What weather? Spring or Spring? Hello, my name is Todd Wamen. I work for the NDSU Extension Service. I'm a horticulture agent in Cass County. Today I'm going to talk to you about homeowners that would like to have a garden in their lawns where their lawns are established now and an easy way to do it besides the traditional way of just digging up the sod. Here's a method that's been done before. You want a little piece of garden in your property and so you dig up the sod, you put the sod on the side, you plant into the soil, and this is what you have. A little bit of this here, a lot of work, very labor intensive, shoveling by hand is not my favorite type of thing. I'm going to go into a little easier way so you won't have to do any type of shoveling to remove your sod and then what do you do with the sod when you're done. Today I'm going to talk about certain plants. I'm going to be growing in this garden area. One everyone recognizes and most people do grow is the tomato. Easily purchased at your local nursery. Another nice thing about this site I've chosen, there is a chain link fence and some people find those very object, chinnable or unsightly. I've chosen grapes to plant every eight feet or so along this fence. The grapes will climb the fence and spread out and create a nice green barrier that can be utilized for beauty but also for a few grapes that grow on there. It makes some jelly or eat them plain, doesn't matter. Also I've got some watermelon that I'm going to plant on here just to basically spread out a little bit, we'll grow on the fence and these are a little sugar baby watermelon, just a small watermelon that tends to do well here. I've also liked to point out growing some beautiful vegetables, Swiss chard. If you look, it has a nice red burgundy green, a little purpleish yellow. Look to it, there are also some just straight colored ones but this one I've chosen is called bright lights and I've chosen it for its aesthetic beauty and also because I like it as vegetable to eat. Another plant, this one, is a newer one that many of you may not be familiar with, purple plant, just an ornamental pepper is what it is and I'm growing it for the purple foliage and it will get some little peppers on it too. I'm basically growing this for its beauty though. First I'd like to point out that there's several different types of material or media that you could use for this. These seem to work very well for me but I've got some peat moss and I've got some vegetable bedding mix with soil and I've also got some organic humus and manure so I should have a great plenty of soil organic matter in this soil and I like to mix it about a third each. This is peat moss and you should be able to get it at any of your nurseries and there are different old recipes. Jump over here to a medium that also is good for bedding plants, just a mix of various soil amendments and soil and perlite and such. This next medium, organic humus and manure, will help with the organic structure as well as the other ones did but it's a nice fertilizer that I can use and mix in here. Also there was a little bit of soil in here I believe. You can use a shovel, I just like to use my hands and like I said if you don't want to touch it with your hand you can obviously wear gloves and mix this all in. We're at our next stage here where I'm going to take and lay down newspaper overlapping and get similar to shingles when you're roughing. All along here right on top of the grass, no digging it up. One thing to remember when using newspaper is use newspaper that does not have lead in its ink. Some of the older newspapers, especially the colored newspaper, had had that. I like to use black and white newspaper and I just put it down here just like this all the way along. I think I'll need another couple right here. It's up to you how thick you don't want it to be too thick because you do want it to decompose and form a nice layer there for your plants in the future but I believe this should be a good place to start. Now I'll grab my media here which is the next step. I like to do about maybe three to four inches thick here. If you find chunks of matter that didn't mix well or didn't break down when you were mixing earlier, this is a nice time to do it too and just crush it up and spread it around in this. I simply for example pop out my grape. Remember containers are cheap and your plants are very expensive so if you can't get them out by simply squeezing them, it's not a bad idea to simply cut the container and throw it away or recycle it I should say. Now I'll take some more, put it over the top of this. I've got it close enough so that it will crawl up the chain link fence. I like to plant my tomatoes but a good oh at least two and a half feet apart maybe more depending on how much room you have. I like to pick off this lower leaf if I can get them nice and deep in there and mount it up to the trunk so it creates all those extra little roots out of the side. I'm going to add a little, these little peppers along here so they squeeze it from the bottom gently pull it out and just add these in here for some beauty of the purpleness that's on there. I don't like to plant them deeper than they are. I've got some little watermelon here called sugar babies and sometimes you can grow different vining crops on a fence. I'm going to try that here. I've had some success with cucumbers and smaller pumpkins on a fence before are trellis and they've done very well. So I'm going to try that today with these. Just let them plant them in here nicely and kind of have them crawl up the fence a little bit maybe give them a little support later on. How far apart do you put an onion? I like to put them as far apart as I think they're going to get for size. They don't like to crowd them. You can then you just eat them, eat the younger ones as they grow. Any ones that are all dried up and not going to grow I put on the side and then they just stick them gently into the soil like this and plant them. Blood meal is a product I like to use. It's a source of, oh, a nitrogen fertilizer for your plants. It's a blood product and you can give it any of your nurseries more unlikely they should carry that. Use it for rabbit control. Rabbit's don't care for it. Care for the smell. Probably your best rabbit control is fencing but since our whole yard is fenced and we have a dog and all three sides here I'm going to try the blood meal and I might add a fence later. I'll sprinkle a little bit in here. Not a lot. Just a little. I generally try not to get fertilizer on the plant if I can help it. Fertilizer at times tends to burn your plants so just a little dusting of it and I like it and make sure you wash your hands whenever you're done with all this type of thing too. We've got about approximately 20 feet of garden space that we just put in in a half hour. Not too bad. It wasn't really labor intensive. We got a nice variety of plants for aesthetic beauty but also as functional and useful. So I'm very pleased with that. As far as the other method of digging out by hand with a shovel, planting in takes about three times as long when I do it. Something a little very undepending on how fast you are digging up side. We also have the situation of what do we do with the sod now? Compost it, haul it away, work it in some other place where you have a patch near lawn that's dead. In this method that we did today, we don't have that problem at all. Eventually the grass underneath will die and the roots from these will penetrate through the newspaper and will have a garden with a lot less work and a lot of, maybe a third of the time that would have taken the older method but still isn't even done.