening before you stick them in the ground?

Um, they're almost always hardened off by the time you get them. Um, I would say it would be pretty irresponsible to sell someone unhardened off seedlings, um, unless you were very clear with them, like, oh, you gotta treat these in this special way. Wouldn't. Wouldn't hurt to ask whoever you're buying them from just in case. But rule of thumb, they should be hardened off when you purchase them.

That's probably especially safe if they're already sort of outdoors in the place you buy them. So if you buy them.

Yeah, you can also observe, like, oh, these are out on a table in full sun where I picked them up, and they're probably good to go.

Yeah. I'm also thinking, I guess, about, like, farmer's markets. You know, if you go to a farmer's market and buy some, you can, you can check on that too, because possibly, I'm not disparaging any farmers here whatsoever, but possibly they pulled them out of a greenhouse or whatever or shade house that morning and then brought them to the farmer's market. So. Yeah, probably not.

But maybe even if they were in a hoop house, they're. They're probably okay to go out. It's like the. In a human house where, where they would experience such. Such cushy conditions that they would be on unready for the real world.

Oh, okay. So it's a real pampered princess of plants living inside with the people. They need a little. Gotcha. Okay. Okay.

Because if you think about, like, the. The temperature shifts and the intensity of light and stuff in the. In a hoop house, it's more similar to. To the outdoors than.

Yeah, than in the house house. That makes a lot of sense.

Grow light.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you for that clarification.

So, absolutely.

I think we've done a really good job covering the sort of early spring things to do with the garden and the different zones and, you know, kind of first and second steps of. Of how people can be getting their gardens ready. And this is a really nice time, you know, if there's some sunshine in an afternoon, if you're not allergic to the sunshine, to maybe step out and start doing a little bit of that work, thinking about your plants, getting in touch with your dirt. I. I say this because I know it's very healing for me, coming out of wintertime and the cold and the dark, to be able to start engaging with land. And I promote it to others often because I think it does have those healing properties for all people to be connected with the earth. And so I hope that others will feel inspired and encouraged to go do that.

Absolutely. Planting is an act of hope, and we certainly need some of that these days. I also want to just mention the idea of planting calendars around here. There's an organization called mofka, the main organic farmers and gardeners association that has a very nice planting calendar. And it's kind of broken down by, like, weeks. And it's like, oh, in, you know, the first week in March, it's time to start these plants indoors. And it's, you know, the first week of May. You should start this indoor and start this outdoor and transplant this. It kind of takes the thinking out of it. You can just look at it and be like, oh, I want to grow that. I should plant it now. Unfortunately, they are only useful locally, so you could probably Google planting calendar and then maybe the state where you live or something like that. But there's so much information out there. You can probably find something similar for your region, and those can be very helpful.

And a lot of. A lot of state universities put those out, especially if they have, like, an extension service kind of a thing. We'll have will have a planting calendar. Depending on whether or not you've got, you know, some microclimates in your state, you may have to find a more smaller regional one. But yeah, and don't. They're very helpful. But also, don't be discouraged by them either. If you're like, oh, shoot, I'm past the date for such and such thing. That doesn't mean that you can't still go out and plant it or start it. It means you might have less of a yield on your plant. You might not get very much out of it before the end of its cycle. But. But, you know, just because it says planted in February and it's now April, that doesn't mean you can't necessarily plant it at all.

There's also a handy chart in the Fedco Seeds catalog that has all the different crops and they have a nice, like, range of months for, like, when you could plant this. And it also gives you seed depth and spacing.

Oh, I love that.

Which is just handy information. And I will provide links to those if you want to put them in the show notes.

Great. Absolutely. We'll have the lovely and talented Inman include those in the show notes. Aaron, is there anything else that you want to shout out, Promote, encourage, et cetera before we sign off here?

See, you could check out my podcast about plants Propaganda by the seed. You could buy plants or seeds or related things from me at edgewoodnursery.com you could follow me on Instagram or Facebook. Edgewoodnursery.

Wonderful. Well, thanks again so much for being on with us and being our friend and our partner in growth and acts of resistance.

I'm always happy to collaborate with Live like the World is dying.

Oh, man, you're the best.

Would be. Would be thrilled to come back for a mid or late season gardening chat if that's something you want to do.

Okay, you heard it here, folks. He's committed to doing it. And so that's. I'm gonna. I'm gonna make it happen.

All right, Awesome. I look forward to it.

All right, we'll see you soon then. Thanks.

All right, thanks for having me on.

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