So my name is AJ. I'm just saying that for Sandy since we just met. And everyone else kind of knows this. But before I came to Berkeley and in the archaeology world, I did my master's in geology at Long Beach State. And I worked with a paleoclimatologist. And while I was down there, it was stressing me that the way that data works in paleoclimatology is a numbers game. And it's all about getting as much data as possible. And I see Vinisha nodding her head, because it's the same world in paleoclimatomy. It's just stacking data. And paleoclimatologists go this way. Palinologists go this way. But the idea is you get as much as possible. And you're as complete as possible. You don't want a cherry pick. If there's a site or a cave or a lake right outside of your site and there's data there that you don't present, reviewers will call you out on it. And it's just not the right thing to do. So I want to share my screen to show you kind of example of what I mean by kind of stacking data here just from a figure that I had in a publication. And since I've probably talked Vinisha's and Nika's head off about Kohokia before, I'll spare that. And just get to the point that it's all about taking as many proxies or types of paleo environmental data and just getting them together to try to find any sort of signal that pops out. In this case, what we notice is that in the 12th century towards the beginning of the 13th century, you can see there's this big decline in the records. It shows up as an increase in this record here. But there's something going on here where we to have just one of these proxies presented would not have been enough to get through publication. It might have, having been through just an archaeology focused journal. But because we're trying to make a very strong statement about what happened with the environment in the past, you get as much of these together as you can. And I talked about cherry picking. And sometimes you're tempted to not present this data. So this line here in G was from a paper where the data agree in this part and these orange data here are from my own study. But they decouple here. And where there's a negative value, we actually have a positive. And that freaked me out. I was like, should I present this? And the answer is yes, you got to. You just have to and explain what happened. I think what happened is one of our chronology starts to go off. And I think it's actually mine. So I have to address weakness of my study. But the point is it's all about lining all this data up. Now, sometimes in archaeology papers, I'm not sure if you've seen this. I'm not going to use any names. But you see a statement, sometimes a bold statement about a relationship between people and some sort of environmental change in the past. And you go to look for the data that backs it up. And I kid you not, it's a figure that shows one bit of paleo-environmental information. Maybe it's isotope data from an ice core in Greenland, which is great data. Many people use that data. But the culture is the Harappan civilization in Pakistan. And the question is, is that fair to do? And it sometimes gets by when there's not a reviewer who's coming from this training that we're talking about here. And it's just not a good thing to do, because you can't be certain that what's going on in the poles reflects what's happening at a local level. And as we talked about, you need multiple proxies to know that that signal is most likely real and not just a blip. So how do you do that? And the answer is you can either go and try to find these papers that have paleo-environmental data buried in them and then go find the supplemental information or you can find some sort of archive that has it all neatly gathered in the same place. And that's what we're going to talk about today, which is this NOAA paleoclimatology archive. And I'm not going to teach anyone, I don't think any new skills really here is more just of like, here's this place. Let's check it out together. And after we're done, here's the links for you to explore it as well. So that's why I don't think we'll take nearly the full time here, but we will, of course, have time to kind of demonstrate how to use it. And then if you want to stay on the line and we can see if you have any questions as you use it yourself, you're welcome to. So I'm going to drop some links into the chat here, which are the links that we're going to use today. So if you give me one second for me to copy paste, we'll start taking this first spin. And the first thing I want you to do is actually to click on link three, the interactive map, and just open it in a window on your computer. Ignore it for now, because it's been taking ages to load for me. I don't know if that's a problem with me or a problem with the servers. But if it is a problem on the website itself, then let's just get this in the background. And by the time we get to it, hopefully it'll be ready to go for us. So just have that in the background here. But now I want to go to link one, the products page. And we'll check out what we have to see. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen once I get to this products page. And we will talk about what there is to see. And if you have any questions about what I'm talking about, please, of course, let me know. So what we're looking at is the NOAA Paleo-climatology database. They have it under products. And by products, they mean data that you can download. And there's this really scary scheduled maintenance bar that says it's scheduled for maintenance today. But it says it ends at 5 Eastern, which has already happened, so I hope we're in luck. And I tried using it earlier today. It was no problem for me. Anyway, so this is kind of a description page on what type of data is available on this website. Let's go check it out. So we're going to scroll down to products. And I'm just going to take maybe two minutes here to just kind of introduce these archives. I know many of you are probably comfortable with a lot of these. I'm just going to put my opinion on it. The things that I would turn to first for these different archives listed. And by the way, this is everything you could ever imagine within Paleo-climatology is any of these links. This is from NOAA. They have over 10,000 data sets contained here. So it's a good place to start if you have a specific proxy in mind. But let's go over the main ones. I suggest starting with ICE core data. Really good. It can give you annual precision. And it either tells you the isotopic composition of water in the ice or as gas. So it can tell you carbon dioxide levels, for example, through time that's trapped in ice. It's going to come from two places. The poles, so Greenland and Antarctica have excellent data heavily cited. And if we use that carbon dioxide information, that's global in scale. That's telling you what the atmosphere was like at any year. So really, really useful. However, you can't just use that, as we talked about earlier. You've got to additionally use stuff that's at least on the continent that you're interested in. Then the other place that you'll find it is in glaciers.  So I remember thinking, oh gosh, if you're anywhere in low latitudes, what would you use ice cores for? But fortunately, there's still glaciers in the world. And many that are dying, like in Kilimanjaro, they've already gotten ice cores. So it's a sad story that some of these glaciers are disappearing. But many good scientists have gotten out and already captured a lot of that data before it melts. So yeah, that's the other thing. So ice cores applied to even places like Peru. The next big one is going to be lakes, which will tell you the sediment composition of carbonate or plastic material at the bottom of the lake, as well as things like percent organic, percent carbonate. That is also there. Oh, looks like we got a new person here. Hi, Lauren. Welcome to the talk or the workshop.  So there's a lot of data to use here. The next big one is going to be under paleo-oceanography, which, like lakes, tells you this composition of carbonates at the bottom of the sea, as well as things that might be less useful to us, like currents and things that are more strictly oceanography. But it's worth checking out the paleo-oceanography stuff for isotopic data. Then the last big ones are pollen, which I'm not even going to mention, because archaeologists, if they know one thing well, I think of all of this, it's going to be pollen. Then we got speleothems, which is a word, meaning stalactites and stalagmites and caves. And just like with ice cores, how you can get, or the bottom of lakes. Let's use the bottom of lakes as the correlate here. Just like the bottom of lakes, you can look at carbonate there and look at the isotopic composition of that. You can do the same thing for carbonate and those stalactites and those stalagmites. And that's really good data because it's often annual. Every single year, there's a new layer of that stalactite that forms as you get a wet season, drips down, carbonate forms, summertime stops, next season, boom, another one. So really, really precise.  So that's another great one. And then finally tree rings, of course, tell us about drought histories. And they're extremely precise as well because of gender chronology. So those are the big six. Ice core, lakes, oceans, pollen, speleothems and tree rings that I personally trust the most and are heavily cited. Then there's a bunch of other stuff here that's more niche or isn't actual data. So in terms of that, isn't actual data. The modeling, the climate reconstructions, climate forcing, drought variability that's plotted here. These are all aggregates, interpretations and models of the other data that's on this page that have been published and presented as things like deviation of temperature from today. And you've seen that where it says, a thousand years ago, North America was half a degree warmer or cooler. I don't really have the numbers off the top of my head. That's not primary data. It's not raw data, right? That's a second order of interpretation. So just be aware of that when you click on that to know that you're using something that is itself an interpretation of something else. Then there's other raw data here that's very niche. So we've got borehole data, which is probably not gonna apply to us because it's super, that's like going down geologic lengths of time, super far down, probably not gonna help us. You've got things that might help us a lot like historical data. And by the way, you can click on any of these and they give you a little synopsis if you're not sure what the word means. So historical data, I've never used this, but this could be really useful in terms of like, harvest dates, harbor, ice-free dates, ship logs, if you're working in the colonial period, that could be super useful. And I noticed that since we have several people who joined us here, so Hibo and Lauren, let me know if you're confused where we're at. If you look at the chat, I've got some links and right now we're on the link one, so you can join us there. We're basically done with link one, but you know, that's how you get to where we are. And let me know in the chat if you got any questions about it. Okay, so anyhow, I just wanted to, as I said, introduce these types of data sets. Where did I go? Historical, that's correct because I clicked on it. Could you maybe resend the link? New people won't have the link. Oh, you're right. Thank you, Nico. I'm sorry, everyone. Let's resend it. Boom. All right, I think that should be through and it is. Okay, so assume that there's no questions about like these types of data. Let's now start to use the site. And for that, I'm gonna ask you to click on link two and for link two, you're gonna go to the main search page for this NOAA archive. And we got one more person joining us. So I'm gonna post the links like one more time. So for the person just joined, we're on link two right now. And please follow along at home. You can of course just watch too, but I think it's more helpful this way. Okay, so this is access to these, this 10,000 data sets that we talked about. There's a general search, but unless you have like a specific lake or a specific cave in mind, I don't think that's gonna be very useful. If you just type in like Peru drought or something, you're gonna get so many resources, it's not gonna really be helpful. So let's go instead to the advanced search. So you can keep scrolling down to advanced search. We're gonna skip the investigators. We don't really need to search by that, but what really helps is locations. So I mentioned at the start of the talk that I've decided to use Peru as an example here. You can of course choose with everyone you wanna do, but what if we just all stay on the same topic, let's just all use Peru. So you can search in the search bar Peru. And then if you just click on that, what shows up in this next box here is basically saying that's gonna screen everything in the world to only focus on the country of Peru, which is great, right? If you work in Morocco, you can click Morocco and it'll only give you results from Iraq, right? So that's a great way to start. If you wanna be even more specific, you can use this bar here and we're gonna go zoom into Peru. Let's fly with me in the slow down to Peru. All right, and we're gonna, sorry, I apologize. We're gonna go ahead and box. And we've made this little search box here. In fact, I'm gonna delete that. I'm gonna make it again a little... All right, here we go. So we've picked a corner of Peru. What is that? Maybe like a third of the country, a quarter of the country, something like that. You can make it as big or small as you like, but now we can say, okay, we're focusing on like the central part of the country and we'll see what's there. If we go into the entry bars on the left, we can actually search by elevation. So maybe you know that you want to get ice core data. So you might have a minimum elevation of 2000 meters or something like that or 3000 meters, whatever gets you to wherever ice is in Peru. So that's another way of specifying where you want your data to come from. And then these variables that they have at the end are even more specific, too specific for what I think I wanna talk about today. But if you wanna get data that only has to do with coccolitho spores, there's fours, coccolitho spores, I thought they're coccoliths. Anyway, point is you could highlight that and that would be the only type of data you get. So you can get really specific if you want to. But let's keep on going down to the bottom here. And I think what's really helpful for everyone to use is this time feature where you can specify the time range that you want your results to include. Now, for Peru, I know that there've been people there for a while, but let's say 10,000 years. There's just a nice even number, right? And that will get rid of things that are super old because this archive is for geologists as well. People who are studying the myosin, we don't want stuff that's millions of years old. So we're just gonna get that out of there and that will help us really narrow down the approach. However, when you do this on your own, you might wanna start a little bit broader than what I selected here. So I'd recommend maybe starting with 100,000 and then working your way down to something like 10. The reason is that sometimes you find really long archives that might cover 100,000 years and 90% of that is outside of human history, but that last 10% could still be useful to you. And that's important. But for today, I'm just gonna choose 10,000 to make things simple and easy. Okay. And then we go ahead and we click search and we can see what we get. So of course, continue to let me know if there are any questions or anything, but we'll see what we have here. And we've got our results. So we've got 20 studies that are inside this archive that show up in this box within Burroul. And that's not bad, right? 20 references just like that. Now they might not all be applicable to us but let's check them out. First one here is XRF and pollen data from a peatland, some kind of marshy area, I guess. That could be really relevant to us. That's great. Let's keep on going. There's modern surf clam. What do they mean by that? Stable isotope from surf, what do they mean by modern? Let's take a look at it. And if we keep on going to the bottom it tells you when the study starts and ends. And it says here, the earliest year is negative 61 BP which is 10 years ago. So that is definitely not of interest to us. So we're gonna scratch that, right? But the point is you can look through these and you can see pretty quickly what stuff will be useful to you and what stuff won't. Let's now go to and select this Wagapo cave, 7,200 years spheliothem stable isotope data. And let's check it out. Okay, so first of all, 7,200 years that covers a lot of time in human history in Peru could be useful to us. Let's see where it is. So you can zoom in and see, hey, it's in the valley outside of Lima. I'm not sure how far away that is. But that sure does beat an ice core from Greenland, doesn't it? Right, if we wanna talk about Peru and we've got something right here and I'm no Peruvian archeologist I would guess that there are many archeological sites in this nice river valley right here. And this could, sorry, what was that? Oh, it's just north of the Montano Valley, yeah. Is that an important archeological location? I know further south it really is. I don't know up right around in there but probably everything in Peru is just a couple. Gotcha. And so, but the point is here is that even if your site is 200 miles away this is giving you data that's gonna be much more applicable to that site than things coming from the middle of the ocean than things coming from these glaciers or not necessarily glaciers here but ice sheets that are so often used in archeology but so far away. So this is kind of the whole point here is that you can find stuff really close to where you wanna be. And then the first stuff that you see is mostly boilerplate but then you can get to where you download the data and I'd like us all to do that now. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna click and I'm gonna go ahead and use control click so it opens up in a new window or a new page but we're gonna click on Wagapo Cave P00H1. We're gonna do this first one. And a text file opens up and the beginning is all just stuff that tells you about the authors of the data, blah, blah, blah. Really important stuff if you end up using it in your vapor but for now let's get to the data. So we're gonna skip down through the text file. It's gonna tell us about how they constructed their chronology. Again, good to use if you end up publishing it to know what the uncertainty is, how good is their chronology? And by the way, it's probably gonna be good enough because all this stuff is published. A lot of this stuff has been funded by MSF so not only has it been published but it's been through a rigorous review process just to get to the study phase. So this is kind of the crème de la crème most of the time here. And we skip down and here's our data. So look at all this data, yummy, yummy data all of that there for us to use. And we can just go ahead and copy and paste it and put it into Excel. So if you have Excel, why don't you open up an Excel file real quick and we'll just start manipulating the data now. So if you just go ahead and open up a blank Excel file and I'll share what I'm doing in a second with that. And once you have the Excel file open, we can go and we can copy this data and just select it all with your mouse or whatever you have and then copy it and paste it into Excel. And you might notice right away that there's a problem. Oh, let me go ahead and stop the share and bring you over to my Excel file. Hey, Albert, how's it going? Good to see you here. Let's go into Excel. And because this is text, it all falls into one column and all of the data on the site are gonna be this way. Sometimes you can download individual Excel files where it's nice and clean, but most of the time you have to copy and paste it. And so there's a little trick you do in Excel and again, this is like the one skill and it's the most basic skill ever that I could teach but this is the skill part of the workshop. We're gonna learn how to take this data and put it into a meaningful usable form in Excel. So you highlight the column, you go to the data tab, you click text to columns and then if you click the first button that says delineated, we click next, we click space, finish and there we go. Now we have our columns and we can totally start working with this data. And I'm gonna go ahead and look through it to see if it looks funky. Sometimes there might be a problem. In this case, there's one line that was problematic where it oriented the numbers a date. So I'm just gonna delete it. But everything else should be fine. And we can start looking at paleoclimate data just like this. So we're gonna go ahead and make a chart. And here is oxygen, 18 isotopic data from a speliothem over about 1400 years. Now I mentioned in the beginning of the talk that like, I'm not gonna try to interpret what this means for climate because it's really hard to do that actually. It seems simple at first, but there's so many things that affect us. But what we can do is look for trends. Know that trends have to do with changes of some sort in the environment. And we can at least say that. And so if we look at this data, it's like, okay, we've got kind of a high about 1300 years ago and a high in the present, but there's this noticeable dip, this noticeable minimum about 300 BP, right? So I put this in the 18th century. And that might have, that might be an important climatic event.  And so we know that, you know, the Incan Empire is happening around here. There's a decline in these values after that. Micahs have impacted people living there at this time. Who knows? But we're gonna, we can at least have some data to start to investigate those sort of questions. But as we talked about earlier, one isn't enough, but we've got our start. So let's go back to the search results. So I'm gonna stop my share. When I go back to where we were on that second link, under the search results and just keep looking here. Oh, did I share my screen? I don't think I shared my screen today. Whoops. Let me share my screen again here. Apologize everyone for that. So if we go back to the results, let's keep on looking and see what we got. And lo and behold, only two records down, there's another isotopic data. This time it's from Laguna Puma Cocha, which I'm gonna guess is like a lake or some sort of body of water. Let's see if it says in the abstract here. Every see, a varved lake. So this is great because the earlier record was a speliothem, which is one type of proxy. Yeah, of course. Here we go. So the speliothem is one proxy of isotopic data, and now we have lake sediment as another. And if these agree, we can be more confident about what we have been seeing in that first record. Is that decline real? Does that correspond to an instance of climatic change? So let's do what we did before and download it. So we're gonna go down, we're gonna click on PumaCocha.txt. You could click on the Excel file, but since we're gonna practice our skills with the text, and very few of these are actually Excel based. Most of them that I've seen are just the straight up just text file. Let's go find the data. So of course at the beginning, they have the chronology data, which is important, but not actual paleoclimate data. So let's go find that. And here it is. We have to scroll down kind of far, but we found it. And we've got depth in the core, the year from their chronology, and then carbon and oxygen isotope data. So we're gonna go and we're gonna bring our cursor down, get all of the data that we can, just copy paste it. And we're gonna go back to our Excel file. So I'm gonna stop the share again. And we're gonna do the same thing we did. Oh, I'm gonna restart the share again. A lot of sharing and then not sharing. Kind of like my baby. All right, so we're gonna go to the make a new tab here and do the same thing we did before, right? Where we copy it and we paste it. We go to data. We, sorry, gotta find my data bar. There it is. The text of columns, delimited finish. And voila, we have our data again. One problem though is that before, in the last archive, our data was in years BP. Now it's in years AD. So we gotta just do a quick fix for that so they can say the same thing and be potted. So we're just gonna do a quick equals 1950 minus B2. And we're just gonna drag that across here. And that way everything's gonna be in BP and it'll be a lot easier to compare. I'm just gonna keep going down and we're at the bottom. And so now we've got our years in BP and we can do option 18 and we can make a graph. Oh my gosh, I messed up somehow. Let's try that again. Insert graph. There it is. Now this, it was kind of lazy. It didn't wanna auto-adjust the axis. So I'm just gonna mess around with the axis real quick to make it a little more pretty here for us. We'll make that maybe negative 11. There we go. Now we can see the changes. And what we can do now is say, okay, let's see how well this data match up with the data set from before. And to do that, the real way to do this is to plot them on the same graph, but in Excel, it's hard to do because they'll just kind of all, yeah, it won't look that good. If you're doing this for publication, you're gonna either use graphing software or illustrator and do this in a very exact manner. So I'm not gonna do that. So don't do this at home kids for at least in the professional sense. But what I'm gonna do here is just a quick and dirty way of comparing them. We're just gonna say, all right, I'm gonna make the scales on them the same. So I'm gonna say the scale here is gonna be negative 50 to 1400 BP. And then I'm gonna make the scale on this one the same and I'm gonna change the color as well so that we can differentiate them. So we're gonna make that what I say negative 50. And I think I said 1400. Cool. And then all I'm gonna do is just copy and paste this one to the other one just to kind of look at what they, how similar or different they are. I'll make this transparent as well. So if I go to this and I actually, I did the thing I meant to not do, okay. Oops, almost there. And again, this is not the real way of doing this. I'm just kind of doing a very fast version of what I do normally. But now we have these two proxies. Their scale is the same. I think I've made it almost perfect where they start and end at the same years and we can compare them. Now I mentioned at the beginning that this is not enough. You'd wanna make a big, tall version of this with many more proxies, but this is how you start, and you can start to see, is there any agreement between them? And maybe I'll open up to y'all. What do you think? Do you see it? Would you say that these proxies are an agreement? It's bowed here. Looks like we got a little dip there around 350. I don't know if that bump at 950 is significant, but it looks like I can see a general shape there, I guess. You know, Bo, yeah, I could not agree with you more in the way that you put it. There seems to be some agreement that there is a local minimum around 350 BP. Now, as Bo also said, around 950, this record, which was the one from a lake, shows a local maximum, whereas this one from the speleothem shows really stable values over a period of 500 years. So they are not an agreement, they decouple this part of their chronology, but they agree here. Now, if we were to get more data and find that this 350 thing, there's something going on there, the more that we see shifts around this time, the more comfortable and confident we could be in saying, there's a significant thing going on in local climate in this area at 350. And at that point, maybe at that point, then we can incorporate archaeology and we can say what is happening with people at this time, right? But we first need to be sure that what's happening in local area is real. And you can see how you could get yourself into trouble. If you only use the record in red, and you said there's something important going on at 950, and if you were to base your whole paper on that and you make a big story and you've done all this work, and then someone finds this other record and says, what the hell are you talking about? It's completely flat and stable. The climate is in stasis. You got yourself a problem, right? So that is how we prevent that. By doing a good job, it really kind of seeing what the data tell us from multiple proxies. We got isotopic stuff from lakes and a cave. That's a good start. Maybe we could get a glacier, make it three. Maybe there's some other sort of stuff in terms of pollen. Maybe there's a shift in vegetation at 350 BP too. So the more that you diversify the data and they all agree, makes you even more confident that something is going on. And I did promise to not interpret what is happening here. But I mean, this is kind of like the very end of little ice age. Maybe it's something really bad, but that's more of a Northern Hemisphere thing. It's definitely more of a Northern Hemisphere thing. I shouldn't even said that. That was silly and unwise of me to deal. Okay, so we will stop sharing, but I hope that gets you an idea of how you start with the search page. You find the data, you get the data, you put new Excel and you don't stop there. You keep getting data, you keep comparing it until you find something. So the last thing, we got one more thing that I wanted to do. If anyone has any questions, please let me know. Otherwise I'm just gonna keep, just pushing through the last thing, which is to go to link three. And link three is the one that is possibly gonna be a disaster. So I saved it for the end. So go ahead and click on link three and we'll see what happens. And what link three is is, let me just get it to it on my page, is a really, really cool tool from NOAA, but it's also been frustrating to use, which is why I saved it for the end. So let me find the share screen feature. So this is this map search where instead of doing what we did before where we searched it by kind of using more text-based things, you can actually zoom into a specific latitude and longitude on planet Earth and see how close various datasets are to you. So I'm gonna try this and again, it takes forever to load most of the time, which is why I was so afraid to do it live because like what are we gonna do? Just stare at each other while the screen loads see it's happening. I was afraid of this. Point is in your own time, I'll give this maybe 30 seconds of a grace period to see if it plays ball with us. If, oh, it's starting to, it's starting to, but on your own time, check out this website, which is this map version. And you can say, hey, I know where my archeological site is in the world that I'm interested in. And I wanna know what data is available to me within 50 miles, 100 miles. And you can just scoot around and see and the different symbols say, oh, it's this type of proxy. You've got tree rings here, you've got a lake here, you've got a cave here and there's stuff from the ocean off the coast here.  But as you can see, it's been super like just chugging along. And when I use this last, it was far more efficient, but I seriously use this like, I don't know, six months ago, it was doing better than this.  So I might say that this is something for everyone to try at home and all conclude with what I have to share there. So maybe what we can do is just see if there are any questions about what we covered just then. If you wanna try it out on your own right now and say, hey, I'm gonna try searching things and can you give me a minute to try that out and see if I have any questions? I'm happy to stick around and talk you through it if you wanna do that. But yeah, I hope that wasn't too long or too short or anything like that. So thanks everybody.


Hi, I'm Megan Humphrey and I am the Executive Director of Hands and we are a small non-profit in Burlington, Vermont. And our mission is to get food to adults who are 50 years and over and we have a few programs. One of them is this great Hands in the Dirt Gardening Program which we partner with Garden Expert Charlie Nardosi and I even wore my Peapod earrings just for this. We also do a meal and gift bag delivery all over the county on Christmas Day. And we have nutrition education workshops called Hands in the Kitchen and we've also just started partnering with Heineberg Senior Center during this time of COVID to set up a brand new program called Support Buddies. So we really want to thank Charlie so much for coming in today and he is going to be talking about mid-season gardening. So Charlie take it away, thank you. Thank you Megan and it's great to be here. It's always great to be involved in gardening activities especially at places like our Lady of Providence and whoever else is out there watching or listening to this webinar. This is the second in a series. We did one on spring gardening and now we're into June. Things have changed dramatically from May to June. If you remember back, hard to believe a month ago it was snowing and it was freezing out. Now, of course, we're in the middle of a heat wave if you're watching this live on June, what are we here? June 23rd. Look at that. On June 23rd. So what I'd like to do today is do a short presentation all about things we should be thinking about in our garden, in our June gardens. Many of us have put our gardens in last month and things are growing for better or for worse but there are a lot of things that we really should be thinking about doing to create a better garden, a more productive garden, and one that's going to last all season long. That's really a key thing and now is the time to really act on a lot of things. All right. So June garden tune up. This is a time of year that's kind of critical to make sure things are really growing strong because we're really trying to set up having July, August, September being really productive months in the vegetable garden. And one of the first things we want to think about doing is thinning and spacing if we haven't already done this. I realize some of these chores and tasks might be things you've already done and you're on top of it. Great. Good for you. But I'm just going to try to cover all the bases here and put it out. And one of the things about thinning and spacing is that you need to thin certain vegetables enough so that they have room to grow. A good example is what's on the screen right now, which is carrots. If you don't thin carrots, you'll get small spindly little carrots. So at this time of year, you should be thinning them to about four inches apart. That's pretty much true for beets as well. Radishes could be thinned to a couple inches apart. So any of those root crops need room to expand to grow. If you planted onion sets or plants, you wanted to have those at least about six inches apart as well so they, again, can form those nice big bulbs. But it doesn't stop there with the thinning and spacing. If you got a little overzealous in your garden, which we often do and it's hard not to do that, we have a couple extra cucumber plants. We have a couple extra squash. If you pop them in, maybe forget about the proper spacing. That's something you might want to come back to. So if you have cucumbers, you should have the cucumbers good eight to 12 inches apart for the individual plants, giving them plenty of room to grow up a trellis or along the ground. For zucchini and summer squash, you want to have those probably about a foot or so apart. For bigger plants like tomatoes, those should be three feet apart. For peppers and eggplants, you can be a couple feet apart. The idea is that you don't want to have them overcrowded. Looks like a lot of open space now is going to quickly fill in over the next month. So if the plants are overcrowded, they're not going to flower and fruit as well because they'll be competing for nutrients and for water since it's been so dry. So take a look at your spacing of your plants that either you put in originally or ones that came up from seed and make sure you have the proper spacing for each one of them. Now this time of year is also a good time to do a little pinching, a fun activity. If you have plants like basil, for example, or any of the herbs, oregano and thyme, this works on too, or if you have some flowers, say you have some zinnias out there, it's good to pinch the tops of those plants now. And the reason for pinching the tops is that you want to create a bushier plant. I know that the temptation is, oh my God, I've got basil. I want to pick every leaf of it. But if you spend a little time just pinching a few of those plants now, taking the top two or four leaves off, just with your fingertips, just give them a little pinch. What will happen is that all the buds lower down. If you look at this image on the screen of the basil, you can see there's little leaves kind of going down that stem. If you pinch to right above those leaves, those leaves will form new leaves, new stems.  So pinching now is going to give you dividends later on, whether it be with basil, with marigolds, with calendula, with zinnias, like I mentioned, a lot of different plants. Also, when you start harvesting, and I'll talk more about this as we go along, you want to harvest early and often. I know some people, my neighbor included, are already harvesting summer squash and zucchini, much to my jealousy. He did a great job getting them off started earlier, and they're a protected spot, and they're just going gangbusters. So you want to harvest those plants when the fruit is small, and there's a reason for it. Not only is the fruit tastier and it's more tender, but it also keeps the plant producing. So if you let that zucchini or that cucumber get really big, sometimes happens with zucchinis unintentionally, like something you would float down the Onuski River in, if that happens, what happens inside that zucchini or that cucumber is that the seeds mature, and when those seeds mature, it sends a message back to the plant to stop producing more fruit. Job is done, good job, take the rest of the summer off. So you want to be picking early and often. I often will pick zucchini when it's a very small stage, even with the flower attached. Cucumbers, when they're four to six inches long, beans is another one that does this. Those bush beans or pole beans, if you can harvest those before those bean seeds start maturing inside, getting those little bumps, that's going to be really good to set up more harvest going throughout the summer. Another thing you might want to look at, and again, this all depends upon your situation, is if you have some scraggly little plants, especially things like eggplants and peppers and sometimes tomatoes, even though most people's tomatoes now are probably grown pretty strong, but if you have little scraggly plants of peppers, of eggplant, some squashes, winter squash, melons, and they start flowering, even though the pepper plant or the plant leaves are very small, and the plant is not very big. That's not a good idea. So the best thing to do is to pick off that first flower. Oh, I know that might kill you to do that, but the reason for it is that the plant will send more energy into the leaves, more injury into the root system, so you won't get that first fruit, but all the other fruits that have come will be bigger, healthier, and you'll get more of them. Now, again, if you've already kind of gone through this and you've kind of moved beyond that stage and you have big pepper plants, you know, I have big pepper plants right now, or big tomato plants, then this doesn't pertain to you, but if you have some small plants that you maybe got in a little bit late and they're just kind of limping along, don't let them flower. Let them get a leg up, let them get some nice big leaves, and then you can start letting them to set their flowers. Also, if you haven't noticed, it's dry out there. We've been in a drought now for most of the spring and it's really been accelerated with this heat wave that, again, if you're listening live on the 23rd of June, we're still right in the middle of it. It's about a week of 90-degree days with wind and a lot of sun. So watering is key and it's really important that you water well, whether you have raised beds or in ground plants. Now, if you have raised beds that have legs on them, so you have a small box, basically, where the soil is, those you're probably gonna have to water daily, especially when it's really hot and really windy and really sunny because they're gonna dry out really fast. If you have bigger beds, maybe ones that are up two to three feet tall, those you probably don't have to water daily. Those you could probably go a couple days without watering because there's such soil mass there that's gonna hold more of the water. Also, it depends on what kind of plants you have.  That's what happens in our garden. Every day it dries out. Those are the ones I have to water daily. But if you have transplants like a tomato or a zucchini or a cucumber and they're pretty well established now, you can go a couple days without watering them unless you have those shallow beds or unless you have containers. Those you're probably gonna have to stay on top of the watering. You can automate this a little bit too. So you can get what we call soaker hoses. So that black hose in between the rows of beets and carrots there is a soaker hose. And that just oozes out water from the hose and you hook it up to a regular garden hose which hooks up to your faucet. You turn it on and you just leave it on until the water sinks down a good six to eight inches. That's kind of the rule of thumb you wanna have. Six to eight inches is how deep you want the water to sink down into. So a couple ways you can measure it simply is to get a pencil or get a little, even like a little rod or something of that nature that measures six to eight inches, push it down into the soil and see after you've watered is it moist all the way down at the bottom. If it's done that then you want a time how long you had to run that hose to get it that deep. And that's what you'd use going forward into the future. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, no matter what it is. You keep that number in mind. What's nice about this soaker hose system it's called the snick and drip in that you can create little juncture hoses, junction hoses that will connect the soaker hoses without having to have the soaker hose run through pathways or across the lawn. You're not wasting water this way. And you can also put a little timer on it in the faucet. So if you have a hard time keeping up with watering using something automated is great. And as I mentioned, if you have containers those are exceptional because you have a small soil mass that's gonna dry out really quickly. But I would still check it. You know, we have some pretty big containers and I haven't had to water those every day. They also are in a little bit of a shady spot where they don't get sun in the afternoon and that'll make a difference too. So if you're worried about your containers they look like they're drying out too fast. Plants aren't doing well. You might wanna protect them from that hot afternoon sun during these hot dry days. Weeding is another thing that we all wanna do right now. Well, not maybe in 95 degree temperature. First thing in the morning and late in the evening. That's the time to weed. And it's good to do some weeding now even if you don't see a lot of weeds. And the reason is they're coming. Either they're germinating now and there's little baby seedlings you can hardly see coming up or they'll be germinating really quickly. The way you wanna weed is using that hoe on the left hand side of the screen. That's what we call a collinear hoe or it's a small sharp bladed hoe. What's nice about it is that you just drag it along the soil surface and it pulls out those weeds. It just scalps them or pulls them right out. The nice thing about this way of hoeing is that you're not digging down into the soil so you're not bringing up the other weed seeds that are lurking under the soil that'll germinate. So it'll keep an ongoing process. If you keep doing that, you'd have to be weeding every week. This way, if you keep weeding like this through June and into early July for the rest of the summer, you won't see so many weeds. If you have bigger weeds like a dandelion, for example, you might wanna use that tool on the right there. And these come as hand tools or long handled tools. And those have more of a claw on them that'll enable you to go down and really pull out that weed down at its roots.  And this could be, again, in a raised bed or it could be an in-ground garden. Even in a container garden, you could do this. You can use straw, which is usually a preferred mulch that keeps the soil nice and moist and keeps the weeds from growing. I use hay because it's just readily available where I am. I know people are concerned about weed seeds. I haven't seen that many, at least in the hay that I've gotten. Sure, there's some grass that comes through, but it's easy to kind of pull it out. And for the most part, it makes life a lot easier. If you have a container, you might get a little shredded bark mulch or bark chips and put those in there. That would be another way to protect them. You can use other materials like chopped up leaves or untreated grass clippings from a lawn that hasn't had herbicides on it and sprinkle that around too. Ideally in a garden or in a raised bed, you wanna have about four inches or so of a nice mulch layer. In a container, you can go a little shallower because you don't wanna bury the plants too much. But mulching is a great way to conserve water, help with weeding and keep your plants growing strong. Now, if you have tomatoes, you're gonna wanna support them if you haven't already. I always will support our tomatoes right after I plant them, so I don't have to think about it, but sometimes life gets in the way and you don't have time to do everything. So you'll often find people using these kind of tomato supports. These are the four-ring tomato cages. Very common, great for a big plant, but what starts out as a little plant in a big cage quickly can turn into a big plant in a little cage. As you can see on the left-hand tomato plant there, it's already growing outside of its cage, hasn't even had its fruit start to ripen yet, and it's already that big. So these tomato cages are good for certain usages. They're good for tomatoes that are what we call determinant, meaning that they grow up about three feet tall, set their fruit, and that's about as big as they get. So they get about as big as that tomato on the right. That's nice for these cages, because the cage is strong enough to hold them up and they won't flop over. Celebrity is a variety of tomato that is a determinant tomato. However, there are a lot of other tomatoes, especially the ones that we love, like the Sun Gold Cherry Tomatoes or the Red Cherry Tomatoes, or the heirlooms like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple and Mortgage Lifter, those are all great plants, but they are what we call indeterminate plants, meaning that they'll keep growing and growing and growing until frost or disease or you get sick of them and you knock them down. So that'll be more like that tomato on the left, and what ends up happening is it outgrows as a cage, it starts setting fruit, and then when you get a big summer thunderstorm or a windstorm, it knocks the whole thing over. So you have to be careful if you're growing those indeterminate plants to get a strong cage. It could be, you could use these cages, but I would put in a stake or two to help support that cage. Another thing you could do is the old Italiano way of growing tomatoes like my grandfather Rocco used to do, you get one stake, one plant, you trim off all the side branches of that plant so you have one main trunk. If you look really closely, you could probably see that one main trunk going up the stake that's there, and you prune off the lower leaves and then you can see the fruit sets there and then you let it continue to grow up. The nice thing about this is it keeps everything neat and clean and you get, you can see the fruit and you get less disease because they don't have those lower leaves. The downside is you're gonna have less production, less fruit this way, and I think personally the fruit doesn't taste as good because you don't have as much photosynthesis happening from the sun, you don't have as many leaves, so you're not getting as much sugars going into the fruit. But you can try it out and it certainly works really well in a small space area like in a raised bed where you do a little pinching and try it. You can try a couple different ways. Or you can use some of these, what I call Space Age New Cages. This one's called Vertex Gardener Supply Cells, this one. And this, you can buy the small one you can see down there in the foreground or you can make it a double decker and get the big one you see in the background there. What's nice about these cages is that they're lightweight aluminum cages. They're pretty sturdy, they don't rust. They fold up really easily to store in the winter. You can just hang them in a basement somewhere really simply. And if you look closely, it's a little hard to see, but on the bottom one you can see they have these little clips. And so if you forgot to put your cage on your tomato and the tomato's really big, instead of trying to squeeze that cage on there, like you're trying to squeeze your bathing suit on after a really ambitious winter, instead of having to squeeze it in and breaking branches, what you can do instead is just wrap it around and use that clip to clip it together. So that's a nice feature of this Vertex Tomato Cage. So think about supporting your tomatoes. You wanna keep them off the ground so they don't rot or have the animals get the best of them. Also another thing to do this time of year is some summer fertilizing. So vegetables have probably been in gardens for a week to six weeks, four to six weeks by now. And some of the things like spinach maybe, or even lettuces might have bolted. And so now you find yourself with a bed or part of a bed that's open, you can do some more planting in that bed. Before you do that, put some compost in and maybe put some organic fertilizer in. Also, if you're growing long-season vegetables, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, cucumbers, melons, anything that's gonna take a whole season of growth, you want to add a little side dressing of that same granular fertilizer probably once a month. So do it now, do it again in July, do it again in August. That's gonna help keep the fruits coming, keep the plant growing strong so you continue to get those cucumbers and squash right into the fall.  And a lot of it is attributed to the heat and the drought. Like I said, it's been very dry in the spring and especially the last couple of weeks. And now we've been having these record high temperatures. So what happens is the plant has these different defense mechanisms that it puts in place to survive. One of them is you'll start seeing these leaves curling. This is a tomato leaf and you can see it starts curling and that way it reduces the amount of exposure it has to the air and so it doesn't evaporate water as quickly. If you can't do that fast enough what ends up happening is you see all the brown edges on those leaves, that's leaf scorch. That happens because the plant is transpiring so much moisture that the roots can't keep up. And so those leaves at the tips of those leaves are the first ones that'll kind of brown and shrivel because they can't have enough moisture from the root system to keep them green. Luckily a lot of this will be a changed around once we get cooler weather and once we get some rain or once you do some heavier watering on them. So don't get too frustrated if you see these kind of leaves and leaves scorching out there, leave them as they are. If the whole leaf of course dies and the whole branch is dead, you can take it off. But if the leaves are still green, leave them as they are it's more likely that they'll survive. So let's talk about a few pests because I know everyone's really wondering about what's going on pest wise. Those black things you see on your screen are aphids and aphids are like the rabbits of the insect world. They reproduce really quickly and often we'll find those on basil or on flowers or on the stems of eggplants or leaves. They like the new growth, they like the new leaves. Now the little critter on the left there is a ladybug beetle and she's going to have a little snack. That's good, we wanna encourage them. The little critter on the right is an ant and that ant is actually a farmer. He is farming those aphids trying to get that sticky sweet substance called honeydew from them to bring back to the hive. So you've got the ladybug trying to eat the ants and the farmer trying to protect the ants because he's farming them almost like a crop. Now you might see this kind of damage. I know I've seen it in our garden and you'll see it on spinach leaves, beet leaves and Swiss chard leaves in particular. It's called a leaf miner. Now leaf miner is an adult fly that lays the egg on the leaf, the egg hatches into a little caterpillar. It's so small it actually tunnels in between the layers of the leaf causing all this damage you see here. The best way to control the leaf miner is to do what we call sanitation, meaning go through, you see leaves that have the leaf miner damage, just pick them off, just pinch them right off. And it's important though, not to drop them, but to take them away, put them in a garbage or put them somewhere away from that area so those insects won't come back and re-infest other plants that you have. Often with the leaf miner, one last thing about that is it comes in cycles. So you'll get it in the spring with a lot of those spring greens and then in the summer you don't see it much and then it sometimes comes back in the fall. So you have to be aware of how those life cycles work. Also you can plant resistant varieties of plants. So everyone loves squashes and this of course is a butternut squash. But what'll happen sometimes in mid-summer is that that butternut squash plant will just start wilting for seemingly no reason at all. Even though the ground might be moist, it just starts wilting. If you go back on the stem all the way back to the crown you might find this kind of damage. Now that's kind of disgusting, doesn't it? Those little white things you see on your screen are the squash vine borer caterpillars and they have started to bore into the stem and they'll start boring away from the center of the plant.   That's why you should have chickens, huh? Or if you don't want to do that, you can just toss them on the lawn. I think the birds will have them for a snack. So a way to get around the squash vine borer is to grow squash that don't get it. So butternut happens to be one of those types of squash that does not get the vine borer. But your zucchinis and your summer squash and your acorn squash and Hubbard squash and pumpkins will get it. So you have to be on the lookout for that kind of insect that might be attacking your plants. This one is a common one you probably are already familiar with. It is the cabbage worm.  That's the adult. It's laying the eggs on the leaf, the leaf on the underside of the leaf. And actually you can see a little egg there. If you look really close, you see that kind of pale yellow little dot right below the caterpillar? That's the cabbage worm egg. So the cabbage worm, of course, eats the holes in the leaves. And if you get a lot of them, it could really deform the plant. So the best thing to do, and I'll talk more about this, is to exclude that cabbage worm adult from laying the eggs, or by checking on the underside of the leg, look for the cabbage worms and again, pick them off or squish them with your fingers. Those are the best way to ensure more sure fireways to control them. If you have cucumbers, chances are you're probably gonna see cucumber beetles, these black spotted or striped, depending upon the type you have, will often go after the yellow flowers and after the leaves and causing all kinds of damage. You can sprinkle something called diatomaceous earth, diatomaceous earth, which is kind of a small little diatoms in a powder form and has sharp little skeletons. It's not sharp for our touch, but it's sharp to the beetles. They don't like it and that sometimes keeps them away. You can also trap these with yellow sticky cards.  So it's important to kind of control cucumber beetles before they get an upper hand. If you have raised beds, especially tall raised beds, this may not be a problem. I've noticed that they don't seem to notice plants that are up tall on a tall raised bed or in a window box, for example, any place where it's kind of elevated. Even those elevated beds that are on legs might be a good place to grow cucumbers for that reason. But a lot of these insects can be controlled without having to do any hand picking or spraying just by using what we call barriers. So this is a barrier called a floating row cover and you can just drape this over your plants. There's different weights of it. This one is the insect weight. It lets in air and water and it works really well. But this is my favorite for insect control and it's called micro mesh, micro mesh. And it's made kind of like a window screen material. You just drape it over the plants. I have some little wire hoops in there you can see that's keeping it off the plants but it's very lightweight. It lets in air, light and water and you can see through it. But the thing I like about it more so than the row covers is that it's long lasting. It's much more durable. It'll last for years whereas the row covers sometimes break down over time. So using these barriers over almost all your vegetables can really prevent damage. You can get hoops that are really tall for tall vegetables. The only vegetables you can't do this with are the squash cucumber pumpkin family because they need cross pollination from bees. Pretty much everything else would do fine. Another thing you can look for are eggs. So look on the bottom side of squash leaves for these eggs or the bottom side of potato leaves for the potato beetle yellow eggs. And because these little eggs look very innocuous but they'll turn into the squash bug which can make a mess on your squash and melons come August and September. So by finding those eggs on the bottom there and squishing them or just cutting them out if you don't want to squish them it's a good thing to do. They're not out yet but in the next couple weeks you'll start seeing them flip over the leaves, look for the eggs if you see them they're all lined up like little soldiers or copper colored cut them out or squish them and you won't get so many of these. Another thing to look out for come July is the tomato horn worm. Now this creature is literally that big. It grows four to six inches long and even though it's huge it's amazingly camouflaged. It'll be on your tomato plant and you'll never notice it but you'll notice the damage. You'll see on the tops of the plants lots of leaves have been eaten and chewed down. It looks like almost like deer have gotten in there. It's probably not deer it's probably a tomato horn worm. Start looking for little black, dark green blackish droppings on the leaves. That's the poop from this tomato horn worm.  So keep your eyes peeled for this. If you see some damage get on it fast because these guys eat a lot really quickly. And like I said it's usually in July some time where you start seeing the damage. Now I know it's been hot and dry and you probably haven't thought much about slugs but they're out there and they're just waiting for a rainfall. Or if you've done some mulching they're lurking underneath there and they wanna start getting into your lettuce and getting into your basil and getting into all your plants. So you can control them even starting now with beer traps. This is one Wendy and I put together a very simple one, took a hummus container put in some very cheap beer. I think it was Coors Light but don't tell Coors that. Cheap is what I could find. And just place it around the plants where you think you've seen damage. And what happens overnight is that these slugs that you can see them floating there they try to stretch out and get to the beer and they flop in and they drown in the beer. What a way to go, huh? In the morning you scoop out the dead ones put a little more beer in and on and on it goes. Now this works great but it might invite other critters to come in too like some dogs or last night in our house we had raccoons in our garden and they started hooting and howling and we couldn't, one in the morning couldn't figure out what was going on then I realized oh they drank all the beer and they were drunk raccoons.  But it's a good control for slugs. If you have someone who is a sheep farmer or you know where you can get some raw wool using wool as a mulch is a good way to keep slugs away because they don't like crossing those barriers that scratchy kind of barrier. So just put it around, I saw this first saw this in England and they were doing it around hostas but it'll work around any plants and that's a nice barrier to keep the slugs and stales from eating your plants. If you have containers you can use copper flashing or copper strips, you can buy these or get these and you just wrap them around and catch it to the top rim of your container and as that slug comes up and tries to cross the copper it gets an electrochemical shot, doesn't like it turns around and goes somewhere else. So there's a lot of fun little things you could do if you're starting to see some slug damage out there besides having to hand pick them which is kind of a squeamy little thing to do. And I wanted to talk just a minute about a few diseases and one with them of course would be powdery mildew. Now we're not seeing that quite yet because it's so hot but once it gets cooler especially as we get towards July and August, cooler in the evenings you start seeing the white powderiness on those leaves. You can get varieties of squash and melons that are resistant to powdery mildew, nice thing to look for. You can do some preventive sprays of baking soda or serenade which is an organic fungicide or you can even just pick off those leaves when you start seeing that damage to reduce it so you don't get so much. It's okay if a few leaves have it especially when you get to August, September but you don't want to have the whole plan in a day because it'll cut down on the production.  You can still plant a lot of things including plants of tomatoes, peppers and eggplants, squashes, cucumbers and melons. You can still be seeding beans. You can seed beans right to the end of July or you can do greens. So here we're doing succession crops of greens. You could see that there's different greens that are planted at different times and this is a nice way to plant to use that space in your raised bed where if you only have a one or two raised beds it's a nice way to maximize the space but also get a consistent supply of greens or beans or carrots or beets or whatever it is you want right through the season. So you don't get that whole glut of them and then you have nothing for the rest of the season. We often will plant succession crops of bush beans for that reason so that we'll go to the end of July planting bush beans so we have beans, fresh beans, not ones that are old all the way into September and October. So continue to think about planting especially as other plants either are finished producing or die, you can continue to add things to that garden. So hopefully everyone will have a happy garden. This of course, Megan recognized the Canal Street garden that we did a few years ago and a very successful garden in a very harsh and climate and harsh environment. And this is one from Megan and she has a question about cucumbers. Get the same leaf scorches, tomatoes. I put in some lovely healthy cucumbers but now they look awful. Yes, Megan, that does happen. You'll see the brownie edges of those cucumbers happens on squash cucumbers, especially if it's a small plant that doesn't have a good established root system it's drying out faster than you can water it. You know, you might have to water it twice a day almost to keep up with it. So that's probably what's happening to those. Hopefully if you have the green leaves in the center are still green and still growing, it'll outgrow that especially once the weather breaks a little bit and then the cucumber will come back and you'll still get some fruit. To my knowledge right now there are no home garden genetically modified vegetables. There might be a few that they're working on but I think 99.9% of the vegetables out there for a home gardener are not genetically modified. So they're not gonna have that growth that Sister Arlene was kind of referring to. But it is true that if the plants are growing bigger and bigger and are growing abnormally big or abnormally fast, there are insects like the aphids for example are really gonna kind of glom onto those because it's got a lot of food for them. So you certainly wanna have a healthy plant but you don't wanna have an abnormally healthy plant with too much fertilizer, too much compost that gets huge and it becomes like a buffet for the insects and animals. Charlie, I have a question about pastile soap and also the baking soda that you mentioned as a potential pest deterrent. Could you talk about pastile soap in terms of pest control? Well, pastile like any of the liquid types of soaps is fine to use in a diluted form as a spray. And it's called insecticidal soap. You can buy formulations of that from a garden center. You can make it yourself as well. You just don't wanna have, you just need a couple of drops in a little spray bottle. You don't need a lot to be effective and you wanna spray it for what we call soft-bodied insects. So like aphids that I just was talking about are white flies or mealybugs. Insects like that that have soft bodies it'll kind of break down quickly because of the soap. So yeah, it's fine to do that and you can make your own baking soda sprays and that's another one that's commercially available but you can also make your own. And I believe, I'm gonna go out on a limb here if I can remember my recipe for it. I believe it's a tablespoon of baking soda.  And you mix all that up and you spray it and if it's different than that I'll let you know but I think that that's the recipe. And you wanna spray it as a preventive that's the really important thing because it's not gonna stop those diseases once they start but it'll stop them from getting started in the first place. How often would we do the spray, Charlie? If you're trying to prevent like powdery mildew probably every week. Okay, on a weekly basis. Now I just have one more question. Would you recommend, so could you tell me the difference between hay, straw and the mulch in terms of what would you recommend and where would we get it? Sure, so straw is what's usually recommended cause it's made from like wheat and rye and they take all the seed heads off. So you're just getting like the straw. You're getting the stalks of the plant. So you don't have any weed seeds or grass seeds in it and that's why straw is recommended. The downside of straw is it's very expensive especially around here. So if you have a small garden and you just need one bale it might be fine but if you need like five or 10 bales it gets kind of pricey to do that. The alternative would be using chopped up leaves not just whole leaves from last fall but chopped up ones that are shredded or grass clippings that you can sprinkle in there as a mulch. Or you can use hay, now I know a lot of people say that hay has weed seeds in it, grass seeds and that's true but my experience is if you put a thick enough layer of hay down you might get some grass and things germinating but it's not a lot and hay is so much cheaper and so much easier to find around here than the straw. And that's gonna also hold in moisture. Right, it holds in the moisture and prevents the weeds from growing. So your plants especially during conditions like now will do much better. Thank you all for coming and we'll do this again soon and I'll be seeing you in the garden. Thanks Charlie.


Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a message of support and solidarity for my friends at the Institute for Palestinian Studies. As I utter these words, Palestine, Gaza in particular, is being bombarded to smithereens. This is not the time to study the Palestinian issue. This is the time to defend the existence, the very existence of Palestinians, so that the study of the people of Palestine does not become the equivalent of the study of Etruscans or other peoples that have disappeared from the face of the planet. These are technical days for all of us who care about not just the Palestinians, but Jews and the Armenians in Gorma Karabakh. People who are not fashionable victims, because this is where we are today. The West, which is culturally so dominant, has distinguished between fashionable and unfashionable victims. So if you are today a Ukrainian that is being bombed and resists violently, then you're celebrated. But if you are a Yemeni or a Palestinian, you are either bathed in insignificance or bombed even further. My message to those who concentrate on Hamas now is really very simple. Imagine that terror in Tel Aviv and in Washington, if Hamas, every single Hamas fighter, were to surrender. Just give up. Say, we were wrong. We're not going to do this anymore. What could they do? The answer is West Bank. Just look at what has been going on in West Bank, where Hamas is not particularly active and certainly not dominant. Ethnic cleansing galore. The eradication of any possibility of the two-state solution. This is what should concentrate our minds, and this is what we should try to stress and emphasize. Because we are in the West, in the world at large. We are experiencing and we are part of a war of propaganda, the purpose of which is to justify fully the state of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and the annihilation of the people of Palestine. Let's keep fighting.