Science Friday - Garden Hotline, Benjamin Franklin. July 2, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

The Science Of Your Summer Vegetable Garden Planting and tending to a vegetable garden is both an art and a science. If all goes well, you’ll be enjoying delicious homemade salads all summer long. But if your tomatoes get too little water, or if the soil is too acidic, or if pests get to the lettuce before you do, then all that hard work may have been for nothing. Whether you’re a seasoned grower or first-time gardener, it’s never a bad idea to hear what the experts have to say. Years ago there was a radio program in New York called “The Garden Hotline,” hosted by horticultural expert the late Ralph Snodsmith. Every Sunday morning on WOR, Snodsmith fielded listeners’ questions, such as: “Can coffee and tea grounds help acidify my soil? Not to any marked degree. Can seedlings thinned from a row of lettuce be used as transplants? If you’re careful with their tiny roots, yes. Is it better to plant my tomato transplants into the garden on a sunny or cloudy day? Cloudy, since reduced light exposure reduces transpiration.”  This week, Science Friday pays homage to Snodsmith’s original radio program and others like it, answering questions about the science of your summer vegetable garden. Ira is joined by Elizabeth Buck, fresh market vegetable production specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, and Gary Pilarchik, hobbyist gardener and host of the YouTube channel The Rusted Garden, to answer SciFri listener questions in front of a live Zoom audience. Recalling The Life Of Benjamin Franklin, Scientist Benjamin Franklin was a printer, politician, diplomat, and journalist. But despite only two years of schooling, he was also an ingenious scientist. In this conversation from 2010, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dudley Herschbach and Ben Franklin biographer Philip Dray discuss the achievements of the statesman-scientist.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Heading into the 4th of July weekend, seems like a good time to talk about Benjamin Franklin. He might be best known as a statesman, of course, but he was also a scientist interested in all sorts of scientific fields. He's known for his famous kite experiment, right? But he dabbled in everything from medicine to entomology to the Gulfstream, and he even invented a musical instrument. My interest in Franklin as a scientist goes way back.

And in this interview from 2010, I chatted about his scientific side with two other Franklinophiles. Joining me now to talk about some of Franklin's scientific pursuits are my guest. Dudley Hirschbach is Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Harvard and part-time professor of physics at Texas A&M. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1986, and he's a longtime Franklinophile. Welcome back to Science Friday, Dr. Hirschbach. Glad to be with you. I remember the first time I met you. you whipped out of your back pocket.

You're a little Ben Franklin pamphlet. You wanted me to know more than about what your chemistry endeavors were. Well, I discovered you're a long-time fan of Franklin as well. That's true. Also with us is Philip Dre. He's author of Stealing God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America and a number of other books on American history. He's here in our studios in New York.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Glad to be here. Dudley, one of his electrical experiments, which is less famous than the cat experiment, was something people don't know a lot about, was electrocuting turkeys. Oh, yes. He almost electrocuted himself, in fact, one time trying to do that. He was distracted by his guests and grabbed the wrong thing.

Is that right? Did he just, was that just out of the total experiment to see if you could electrocuted it? Oh, yeah, it flattened him. Yeah. Yeah. As I remember, he was trying to see if he could make the turkeys taste better by electrocuting them rather than some other means of sacrifice. Fresh-killed turkey there. Philip, Franklin was not the first to do that experiment, was he?

The kite experiment. Well, he was the first to do the kite experiment. He had written in a series of letters to a friend in London a description of how one might. test the electrification of the atmosphere by going up on a high, like a church steeple or something like that. And so a man in France named Dalabard performed that experiment a month prior to Franklin's kite experiment. Franklin had not heard of it when he himself, failing to have an appropriate church steeple at hand, went out with his son William and performed the kite experiment. So he was the first to do that particular inquiry. And he became a hero in France because of that experiment.

Absolutely. Franklin was overnight became kind of legendary in France, and when he showed up, of course, he was greeted as a scientific celebrity. How controversial, he was all, we all know him for that experiment and the associated work with the Lightning Rod. How controversial, I understand, was the Lightning Rod in those days? The Lightning Rod was kind of a major breakthrough, both culturally and scientifically. It sort of resolved a question which had been on many people's minds about what, what, what, thunder and lightning really were. Of course, people were scared to death of it, rightly so. It also kind of set off a reaction in the church because, of course, for centuries, the idea that lightning and thunder were controlled by the god were sent down even as a form of retribution. After Franklin invented the lightning rod, which showed that lightning was a natural phenomenon and even could be controlled and defended against by man, lightning and thunder became

a weapon of the people. As you see this in radical pamphlets in France, in the it's thunder and lightning, toppling monarchs from their thrones, this sort of thing. So Franklin had this effect. Dudley, you said before that Franklin's type of science was curiosity-driven, not necessarily with any practical application in mind. Is that still true today? It doesn't seem like you can get funding for just curiosity-driven science research. Well, what scientists do, they get funding, writing proposals and all that,

fill the current criteria but then they sneak in the things that really get them excited and often open up whole new possibilities that they wouldn't have dared to put in a proposal wouldn't have been favorably reviewed well there are lots of great

products and inventions we have that just came we didn't know what we were going to do with did we that's right that's quite right or had in mind a different thing altogether I mean, I remember when the laser beam was invented, they'd just cut razor blades with it. Well, in the earliest time, they thought it would be useful for communication because the waves were so precisely defined in all. You could modulate them and add a lot of information that way, and that is part.

But no one imagined then it's used in surgery, it's playing music, checking out groceries, all the myriad things that lasers do now. in the world. Philip, science is so complex today. Do you think Franklin could exist if you were around today doing what kinds of things he did? I think he could in a sense. I mean, obviously science has become much more specialized and much bigger than it was in his day. However, I think there is something universal and timeless about people having innovative ideas. I think a good example recently would be those young people who have introduced technical improvements

and advances with the Internet, things like YouTube and Facebook. Facebook, those are not coming out of huge science think tanks or universities. They're coming from young grad students in their early 20s. Well, how was he free to do all these things? He studied medicine. He studied the Gulf Stream. He studied ants. He looked at astronomy.

Invented a musical instrument. What was it? The harmonia? Harmonica. Armonica. Armonica. And he was able to have the freedom to do these things. That it was sort of the...

Well, many people don't realize. He retired at age 42 to devote himself entirely to experiments and study of what was called natural philosophy, we now call science. And, of course, within a few years, he was carried into so many social responsibilities that he couldn't personally pursue it that much more.

But in the meantime, he had done much more than Fly the Kite. He'd done a whole series of experiments and so were a span of six or seven years that were described in these letters, Philip mentioned, to his friend in London who read them before their oral society, and they

greatly impressed the savants who had been so puzzled by the nature of electricity. I mean, Franklin did very fine experiments, and he interpreted them, and, in fact, provided a lot of the vocabulary we still

use in talking about electricity. Sure, such as electric. He was called the Newton of electricity in his day. That's right. He would have been buried next to Newton in the Westminster Abbey if he had remained a loyal, very subject. I think his reputation was that large in science. It's worth mentioning, too, and I think Professor Hirschbach would agree that what was astounding about Franklin to the European scholars was that they weren't used to important science coming from America, let alone from someone who was really a tradesman or a publisher of a newspaper.

And at first they were inclined to, oh, my. most disbelieve that there was, could be such a man. Of course, Franklin was always tickled by this, but not only Franklin, but the book he wrote, experiments in observation on electricity, came as a really like a major breakthrough, one of the most important American books of the 18th century in Europe. It was translated widely. Yes, it was a collection of letters. Yes. And Franklin was a fine writer. It was revised repeatedly, I think, as you said, five or six editions, three French editions alone, I know. And probably for more than 20 years, every literate person had to take a look at it. It was such a stunning, key thing in that time.

Falkin. The Enlightenment. I'm sorry, Falkin, Tucson, Arizona. Hi, Fault. Hi, how are you on? Go ahead. The best things we can take away from this is that, you know, Ben Franklin's very existence is an antidote to the punditocracy and over-reliance and expert to find contemporary culture. and he's right in line with Emerson, you know, who said, don't read books, go out and take a walk in the woods. You know, and so all we need to do today is engage the natural world and we can make our own discoveries, make up our own mind, and dare to think, like Kant said.

Anyway, that's it. That's good way to begin. Philip, you have a comment on that? Well, it's certainly true about someone like Franklin that he almost seemed to be unable to stop inventing things when he'd be able to begin. be on a ship, he'd realize that they needed a different type of soup bowl that wouldn't spill the broth. He also, of course, was one of the first to explain how the Gulf Stream functioned. At home, when he found he couldn't reach the books on his top shelf, he invented that pinching

device we all see that takes the books down, this sort of thing. So he was kind of relentless with it. And even when he was engaged in international diplomacy and all these very tense political negotiations in France, if you look at his correspondence, he's always when he's even not doing something himself. He's corresponding with other scientists, encouraging them, reviewing their work. So it really was a kind of an obsession with him. It's amazing what he did. The Franklin Papers at Yale have 15,000 documents in his handwriting, many of them are very long, all handwritten. That alone took a lot of effort. Let's go to Zach in Detroit. Hi, Zach. Hi, I just don't know if I heard you guys correctly, but did you say that he invented

the harmonica? No, the armonica. We'll describe it now. Go ahead. Well, the harmonica is an instrument in which cups or glasses that are turned on their side are spun and rubbed by hand and emit a very kind of beautiful ethereal sound. Franklin got the idea because he was living in London and he went to a concert at which a man was rubbing the tops of wine glasses filled with different levels of liquid. And, of course, Franklin, with his practical band, thought, well, that looks like a lot of effort wasted. Why not just tip them on their side, put them on a spindle, and then turn the whole thing with a foot treadle. And, of course, that made it much easier.

And the harmonica caught on. It was a beautiful instrument. Mozart composed for it. And, of course, Franklin himself learned to play it and taught many other people how to play. As a graduate student, in 1956, I heard a performance on what was intended to be an exact replica. of the 18th century harmonica as described in that literature. The American Academy of Arts and Science

had commissioned the Corning Glassworks to produce it. They had terrible time. In fact, E. Power Vig, is a great organist who performed first on musical glasses and then on this harmonica had trouble too. Some of the bowls broke as he was playing. And you got the impression

from the things they quoted of contemporary descriptions that we're aware they're pulling Posteri's leg a bit on that. After the break, more from that 2010 conversation about the science and inventions of Benjamin Franklin with author Philip Drey and Nobel Prize winning chemist Dudley Hirschbach. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In case you're just joining us, we're revisiting a conversation from 2010 about Benjamin Franklin and all of this science he conducted that you may not have heard about.

My guests were Dudley Hirschbach, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Harvard, and a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, and Philip Dre, author of Stealing God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod and the Invention of America. We jump back in the conversation with a question from a listener. Let's go to Scott in Wald Lake, Michigan. Hi, Scott. Hi. I was curious if Benjamin Franklin did, any other mathematics other than his magic squares, how involved he was with mathematics.

I know it's a science program, but Newton played with mathematics, too. Oh, sure. The other example I can think of his using mathematics, and Professor Hirschbach probably can talk about this, too, is, you know, Franklin, he loved to project figures into the future and about population and demographics and that sort of thing. And he was incredibly accurate, actually, in predicting, for instance, the future population of the United States of America, that sort of thing. Yes, in fact, that was a strong element of his political philosophy

that in a time scale that he estimated there would be more people of English births in the colonies than in the mother country. And so he had hoped originally to avoid a revolution saying that in time, this will take care of things. But he also used mathematics. brilliantly in these magic squares, but he also used it an interesting way once to estimate the number of people who could have heard a speech. Oh, yes.

Very interesting paper. I mean, really, he could have been a gifted mathematician, I think, if he'd had an opportunity to really study it. Talking with Dr. Dudley Hirschbach and Phil Dre, he was author of Stealing God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's Lightning Rod, and the Invention of America. years ago, the late Isaac Asimov wrote a book called the kite that won the revolution, right? I think that's what it was called. Basically the point that Franklin being so famous and revered in France was able to ask France to send Lafayette over and fight the American Revolution.

Well, I think it's certainly true that Franklin was enormously popular in France, and he kind of played up. They loved him as a kind of a rustic, and he played that up by wearing this kind of silly beaver hat and dressing as a farmer. But yes, he was very charismatic, very beloved, and I'm sure that he had a very low-key style of diplomacy that worked very well. But I think probably what that title also referred to was, in a larger sense, the Republic of Science, as they called it, of the 18th century, and that Franklin was so much identified with sort of, sort of as a template almost for the political and social developments that included our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. It is amazing that he got from the France all the financial support also for an enterprise, this rag-tag colonies undertaking to free themselves from the greatest military power the world had ever seen, and a power that had defeated France in war after war for 20 years.

So it was really an amazing thing that Franklin brought the French, to support that effort. And it was crucial to, I think, is the success of the revolution. People don't realize when Cornwall surrendered, there was one side Washington's army, the other side, the French army, and very important, the French fleet

blocking the way to the British fleet that had tallied too long in New York, didn't arrive in time. The French had a huge role. Let's go to Jason in Naples, Florida. Hi, Jason. Bifocals. He invented the bifocal, because I'm an optometrist.

Uh-huh. Yep, that's right. And, you know, a lot of people, I mean, the one thing I would mention about it is is that he wasn't really versed in, you know, the science thought he just basically crudely one day got sick and tired of switching his glasses and took two pair and cut them in half and glued them together and invented bifocals. And just, you know, it's indicative of me of how Ben Franklin, even though he didn't. didn't have a, you know, a formal education in these areas just invented these things.

They also worked with a couple. Oh, yeah. There's a very funny story about that, actually, which I understood is that he, the idea for the bifocals came from his frustration that when he would go out to a diplomatic dinner or a state dinner in France, he couldn't both look at the food on his plate and also see the lips of the people talking to him. And because his knowledge of French was imperfect, it was very important that he see people's lips moving. he became so frustrated, as this gentleman just said, he went home one night and Broke started tearing up his own sets of glasses and had this idea to combine them. Wow. It was a very typical of him.

Yeah. You have a problem? Go out and fix it. There you go. Yeah. But he did so many other things that are endearing. For example, the king became jealous of all the images of Franklin that were all over, medallions and so on. in France.

They didn't have t-shirts then, but it was the same thing. And so much so that the king gave his favorite mistress, a chamber pot was one of Franklin medallions on the bottom. When Franklin heard of it, he was so delighted he ordered

supply of the same chamber pot with medallions of George III in the bottom. Many, many episodes like that. The guy was just marvelous. What would you ask him today? I got about a minute and a half left. If you could speak to him today, what would you ask him, Dudley?

What would you want to do? Well, right now, I'd want to ask him how to take care of this BP. Yes, that's exactly right. You would have fine ideas, right? You'd think he would be able to figure out how to stop the oil? I think so, because one thing about Franklin was he was very interested in what he called subtle fluids, things like water currents, heat, you know, electricity, et cetera. I think he'd also like to tackle global warming for us, too. Yes. Okay, well, we'll see if we can channel.

Okay, let's hope. Let's hope we can channel Ben Franklin. I want to thank you both very much for this holiday weekend. It's a great weekend to talk about Ben Franklin for being with us today. Well, Science Friday would delight Franklin, I'm sure. Well, that's a great quote, Dudley. Thank you very much for that compliment. That was a conversation from 2010 with Dudley Hirschbach, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Harvard,

and a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, and Philip Drey, author of Stealing, God's Thunder, Benjamin Franklin's lightning rod and the invention of America. Years ago, row by inch by row, going to make this garden grow. All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground. Years ago, there was an old radio program on W-O-R in New York called the Garden Hotline. It was hosted by horticultural expert, the late Ralph Snodd-Smith. He always started his show with that John Denver music you're listening to. I listen to that show every Sunday morning as he fielded gardening questions from listeners.

Questions like, can coffee and tea grounds help acidify my soil? Well, not to any marked degree, is the answer. Question, can seedlings thin from a row of lettuce be used as transplants? Answer, if you're careful with their tiny roots, yes. Question, is it better to plant my tomatoes? on a sunny or a cloudy day. Answer, cloudy, since reduced light exposure reduces transpiration. As a backyard gardener myself, I still have lots of questions, and I know so do you.

So we're recreating that garden hotline, hopefully giving you some science behind the gardening tips. We've collected your sciencey gardening questions, and we've asked two guest experts to answer them. Here they are. Elizabeth Buck, Fresh Market Vegetable Production Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension, which is in Ithaca, New York, Gary Polarchek, author of the Modern Homestead Garden, and host of the Rusted Garden YouTube channel he lives in Howard County, Maryland. Welcome both of you to Science Friday. Thanks for having me.

It's great to be here. Thank you. And just a note to those listening, we're recording this segment in front of a live Zoom audience, and if you would like to be part of our next Zoom audience, You can find out more about attending future segments at ScienceFriday.com slash live stream. Okay, let's get right to our questions. Gary, let me first say that I really enjoy your rusted garden videos on YouTube. I've learned a lot. Hope you can share some of your down-to-earth knowledge with our listeners.

So let's get right into it. Our first question submitted via the SciFri Voxpop app, and this is from Dan in Yorkville, New York. I'd really like to hear about some nice non-lethal means of keeping squirrels and rabbits and whatnot from getting to tomatoes and things like that. I also would like to see if there's some nice non-lethal, non-toxic way of keeping insects out of the garden as well. Well, you know, you try reasoning and they just won't stay on one plant. So they do become a nuisance and they will take everything down. Non-lethal way, I have so many squirrels where I'm at,

on my two acres. I had to do trap and release and move them five miles away. Some people may not want to do that, but it can be done. You have to move them away. The other thing is because squirrels are such great climbers, even if you use a fence or you create something high, they will just climb over it. Fences are great for groundhogs and other things like that. But it's really, really a challenge with even birds, small animals and such. There are sprays you can put out, but they tend not to work for squirrel and a good rain comes, it washes them away. You can try planting stuff away from your garden. Maybe they'll eat that and get the fill and not come over to your garden, but it's really,

really difficult. And then non-lethal ways for insects and maybe like diseases and stuff like that, at least for insects, any kind of organic dust or insect dust that you use, even though it's organic and safer for you and me, it's going to kill good and bad insects. So you have to be aware of that too. So it's really hard not to harm your pollinators or your bees. Elizabeth, I know that pollinators are very important to have in your garden, are they not? Yes, absolutely.

And pollinators are good for all of your plants, not all of them need them. One of the cool things is that a lot of plants are self-pollinating. And those are things that tend to have closed flowers. So your tomatoes, for example, they tend to pollinate themselves. So if you're not seeing a lot of bees on your tomatoes, no worries, that's fine. I think the coolest thing about pollinators is that it's not just bees. There are native bees, there's flies, there's insects, all sorts of critters are out there doing the work of pollination. So it's really this great biodiverse system out in your garden.

And I know, Gary, that some people choose to grow their veggies in a container. I've seen on your YouTube, you showing us how to do that. Will that keep some of these pests away if you can grow them in a container? I wish that I could say yes. It does that. If each guarding zone is very unique. So whatever pests you have or whatever critters you have, they can find their way into containers and stuff like that. If you have a really big problem, one container I have, it's just a big fire ring that you would buy. I'm growing a Brussels sprout in there. And I've set up a couple arches and put ag fabric over it. and it zips shut. That is a way to keep out squirrels, birds, and stuff like that. But you have to

make a decision on do you want these big ag fabric tents everywhere? Let's go to Ryan, who has a question about their garden onions. Ryan, you're growing onions. Go ahead. Yeah, so I grew some onions that I got from the garden store, the little shoot starts, not the bulbs. And I thought they would not go to seed, but they did go to seed. And I didn't know if that was because it was, we had a cold period after I planted them. So maybe they thought they went through a winter. So I was just, A, looking for an explanation on that, and be wondering if I could gather the seeds from them to plant for next year and how I'd go about doing that. You know, they developed the seed head and they just started opening up. Gary, what do you say to help out, Ryan, there?

Yes, starting, you can collect the seeds and you can use. use them. And sometimes onions do better if the seeds are put in directly. And you kind of answered the question. Onions are biennials. So if even if they're small and they evolve and they think they're on their second year growth, sometimes they more quickly go to flour. It could have been that cold period. Could be sometimes and, you know, I'm not 100% sure, but you got short day, you know, midday, long day onions. Sometimes that can impact them to based on where you're growing. And when we buy those onion bunches, we don't always know what exactly those onion varieties are, except they're yellow, white, or red. There's not a lot of information there.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Okay, let's go to Elizabeth. A question for you from Ariel from Pittsburgh. It seems like plants choose between lush leaves and abundant fruits. Some of my best-performing tomato and pumpkin plants are a bit spindly, while those that are super green and lush have lower yields? Why is that? And how do I get them to make more fruit and less leaves? Any ideas? Yeah, it's a great question, Ariel. And it all comes back to how the plant balances energy within itself. So plants will do a lot of vegetative growth, and that's the big green, happy leaves, or they do reproductive growth. And because they're vegetables, they're relatively short-lived plants, once they make that switch to reproductive, to fruiting, they don't

easily want to go back and push a lot of that green tissue up. So sometimes we can love our plants a little bit too much. And if we over fertilize them, particularly if we give them too much nitrogen, the plant responds to that nitrogen by growing a lot of leaves. And life is good and life is easy, and it grows a lot of leaves and doesn't get to fruiting. The other thing that can happen is that when plants are really stressed, it pushes them towards fruiting more because they're a little bit worried they're not going to make it through. So in that case, when your plants are a little bit spindly, sometimes they're going to produce more because they're kind of worried. So you can balance things out in your garden and get a good-sized plant that still prints out a lot of fruit by adjusting

the amount of nitrogen and potassium that you feed your plant because most vegetables, when they're putting out fruit, they need less nitrogen and more potassium. So you want to kind of change how you feed your plant. Gary, what kind of fertilizer do you feed your plants? So I mean, I focus on two things. If I'm doing a granular fertilizer, any organic granular fertilizer, around the 5-5-5-n-K, that's pretty balanced. Up or down, a few numbers is fine. That's a slow release, which means when you mix it into your soil, take some time for the microbiology to break it down and it slowly feed your plant, say, over a couple of months. Then you have your water-soluble fertilizer. What I use, used for that is fish emulsion. It's a 511 NP and K, more than nitrogen, as Elizabeth was saying,

that helps that green growth get started. And being water soluble, it means it's immediately available to your plant. It can use it right away. So in combination, it's good to have your organic granular, your water soluble. But in addition to that, I put my beds to rest in the fall with compost, with leaves. I even put wood ash on them, even alfalfa pellets to just kind of put organic matter in there. and I do the same thing again in the spring. I think you've got a really strong point there, Gary, where you say it takes time for the organic fertilizers to break down. That's, I think, where it's hard for people to gauge how long.

And so it's good to think of your garden in terms of what's the slow release fertilizer and what's my quick release fertilizer. And if you continue to do that, then you can set yourself up for a lot of success. We're going to take a break, and we'll only come back more of the science of your summer vegetable garden. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. In case you're just joining us, we're talking about the science of your summer vegetable garden with my guests, Elizabeth Buck, Fresh Market Vegetable Production Specialist with

Cornell Cooperative Extension, and Gary Pilarchick, author of the book The Modern Homestead Garden and host of the Rusted Garden YouTube channel. All right, let's go back to our audience. Mary, Mary has a question about basil. I love my basal. I'm waiting to hear what Mary has to say. Mary, go ahead. Well, I am a basal failure. I have planted probably, I don't know how many seed packets of basal. And last year, I went through three of them before it finally dawned on me. They may like it really hot, like Zinias have to have really hot, sustained weather to germinate. This year, I waited until it was just murderously hot. And I planted multiple times, and I haven't seen a single single seedling.

I don't get what the difference is. Elizabeth, you're shaking, you're nodding your head in agreement here. So are you planting it into a container or right out into the soil? Mary? So soil, in soil. So basil, you're right, basil does want to germinate under warmer conditions. And it's a little tough sometimes when you do it right in the soil. Lots of times there's better success in starting the basil inside in the small pot and then transplanting the outside.

And that's because there are a couple of diseases that will take out the seedling just as it's germinating. and so it's sometimes more successful to just take that element of uncertainty out of the picture, start inside, and that way you can control the moisture levels too. Basel doesn't really like heavy clay soils. So if you've got a heavier soil and your brother, your neighbor, whoever has is lighter soil, they're going to be a little bit more successful getting into germinate directly in the ground. Gary, any hints from you? Yeah, I agree with that.

So getting a basic potting mix or a starting mix and just like a little yogurt container, And when it's warm, you know, the basil is looking for warm soil, warm ambient temperature. If you plant it up in a little container and you keep it outside, just let the top dry. That's when you know to water again. But let that top dry. And that helps with that damping off kind of disease that comes along. And that's how I start all of mine. And they do transfer nicely into the garden that way.

How do you know when it's better to go to the garden store and buy a little basil plant rather than starting from seed? And I guess generally for all of your plants, Gary? So I have a thing against buying plants from the big box stores. Go to your local nurseries, know the people that are growing the plants. Sometimes you can buy basil that's been sitting. It's not been watered. It struggles. It's getting tall.

It doesn't look great. It looks great, but it's a little bit past its prime. By the time you get it to your garden, it wants to go and flower really quickly. So I do recommend either getting really small transplants from your local nursery, and getting them into your soil or going by seed. Just be careful that you're not buying plants that have been totally stressed at your local big box stores because it damages the plant. And like Elizabeth was saying, sometimes when you're stressed,

then you go right to fruit production, trying to reproduce, and you just have a hard time getting them going. Let's go to another Zoom call. Carol. Carol has a question about her compost pile. A gardener in our family puts a lot of coffee ground. bags and bags from a coffee chain into the compost pile. How much is too much? Elizabeth, can you feel that one?

Sure. So when you're mixing compost, you want to balance everything out. And so you have to think about what are the characteristics of what I'm putting in. So if you're putting in a lot of coffee grounds, that's going to be a acidic material. It's going to be a fine texture material. And it's going to be a material that's maybe not the fastest to break down compared to some other things. So it becomes more of a question of volume. Can I balance out this volume of coffee grounds with an equal volume of something that's going to be very complementary to it?

And really, I think that's more a question of how much space do you have in your composting area. Do coffee grounds acidify? They're sort of acidic by nature. Do they acidify the soil? Can you plant them or spread them on the ground to make it more acid, Gary? I think the answer is in theory it sounds good, but you would need a lot of it. So what you'd be putting down, if you're just sprinkling grounds down anyway, they need to be, they need to break down by the soil microbiology.

And sometimes that kind of moderates things a little bit. If you needed something to quickly change the pH of your soil, you're better off using, you know, something else. I wouldn't mix a lot of coffee grounds into your container mixes, but you would have to use a lot. And while I have you here, and I watched your video on this, because this is the first year that I am planting potatoes. I mean, I've tried potatoes in my five-gallon bucket. I've got one in one of these cloth buckets, and they've been growing terrific. They grow giant stalks, and then they have flowers, gorgeous flowers.

Who knew that potatoes had such gorgeous flowers on the top? How do I know when to dig them up, Gary? After they've been growing about 70 days, there's probably potatoes in there. kind of, you know, dig around and pull some out if you want to. But you really know when to harvest them when the greenery starts looking yellow. You're going to think it's sickly. You're going to start to worry. You might want to start feeding it more. That's just the natural end to the potato. So when it starts to yellow, turns brown, you know, dies off. You can let them sit in there a week or so, and then you can harvest your potatoes that way. That's the sign you're ready to go. And when you do

harvest them, a lot of people don't know that you can plant potatoes again, especially the early 70, 90-day potatoes. So when you're harvesting, start some more. And, you know, you can take them really through the summer. Sometimes it gets too hot, but I recommend people keep a journal. I always say try it, experiment, take notes. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But you can continue potatoes all the way into the frost period in your area. Well, speaking of hot, Elizabeth, we've had a lot, a lot of questions about the heat this summer. And, you know, 90s, hundreds, triple digits. What's the best thing you should do to protect your garden from all of this heat? That's a great question. And we're going to continue to see more heat as we move forward in time.

Plants are built in to cool themselves. And the way that works in the plant is it draws water up through the roots and lets it out through the leaves like evapro, it's evapro transpiration. And it gives us a really good way to check on how our plants are doing. If you walk up to your plant and you grab a leaf in the middle, not one right up on the top, where it's in the sun, but one in the middle, that leaf should feel cool to the touch. And that means the plant is happy and it's got enough water moving through it to keep itself cool. Because they have this built-in mechanism, it really comes down to, can I give my plant enough water? So the other thing you can do is kind of redesign your garden and say, all right, maybe this plant doesn't need to be in the sun for 10 hours a day.

Maybe it only needs to be in the sun for six hours a day to grow properly. and by taking it out of the sun, those extra hours planting in a different place, reducing the amount of stress and the amount of water it's going to consume, which lets it cool itself better. Great answer. That's something we all can use that advice. Let's move on to a Twitter question. Sylvia Wright from California asks us, what's the truth about blossom and rot in tomatoes?

Let me begin with that, Gary. How do you stop that? So the truth. She's probably talking about you here two things. There's not enough calcium, add calcium, or it's just a watering issue. And it's really kind of a combination of both. If you're not watering your tomato plant properly, the roots can be affected and you may have calcium present and it can't pull that calcium into the plant system.

So it's not really a calcium issue. However, if you put some calcium nitrate, some calcium that can be pulled in through the leaves or more easily absorbed, that can help out the problem. The best thing to do is just, you know, have some lime in your soil, know that the calcium's there, and stick with that consistent watering. This happens a lot more, I think, with Roma-type tomatoes and with containers. If a container, because of the heat that we're talking about, you may have to water a container plant twice in a day. So moisture, keeping it consistent, mulching out in the garden, and knowing that you have calcium present,

you don't need a lot of calcium. Watering, I think, is the bigger issue. Elizabeth, what does Blossom and Rot look like for people who don't know what we're talking about? Absolutely. So Blossom and Rot is on the bottom of the tomato. And the reason it's on the bottom of the tomato is remember those straws that pull the water through. Well, the bottom of the tomato doesn't have very many of those straws. And if it doesn't have a lot of straws, it can't pull water. Since calcium moves with the water and plant, no water goes to the bound tomato, no calcium goes to the bottom of tomato. And the cells at the bottom of the tomato, they can't expand. Calcium is really important in allowing plant. cells to grow and divide and get bigger. And when they can't expand, they die. So what ends up happening

is you get this brown or dark gray dead spot on the bottom of the tomato. And it starts out as a firm rot. Sometimes a secondary rot will come to make it soft, but it's a firm, dry, browner, dark, colored rot at the bottom of the fruit. And it's really characteristic. And the important thing to know about blossom and dry is exactly what Gary was saying. It's about making sure that your watering is consistent. And the second thing to know about diagnosing it is the problem that you see probably happened two to three weeks ago that the plant was deficient in water and or calcium. Yeah, that's a good point too, because people say, can I save my tomato that's browned on the bottom? If it ripens, you can actually cut it off, but those are pretty much garners, but you can start

watering consistently and getting it back in shape, and then the future tomatoes will do okay. Okay, great advice so far. Let's go on. on to the next question. On Facebook, Scott Kloss wants to know, why is my cantaloupe not growing? I planted them as starts at the same time as my zucchini when they were the same size. Now my zucchini are much bigger, Elizabeth. What advice do you have? This is a lot of back and forth troubleshooting, and sometimes it's not easy to do this. There are resources for home gardeners to use and great books. What's wrong with my vegetable garden is a good one. And the reason I'm saying that is because without being asked a question why, I can't really answer it.

But I can take some guesses. And the first guess is that these are plants that are in the same family. So they oftentimes have very similar needs. So that means that, you know, it wasn't planted at the wrong time or it's not getting too much or too little water compared to the one next door, the zucchini. So in those situations, I am oftentimes wondering, was the cantaloupe maybe struggling with something when it went into the ground? Was that transplant maybe having a little bit of root rot before it was ever put in the ground? And that's something that can come from a greenhouse center. It's really common, but it's good to know and be able to check out your plants ahead of time

because then you end up in situations where you get a big zucchini and a sad cantaloupe. Anything to add, Gary, to that? I agree with that because that goes to sometimes you'll buy the cantaloupe and maybe it dried out or was it treated well. I mean, some things that you can do with that canaloupe is you can give it that fish emulsion and you can try and give it more nitrogen. And you should see it start to green up over three to five days. You can do it again. And just see if you can save the plant.

If you've given it, you know, a couple of weeks, it doesn't look good. That's when I recommend replanting new seeds or maybe start some backup plants when you notice it's struggling so that when you decide to pull that out, you can put in a new cantaloupe and maybe that takes off. And this way you don't lose much time. Good advice from both of you. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Let's move on to Daniela on Zoom. Daniela has a question about cucumbers in her garden.

Daniela, what's your problem? Okay. The problem is that I've got these beetles. They're striped, and I think they are cucumber beetles. And I really want to get rid of them because they are also taking my pepper plants and they leave holes. Elizabeth, what do you suggest? So cucumber beals are a very pesky, annoying insect, and I think the best tool for a cucumber beetle is exclusion. So Gary earlier mentioned ag fabric.

There's a very lightweight spun woven material called row cover. And row cover is, it does exactly what it sounds like. You put it over top of your plants and you put it out when you plant and keep that row cover on them with a, you know, little bit if it lets water through, it lets sunlight through, it lets air through, but it keeps the cucumber beetles out. When they start flowering, you want to take the row cover off because cucumbers do need pollination. And at that point in time, if the cucumber beetles move in, then from a homeowner standpoint, you can try to repel them. They don't like gritty-feeling things. So there's a cauling clay-based products that will repel the cucumbers away from your

plants and that's organic. And if you really feel like you want to try to spray them, you can try to use something called Pygantic. It's another organic spray, and it's a little bit more effective than a neat. Gary, you mentioned that you're gardening. I know you're in Maryland. So that would be Zone 7. Explain to people what the zone system is all about. So I think North America is the only place that uses the zone system. And because of however you feel about weather changing, the zones are changing. So they're a little bit outdated, but they were kind of set up to help you identify first frostate, last frostate, so that you can kind of plant around it. But the zones were to kind of give you an idea of when to plant, what to plant. Because, you know, climate change,

the zones are changing, right? We have a Zoom listener wants to know. I heard that fruit grows well when they are planted with native plants. Can you verify that, Elizabeth? Sure. So I'm going to take a little more nuance with it. I think it's important to remember that fruit, many fruits that we grow here are not native plants. Strawberries are native. Blueberries are native. There's brambles and definitely other types of berries that are native. But if we're talking about things like apple trees, they're not from here. I think when you start working with native plants, you get a lot of benefits because you're consciously thinking about the biodiversity and the ecology. of your garden. And when you think about biodiversity and ecology, you get all sorts of good benefits like increased pollinators, better habitat for good microbes, increased soil health. And so my sense is that it's probably more of result of the overall gardeners awareness. And that's always a positive thing to be aware of all the biology and ecology going on out there.

I think we have time for one more question. This is from a listener in our Sci-Fry Vox Pop app with a question about wildfires and garden vegetables. Margaret from Albany, California. I have Quintus beans, which are like Romano beans. I'm concerned about the wildfires in California with all of the smoke. Are my vegetables, including my beans, going to be okay to eat after all of the fires? Gary, what do you think? I never thought about that, but I would have to roll the dice and say that it's okay.

fires have been around since the earth's been around, you know, unless there's a chemical contaminant in your smoke, I think you just go ahead and you grow and, you know, harvest as you wish. You know, what's interesting is that these are questions we never had to think about before, did we? I mean, wildfires and the smoke spreading everywhere into people's gardens. I mean, climate change has brought around a new reality, Elizabeth, has it not about how we have to think about gardening, whether it's the temperature or the zones or the, or they, or they, atmosphere. It absolutely has. And the bulk of my job is working with commercial growers in New York State, and they're having a hard time and they're professionals. Things are happening like

getting 40-degree nights in the beginning of June, and everything that is going on climate affects all the gardens, too. So it's becoming so much more difficult to just grow. Yeah, we have run out of time. I'm thinking about the gardeners now out in the Pacific Northwest in California with the temperatures and their lack of water that's going on out there. That's a different subject for another time. Right now we're talking about home gardening, and I want to thank my two expert guests here who have talked about it. Elizabeth Buck, Fresh Market Vegetable Production Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension

and Gary Polarchic, author of the book The Modern Homestead Garden and host of the Rusted Garden YouTube channel. And if you missed any part of this program, you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts, or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We'll see you next week.