5 Ways Gardeners Accidentally Make Things Worse

Today's video is my contribution to Halloween, and these are the four probably creepiest things that can happen in your garden that will definitely go down in your mind as absolute horror mysteries, all four of which have actually happened to myself. So let's get into it. Number one is the beautiful compost that had a history or unfinished business. Now, this is any sort of compost that has persistent herbicides in it. Maybe it has A heavy load of something that's allelopathic, so for example, a sunflower-heavy compost, or it has some sort of disease, and of course, unfinished business-wise, it's something that has not actually been properly cured. Now, this can cause a number of different issues, but most of which show up in seedlings that either just don't germinate or transplants that look really weak and gangly and sick. Now, this can happen to nearly anyone. It doesn't have to just necessarily be compost. It could also be manure. Very rarely would this happen in like a coconut coir straight mix or a peat moss mix in any case, because there's not a lot of inputs into that and there's no curing time needed. But with that being said, one way you can actually help prevent against this horse radish or kind of acting its way out in your garden is to use something called a bioassay test. Now, this is really simple to do. You're going to take 10 pea seeds. And you're going to take 10 corn seeds. Corn seeds are monocots and pea seeds are dicots. And the difference between the two is how they respond, particularly to specific scenarios like persistent herbicide. Now, this isn't going to tell you if there's disease and it's not going to tell you necessarily if there's a high sunflower concentration. But what it is going to tell you is if the persistent herbicide was for monocots or dicots. So one of those two may perform less than ideally. So if you have Less than 50% germination with one of the two, there's probably a high likelihood that you have one of the two issues. So you want to plant the one that performed well to try to eat up any reserves that may be in that system. Now both tend to germinate really poorly, then this is a great indicator that maybe you have something with high sunflower material in it, oak leaves, for example, like a straight oak leaf mulch. Um, or you have an uncured, still hot type compost manure mix. So those are kind of three things that'll happen if all, both sets of seeds end up performing really poorly. So number one, hands down is compost with unfinished business. So number two is weeds that just don't seem to want to die. You chop the head off and they keep coming back. So I think really obvious examples of this are things like black grass. So we're trying to establish a new garden. You're probably thinking to yourself. I'll just till this up and then everything will be good. That's not always the case. If you have anything that is spread rhizomatically, bindweed is another example of something that seems to be very, very persistent and continues to come back. If you till it once and then you leave it, it's very likely that it's going to become a problem again. So one of the best ways to actually take care of these manic plants that just seem to keep on coming back over and over and over again is kind of two methods mainly, well, three technically. So number one is if you take a tiller and you till that land up, now you're going to want to till it multiple times. So every time you see new growth, you're going to go in and till it again. What you're doing is you're chopping up those rhizomes. Now this isn't going to kill the plant, don't get me wrong, but what it is going to do is it's going to make the storage units smaller and smaller and smaller, meaning the battery reserve goes from a D-volt to a triple A or watch battery, the reserve goes down. And that's the idea that we want to go with. After that part, you have kind of next step, which would be, there's a mouse over there or something. I can hear it. Gross. It's by my compost, of course. I love the compost. I digress. But inoculation is when you kind of take... a tarp of some sort, a silage tarp, a tarp, tarp, landscape fabric, or whatever the case is, and you are going to choke out that plant's way to light. So the soil temp is going to be enough. The soil moisture is going to be enough to cause the plant to actually grow. Now, once it starts growing, what's going to happen is it's going to have sunlight to allow for photosynthesis to take place, to get the gas in the tank. So that plant's going to run out of reserve and eventually die Now, step three, optional but also useful, is solarization. So a clear plastic tarp is going to nuke anything that's remaining. It's going to nuke the good guys and the bad guys, but the good guys will recolonize relatively quickly. So don't be too worried about that. There's lots of science that shows that recolonization of things like microbes and stuff is pretty quick, 48-ish hours, generally speaking. So long as it's connected to the Earth still in some capacity, you should be good to go. So that's kind of step three. To ensure that the weeds don't keep on coming back. So thistle, quack grass, anything like that would fall kind of into the category of this three-step process to help really take care of everything. And hand weeding at the surface with those guys is not going to help. The only way that that's going to help is if you keep on weeding and weeding and weeding, but you weed it soon enough that it doesn't have enough time to grow enough leaves to allow for photosynthesis to recharge the roots. If you're allowing these things to get big. Before you go in and hand weed, what's going to happen is the roots are just going to be fired up the storage organs again, and they're going to be completely fine. So just keep that in the back of your head. The next one is it followed me into the house. So Next up is when you bring outdoor plants inside, there's a number of different pests either in the soil, on the leaves, or in the stem, and all of which can be brought indoors if you don't take the proper precautions to eliminate this issue. I did a whole video on exactly how to do this because I've been burnt by this severely before, like taking out all my houseplants, bad mealybugs. Not happy, not impressed with it, and nothing you can use once it gets that bad is going to work. So hands down, I will say one of my best favorite methods is to actually change out that soil around the root ball and put some fresh soil in place. This means that you're not going to have any sort of critters that have laid eggs in there coming indoors. That's going to be step one. Now, step Step two is going to be. Actually washing and cleaning off all the leaves. So giving it one good spray down with an insecticidal soap to start with and actually wiping those leaves off is going to be important. Now, number three, I think you could probably skip one and two and just go to three if you are going to stay on top of things, but that is beneficial. So there's kind of two different options you can go with when it comes to beneficials in the garden and bringing houseplants from outside indoors. Number one is nematodes. So nematodes are something that crawl around in the soil and they will eat anything that can cause problems. Fungus gnats, thrips, anything that is soil-borne, these bad boys will take out and they take out very effectively. Now there's a ton of different brands out there. I've used pot poppers before, but I also like the Neemonites brand. I think Neemonites is maybe only available in Canada as maybe the only downfall for the rest of the world that may be watching, but... Predatory nematodes specific to gnats and thrips and that sort of thing is important. Now, you can get nematodes that do snails, slugs, ants, that sort of thing. Obviously, that's not what we need in this case. We need the pest ones. So those are number one. Number two is going to be predatory mites. Now, there are a ton of different companies out there. And some of these companies are big monster companies that deal with greenhouses and that sort of thing. And I actually posted something on Instagram. And one of these larger companies had commented on the reel being like, yeah, well, we sell that to you. And it was like answering everyone's comments saying, come buy it from us, which is wild considering who I had tagged in the video is like a mom and pop shop. Probably not affecting their bottom dollar at all, but I digress. Bold move. But anyways, there is a little tiny company out there. They do have an Instagram page, but it's nothing like crazy. And they have the cutest packaging. It's called Grub Grenade. It's got like a little mite with a helmet on it and I think a cigar out its mouth or something like that. Anyways, it's just a little mom and pop shop here in Saskatchewan. They are alive, so they're shipped alive, and you need to use them right away. But those will take care of anything that's in that upper canopy, and they will move. Plant to plant, so long as you have a plant highway. So as long as you've got leaves touching, which can work to your benefit and to your detriment, depending on what you want to go for. But wherever you have leaves touching, critters like that can crawl across and move into other locations. If the leaves aren't touching, then that's a different conversation. And of course, there's a whole bunch of other kind of predatory bugs you can get for the indoors. But these two you can't see. They're not going to show up in your Christmas mashed potatoes. No one's going to notice that they're in your home. You know, there's a lot bigger bugs out there, like ladybugs or praying mantises that people will notice loose in your house. So just keep that in the back of your head when choosing what you want to go with. These two are completely invisible, the zombie plants of our world. So there's a number of different plants out there that when you plant them, they come back without you wanting them to come back. So this can include things like amaranth and mint and morning glories in some areas. Now, I don't have issues with morning glories popping up everywhere here where I am. I've never really seen that in my case. Mint, I have had, but nothing crazy or bad. However, I banned from my garden for a period of time until I discovered the idea of just planting them in raised beds and raised beds on top of mulch. Prior to that, I actually had them planted kind of in containers in my yard. And they start showing up in all my rock and my bark, which I hate, but I had a dog who's now passed, but he loved digging holes everywhere. And so my lawn was just a bunch of craters, which is why I've gone kind of raised beds on top of gravel and mulch. I'm going to do it for the doggos sometimes, but I digress. Amaranth is definitely one. So my kind of tip here is to actually Google stuff before you plant it to make sure it's not going to become your nightmare that that you're going to be weeding. Many, many, many years in the future because there's a number of plants out there that kind of fall into that category. Now, with that being said, get curious, let me know in the comments down below what your kind of Halloween creepy horror stories are from your garden or gardens over the years. I will talk to you guys next time.