Fresh From the Garden on DIY Network is back

[feldon30]

I've been patiently (and then impatiently) waiting to see if Fresh From the Garden with Joe Lamp'l would be coming back to DIY Network.

I am happy to say it's back on, and the introduction to the 2004 season opener will be airing at these times: April 6 at 5am EDT and April 9 at 2:30am EDT. The tomatoes episode will air April 11 and again May 30, both at 5 am EDT. I'm not sure why they waited so long to air these episodes, especially since the episodes explaining how to grow cool-weather crops probably won't air until mid-summer. I'd record them to DVD and they'll be ready to watch again in January when we're all huddled up with blankets and hot chocolate.

Joe is very good about explaining things and throwing tips in. What gets me every time is how he finishes nearly every sentence with a smile, even ones when he is talking about all your plants being wiped out by fungus or insect plague.


Also, Fresh from the Orchard is back, with the Strawberries episode airing at 5am EDT tomorrow morning (4/5/2007) and the Blackberries and Raspberries episodes airing the following Thursday mornings.

Again, I cannot imagine keeping up with these shows without a TiVo or other DVR.

I intend to record both of them to DVDs so I have them.

[Worth1]

Huddled up with blankets and hot chocolate!!!!!!
In January, in Houston!!!!!

More like flip flops and shorts.


Worth

[feldon30]

Here in Houston, we had something like 20 days with night temps of 32 degrees from December 1, 2006 to February 1, 2007. It was not a winter of Alaska proportions, but it WAS a winter. The first one I've experienced in 10 years of living here.

Usually we have a few cold days, then a couple of 70 and 80 degree days pop in. Not this time. It was COLD.

[Worth1]

Feldon,
One winter in Angleton I grew pepper and tomato plants through the winter.
The next year an ice storm, but of course I think Angleton is about 50/60 miles south of you if you live in north Houston.
That makes a big difference in weather over there.
You never know what you will have from one year to the next; it all depends on the jet stream.
They didn’t even know we had a jet stream until we started bombing Japan in high altitude bombers in the 40’s.
Now if we could just control the jet stream.

Worth

[feldon30]

The segment on Strawberries missed a lot of key points and made it sound a lot easier than it is.

She did not really cover how important root and crown placement are. She did not cover how important it is that the soil be sandy and well-draining. She did not mention the new day neutral varieties of strawberries. She showed, but did not mention or discuss that you want individual strawberry crowns to be separated before planting. This is extremely important. Most strawberry transplants or buckets you find at garden centers have 2, 3, or more crowns very close together. These will fight with each other and produce just a few, small berries. You want crowns to be as far apart as possible -- in raised beds this is 1 foot.

Also I was astounded to see her WALKING in her raised beds, giving people the impression that there is nothing wrong with this.

I was about to scream at the TV when she mentioned Anthracnose and said that picking off the leaves was the best solution. But at the end of that segment, she did have a bottle turned away from the camera that looked suspiciously like Daconil and suggested people contact their county extension office to learn what fungicides are best.

She demonstrated both a raised bed and one of those strawberry planter pots that has holes in the sides to plant approx 16 plants.

Squirrels and birds were mentioned as a problem, but the usual advice of a few fake owls just doesn't work as well as some inexpensive netting. Yes it's ugly, but it works.

She did explain that in the South, strawberries are sometimes grown as annuals, but she said that the plants should be discarded and replanted each year. This is an expensive proposition for a small garden, as 25 bare root plants are $8 plus $17 shipping. The advice I have heard is to let the mother plants produce runners and try to get one good, strong daughter plant from each parent plant and then in the fall, pull the parent plants. This way you have new plants each year without paying for them.

[natural]

Feldon,

Thanks for the info on Fresh From the Garden.

Joe used to frequent one of our Farmers Market's where we sell. He was always very nice and always took time to chat with us. He would even share some of our stories on his Blog. He recently moved away from our area. We will certainly miss him, but I'm glad we can still view some of the old episodes.

He also had a Sat. morning radio garden show that was very good. We miss that as well.
Bill

[feldon30]

Wow, that's great to hear that you got to meet him, etc.

He keeps trying to get exposure and do more projects. He just published a book. His website is JoeGardener.com.

I'm sure I'll be yelling at the TV when he does his program on tomatoes, since you really need 2-3 hours to cover the basics and it's a 30 minute program.


What killed me about the strawberry thing is about 5 minutes was DIY promos and stuff about people knitting and making arts and crafts, etc. And then the last 2 minutes was this tacked on recipe segment. That 7 minutes could have been used to round out the issues I mentioned.

Joe doesn't waste time like that on his segments.

[natural]

I did enjoy the no-nonsense style of the show.

I plan to buy his new book soon. I also enjoy his website. I really like the amount of time he spends featuring new products and discussing his success or lack thereof with them.

[feldon30]

Well, Joe completely let me down on the 2006 Tomatoes episode I'm watching now.


Varieties
He mentioned Brandywine only in passing when mentioning the thousands of tomato varieties available. These are the 6 varieties he planted:

Indeterminate: Husky Cherry Red*, Better Boy, Early Girl
Determinate: Bush Goliath, Heatwave, Patio

These kinds of gardening shows just perpetuate the myth that O.P. varieties are somehow harder to grow. Towards the end of the show, he mentioned heirloom varieties and that the same techniques he used can be used to grow those. I think the 2006 Fresh From the Garden was set in Virginia, so there's no reason he couldn't have grown some more creative varieties.

*There seems to be some confusion about Husky Red Cherry. What I bought has rugose foliage and looks to be a 3' tall dwarf plant. Yet on GW someone else said it was indeterminate as well. Maybe Bonnie's mixed up some seeds?


Support
His recommended method of growing indeterminates is to build a frame out of 2x2 up and over the center of the bed and hang a string down to the plant and then train the plant up the string. This requires heavy, diligent pruning to limit the plant to 1 leader. I guess it's an economical way to grow tomatoes, but requires frequent cutting on the plants. He also emphasized twice that all suckers should be removed. I was surprised that he only grew 4 tomato plants in a 3' x 12' bed.

When I look at my tomato plants, with heavy duty branches all over the place, I wonder where I would begin to start cutting to get them to have 1 main leader? Even 2 weeks after transplant, I really have no idea which branches the plant is going to choose to care about.

I like to make cages out of concrete reinforcing wire or fence material. If fence material with 2" x 4" holes is used, then a 8" gap should be left on one side and then wire ties should be used to hold the 8" gap open so the cage resembles a "C" shape, so that the plant can be tended to. If you did well in the stock market, Texas Tomato Cages are hassle free and the Cadillac of tomato cages. They have 18" long spikes, are sectional so you can install the first 2 feet and then come back and add the other 4 feet later on, and the cages fold up for easy storage. They also cost about $23 each including shipping.

Joe talked about how there are various supports available for indeterminate tomato plants while touching and interacting with a pair of those conical 54" and 46" round tomato cages they have at the big box stores. Under no circumstances should these tomato cages be used for growing indeterminate tomato plants. For determinate (bush) or dwarf types, they will do in a pinch, but 4' cages made out of concrete reinforcing wire, fence material, or cattle panels are better.


Diseases
He twice suggested that Fusarium and Verticillium can be prevented by mulching. This doesn't sound right to me. The limited solutions I'm aware of for Fusarium and Verticillium are crop rotation and the use of some soil treatments including solarization. He also mentioned Tobacco Mosiac Virus, which has been eradicated from the U.S. for several years now. And he correctly identified BER as being a chemical imbalance caused by watering fluctuations.

Mulching IS great for preventing soil splashback of fungal diseases like Early Blight, Late Blight, Septoria Leaf Spot, Alternaria Canker, and Anthracnose and bacterial diseases like Bacterial Spot and Bacterial Speck. No mention was made of anti-fungal products.


Pests
In the pests section, he did show hornworms, but did not mention parasitic wasps or Bacillus thuringiensis, just using the general term "insecticides". Then he showed cutworms and did demonstrate using foil around the stems.


Soil
He did cover that sandy soil needs peat and clay soil needs sand, and that he adds dolomitic lime to the hole.


Fertilization
At initial plant out, he used 10-10-10. Then he immediately fertilized the seedlings with full strength Miracle Gro "for Tomatoes" 18-18-21. Later in the program, he did show Alaska 5-1-1 fish emulsion and Black Kow composted manure, but did not mention Espoma TomatoTone which has a fantastic 4-7-10 numbering for tomatoes including a great array of micronutrients. I'm guessing they had an advertising contract with Miracle Gro. I know all the plants he uses are Bonnie's and I've seen quite a few Bonnie's ads in previous airings of this show.


I know there is no 1 way to grow tomatoes, but this segment made me want to get out the camcorder and put my ugly mug in front of the camera. Of course I'd want to interview people who actually know something about tomatoes.

[feldon30]

Sirtanon posted the correct information over at GW in a related thread about the Husky series. It was, not surprisingly, to correct someone who matter-of-factly stated wrong info.

Originally Posted by sirtanon

All THREE of the Husky series tomatoes - Husky Red, Husky Gold, and Husky Cherry Red - are a very compact, tree-like semi-determinate with RUGOSE foliage.. but foliage-type aside, all three are quite nice for container growing. Considering they fall under the ISI category (Indeterminate, Short Internode), they will continue to produce fruit all season, but will stay quite compact, and don't require MUCH staking. Read that as "fairly self-supporting, but a stake or small cage wouldn't hurt."

So there is no reason whatsoever for Joe Lamp'l to have put Husky Red Cherry in his indeterminate row with 8 feet of vertical support unless he did not know that it was a dwarf that could be grown with his other smaller plants?

I got the impression from the segment that Joe doesn't like tomatoes all that much compared to other crops he's shown more interest in.

[garnetmoth]

Mr. Feldon, excuse me if this is too much, but PLEASE! ugly mug? id say a close 2nd for David Duchovny :-)

[feldon30]

I think it's true of any topic that the more you know about it, the more you will be infuriated by how journalists and TV personalities alike completely and totally bungle its coverage. Those who can become researchers and historians, those who are bored after a 1 page synopsis become TV news anchors.

I know I'm skating on political ice now but I will just say I encourage people to at least try to read a news magazine once in a while. The 20 seconds of coverage you get on each topic on TV tells you 1 person's opinion from a certain viewpoint of a tiny fraction of what happened. A 2-4 page news article by a journalist at least has a CHANCE of giving you a few different viewpoints and some background information.


I just watched the blackberries segment on Fresh from the Orchard. That show is so much fluff. They showed lots of beauty shots of blackberries and spent almost 2 minutes showing how to pick a ripe blackberry but did not actually show pruning primocanes vs florocanes. They planted the Hull and Kiowa blackberry varieties. TAMU article about blackberries. I didn't see anything on the show that I really objected to, but then again I know almost nothing about growing blackberries.

[sirtanon]

I thought the same thing. Why would he be listing that in a list of indeterminates when it's clearly a dwarf. The only explanation I can think of would be that it actually IS an indeterminate, just a short one.. then again, an 8 foot support??

... and wow. I'm being quoted inter-forum now

[FlipTX]

I had a couple 4 foot bamboo poles in the pot with Husky Cherry Read and that was fine. I probably wouldn't have even needed that if I hadn't let two leaders grow instead of trimming it to one. The two main branches made a "V" that got unwieldy as the season went on. The plant probably reached a final height of about four feet.

[bbjm]

I grew Husky Cherry Red in a 5 gallon container last year and it was one of my best plants (I'm a novice, so that is not saying much). It is a very stocky plant and needed vertually no support. Certainly nothing like 8 feet of support. I suppose it would get bigger in the ground, but most other plants would make better use of that kind of support.