Show: Master Gardener Station: KNCO File: 10:24.mp3 Air date: 2026-10-24 Source: OpenAI whisper-1 · shrunk from 123.6 MB to 24.7 MB, split into 8 pieces --- transcript --- 30. As Nevada County Master Gardeners, our mission is to inspire foothill home gardeners to embrace research-based sustainable gardening practices so our community and environment can thrive. I want to emphasize that this is research-based gardening practices from the University of California Cooperative Extension and this is a two-way radio program and we're here for you. Please call me today at 530-477-5626, that's 530-477-KNCO, or you can text me at 530-913-4685 to ask a question or to share with with me and others what is happening in your garden. If you've got a picture of something that's going on that you're not quite sure what's happening or even if it's a picture of something that you're proud of that you found out new or whatever, please send it to me and we'll take a look at it and see what's going on. So again the phone number is 530-477-5626 or 530-477-KNCO and then the text line is 530-913-4685. Again you can send me a photo for something like that. So who are we? Who are our Master Gardeners? What do we do? A lot of you already listen in and we appreciate the fact that you do so, but for any of you who are listening in for the first time and you're not sure who we are and what we do, we began actually in the mid-70s. The farm advisors in California were starting to get a lot of questions from people who had maybe one tomato plant or they had roses and they had some little bugs on there and so they called the farm advisors and said what's going on and they are pretty busy because those the farm advisors do a lot of advising for farmers, duh, and so they started this program where we volunteer and they give us I guess training, schooling, whatever you want to call it, so that we can go out to the public. We have a hotline that you can call 530-273-0919. You can leave a message 24 7 and ask us what's going on in your garden if there's a problem. We have workshops pretty much every Saturday, not during the winter time. This is not a good time for that, but a lot of times we do workshops on anything from composting to maple trees to seed saving and et cetera and they're all free and a lot of them are given at our demonstration garden and if you're not familiar with our demonstration garden, that's 1036 West Main Street in Grass Valley. It's behind the NID office across from Lyman Gilmore School and it's a wonderful area the NID people have graciously allowed us to use. I don't know exactly, I think it's three quarters, maybe a full acre, and we have a demonstration garden there where we have raised beds, we have an orchard area, we have an oak habitat, we do composting, and this is where we do a lot of our workshops. We obviously have the radio program. We also have a speakers bureau and you can call 530-273-0919, leave a message. Master Gardener will return your call and arrange a speaker for your group. If you have a gardening group that you belong to and you would like one of us to come and talk about roses, I'm not so sure we have anybody who talks about bonsais, but I do know that at one point I did a workshop on sharpening bonsai tools and that was a fun workshop for me. I went down to Lake Wildwood and I spent an afternoon with some very nice people and we sharpened tools and we had a wonderful time. If you've seen the daffodils along the roadways and other areas like the cemeteries particularly that have lots of daffodils in them, we are the ones who did that and we take donations and we dig them up in the spring, dig up the land that is, and then we plant the daffodils. We also have a garden guide and this is written by Nevada County Master Gardeners specifically for Nevada County. It's available at local nurseries, bookstores, our office in the Veterans Building, and we also sell it when we're doing our workshops. So you can get that and again it's written by us Master Gardeners specifically for this area so it's very detailed as to things. I mean it includes how to build raised beds, there's sections on blueberries, there's how to deal with deer which is difficult as we all know. We also have a Curious Gardener free quarterly publication done in conjunction with Placer County. Subscribe online at ncmg.ucanr.org slash curiousgardener and it will be sent to your email address. So those are some of the things that that we do. We also have a spring plant sale and I think a lot of you know about that. This is very well attended. That's usually around Mother's Day in May, the Saturday of that day. We also have information booth at growers markets at various places. Harmon home and garden shows in Nevada County. I love the Nevada County Fair. We always have a booth there and at that fair we do little sprouts. We have a compost pile that we talk about and we give small half an hour workshops at that. We used to do a tomato tasting so there's no point in talking about that but hopefully we'll get back to that. So what's happening in your garden in October? Obviously things are really winding down. I have one cherry tomato that is still giving me tomatoes. It hasn't gotten cold enough. I doubt that it's going they're going to ripen up on that but I'm getting ready to to pick them with the ones that are left and put them in a small bag. This is a good time to start thinking about fall, actually winter. Plant seeds of spinach, peas, chives, green onions. This is a good time to divide and plant your garlic bulbs. Also cool season annuals. This is a good time for me when I plant my winter cover crop in the garden and I like to do this. We're going to take a short break and we will be right back. 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Once okayed, your event will be added to the community calendar on knco.com and added to many of the local area chamber of commerce websites as well. It's free and available to you from KNCO News Talk 830. Welcome back to the Master Gardeners and Friends radio show on KNCO 830 on your AM dial. I'm Master Gardener Paul Duprat and I am here to hopefully answer any questions that you might have. A number to call, please call me 530-477-5626 or 530-477-KNCO. If you've got a picture of something that you'd like to show to me, text me at 530-913-4685. So I was talking a little bit about garlic and this is a good time to plant, divide your garlic bulbs, plant the cloves in rich well-drained soil and to prevent the bulbs from rotting, plant them in a location that receives little to no summer water because they will rot with that. Add a little bit of soft rock phosphate to the bottom of the planting hole and water until the rains begin. Water lightly, you don't need to really rot them out. So it's cool season annuals, this is also a good time. Again, a cover crop really helps your garden. I do that where I plant my vegetables and it really does help. They're nitrogen fixing so what happens is as the plants grow, they put nitrogen back down into your soil where you plant your vegetables. The key is that you need to right before in the spring when they start to flower, you need to cut them and put them back into the soil because otherwise at that point they will start dragging the nitrogen back out. Clean up your spent annuals and vegetables, remove fruit and leaves from under the trees and you really want to compost. Hopefully you have a compost pile, they're pretty easy and only pest free plant debris. If you have a lawn, we really recommend that. A lawn is a real water grubber but if you do have one, now it's time to mow, get it really low, scratch the bare areas with a rake, seed and top dress and water it regularly until it rains. We got a little bit of rain, I don't know how much you got where you are. I live in Altus here, I got a little over a quarter of an inch over the last couple of days. It wasn't really that much but it was nice to have. You can help control corn earworms, tomato hornworms by cultivating or rototilling your plant residues into this year's planting beds. Don't put anything infected into your compost pile, put it in your garbage. So, another thing that I would like to speak about and I don't know if any of you have heard about this but I had the privilege a couple of weeks ago to go on a kind of a field trip with an organization called the Felix Gillet Organization. For those of you who don't know, and I did not know this until a couple of years ago, Felix Gillet was a gardener, nursery man is in the 1800s and he was from France and he came over here and during the mining era, he went back to France and got a whole bunch of fruit trees and brought them here and sold them to not only the miners but anyone who had a small homestead. And many of these trees have been neglected for years and the Felix Gillet Institute, they travel around and try to get permission from anybody who owns some property and these old fruit trees, they take cuttings from them and they sell them and a lot of times they are absolutely delicious because they are old types, not brand new types. And during the workshop, I was told that a lot of them are actually resistant to fire blight which I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a little bit because I'm having problems with my one apple tree and the fire blight is not good on it but these seem to be because of their old timiness, which is a silly word, but they seem to be somewhat resistant to it. Obviously, they've had it but if you have a chance, look up this organization and support them if you can. They drive around and like I said, they go to all these different places and try to find old fruit trees that have been neglected for the most part and it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So I'm going to talk a little bit about fire blight and I'm not sure if any of you have seen that but it's mostly apples and pears, although they can be on crab apples, hawthorn, Juneberry, serviceberry, loquat, mountain ash, the disease can actually destroy limbs and even entire shrubs or trees and it's called fire blight because it's a bacteria and it actually turns the leaves and the branches dark brown to black and the only way that you can, I guess, you're never going to get rid of it because once it's in your tree, it's in your tree but you can cut it. You cut it back a good 10, 12, 14 inches below where it's still good wood and you need to take your spears, your cutters and dip them in a 10% bleach water, 10% bleach to water and between each and every cut because otherwise you will go ahead and spread it. So that's fire blight. I talked a little bit about workshops and we still have a couple of workshops coming up. There's one today out at the demo garden and that's on composting actually. That's today, October 24th, 10 to 12 so if you want to listen to us on your car radio, you could always just drive over there and that's a wonderful workshop. Composting is good for everything. November 7th, there's a workshop on fall fruit tree pruning again at the demo garden and we have a couple of people who are very good at pruning and they will do a two-hour workshop on how to prune your fruit trees and when we do this, we also ask that you go ahead and write down what workshops you would like us to do. We don't want to just do the same ones every year but sometimes we go years between having done some of them so it's always nice to say, oh we haven't done a maple workshop, oh we haven't done a seed saving workshop for a while. So let us know what you think about that. On November 14th, this is one that I have a couple of blueberries that are not doing well so I intend to go to that one. It's again at the demo garden and it's on blueberries and this is a wonderful area for blueberries and also for the apple trees. Any questions, please give me a call. I'm here by myself today and so I'm blithering and I would love a call. Ask me a question so I can look something up. Let's go on to what's going on in your garden again. We talked a little bit about what's doing right now and of course this weather is so bizarre. It's been really warm, now it's finally cooled. I'm hoping that we get some more rain but not on my computer, I'm not seeing anything for the next 10 days except I think there's a chance next Wednesday or something. This is a good time to work compost, fur, bark, rice hulls, wood chips into the soil. Check to see that the growing conditions have not greatly changed. Just rake up all your leaves and fallen fruit, dispose of any diseased fruit, plant parts. It's just a good time to get everything clean and ready and like I said, I do a tool workshop. This is a good time for me, once you get your garden spruced up, if you will, everything up off the ground and the ground raked and you've got hopefully the bad pupas and bugs out of your soil, it's a good time to get your tools out and clean them off, wash them off with water and a brush and just knock off all the mud, get all the rust off that you can. I like to use, tools and plants and soil don't like petroleum products too much. It's not good for them so I use a plant based lubricant, you can get this, it's a spray that you use for cooking and just a quick little bit of that, wipe it on your tools and it will help protect that. So we talked about the workshops. Okay, we're going to take another break, please, 530-477-5626, 530-477-KNCO. Ace is the place for the helpful hardware folks. Need a hand with your next painting project? Your neighbors at BNC Ace Home and Garden Center are always ready to go that extra mile to help. 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I talked a little bit about fire blight, and I talked about Félix Gilet, and I'd like to mention a little bit about how you can look up problems in your garden if you have a computer, which most people now really do. There's an IPM website. You put in IPM UC Davis, and it will come up, and it's got all kinds of different things. Put in whatever plant it is that you're concerned about. If you're concerned about an apple tree, if you're concerned about a blueberry, if you're concerned about gophers, voles, moles, and it will give you every kind of information that will help you figure out how to deal. First of all, maybe what your problem is if you're not quite sure. I do know that we get questions about, well, do I have a mole or a vole or a gopher? Because if you can't see the darn thing, then you're not quite sure. But IPM UC Davis, and you can look it up, and they will give you, there's pictures and all kinds of really good information. Again, if you have another problem, then you can give us a call at our call number. So that would be another thing that you can do. So I know that this is the fall and winter is coming, but one of the things that I had learned about in the last little bit is using straw bales as a medium. I don't have a whole lot of room in my garden, and I've been using some containers. I have one raised bed, but I really don't have a lot of deer-proofed area to deal with. So I tried this, and I had a pretty good luck with it. And you're using a straw bale. So the bale that I got was rice straw. And so I had a heck of a time. I brought it home. It's pretty heavy. I'm getting a little bit older, and it wasn't fun to drag around. I really had a hard time digging into it, which I'm going to get to in a minute, to get to where I could really plant something. But I had a friend say, why don't you just use your chainsaw and dig around in it? If it's not quite as thick as mine, this may work okay with you. So you want to dig a little bit of a hole in it. Soak the straw with water, and you add nitrogen. Moisture and nitrogen interacting with the straw, it starts to decompose the bale, and that's what you want. Living organisms such as bacteria, fungi, mold, insects, and worm metabolizing and digesting the straw, slowly it turns it into soil, and you need to start this early in the spring. And the chart that I have is pretty well detailed. It's a 12 to 17 to 20 day process. So day one, traditional fertilizer, a half a cup with lots of water. You want to saturate that bale. Organic fertilizer, three cups. Half a cup of traditional fertilizer, three cups of organic. Water it in really well. Day two, let it sit. You skip it, but you do water it. You don't add any fertilizer, you just water it in. Day three, again, you do another half cup of, if you're using traditional fertilizer, or organic fertilizer, three cups. And you wash it in really well. Day four, you skip it again. You give it a day of rest. Let it soak. Hopefully you're getting some sun on it, and the straw is starting to dissolve, or actually metabolize. So day five, half a cup, again, of traditional fertilizer, three cups of organic. Warm water. Now you're not using your tap water, your hose water. You want to kind of warm it up a little bit. Not hot, but you want to get it warm. Day six, you skip it, but you still put warm water on it. Day seven, you go down in fertilizer from a half a cup to one quarter cup, and the organic fertilizer, one and a half cups. Warm water, again, warm. You want to really start getting those bacteria and things starting to percolate. Day seven, quarter cup of regular, one and a half cups of organic. Warm water, still using warm water. Day eight, same thing. Quarter cup, one and a half cups of organic. Warm water. Day nine, same thing. So three days in a row, you're going to be doing the warm water with fertilizer. Day 10, you're going to up it to one cup, and you want to make sure you get some 10-10-10. That's NPK, 10-10-10 fertilizer. Or three cups with just P and K, and water to wash in the fertilizer. This can just be your hose water if you want. Day 11, you skip it, but you keep it moist. By this time, you should be starting to feel a little bit of heat out of that thing. Day 12, traditional fertilizer, you can go ahead and plant. You've dug a hole in that thing. You've a little bed of potting soil to hold the moisture atop the bale until the germination. Like I said, I used a chainsaw because it when I first did this, I'm raking it with an old hay hook, and I was having a tough time with it. So you want to get yourself a hole in the middle of that bale and put a little bit of potting soil, hold the moisture in until germination. The heat generated by the decomposing straw allows you to plant two to four weeks earlier than if you're planting in the ground. And continue to water it because it will go down through that plant, I'm sorry, through the bale itself. Water, water, and watch. And that will hopefully start to germinate. So once the bales are fertilized, they're ready for planting. High quality soil that's mixed with some compost. This is what the holes you fill with so you can anchor the seedlings because you don't want to put a seed in there. Or you can, but if you do direct seeding, apply several inches of the mix to the top of the bale. Balanced fertilizers, 10-10-10 is really good. And I like worm castings. That's a 3-1-2. Alfalfa meal is a 2-1-2. You don't want to use a slow release fertilizer. If you want to give it a boost at the beginning, you can do a high nitrogen 29-0-4. That's a lawn starter. Ammonium nitrate is, I wouldn't recommend that, 34. I really like, soybean meal is a balanced 7-7-2. Bat guano is 10-3-1. And this really works pretty well as far as I know. So that's pretty much what you're doing. You want to keep the fertilizer on it, and you want to water it. Keep it wet. Hopefully it starts to, you can feel the bale start to warm up. So and then once it starts to grow, then you can pretty much tell what you need to do. So that's a little bit about hay bale gardening. I'd like to talk a little bit more about the IPM, because I think that's so important. Everybody, at least that I know of, we have pests. I have people who have gophers. People who have dogs or outdoor cats don't have as much of a problem. But if you're like me, I don't have that. So I go to my IPM quite a bit, and it works for me. It's a very, very good asset for me. So getting up into almost November, this is the end of October pretty much. It's a good time to start thinking about if you're going to plant a tree. Good time to shop for trees, shrubs, vines with fall color. Chinese pistachios, maples. I love, I have a couple of maples, and they are so showy this time of year. Crepe myrtles, hopefully you've trimmed them. Crepe myrtles, the flowers come on new growth. So you want to prune those in the fall. And again, we have a workshop on next Saturday on pruning fruit trees. And I know that Kevin will talk a little bit about pruning crepe myrtles. He calls it crepe myrtle. So smoke trees are great to plant. I have one that is starting to come along pretty good. And it's a real showy, showy tree. Grapes, Virginia creeper, this is a good time to start planting flowers. It's almost, again, November. Plant perennials, spring flowering bulbs. Plant prairie root artichokes, garlic, onion bulbs, green onions. Plant your seeds of peas, parsley, and spinach if you're into that. California native plants, so this is a good time to fertilize cool season grasses. Flowers and vegetables with a balanced fertilizer. Keep a bucket full of mixed compost and aged manure if you can find it to scatter around the roots of any plant that's not its best. Prune, this is a good time to get in there and prune dead or broken branches from shrubs and trees. Just clean up everything. Pick up what's left of the summer vegetable garden, remove dead annuals, rake the leaves. We went through this. Control the cutworms, tomato hornworms, rototilling in the previous season's growing beds. This is a good time, if you have peaches and nectarines, maybe sprayed with copper sulfate to control peach leaf curl. So that's another good thing that you can do. Divide the perennials by lifting them with a spading fork, separating overgrown clumps. Separate more delicate root systems by hand. Add organic material to the soil and replant. Again, and this is not to keep going over it, but this is a good time to put your garlic in. This is, get it planted in, get it watered in, get it ready for the winter. But again, summertime, plant it where it's not going to get a whole lot of automatic water in the summertime. The first time I planted garlic, I wasn't a master gardener, and I put it in and it was automatically watered. And I lost a lot of the bulbs. So we're going to take another break. Please give me a call, 530-477-5626. ♪♪♪ Hello, Nevada County. I'm Heidi Wingo, Executive Director of Foothills Compassionate Care. For the last 46 years, Hospice of the Foothills has been a trusted provider of compassionate end-of-life care. As our community has grown and their needs have evolved, we too have grown to include other services. Foothills Compassionate Care is now the umbrella under which Hospice of the Foothills, Sierra Community Palliative Care, Foothills Gift and Thrift, and our other programs reside. While the heart of our care is still hospice, we offer palliative care, bereavement support, caregiver resources, community education, and other services that guide you during life's most challenging chapters. 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Visit FastKnowOrCal.com or call 530-271-5879 to schedule your appointment today. Foot and Ankle Surgeons of Northern California because every great journey starts with healthy feet. When you know, you know. Get ready to win the prize of the day. Perhaps cupcakes, maybe a pasty. It could even be a Bloody Mary mix or something totally different. Each weekday, late in the 7 a.m. hour, Tom and Paul present You Make the Call, a contest for which you do not need to know the answer, you just need to know if Paul knows the answer. Join us for a great opportunity at an incredible prize with You Make the Call, a part of The Morning Show for as long as I can remember. Each weekday with Tom and Paul on KNCO News Talk 830. Welcome back to the Master Gardeners and Friends Radio Show on KNCO 830 on the a.m. dial. I'm Master Gardener, Paul Duprat, and I am here to hopefully answer any questions you have. I'd love to hear from you. Please give me a call. That's at 530-477-5626. 530-477-KNCO. But if you've got a picture you want me to take a look at, please call me at 530-913-4685. Okay, so I've been talking a lot about this IPM and how much I like it. And let me go through a few of the things that they do that really, really helps because you have all these. First of all, integrated pest management. What's a pest? Well, a pest is any organism that damages or interferes with desirable plants in our fields and orchards. Landscapes or wild lands or damaged homes or other structures. It's an organism, it's a living creature, it's anything that might transmit disease or just be a nuisance. I remember my father and I, we talked to a guy years and years ago and we wanted to know what was wrong with this one plant was. This is 50 years ago. And the guy looked at it and he looked at it and he looked at it and he said, well, he said, if you want it, water it and if you don't, spray it. And that wasn't very much help. So I appreciate the integrated pest management. So here are some of the things that they do if you go to look it up. There's approaches for managing pests that are often grouped in, here's a bunch of different categories. There's a biological control and that's the use of natural enemies. Predators, parasites, pathogens, competitors to control pests and their damages. Invertebrates, plant pathogens, nematodes, weeds and vertebrates have many natural enemies. So their cultural controls are practices that reduce pest establishment, reproduction, dispersal and survival. For example, changing irrigation practices can reduce pest problems since too much water can increase root disease in weeds. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about your irrigation system. Once the rains start, we can turn it off and it's a good idea to check it then so that in the spring, you don't have any surprises. There's nothing worse than spring, you finally decide. that you're going to turn your water system on, and you do, and it's full of holes, and leaks, and things that are missing. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about how to keep on top of something like that. There's mechanical and physical controls. This kills a pest directly, or makes the environment unsuitable for it. Traps for rodents are examples of a mechanical control. There are any number of mechanical traps. There's tunnels that you can put down into a gopher hole that they try to crawl through, and it will catch them. Or there's just the regular old traps. Physical controls include mulches for weed management, and I recommend that you really mulch everything. It will save you much on water, and help keep disease down. Steam sterilization of the soil for disease management, that's a little bit more difficult to do, but it can be done. Or barriers such as screens to keep birds or insects out. And part of that mulch is you can put, if there's a screening that you can put down on your soil, and that will keep anything from growing through it. And I know that with my, I had a cherry tree that was old and not doing well, and the birds would eat the cherries, and it was small enough to where I was able to put a screen over it. So chemical control is the use of pesticides. And in IPM, as we as master gardeners, we really only want to and recommend using that when it's needed, and in combination with other approaches for more effective long-term control. Also, pesticides are selected and applied in a way that minimizes their possible harm to people and the environment. With IPM, you use the most selective pesticide that will do the job, and be the safest for other organisms, and for the air, soil, and water quality. And really, if you are going to use a pesticide, please read the directions. Follow them very, very carefully. They can be harmful not only to the environment, but yourself. Use them in bait stations rather than sprays. Sprays can get out of control. The wind can come up. You can, it can spray good things as opposed to just your bad things. Spot spray a few weeds instead of an entire area. So these IPM principles and practices are combined to create IPM programs. While each situation is different, five major components are common to all of our IPM programs. And that's number one is pest identification. What is it? What is it that's harming your plant? Is it physical? Is something eating it? And how big is it? I went out in my garden three days ago, I think, and my milkweed had been completely eaten. And it was a huge, two huge plants of milkweed. And so I had to just, what was this all about? Was it bugs? No. And then I found some raccoon scat, and there it was. So the only thing I can do about that is to protect that. So first of all, you need to discover, is it an animal? Or is it a bacteria, like in fire blight? That's something else. There's also a worm that can, you find a hole in one of your apples. And there you have, and it's a worm. So there you do, you find out what your pest is. So monitoring and assessing pest numbers and damage. What do you have? Is it your whole tree? If you've got an apple tree and every apple is infected with a worm, that's not good. You're going to have to deal with that. Or is it just one? So what's the damage? How many numbers? What's the best thing to do with it? And guidelines for when management action is needed. How bad is it? If you have rose bushes and you've got aphids on it, you can take a hose, knock them off. That works really pretty well, because it just knocks them off and they can't do much with that. You don't need to spray that with some sort of a pesticide. So use a combination, biological, cultural, physical, mechanical, and chemical management tools. This website can help you learn about IPM and how you can apply it to your pest problems. Your local cooperative extension can also help. And that's that number that we have so that you can call. And that's our hotline, 530-273-0919. And they're working on the office. I'm not sure that you can go in right now and take anything, but we're working on that and finding a place where we could do that. If anybody knows where that is, you could give me a call and let me know, OK? One of my fellow master gardeners, I've been out of the loop for a while. I've had some things going on in my life like everybody else. So, OK. So, integrated pest management. So, we talked a little bit about that. Mostly, it's the correct pest management, finding out what your pest is, and what is it that you need to do with that. And again, the IPM, UC Davis, will help you do that. Rather than simply eliminating the pest you see right now, using a pest management tool like this or eliminating the pest you see right now, using an IPM means you'll look at environmental factors that affect the pest and its ability to thrive. You can create conditions that are unfavorable for it. And a pest can be a plant, a weed, a vertebrate, bird, rodent, or other mammal, an invertebrate, insect, tick, mite, or snail, or a nematode, a pathogen like a bacteria, or fungus, causes disease, or any other unwanted organism that may harm water quality, animal life, or other parts of the ecosystem. So, monitoring. This goes along with your irrigation system. I went on vacation. I was gone for almost three weeks. And I came back, and I had a plant that was basically dead. And what had happened was a squirrel had gone in and gnawed through one of my little tubes that was feeding my salvia. And so, I mean, I was able to fix it and water it. And it looks like it's going to survive and hopefully thrive. But monitoring. I don't walk out every single day and look at my garden. And that's probably not a bad idea. OK, we're going to take another break. And we'll be back. Please give me a call. Call me. 530-477-5626. Talk to me. keeping Nevada County green and gorgeous. The Master Gardeners on KNCO Grass Valley Nevada City. 106.9 FM and 830 AM. It's 11 o'clock. You are one of a kind. Your smile, your laugh, the way you look at those you love. So when it comes to cancer care, you deserve a treatment approach that's as unique as you. Dignity Health Sierra Nevada Memorial Hospital features a comprehensive range of services from advanced diagnosis and treatment, through supportive care and recovery, so you get the plan that best fits your needs. Learn more at dignityhealth.org slash Sierra Nevada Cancer. Dignity Health. Low Human Kindness. Bad decisions limit future options. Make enough bad decisions and you will destroy your life. Listen to the Flotline with your host Rick Hughes every Sunday morning at 8 here on KNCO News Talk 830. The Flotline describes a main line of resistance in your soul built on God's Word. Join us each Sunday for 30 minutes of inspiration, motivation, and education, all without manipulation. That's the Flotline with Rick Hughes every Sunday at 8 AM right here on KNCO News Talk 830. Welcome back to the Master Gardeners and Friends radio show on KNCO 830 on the AM dial. I'm Master Gardener Paul Duprat and I am here today to hopefully answer any questions you have. Please give me a call 530-477-5626 or 530-477-KNCO. If you've got a picture, please 530-913-4685. Send me a picture of what's going on in your garden. Let me know what's your interest and what is happening with you. Please give me a call. I'm here by myself and I'm lonely, so give me a call. Talking about Master Gardeners, I talked a little bit about how we became Master Gardeners. How do you become a Master Gardener? I'm going to talk a little bit about that. Like I said, we are a volunteer organization. The farm advisors started getting a lot of questions about things that really didn't have a lot to do with running a working farm, so they decided that they would train or teach us how to deal with you guys, the public. That's what we do. I went through some of those things that we do and I'd be glad to do a little bit more of that. What we do is every other year, you can go on our website, Master Gardeners of Nevada County, and there's an application. Every other year, we have people sign up to become Master Gardeners. We cover two counties, Placer and Nevada. We administer two Master Gardener programs. Our Placer County office in Auburn is the home base for the Master Gardeners of Placer County, while our Nevada County office in Grass Valley serves us in Nevada County. We interview, you put in your application, and then we select and interview 30 to 40 trainees. General schedule of the volunteer training begins in January and usually ends the first Friday in May. It's intense, thorough, 16 different classes spanning many gardening topics. That's 16 separate days. Only one absence is allowed. The classes occur on Thursday or Friday afternoons from 1 to 5. They take place in Auburn and in Grass Valley. There are required field trips, hotline trainings, and homework. What we do is, there's a lot of us Master Gardeners who are already Master Gardeners, and we teach some of these classes, and we talk about things, intro to horticulture. What is horticulture? You learn about that, and also when you become a trainee, there's a price, and there are books that we get that are all about, well, there's one on integrated pest management, although most things are computerized now, but home orchards, grasses, things like that. Another class would be soils and fertilizers, composting, vermiculture, and compost tea. That was one of my favorite ones. I have learned to compost, and what they did was part of it was we got a kind of a little bucket and full of worms for vermiculture, and I can talk a little bit more about that because vermiculture is absolutely fascinating to me, and I will talk about that in a little bit. Also, the integrated pest management, we talked about that, and obviously with the computer now, when I first went through the program, it was in 2009, we had a lot of screenshots, but now you can put your computer up on the whiteboard, and so they do that, and it's very, very thorough. We talk about plant propagation. That's another thing that we do out in the demo garden is plant propagation, plant pathology, fruit trees, vegetable gardening, and again, these are incorporated as parts of these workshops that I talked about, and those are just some of the things that we do, and the workshops that we've had in the past, gardening for wildlife with native plants, cut flower gardening, drip irrigation basics. I've taught that one several times. We have a workshop on gophers, moles, and more. Workshop, The Power of Keystone Plants and Plant Communities. Container gardening. That's a really popular one, because not a lot of people have a lot of room in their garden. And some people like to just put a couple of three or four container gardeners on their back decks or front decks. County Fair. That's a fabulous time. Visit our booth for workshops and gardening questions. There's another group, one we did in August, Greenhouses. Why, Where, and How. That was really popular, because it was a new topic. As I've said, we've done a lot of over and over workshops. But this one was new, and it was very well organized. And a lot of people came to that. I would love to have a room for a greenhouse, and I don't know that much about it. So that would be a wonderful thing to learn. Another workshop we did was Lawns and Native Grasses, Planting with a Purpose. Cool Season Veggies. This is another one that we did in September, which was in plenty of time. Obviously, that was just last month. So Cool Season Veggies, Kale, Lettuce. I love to plant kale. My wife and I have a kale smoothie three days a week, and it's nice to just go out and pick our own. So that was another good one. And another workshop that we did in October was Spring Flowers, because getting ready to maybe plan for that, your spring flowers, spring plants. Another one we did, Native Plant Roundtable, Your Questions Answered. The demo garden is where most of these go. And if you haven't been to our demo garden, you really need to go. As I told you earlier, that it's a wonderful place, and we have different areas. And the demo garden is just a wonderful place to learn. Many more new signs. Take your phone, take pictures, figure out where everything is. We have a workshop in designing and planning your vegetable garden. One of the things that we do with that is you put plants with, like, tomatoes and squash need the same sun, but maybe something else needs a little bit more shade. And we will teach you how to design and plan for that. We also have a compost workshop, where we do the whole thing, the greens and the browns. It's hard to talk about it on the phone, but greens and browns, the temperature, the turning, really goes into a lot. And there's nothing like having your own bags of compost, because it just really works well. And again, the next two, fall fruit tree pruning, November 7th, and blueberries on November 14th. So February, there was a hands-on fruit tree pruning. We asked you to bring, oh, going to take another break. We'll be back. Please give me a call. 530-477-5626. Never underestimate the power of a great bed. It's the key to that better night's sleep that we all crave. 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They have a clearance center and gift store called The Nest at 3880 Highway 49. They're right here in Grass Valley, 410 Brunswick Road, right next to Safeway. Yo, city drivers, you know the grind, the potholes, the constant stop and go, the mileage racking up quick. When your ride suddenly gives out, that's a problem you don't need. It's time to future-proof your ride. CarShield gets it. We're talking a low-cost, month-to-month vehicle protection plan that saves you from those nasty out-of-pocket expenses on future auto repairs. Engine light on, transmission acting up. Imagine paying almost nothing for covered repairs. Yeah, you heard that right, nothing. This special alert is for every American driver with their factory warranty running out, or you've got no coverage at all. This protection plan is at an all-time low, and we're hooking you up. Activate today and also get free roadside assistance, free towing, and even car rental options, no extra cost. 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So when you shop their thoughtfully curated selection of quality products, you're also helping provide compassion, comfort, and dignity to local families who need it most. Adults 21 and over visit Grass Valley Provisions at 403 Idaho-Maryland Road, open daily, nine to nine. Shop Grass Valley Provisions and support Foothills Compassionate Care every Sunday in October. Discover the stories that shaped Nevada County on History Unfolded, hosted by Tom Fitzsimmons and myself, Mike Stewart, with special guests the second and fourth Mondays at 9 a.m., brought to you by Mowl Paint and Glass, serving Nevada counties since 1949, and Smarter Broadband, local, reliable, high-speed internet. Don't miss the voices, the stories, and the history that make our community unique, right here on KNCO News Talk 830. KNCO.com provides a way for your civic service group or nonprofit organization to tell everyone about an upcoming event or fundraiser, and it's free, the KNCO Community Calendar. Go to KNCO.com, click on the Calendar button in the blue bar, then click Submit an Event and fill out the form. Once okayed, your event will be added to the Community Calendar on KNCO.com and added to many of the local Area Chamber of Commerce websites as well. It's free and available to you from KNCO News Talk 830. My Master Gardeners and Friends radio show on KNCO, 830 on your AM dial. I'm Master Gardener Paul Duprat, and I'm here to answer your call and talk with you about whatever you wanna talk about as far as gardening goes. So give me a call, 530-477-5626, 530-477-KNCO. But if you got a picture, text me, 530-913-4685, and I'll take a look at it, and we'll try to figure something out. It all kinda depends. So, what was I talking about? Oh yes, I was talking about some of our workshops. So, and again, we have two coming up in the rest of 2026, Fall Fruit Tree Pruning and Blueberries, November 7th and November 14th. So, here's one that was another new topic that we did back in February, hopefully we'll do this one again, Gardening for a Lifetime. And I think that's pretty good. A lot of people are, if you've never gardened before, it can be daunting, and it might be difficult to say, well, okay, I'm gonna start digging around in the dirt. Oh, okay. Ruth Penn Valley on the phone. Hi, Ruth, what can I do for you? Hey, I have a question for you. And by the way, you are doing a fantastic job with this show. Because you said, I think you said something to the effect of you're feeling lonely. So I thought, oh, I gotta call him. My partner didn't show up. So I'm here by myself. I had some plans, but it's always nice to have someone else to bounce them off and have them come up with stuff. I'm kind of scrabbling here. So thank you for saying that, but yeah. So what can I do for you? I'm sorry. Okay, no problem. So my question is, if you have a root bound small tree, which we do, what is the best way to, I think what it's done, because it looks like it's doing pretty well, it's small, it's like a little Christmas vine. And I think if the roots have grown through, they're always holes in the bottom of the containers that they're in. And I think the roots have grown through. And now, you know, we wanna plant it. So what advice would you give us about the preparation of the roots and how deep to plant, you know, how deep to make the soil soft and easy and how wide? Okay, so it's obviously in a pot, right? Yes, it is, unfortunately. So what's the approximate outside diameter of the pot? Hmm. A couple of hand widths or is it, you said it was a smaller pot. So it's pretty easy for you to pick up. So it's not that big. Yeah, but I think the tree is rooted. So I don't think it could be very easily picked up. Okay. The pot is, I would say about 12, 14 inches across. About 12, 14 inches across. Can you get it out of the pot by just pulling on it? Well, we can try. Yeah, is the pot something that you wanna save? Actually, I was looking at the wrong pot. It's smaller than that. It's more like two and a half hands wide like you were saying before. Okay. And it's not something we care about saving, the pot itself. Okay, and what is the pot made of? Is it ceramic? Plastic. It's plastic. Well, if you can pick it up and then you thump the outside edge of it, if it will come off, great. And if you don't care about it and you really wanna get it out of there, if it's plastic, you can probably take a pair of shears and cut it off. Right. Okay, and I've done that before. I don't care about this pot. I'll just cut it off. If I can get it out, great, and then I recycle the pot. But if you can get it out of there and then you take a good look, a lot of times the roots will actually, that they will have absorbed so much of whatever soil was in there that there will be a hole in the bottom. And so you wanna stick your hand, put a pair of gloves on, stick your hand up in there and really kind of investigate that hole and then take a pair of shears and start cutting and shaving the roots around it until you get a nice rounded kind of a shape. Am I making any sense with that? Yeah, you're talking about the hole at the bottom of the pot. Well, and now I'm talking about the hole, like I said, when you pull the plant out, I'm betting that there will be a hollow space at the very, very bottom. Okay. Because the soil will have been used up but there will still be some roots around it. You wanna trim the roots around and you wanna dig a hole about twice as big as what you, if you were gonna put it in a pot twice as big, dig a hole about that size. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah, and about how deep? What's the plant? Again, it's a tree? It's a little Christmas pine. Okay, you don't want to bury it so deep that you cover the top of the stem itself. Right. You wanna make that even. So that's how deep you wanna put it. But how deep do you do the soil prep and how wide? Well, again, I would dig a hole twice as big as what you had before. Okay. And then put loose soil in there and what I do is I go ahead and you fill the thing up and then scoop it out and to where I can put the plant with the pot in it. Then I take the pot out and I get rid of the pot and then I put the plant down. Okay, gotcha. Again, am I making sense? It's hard to do on the radio. Yeah, okay. And yeah, and then I would pack it down pack the soil down around it. Again, you don't want the soil above the... Correct. Yeah, and I would put mulch on top of it. Okay. And then I would water it in. Okay, well, very good advice. And that kind of gives me a game plan here for what I'm gonna... Yeah, at least twice as big as what it was in. Okay, gotcha, okay. All right, well, thank you. And again, you're doing a great job and it's so difficult to do radio when there's only one person talking. I notice that. I appreciate the sentiment, thank you. You'll be fine. And you're doing a lot of teaching which is good. Well, I'm a retired school teacher, so thank you. Oh, ok. All right, well thank you, sir. Ok, well thank you Ruth and I appreciate your calling. Ok. All right, you take care. You too. Ok, that was a great call, thank you so much, Ruth. Somebody else out there, give me a call, 530-477-5626, 530-477-KNCO. You can text me at 530-913-4685. Ok, so any questions about what that went through, please give me a call, I want to hear from you. And I'm talking about, again, some of the workshops and these are the workshops we had this year. If you hear something or you don't hear something you want to know about, contact us. Give us a call and say, hey, why don't you do, I'd love to workshop on whatever you're interested in. So we talked about February Gardening for a Lifetime and that's a really good one. And again, one of the things that I noticed, I have some background in agriculture, but I noticed that some of the newer master gardeners, that when I became one, were very hesitant because they were afraid they were going to do something wrong. And I really dispute that. We're working with plants and with soil. Just get in there, dig it up, and one of the things that I really had to learn was not every plant is going to absolutely thrive. They're like people. Some people thrive no matter what. Some people just give it up. And I had to say, okay, this plant's not making it. I also had to learn where to plant things. I was very bad about this when I first, before I became a master gardener, I saw a plant I liked, I bought it, and then took it home and went, now what do I do with it? As opposed to, okay, I've got a spot for this, read the label, it takes direct sun, I don't have any right now, or does it need shade? Read the directions of the labels. It's easy, and I've done this, to fall in love with a plant, but then if you don't put it in the right spot, it can be not good. So gardening for a lifetime, you learn about a lot of these things that will help you. And your landscape. You don't have to grow vegetables, you don't have to grow flowers, there's all kinds of things you can do. I love vegetables, I plant vegetables. My wife loves flowers, she loves color. She plants flowers, I plant vegetables, and she's great because if something's not doing well, out it goes, and something else that will do well will go in. She's absolutely ruthless, and I love it, it really works well. And so, gardening for a lifetime, it was a new topic, and I'm hoping that we're going to keep doing that. It was in February of this year, and so again, if there's a topic you want, okay, we have to take another break, please give me a call, 530-477-5626. We all want to stay cool this summer, and no one wants to pay more to stay that way. The Bean Easy Living Center wants you to add a whole house fan to your cooling arsenal. It's way cheaper to run than your air conditioning. Once the sun goes down and the air outside cools, you open a few windows, turn on the whole house fan, sit back and enjoy the breeze. The fan is on a timer, it can run all night if you like. The evening's cooler air flows through your house up into your attic, pushing stale, warm air out and cooling the entire structure of your home. All this happens while you sleep, with a cool breeze wafting through your bedroom windows. The next day, as it heats up, your home will take that much longer to warm up, which means your AC isn't kicking in as early, saving you money. 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Take care of our customers, stand behind our equipment, and help you finish strong. Visit 302 Railroad Avenue in Grass Valley, or 2021 Live Oak Boulevard in Yuba City, or start at RentalGuys.com. Rental Guys. Rent it right the first time. Global superstar, Ricky Martin. Live in concert. See Ricky Martin performing all the hits for one night only. Live at the venue at Thunder Valley, Friday, November 6th. Get tickets now at ThunderValleyResort.com. Welcome back to the Master Gardeners and Friends radio show on KNCO, 830 on the AM dial. I am Master Gardener Paul Duprat, and I'm here to answer, hopefully, any questions that you have, or at least point you in the right direction. I'd love to hear from you. What's going on in your garden? What are you having fun with? What are you looking forward to? Give me a call, and let's talk about this, 530-477-5626, or that's 530-477-KNCO. Text me a picture at 530-913-4685, and we'll talk about whatever you want to talk about. Again, I'm going through the workshops that we do, and again, I want to mention that these are free. I do know that there are places that will charge you to come to a workshop, but all ours are free. Most of them are at the demo garden. We have two more in November, the 7th and the 14th, fruit tree pruning on the 7th, blueberries on the 14th, and then we're probably going to take a break because the rest of November and December are usually pretty nasty, and in February we'll come back up again. So again, some of the workshops we're doing, and I'm hoping that maybe you're taking a notice of these, and if you don't hear one that you really, really are interested in, don't know much about, or very much would like to know more, give us a call, and we'll see if we can't schedule it. So I talked a little bit about gardening for a lifetime, which was a new topic, and I really liked that because it really does talk about long-term goals. Roses, that was another new topic. I don't know much about roses. On February 28th, we had a garden journaling and planning, another new topic, and I really, I'm not a very organized person. My wife will tell you that, and for me, the beginnings of starting to write down, oh, when did I plant that, where did I buy it, where are the directions that came with it? And I got a small notebook, and I glued it, stapled it, however, in on that page so that I go, I can now look back and go, okay, I bought this plant on this date, this is where I planted it, these are the directions of how to do that. And it has really helped. Those of you who are organized are going, well, duh, what did he think? But again, I've never been really organized, and I'm trying to be better. Don't talk to my wife about that. Okay, another one that we did was Totally Tomatoes. And if you've been to our plant sale, you know that this is what we're really, really about. We're totally into tomatoes. We have people who, they show up with many, many, many, many tomatoes. And we are an organic nursery. We don't sell anything that hasn't been looked at and passed by the FDA. So the day before our plant sale, which is usually, again, around Mother's Day, everything that we sell is guaranteed to be good. And we have a lot of tomatoes. That's pretty much what we're known for. I talked a little bit about those of you who, before the pandemic, we would have a tomato tasting around about, well, actually in September, where we would actually let people, we brought our tomatoes in, we cut them up, people tasted them, they rated them, and we used that to buy seed. Now we don't, the pandemic got rid of that. So now we buy seeds and grow what we like. And if people say, hey, I found this, or I was back east and saw and tasted, we love that. Please communicate, talk to us, call the hotline and say, hey, got an old line tomato from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, tastes fabulous, it's called whatever. And we'll try to get somebody to grow one of those. So straw bale gardening, we actually had a workshop on that. I talked about that at the beginning of the show. I'm going to try that again. I really liked it. If you go to the demo garden, I think there's a lady there who has some straw bale tomatoes and I was there probably 10 days, two weeks ago, and still had tomatoes on it. So it's a really viable, good way if you don't have a lot of space and you only want to do three or four things, and you don't want to invest money in a container. Straw bale gardening is pretty cool. Biochar, not even sure what that is. It's a new topic. I need to look that up. What's biochar? That was a workshop. Where's my phone? I'll look that up next break and see if I can figure that out. Another one we did along with FNPS, native plants, the big picture. I have a raised garden bed, I have a deer fenced area, the rest of it is open to whoever and whatever, and it's all native plants, and that's all that I plant. When I bought the property, it was pretty well filled up, so I haven't been able to add too much. Unfortunately, as I said, before I became a master gardener, I wasn't quite as knowledgeable about things. So there were a couple of plants that are maybe not in the right spot, but stuff happens. Native plants. There's so many that are native pollinators, and I'm going to get to that toward the end of the hour, talk a little bit about pollinators, because attracting good bugs into your garden is just a fantastic idea, and it really helps out. Firescaping, yes, new topic, another new topic, firescaping. I'm sure that you're aware, in this area, the fires are dangerous. We have lost our insurance several times, it had to scrape around like everybody else, and so firescaping is a very important consideration. We live in the foothills, we love it here, it's gorgeous, and we've got a lot of vegetation. I live in Alta Sierra, and I can't tell you how many times the tree guys, it's either PG&E or it's somebody else coming through, and the insurance companies, they've got drones out, they're flying over your property and saying, you have to take this out, you have to take that out. So firescaping is a very important consideration. escaping around your house. It's very important. So propagation from cuttings is another one that we did, which is really, really interesting. And I talked a little bit about Felix Gillet. That's what those people do is they find those old line fruit trees, and they they get cuttings and they propagate them and they sell them. Wonderful, wonderful flavor. Dave. Hi, Dave. Thanks for calling. Good morning, Paul. Morning. Good morning. It kind of brought to mind when you're talking about the old cuttings from the the Frenchman there. Yeah, we've got a piece of property that has a couple of plum trees on them, and they're still producing somewhat. And, but they're probably, oh, 60 years old, at least. And, and they've got kind of a scale on on the limbs and the bark and everything, you know, and so we were just wondering, would a professional pruner be able to fix those up or treat them or anything? Are they just too old and cut them down and plant new? You know, that's a really good question. And I'll bet you that if you contact the Gillet Foundation, they could help you with that. But I would also go on the IPM website, and UC Davis website, prunes, older trees, and there's probably pictures. And you said it had a kind of a scale on it? Yeah, kind of a scale. I would, in fact, I think I'm in that on my computer right here. Hang on just a second. Oops. If you hang with me for just a second. Okay. I'm trying to get into to the, come on. I'm really trying to do something here. I'm not just calling you. Okay. I was trying to hand my phone or the radio to my wife so she could hear without turning it too loud, you know. Uh huh. IPM, UC Davis. Okay. And so this is a plum, correct? It's a plum tree. Uh huh. And how would you describe the the damage? The damage? Just you know how the it just kind of looks like it dries up and is is hanging there. You can knock it off actually with your fingers kind of. That bad, you know, it sticks a little bit and slide down and doesn't just fall off on its own, but just kind of scaly like that, you know, like loose skin. Okay. So I just went on and it's plum and prune. It came up when I when I put in plum. And pests and disorders. There's invertebrates, leaf rollers, scales. Here's it. You would call it a scale. I would call it a scale probably. Okay. Okay. And I'm getting a picture of some really ugly stuff. Scales are immobile insects that suck plant juices from many types of trees, shrubs, and and house plants. What is scale damage look like similar to that of aprons and whiteflies, wet or sticky honeydew on leaves, black city mold growing on the honeydew? Okay, just what do we do with them? Provide plants with proper care, especially irrigation. Yeah, we have started irrigating them in the summer. Typically, there hadn't been any outside of the winter rains, we hadn't really irrigated them. So we started doing that. Yeah. Do you see any any kind of an insect on it like a scale tending ants? This thing says use a sticky barrier inside insecticide baits to selectively control scale tending ants. Okay, we have seen some of that. Okay, so that you know, you can you can get there's a there's a thing called. Oh, shoot, you put it up around the base of the tree, and the ants crawl up it and then they stick to it. They can't go in. Okay. And I can't remember what it's called now. Double stick tape. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Yeah, I would I would definitely go on that website and see what I can say about that. Okay, sounds great. All right. So you don't think just totally because of age that they'd be not worth working on at all. The way that the Gillet people talk, some of those trees are over 100 years old and doing my goodness, they look kind of scraggly. And, you know, they do prune some of them up. But for the most part, if you go there, some of those trees are just astounding. And we went in on this, this, this, this kind of a field trip. And and some of those trees are over 100 years old and still out throwing fruit said it's it's seasonal. Okay. Yes. And like they say, they don't make things like they used to. They do not. And the flavor is amazing. Okay. All right. Well, thanks, Dave. Thank you, Paul. I sure appreciate your beautiful show. You did a great job. Thank you. Bye bye now. Bye. I think we're gonna need to take a break. Yeah, please give me a call 530-477-5626. Great calls. 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Text me at 530-913-4685 with a picture or whatever. Okay, please give me a call. I talked a little bit, we were talking about the workshops and I came across a biochar, which was a new topic and I had no idea what that was. And I'm glad I looked it up. I just did. And biochar is a lightweight carbon rich charcoal like substance made by heating organic biomass, such as wood chips, crop residues or manure in a low oxygen or oxygen limited process called pyrolysis. It is primarily produced for use as a soil amendment, or for long term carbon sequestration. What it does is it improves soil structure, retains moisture and nutrients, acts like a sponge supports soil microbes, the microscopic pockets inside biochar provide a habitat for beneficial bacteria and fungi. And it sequesters carbon. Because biochar resists rapid decomposition, it locks carbon in the ground for decades to centuries, helping offset greenhouse gas emissions. And it's used as gardeners and farmers mix this, blended with compost, worm castings, great stuff, or fertilizer into potting soils, raised beds or field rows. So yeah, house plants, vegetable garden, large farm bed. And it sounds great. I am going to look into that for next year when I plant my tomatoes in my in I got a couple of container gardens. That sounds great. I'm sorry, I didn't go to that. Oh, well, no wonder I was out of town. So we talked about firescaping, propagation from cuttings, the spring plant sale. Again, we have, we have really, we really when I first started, and I became a master gardener in 09, it was mostly tomatoes. And now we've got all kinds of vegetables, annuals, perennials, things that that are grown by us master gardeners. And again, we are a an organic nursery in the FDA, FDA looks at every single plant, we don't, we don't sell you stuff that that doesn't isn't going to grow. We have a booth at the grass valleys, farmers market Saturdays, eight to 1230. So yeah, yeah. We did a workshop on fruit tree integrated pest management, another new topic. This is great. I didn't realize this year, we had so many new topics. But again, if if you can go on our website, and look at the workshops, and I know we're getting ready to get next year's going. So you see something that you really like great. And if you don't see something that you are so interested in, let us know. We're always looking for new new topics like this, this biochar and the straw bale gardening, fire escaping, gardening for a lifetime. I know that these came from from you guys. And and that's important to us. We're here for you as as master gardeners. Again, we want to share resource management processes. So let us know. Okay, another thing I'd like to talk about before we go off the air pretty soon is, and part of in our demo garden, there's an area that we have set off for beneficial insects. And beneficial insects are very important. One of the reasons that we don't like insecticides and pesticides is that you kill everything, good, good bugs and bad bugs. So we have plants that will attract beneficial insects. What are beneficial insects? Anything that eats bad insects. I know that in the garden guide, it talks a lot about that. Spiders are not insects, they're arachnids. But they are incredible predators. Black widow spider is not one you want to mess around with. But you know, if you had one in your garden. So another one that's that's a really good, obviously, I think a lot of people know who these are. There's a praying mantis. And they are really something else. They will eat bees or butterflies. And I have unfortunately seen at least one YouTube thing where a large praying mantis took down a hummingbird. It was pretty ugly. But they are good to have in your garden, because they eat bad bugs, dragonflies. And I had a friend of mine asked me, he said, what do you think is the most voracious, ruthless predator on the planet? And I didn't have a clue. So I guessed wolverine. And he said it was the dragonfly that he had seen something on on the television where then they can really they track and, and they're just absolutely voracious and ruthless. So if you have dragonflies, you don't want to get rid of them. As adults. Feed on mosquitoes, and that's always good. I don't have any standing water around my place, so I don't really have a problem with mosquitoes, but I do know people who do. Wasps and ants, I know that they can be, wasps particularly, can be a problem in the early spring if you don't trap the queen bee for the meat-eater wasps, but they are absolutely great predators. And one of the things that I thought was interesting when I became a master gardener is the ladybug beetle. We all know how cute they are. They're a little round thing, red with black spots on it, and they're absolutely adorable. And then I started seeing, right before I started seeing them, I saw this thing that looks like a backwards crocodile, big head and a small tail. They're very tiny, very, very tiny. And I was told by a master gardener, don't swat them, don't kill them. Those are the larvae of the ladybug beetles. They look horrifying. Unfortunately, they're only an eighth of an inch long. They're very, very small. But they were all over my yard, and I thought, oh, this is kind of icky, ugly. What the heck's going on with this? But they eat more than the adults do. They love aphids, and they will just go after them. So yeah, if you see something that looks like a backwards crocodile that's little tiny, and you haven't seen any ladybug beetles yet, leave it alone. It'll be just fine. Even the ground beetles, anything like that, they love aphids, which is one of the biggest problems that you have, especially. I have a bunch of rosebushes. Like I said, my wife loves color, so I have a lot of rosebushes. And so anyway, there's predatory flies. I know there's one that looks like a bee. The common name is a hoverfly. It's actually called a syrphid, S-Y-R-P-H-I-D, syrphid fly. And they are great, because they're very, very predatory. Even the little green lacewings are predatory. They love aphid scales, ladybugs, whiteflies, caterpillars, leafhoppers, mites, thrips. The true bug, I know it looks like a little tank. It's a predatory true bug, and bees. So yeah, don't spray them. Let them have something to eat, because if you --- end of transcript ---