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Dealing with Downpours - Taming the Rainy Season in Your Garden
101 Plays2 years ago
This week on Hort Culture, we're diving into the deluge! We all love a good spring shower, but what happens when the rain just won't quit? Excessive rain can wreak havoc on our gardens, leading to root rot, erosion, and weakened plants. But fear not, fellow horticulturists, because we've got strategies to help your landscape weather the storm.
- Drainage Do's and Don'ts: We'll discuss the importance of well-draining soil and how to improve it using amendments like compost or raised beds. Learn how to identify poorly draining areas and explore solutions like swales, French drains, or even redirecting downspouts.
- Plant Power: Not all flora is created equal! We'll share tips on selecting plants that thrive in wet conditions, and how to adjust your planting strategy for soggy spots.
- Weathering the Storm: Discover ways to minimize damage during heavy rain. Learn about techniques like mulching properly and avoiding compacting wet soil. We'll also discuss how to support weakened plants after a downpour.
Remember, a little rain preparedness goes a long way! Tune in for actionable advice to keep your garden flourishing, rain or shine!
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
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Transcript
Introduction and Horticulture Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Horticulture, where a group of extension professionals and plant people talk about the business, production, and joy of planting seeds and helping them grow. Join us as we explore the culture of horticulture.
Weather Effects and Personal Anecdotes
00:00:16
Speaker
Hello. I hope the sun is shining where you are, but in the way that like warms you, like that good car nap that you can take when it's like kind of a little chilly outside and warm in the car and not in the way of like, you're really sweating super bad. And you feel like your brain is bubbling in your memory. I've done that. I fall on the sleep in the car and it's been in the summer and I thought it was in the shade and the shade moved and it got really sweaty.
Seasonal Acclimation and Fashion
00:00:40
Speaker
Hopefully the windows weren't up right. Mostly they were kind of up a little bit. He took a bunch of cold medicine and just went to sleep. There was an ambulance crew that came.
00:00:52
Speaker
I may have time traveled in my mind. I don't know. I don't know about you, but like the first day that it gets super, like not even super hot, but like the first day it gets over 80 and it's kind of like the sun is out and you know, you're acting like it's still in the seventies and it's just so much hotter than when you're like acclimated in the middle of July and 85th in the summer. Yeah.
00:01:14
Speaker
That same temperature, it's a matter of perspective or maybe it's just tolerance. I don't know. Like in the spring, how the, you know, 40 degrees is, you know, you're outside in short sleeves, but 40 degrees in the fall is like you're bundled up in a sweater. Yeah. That acclimation period is always a weird time. It's just me ready for the seasons to change. You know, the first cool.
00:01:33
Speaker
day in the fall, man, I have got the sweaters out and I'm like sweating in the afternoon. Those are the clothes that are clean, right? Like they've been ready to wear. They smell funny because they've been in storage for a while, but it's fun. It's fun. This time your cuticle hasn't formed. And so you're covering it. I'm always in long sleeves. So it's always formed. Yeah, it's fine. All year. Just pale problems. I'm just covered up. It's fine.
00:02:03
Speaker
My, my evapotranspiration rate is through the roof. Just hits me. I'm just crazy. I bet there's a tiny little microclimate right around Brett, like just the flow of apple. So much quicker than your Lexus. I mean, I don't mean to keep bringing that up. He comes in and mists me, uh, humidity around in my immediate year vicinity. Yeah.
Impact of Excess Rain in Kentucky
00:02:24
Speaker
I mean, we're pretty much, we've been done with peony season for about six weeks now. How about you? I text Amy.
00:02:33
Speaker
I don't know, two weeks ago, because I was like, all right, it's looking like mine are going to be ready like around the week of Mother's Day or like right before. And so I text Annie and I was like, how far along are your peonies? And she's like, probably today or tomorrow, they're bloom. And I was like, perfect. I'm right on schedule. So I'm like, I just do all my timing by plants. Like Dogwood Winter, this is...
00:02:57
Speaker
One full backyard. Yeah, one full backyard peony spring. Yeah, it's fine. I love it. I appreciate it. I'm cutting crazy amounts of peonies right now. It's very rewarding. But anyways, we're not talking about peonies, but we are talking about something that would affect peonies today or pretty much anything that you grow outside unless you're growing lotus in your pond. I think that they would be okay with our topic today, which would be
00:03:26
Speaker
Too much rain because if you're listening to this in the spring, we often get too much rain. Sometimes in at least Kentucky, we get too much rain in July, but then some of you usually don't. Who even knows? Years we get no rain in July.
Combating Excessive Rain with Strategies
00:03:41
Speaker
Preemptive apology to our West Coast listeners who don't generally have the problem of too much rain or too much water.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah. We do often stay moist and fungal and buggy and weedy in these parts. And everybody just cringed at the word moist. Yeah. That's the same.
00:04:05
Speaker
I don't know, is it worse? Is it something mezzanine? Oh, I don't know what it's called. I just know people get creeped out by that word, so I don't know why. I don't like the word buggy. It just brings up too many bad memories. Yeah, buggy. It's buggy outside. I have malaria. People have no idea. They're like, they have no idea what this is. Mesophonia.
00:04:32
Speaker
Oh, yeah. People don't like a lot of like moist is a common one. I'll just keep saying it. Yeah, it's like a it's like a an aggressive or negative response to like certain mouth sounds. And I think that's mouth sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like when somebody's chewing with their mouth open next to you, they apparently have a word for that. Like when you listen to a podcast or an interview and you can hear that the person's mouth is dry and it's ooh, ooh,
00:05:02
Speaker
Let's back off the compression a little bit. I need a drink of water, like as if he's calling me out. I would sabotage this whole thing and stop it and be like, we need to get... We would not be on this many episodes. If you and Ray fell asleep in the car, you guys need to get some IV fluids in you before you come into this because we do not need drive-outs.
00:05:25
Speaker
Well, no dry mouth today. Uh, just rain, just talking about the rain because it's, if it ain't there yet, it's coming. So, um, yeah, too much rain is what Josh, you said this, uh, saying earlier that you had heard about some being drivers. Yeah. Uh, it was that a dry year will scare you, but a wet year will starve you. And I think we're kind of mostly or.
00:05:51
Speaker
I was expecting we're mostly talking about how to deal with too much rain in a darkening sense. What are the strategies for dealing with that and what can
Disease Spread and Strategic Planning
00:06:02
Speaker
you do about it? Because it's not like, oh, well, it's too dry. Get the irrigation going if you've got a small enough space. It's really an irrigate, unfortunately. The technology is not there.
00:06:12
Speaker
When you talk about to certain agriculture producers, like I think you said, Josh, that maybe that applied to what range land or pastures maybe, or, or a certain type of farming operation in horticulture. We do things intensively, which usually means there's probably irrigation involved. If you're growing field crops, it's just the nature of the business that we are in. And it seems like when I switched, uh, you know, I was prior just an ag agent, I dealt more with, you know,
00:06:39
Speaker
cattle and field crops and then switched over to horticulture, you really needed that rain. There's not a lot you could do but switch to horticulture. And I knew this was the case that they would rather it be a dry year because you have irrigation anyhow and you had fewer diseases on the horticulture in those days. So I guess if a horticulture producer had their choice, they would be just a little bit dry.
00:07:01
Speaker
rather than a little bit wet because of the conditions that you guys have already mentioned of. All the diseases that we have here in our transitional zone in the state of Kentucky, the wonderful state of Kentucky, is it seems like every disease that does exist will exist in a wet year, especially in intensive crops. So that's something that's different with horticulture, not that the hort crops, I don't know, in flowers, Alexis, are there flower producers that still don't, I guess,
00:07:29
Speaker
pretty common not to have irrigation in some of those crops, too? No, I'd say mostly because if you think about it, a lot of them are growing in tunnels. So that's one thing where you're protected from rain, but it's also, they can still do some damage and stuff. Too much rain usually brings high winds and then you don't have sunlight and there's a whole other thing to that.
00:07:54
Speaker
Flower growers don't, the flowers need a lot of water. They do. So most of them are irrigating in some way and doing drip. And I don't know, I think when I think about too much rain and maybe like combating that, and then we can talk about, you know, the things you're trying to combat with
Soil Management and Timing of Tillage
00:08:10
Speaker
that. Some of this will be very obvious, I think, but maybe there'll be some new things that you wouldn't have thought of.
00:08:15
Speaker
My idea is like, let's start from the ground up with soil. So if you're in an area where you know you get a lot of rain, maybe you're farming kind of at the bottom of a bowl area, which a lot of people, you don't have a lot of choice sometimes where you're growing things necessarily, or you just are in an area that you know gets a lot of rain.
00:08:38
Speaker
combating that with things like slightly raised beds you know I'm not and I'm not talking about I'm talking about like a more of a commercial side where but home gardeners could do this as well but you're raking that bed up you're not necessarily putting down you know wood planks or cinder blocks you could certainly do that as a home gardener but
00:08:56
Speaker
I'm talking building that bed up a little bit higher. Uh, and that can be used. I do that. And I know some other growers who do that with certain crops that just like drier. They don't like wet feet is kind of like a terminology we use lavender and all that lavender. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, is a great one. Or if you're growing bulbs of any kind, you know, even if you're doing like a turmeric or something like that, like it doesn't want to sit in water. And with if you have heavy clay soils, even with a moderate amount of rain, there'll be a period of time where you know, those are really saturated. So building up that raised bed can be one way to, you know, kind of modify that environment.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yeah, I have a great point about, I was going to, with raised beds, you know, like when we say raised beds, a lot of people immediately jump to that idea, like you mentioned of, you know, masonry or wood and something that's really tall, but, you know, even having it slightly build up, like just a few inches can have a really dramatic impact on that soil being well drained or draining better.
00:09:58
Speaker
I think about homeowners a lot. Well, and commercially, it's just as important in the spring. It's typically a wetter, um, moisture time of year. Uh, the ground, uh,
00:10:08
Speaker
I always worry about gardeners and even commercial producers getting in the soil and doing soil tillage while the ground is too wet. It's tempting and you just see a brief window where you have a break in the rain and you think your soil is in good enough condition. Yeah, it's just you're doing some damage there. I think about that first is spring tillage operations and especially, you know, we've had
00:10:36
Speaker
episodes with cover crops on there. And we talked about the effect that a heavy cover crop has on a home garden or a commercial operation. It affects both the same in that it holds moisture. And one of the things you can do to mitigate that is to get that cut down and taken off or just mulched up to let the sun shine in to just try to get the soil in better shape. But that's the first thing I think of, Alexis. Yeah. Is from a soil perspective,
00:11:03
Speaker
is in the springtime. Sometimes it's just tough to get the soil worked up and catch the right window. I think about too much moisture in the spring and it's tough. I think about when we were growing even a crop like tobacco in Kentucky in years, years past, that it was a stressful time when you just had a really wet run of weather.
00:11:27
Speaker
and then your plants are ready to go. You don't want those to get too tall. You pull those and then you have a wet spell and it's just really tough. You're just watching for any opportunity to get out there, do final tilling.
00:11:39
Speaker
and get plants in the ground. And the temptation to get on that soil when it's a bit too wet is pretty great. Don't do it. In short, don't do it. Yeah, that's key. When it's so wet to not get out there for tillage. And also, that's a bad time when the plants are wet to spread disease around if you're out there mixing it up. I think that's probably the most frustrating is you see it, but all the wisdom is don't get out there and you can't do anything about it right now.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's later in the season. I guess that flips it right on its end, Josh. That's a great point is that that's the next thing, especially in the horticulture or I know I've talked to the lab Alexis recently and they were talking about like all the struggles that some new like floral producers, cut flower producers have with diseases. You know, that's a crop that's planted very close together, a lot of high density.
00:12:27
Speaker
But yeah, Josh, I think I like picking green beans and stuff and you just spread everything when the surface of plants are wet. So really that shuts you down later in the season and in a very different manner. But if you've got like, you know, I just, I think about transplants, whether it's veggies or, you know, I know people who buy veggie transplants and bring them in from a greenhouse and, you know,
00:12:51
Speaker
it's always up or down. Sometimes you get the most perfect crop and sometimes they're not great and you know, or you're ordering plugs from a big, you know, reputable dealer, but you know, sometimes they can have a little bit of a, like a root, if they have a little bit of a root pathogen issue and you get a lot of rain, that means you've got, you know, um, these fungal spores essentially that are spreading right through that water and it's moving and it'll take, you know, what would in a drier year,
00:13:17
Speaker
be just a couple plants in a small area. I mean, it'll wipe out a row going right with the flow of water.
Managing Crop Diseases
00:13:23
Speaker
And it's frustrating. It's a double whammy. Not only do you have more diseases present, active diseases present, but the conditions are such that you cannot spray. So diseases just have an absolute field day. They just, you know, blow up exponentially depending on what the disease is. So it is a double whammy for sure when it's wet out there. It's like having a leaky roof. You really need to fix it, but you can't do it when it's raining. It's the kind of thing.
00:13:47
Speaker
The other thing I think about, and this is going to be more midsummer, I know we're talking a lot about spring, but I get a lot of questions about this, you know, as we approach summer is, you know, my tomatoes are flowering, my beans are flowering, but I'm not getting any fruit or, you know, I'm not getting any bean. I'm not getting any pods. A lot of these things are insect pollinated. If it is raining, the insects are not moving around, right? The bees aren't going to these things to do that pollination.
00:14:13
Speaker
And again, there's nothing you can do about it unless you want to go out and hand pollinate under a little umbrella or something. So in wet years, you got disease, you got insects not pollinating. So you think about all the things that bees pollinate as an example. And there's just nothing you can do if you're out in the field, unfortunately.
00:14:34
Speaker
And I think one other thing to touch on that we haven't so far is that lots of rain is something that'll leach out nutrients in your soil as well. So it's affecting your kind of fertility plants. That's when mineral-based soil growers feel the pain of a non-mineral-based soil grower or people that are used to growing things in containers with like milk peat-based
00:14:57
Speaker
media, they're used to having to do a constant micro feed of nutrients because they will have to water so much because that media dries out, that they're used to adding those nutrients all the time. Well, the same thing can happen in mineral-based soils. When you have field crops that are growing, yeah, that loss of nitrogen can be pretty pronounced. I hear the folks down in Florida and southern states that have a lot more sandy soils, they talk a lot about that. That if you have a lot of unexpected rain, that effect can be pretty pronounced.
Irrigation and Nutrient Management
00:15:25
Speaker
So you have to think about the replacement nutrients, especially if you're doing drip irrigation.
00:15:30
Speaker
you look at your rates and sometimes they'll bump the rates five, 10% based on experience and knowing their soil. So yeah. Which is why like clay soils are not completely bad, right? They hold on to those nutrients. Just a reminder that if you're dealing with a lot of clay right now and you're mad about it, it's not that organic matter is also so important. And you know, we talk about that and other things, but organic matter will hold onto those nutrients better. So really bumping up that, you know, whether that's compost or cover cropping, you know, all those things we've talked about before.
00:16:00
Speaker
another reason that's so important to combat that rain so that you aren't losing so much into poisoning the water and all that kind of thing. So it's bad. Too much rain. Not good. Not good. But there are some things we can do. We've already hit on some of them. So raise beds as one, just raking up a couple inches.
00:16:22
Speaker
Or if you have a bed shaper or I use a rotary plow to flip that soil, it just spins that soil and flips it up onto an area. So you can go as high tech or low tech as you want. But I can't think of a reason that would be bad to do that. Even in dry years, again, most people have some sort of irrigation in horticulture.
00:16:45
Speaker
It's never a bad thing. And a lot of people are doing no-till and essentially what you're doing with no-till is creating over time, these little bit of raised beds for horticulture crops. So like all that kind of goes, can go together.
Improving Soil Drainage Techniques
00:16:57
Speaker
Oh, somebody's going to say anything. If you are, if you are cover cropping and you've terminated or laid your cover crop down or whatever, and it's created this mulch layer that can actually, that can slow down the process of the soil drying out. And so there's a little bit of.
00:17:13
Speaker
Basically from the point that you're, you're kind of looking for this window starting at the very earliest that you could, and you have to sometimes make executive decisions that you have to tell, or you have to get in at a time that's not optimal and you think, Oh, I'll make it up on the backend.
00:17:29
Speaker
But I think, to Alexis's point, as far as things that you can do to overly, to future-proof your soil or whatever for future years, you can do things like working toward improving the structure, improving the drainage. Sometimes you'll have an issue where there's, especially if an area has been used for agricultural production for a while and it's been tilled in that top,
00:17:58
Speaker
eight, 10, 12 inches, there will be this phenomenon of the hard pan, which is sort of like a false bottom or a bottom underneath. And it can cause things to be even slower in drying out. And so you could look at using something like a subsoiler or
00:18:16
Speaker
using something like tillage radishes or something along those lines to gradually improve the drainage of your soil. You don't want to turn it into a sandbox where it's Florida and everything leeches out the bottom, but it is this really interesting, very slow, long-term strategic plan for how you can improve your soil in a number of different ways for plants.
00:18:42
Speaker
health, but also it can help to mitigate some of the issues with stuff not wanting to dry out. Now, if it rains for five straight days heavy, no matter what you did, but it could be that Alexis took care of her soil and improved drainage in her fields and et cetera. And we get a big rainfall and I didn't do anything and mine's still soaking wet and hers is ready in a couple of days of nice
00:19:08
Speaker
And so like those types of things are more in the broad strategic, longer term plan. And just like with a lot of those ecologically minded things, it helps in multiple different ways, but that is one way that it can provide a little relief.
00:19:23
Speaker
Another general strategy and this one I have mixed thoughts on, I guess it's very situational specific and it sort of gets into the weeds, no pun intended a little bit.
Plant Spacing and Water Management
00:19:31
Speaker
There's a couple different strategies depending on if you're home or commercial. If you're a homeowner, one of the things I go over with homeowners, especially if they're wanting to maintain a reduced spray schedule is, you know, space the plants out. If you've had some rainy seasons and you're fearful of disease transmission,
00:19:48
Speaker
space your plants out, especially crops that have a close canopy later in the season like tomatoes. Spread those out a little bit, increase sunlight penetration, which increases leaf drying, which makes for undesirable, you know, environments for a lot of these pathogens. But on the flip side of that, if I have a rain garden, one of my strategies is to do just the opposite is to
00:20:11
Speaker
to mitigate erosion, which is also associated with too much rainfall. You want to put plants close together. You're kind of mitigating the force of the rain falling on the soil, not only that, but you're increasing the root mass, which holds the soil better. So those are strategies that are kind of opposite end of the spectrum, but you can use those strategies either spacing plants farther apart or bringing plants close together, depending on your situation.
00:20:37
Speaker
And I've worked with people on doing both and both have their place as just general strategies of dealing with. And sometimes you have to look into the future of the crystal ball and anticipate some of these issues if you've had problems with some of these things in the past. So two different strategies, spacing one way or the other.
00:20:57
Speaker
Can't have its place on that. Excuse me. On that note, if you're a tunnel grower and you're going, I don't really worry too much about too much rain because obviously it's not really affecting the tunnel. Too much rain means cloud coverage, which means that it's kind of your humidity often will go up. A lot of times you keep your sides down so that you're, you know, if you've got whipping rain, you're going to keep your sides down. So the rain's not coming into the tunnel. And so you're going to build up a higher humidity in there because your tunnel is closed up.
00:21:27
Speaker
But also there's cloud coverage and so the natural humidity that would form is not drying out as quickly because it's in the tunnel. So there is still some effect to having too much rain and essentially too much cloud coverage and you can get a disease will come in to a tunnel so quick on days like that or a greenhouse or whatever closed environment you might be using.
00:21:52
Speaker
You're not completely free from the, from the effects of rain. Yeah. And, and I mean, a tunnel could have been installed in a place that is somewhat flood prone, right? Yeah. I've definitely seen water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Creating and Managing Drainage Solutions
00:22:06
Speaker
A lot of people put tiles now happening and putting tiles out or pretty good strategy is the.
00:22:14
Speaker
I mean, there's a million and one names for this concept, a drain tile, a French drain, a weeping tile, an ag drain, a subsoil type drain. And they're all kind of terms around this idea of digging a trench and backfilling it in a certain way to give the water somewhere to go and thereby kind of improve drainage overall for an area.
00:22:37
Speaker
That's definitely a strategy. If you're stuck planting in a place that is flood prone or you're concerned about the future potential of rainfall events and things like that, or just worried about its drainage potential, but you're stuck working with it, that kind of like a fresh drain or rock drain is a great way to go. Just to be clear, this wouldn't be like, oh, I just put out a bunch of
00:23:01
Speaker
whatever my crop is, and I'm noticing that it's backing up, I'm going to put in a French drain. It's more structural. And that's what I'm saying. That's what exactly we're saying about the soil stuff. Like a lot of it is there are things you can do to respond in the season, but almost everything with this type of structural, geographical, geological consideration.
00:23:23
Speaker
requires forethought and or wow, that really flooded out this year. I'm going to need to do something different, you know, when we get a chance to get in. And so
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the long-term strategy and the idea of being in a place for a while and thinking through how to make it work better for you is this type of stuff. And yeah, that's sort of the engineering equivalent to what I was talking about earlier with the, if the tillage radishes and the subsoiling and stuff isn't quite enough, you may need to intervene even further.
00:23:57
Speaker
You know, it's yeah, it's yeah, if you're looking pretty interesting stuff, go hard. Yeah, something I learned in preparing for this show was that
00:24:06
Speaker
The French drain isn't of French origin. I was going to ask, is it French? I mean, there's like an aside that it may have been invented in France, but I mean, I'm pretty sure it's an old idea. But the reason we call it a French drain is because of a guy, Henry Flag French of Massachusetts in the mid 1800s who articulated like how to develop one. And like I kind of made it broadly
00:24:33
Speaker
popularized and stuff like that in a, uh, I guess it's an article called farm drainage 1859 aptly named must read you. And on that note, again, much more thought that the, the friend, the French drain, the ag drains are kind of a semi immediate. Like you could do it in one season, but if you wanted to kind of, I like the idea of always like stacking things and how do I make something work? So like,
00:24:59
Speaker
In flower farming for an example, but this could be for if you're doing like agroforestry or something like that Ray was talking about earlier like rain garden plants Where you're kind of slow in that water. You need a lot of plant roots to suck up that water you do the same sort of thing Where if you've got like a hill that's coming down a lot of water runs onto maybe where you're growing and it's coming from maybe one main direction you can put in like some shrubs or some trees grass, you know some
00:25:29
Speaker
native grasses type things where it's going to slow that runoff, first of all, but then, you know, they're going to suck up a lot of that water and then maybe you can use those. Maybe your orchard, you know, obviously you don't want your, you know, orchard to be in the rain, but if it, I'm just saying if there's a lot of moving water type of situation. Yeah.
00:25:47
Speaker
You can put your orchard there or your blackberries or, you know, if you're doing ornamentals, you can do, you know, wajiglia or fursithia or, you know, any of these things. And, you know, we've talked about making habitat for, you know, birds that help with your insect pests and stuff like that. So there's kind of this multi-way to think about using an area and all the different ways
Natural Water Management Features
00:26:10
Speaker
it can help you. So you're not wasting that area. Like, I know a lot of people like have a hard time with putting in, like,
00:26:16
Speaker
trees and things like that if they're more into more traditional. Not trees. More traditional, just big open blank spaces. Not really realizing all the ways you can use those areas. Brambles are a great way to really slow down some water. They'll suck it up. They don't want wet feet, but they're much better at sitting in water, and then you can pick off of them. You're going to make money off of that area.
00:26:44
Speaker
If that you're you're definitely moving into like the kind of permaculture principles that's the idea of like keeping water on the farm and slowing down and yeah at least to go in a place to be stored and held and.
00:27:02
Speaker
the way that that has like a cumulative effect on the entire property. And even just, we talked about Josh's publication that he had done on the, excuse me, the ecosystem services of plants and the idea of a tree's canopy slowing down water as it holds on to all the droplets of water. He gives the example of go stand under a tree after it just rained and shake one of the branches and see how much water comes off all over you.
00:27:32
Speaker
That same principle of just, it's like this really, once you start really thinking about water flows on your farm, and in this case, you know, managing the downsides of that, you can really, your brain can go to some really crazy wild places of
Erosion Control in Fields and Landscapes
00:27:47
Speaker
engineering. We spent so much time on this, Brad, in the eastern foothills. And my dad, the fields, some of the fields we were using were marginal, and we use those for row crops.
00:27:56
Speaker
once again, primarily, you know, for things like tobacco and some horticulture crops, but it was interesting how the farm had developed over the years with my father and it was all to manage erosion and both the flow and the magnitude of water that would accumulate, which is massive. You know, we'd have these weird people drive along and they'd say, and you know, they wouldn't realize that there was as much slope as there was in a field.
00:28:21
Speaker
But there was areas where dad would leave green buffer strips because he knew that if he killed that, it would.
00:28:27
Speaker
started as a little, little, little tiny stream and end up as a gully, you know, three feet deep. He just knew that because of just years of experience. And we had spent so much time just honing this really interesting system of how to orient the rows and breaking up blocks and providing water drainage and buffer strips to slow the velocity of the water. I mean, over time, you know, everything was kind of finely tuned. But
00:28:54
Speaker
You know, when he turned over a couple of fields to me, some of my first fields, and he let me make these mistakes. I'm sure I went, what did I do? I tilt everything. You got more space for more crops, more money. That was super excited. But he gave me these small little fields.
00:29:14
Speaker
And they were Sandy and I had to go back in and fill in two and a half, three foot ditches. And he's like, well, why do you think that happened? And, you know, we had this big, long discussion one day and he put it in his own down to earth practical terms.
00:29:27
Speaker
And I'll never forget it, that I did not put enough emphasis and consideration into managing those fields. And I was like, well, this really stinks. I'm filling up a three foot hole here that runs a quarter of a mile. And dad's like, well, you could have avoided that if you had to lift that buffer strip alone. And I was like, but that's more tomatoes. And it was mama's face.
00:29:58
Speaker
And in general with a lot of these, you know, longer term thinking about managing around water and soil erosion and all that stuff, you realize that you can
00:30:10
Speaker
It takes 10 years to make progress and like 10 minutes to screw it up. It takes one right, one year to go and mess up a couple of these fields. And that's just the way it goes. And like you said, you learn from it and move on. So I mean, we've talked a little bit about the soil-based, a little bit more of the longer term infrastructural considerations, topography, hydrology, we've covered a lot of ground.
00:30:36
Speaker
there, but like what about the other components of having too much rain?
Mitigating Fruit Cracking and Diseases
00:30:41
Speaker
Some of the things that maybe we can deal with in a within the course of the season. Yeah, I'm thinking about things like disease as an example. It's not a disease but one thing that always got me and I still work with people on and it still keeps us up at night in commercial horticulture and that is cracking.
00:31:01
Speaker
I love you guys have ever had to work with like a melon grower or tomato grower and it's been a dry season, even though they've done a pretty good job of irrigating, staying on a schedule, a rainy spell comes towards the end of the season. Nothing will ruin your day as a commercial producer. Yes, diseases are bad, but so is like an acre of tomatoes that all the shoulders have cracked on and just destroyed the commercial value of.
00:31:25
Speaker
And the only way you can mitigate that as a producer, I think, is, you know, soil type and a lot of other factors go into kind of managing that, but is to have like irrigation that's good and even throughout the season and just hope for the best towards the end of the season. If you just have an unusually wet spell, you're probably going to have some issues, whether it's a watermelon or a tomato, lots of fruit. When they get engorged with water towards the end of the growing season, they will just crack wide open.
00:31:54
Speaker
I feel that after Thanksgiving. Yes, absolutely. I mean, it's that snow. It's water with gravy. Turkey. Yeah. And I think moderation. Yeah. Well, raise beds. We're going back to it's all going back to, you know, if you have raised beds in theory, they should drain a little faster and maybe you have a little bit less time for those plants to just like engorge themselves with water. Yeah.
00:32:21
Speaker
That can be one way. I think when we talk about disease, and disease goes to those abiotic issues like cracking, right? Or, you know, if you have the nutrient leaching because of so much rain can lead to disorders and then you have disease problems that come in as well. And so I think
00:32:42
Speaker
The keys with disease, no matter the time of year, but especially when it's rainy, is going to be as much prevention as you can do. We've talked about prevention from a soil perspective, but prevention in sprays. It's hard to spray. Again, if it's raining for five days, there's really nothing you can do, but getting something on really quickly after that rain or
00:33:03
Speaker
Depending on what you're using, you know, if it's something that is going to, you know, quote unquote soak in and putting that on at the right amount of time before rain, if you see that coming. So being preventative and knowing what the weather is going to do. If you can get some of that in there and you're still going to have issues with the things that form like right on the leaf surfaces, because
00:33:23
Speaker
You know, pretty much all of our treatments for those, like I'm thinking about powdery mildew, things like that are going to be surface. Most of our treatments are like, and if you, it's raining, you can't get anything on the surface, but there are some diseases, root rots, things like that, where you can get some things down that are systemic. And so there, it's in the cells essentially.
00:33:42
Speaker
and that can help really deter that and then getting those plants dry quickly. Obviously, if you're out in the fields, you're probably not going to put fans on stuff, but if you are in a tunnel situation and you're dealing with that high humidity, getting some fans running in there to dry the leaf surface, and then good pruning tactics.
00:34:05
Speaker
you know, are you pruning your tomatoes and suckering them correctly? If you're doing fruit trees or even, you know, brambles, are you making sure that you're taking out enough so that air movement can get through there. So as soon as it's done raining, that leaf surface is drying out because the air is getting through there. Even if the sun's not out, you can get some movement, dry out that leaf surface. Then you don't get the buildup of disease that you normally would get.
00:34:33
Speaker
Yeah, I think just a couple of metaphors or something with a lot, like a lot of the fungicides, you have to think of it more like sunscreen ahead of getting sunburned than aloe vera after you've already been sunburned. That's a great one. In other words, it's preventative. And so it will come to you if you have powdery mildew,
00:34:55
Speaker
that powdery mildew is not going to respond in general to fungicides. And so you'll see people who grow things that are really fun fungal susceptible like grapes, for instance. Those people monitor the weather and they monitor disease risk and sentinel plots and all kinds of other stuff.
00:35:15
Speaker
and they will preemptively spray ahead of a rainfall. And I think the other metaphor example, I guess, is that idea of pruning, I think, is really important. It's like one of the overlooked cultural practices, especially for home gardeners. But think about if you have a pile of wet clothes and you take them and you just lay them in a pile, they're just going to stay wet and start smelling weird. Whereas if you take them and hang them up on a line spaced out where the breeze can blow across them, they can dry out.
00:35:44
Speaker
That drying out limits the, in the case of the, the plant leaves where they're all bunched up together in a not pruned, uh, not pruned plant. They can't dry out on that. And cold and wet is perfect conditions for some fungal, funky folk fungal. Bacterial too. Yeah. Yeah. Back to everything. It just, that thrives in that moist environment. So you just, just think about it in terms of, you know, if you want something that you want something to stay dry, like you want
00:36:11
Speaker
in general, we would prefer if the plants could take up the moisture from their roots, put it out to everything and everything else would stay dry. I mean, that's why the Central Valley of California does so well is because they get water only where they put it. And so yeah, I think that the that and one thing I just wanted to
00:36:31
Speaker
clarify something I had to learn a long time ago, but when when you talk about raised beds, some people might have in their mind, like a built frame wooden boxes of raised beds. Yeah, not as a type of raised bed, but in the in the biz like Alexis is in and like we're talking about some some commercial stuff, a raised bed could literally just be a long mound of soil, mound of soil, breaking it out of the rest of the soil. And so if you're thinking,
00:36:57
Speaker
Oh no, I have to build all these boxes and buy all this stuff. No, that's not what we're just talking about. Just where you build it up so it's a little bit higher than everywhere else. And there's a little like kind of a long mound, like a caterpillar or like a dune worm or something. I don't know. Maybe a little smaller, like a baby, baby worm.
00:37:16
Speaker
Well, think about your grandmother, how she planted cucumbers. They planted them in hills. Yeah. And that was very good.
Advantages of Raised Beds
00:37:22
Speaker
Potatoes, right? Yes. And same thing. And that was an old heritage technique before the advent or the widespread availability of, you know, these complex chemicals as they had to do good cultural practices, which means, you know, putting a seed in soil that is warmed and well-drained and ready to go, fast germination.
00:37:41
Speaker
And something that's growing well and germinates fast has less issues with some of these pythium disease, all these different dampening off diseases. But it's amazing that those cultural practices evolved for a reason. So there's a reason why grandmother put cucumbers and or whatever watermelons in the hills or potatoes, you know, for a different reason or two. But yeah, yeah, some of that was because they didn't have the chemicals to rescue treatments.
00:38:05
Speaker
I mean IPM is basically do that still knowing that you have in your back pocket, the modern chemicals. Yeah. Don't just rely on it. Yeah, that's awesome. The OG raised bed. Yeah, if you think about it, that was the original raised bed. It not only was warmer, but drier. So, yeah. I really liked Brett's example of the, you know, hanging up the clothes on the vine where I thought he was going to take it was, you know, similar to the importance of making sure that your trellis plants are hung up and kind of like,
00:38:34
Speaker
have those open airflow and all that stuff as well. Yeah. We just had certain fields that I mean, not even moisture, not even excess moisture, but typical moisture next to a river.
00:38:45
Speaker
We had fields that would be a, and Alexis mentioned it earlier, when we think of moisture, we think of just rainfall in out of the sky, but there's a lot of other things that can get you. And humidity and, you know, things like fog and relative humidity, all that plays into that. And it's just as conducive for diseases. But we had some of those fields that were sort of in oxbows of the river and they had a higher relative humidity.
00:39:06
Speaker
very low air drainage, very low air flow. And every single year we knew that if the chemical label said spray preventatively every seven to 14 days, guess which interval we would do? We would do every seven days because we knew that those areas produced diseases unlike any other area on the farm. And that's another thing I guess if you're a homeowner, I spend a lot of time stressing that if something like a chlorothalonil, broad spread, you know,
00:39:33
Speaker
fungicide says on the label spray every seven to 14 days, you know, look at the weather, look ahead. If there's a wet pattern coming, you know, use that, you know, closer interval of seven days rather than 14 days if you have higher humidity. But yeah, yeah, there's just some areas that, you know, and Alexis already kind of spoke to that is certain areas or certain way you plant certain areas, you know, it's going to be worse for diseases.
00:39:57
Speaker
Another little tip that can be helpful for a variety of crops, flowers, fruits. I mean, a lot of stuff just to point home how that pruning, maybe it's not something you've thought of, but
00:40:13
Speaker
base pruning of taking the leaves off within about six to 12 inches, depending on the size of the plant, of the soil to prevent soil splash from being able to reach those leaves. Mulch is a great way to do that as well, but that's not always practical in any of your situations. So sometimes it's easier. You see this on tomatoes. I've seen this done in dahlias and zinnias, all kinds of things where if you can prevent some of that soil splash,
00:40:40
Speaker
from getting up there as well as kind of you know usually the plant has a lot of foliage at the bottom and as it grows it doesn't necessarily need that much because it's got a bunch up top where the wind is getting to it but at the base of the plant sometimes that wind isn't drying that out so you can thin that out or remove it completely and you got a little bit of a naked stem at the bottom and you know it's not perfect for every situation but it is an option
00:41:05
Speaker
that I think can be really helpful for a variety of different crops.
Disease Resistance and Plant Varieties
00:41:10
Speaker
So it's technically pruning, but not always the way we think about pruning.
00:41:15
Speaker
in, you know, in a lot of horticulture crops. So I just thought of that one suddenly. It was like, I must tell you. Yeah. And if you watch your, you know, watch your tomatoes this year, you'll notice that they almost always get sick from the bottom up because it's down low and it just, that's where, that's where the slope happens. Ladders up. It's the classic ladder effect. Yeah.
00:41:36
Speaker
I figured those leaves are going to die anyway, so I'll go ahead and get ahead of that curve. Just take them off. I think something may be unspoken amongst us, but you can find hybrid cultivars that have been bred with resistance to certain diseases. True. So maybe blight or it maybe has a particular resistance to powdery mildew or something like that, depending on whatever the crop is.
00:42:01
Speaker
That's another way that you can kind of, you know, it's one of those tricky aspects. You know, I am, well, I used to be very crunchy, very, uh, yeah. And, and I still have some of those sensibilities, but when I hear people talk about and get really excited about, uh, growing heirloom varieties of things or growing, uh, even growing like fruit trees and things like that. And there's this homestead kind of.
00:42:28
Speaker
spirit about what they're doing. I want to be so supportive, but I also don't like setting people up for unrealistic expectations. The thing is, if there's a reason why commercial growers grow a lot of the hybridized tomatoes that sometimes are even grafted to have additional disease resistance, and a lot of those old heirloom cultivars don't have that. They are delicious tomatoes, for instance. They're delicious and amazing and incredible, but
00:42:58
Speaker
If you want to feel defeated, go through a year trying to grow all heirloom tomatoes in a moist, hot, wet year in the South. It's not like it can't be done. There is a different mentality, a different level of cultural practice that you need to go through. I'm not going to say the words that freak people out, but
00:43:24
Speaker
And everybody says, well, my grandmother did it and she never sprayed. Well, yeah. Okay. And let's just say you're using the same exact cultural practices. You may even be using that heirloom seed that has been passed down through generations, which is cool as heck. But Kentucky is not the same place it was when your grandma was growing those heirloom tomatoes. Okay.
00:43:44
Speaker
It just is the weather is different. Call it whatever you want. But like we know that the data shows that our, our summers are hotter. We have rain at weird times. We never had them before. We have the weirdest winters we, you know, every year. And so it's, you're not growing, it's not comparable.
Scaling Traditional Methods and Rain Impact
00:44:01
Speaker
It's not apples to oranges anymore of growing those heirloom tomatoes. So like, instead of just growing four plants like grandmother did, if you apply that logic to 400 plants, yeah.
00:44:10
Speaker
You're increasing the disease load exponentially. So the logic is doesn't scale real well sometimes there. Yeah. So just a thought process. If you do fail and you're feeling bad about yourself, don't because you're not, you're not, it's not apples to apples always. So, you know, it's okay. So just give me a little boost there. Everything's going to be okay. It's just plants.
00:44:30
Speaker
That's right. I know we talked a lot about field crops, but I'm thinking about the landscape too and all the ways. I've got a, I think it's an angel wings lilac out front right now and it's cracking me up because I pruned it back and it had a flush of new growth, which means one thing and it looks terrible now because it is floppy. I don't know if, I mean, but every time I get a rain now, Jennifer says, what have you done to this plant? It looks terrible. I pruned it back because it was getting overgrown and it's floppy.
00:44:58
Speaker
But is there any strategy? I mean, like in landscapes, you know, rain affects that too. But there's some things I probably could have done to get in front of that floppy plants. But even I think we mentioned it. I pruned it early in the spring, early this spring. I pruned everything that was old. All the older shoots there, three years or older. Actually, probably two years or older because it was really overgrown.
00:45:21
Speaker
And what that's left is a bunch of very limber new growth. And now when rain hits the leaves, it does a lot in landscapes, not only to plants the shrubs, like this lilac, but I think about trees and all the weight that rain puts on leaves. And in the eastern part of the state, I worked a lot with community trails development. And that is when all the trees would fall over trails and they would start to, during these wet periods, if you're in the gorge.
00:45:50
Speaker
in hilly areas, you know that rain has a huge impact on plants, especially on slopes and in landscapes. But this made me think about this plant right out front where everybody can see it is flopped over now and it's still flopped over and looks terrible.
00:46:05
Speaker
But I guess one of the, what would have been a pruning strategy if I have something like a bee balm or what is it you bred that has some flocks? I mean, plants like that, I couldn't remember. Yeah, yarrow. You can actually, I could have pruned those back to, you know, stimulate branching would have been a much sturdier plant rather than taking them all the way to the ground. But did I use forethought? No.
00:46:27
Speaker
I just went ahead and removed everything because I was sick of it. It's a beautiful plant, but it was too big. But there's some strategies there that you can deal with like hydrangeas. I mean, there's a certain plants that the nature of the way that they grow
00:46:40
Speaker
You know, the flopping and landscapes I take note of a lot when I drive around and it's been really wet and it's in the spring, diamond, summer, and I see all these. So it's judgy. I am. I'm like, they really should have headed that back and that's me. Did you put the lilac where it is or was it there already? It was there when I came. Yeah. That's part of it too, right? Is it maybe you would have put it in a different spot. It's not my fault. They had more space. Yeah.
00:47:02
Speaker
I planted a standard French lilac, but it has plenty of room to grow, and it is not floppy. I will have you guys know. Not floppy. It has your favor, you know? It has. It's in the blessed realm. Yes. Good luck. May the odds be forever in your favor.
00:47:17
Speaker
I would just characterize it as look at, you know, like anybody who's gone way too long without a haircut, they get something kind of drastic. And in the first, you know, month or so, it looks weird. Let's call it a period of acclimation. I like that spin, Josh, a lot. Yeah. But there's some ways that you can prune. And you guys have mentioned mulch earlier. I mean, that's kind of a big thing.
00:47:38
Speaker
landscape beds and there's sprays that you can and I've used when I was a commercial landscaper that you know in sloping areas it's the type of mulch but also you can get products to spray on mulch that it's a locking you know spray that locks mulch and like it won't go anywhere is on slopes and it's a wonderful material.
00:47:55
Speaker
There's a lot of strategies to mitigate erosion and to keep soil where it's supposed to be and to manage plants in a certain way. You guys have already mentioned the most important things, which is like the pruning methods to open up the canopy. Pruning, spacing, all that. All that can be applied.
00:48:12
Speaker
Yeah, everything we're saying about commercial field production can apply to the home landscape because it's just kind of general concepts and principles. I think of stuff like, I mean, always engineering and digging stuff, but like trenching to redirect where water flows if you've got someplace where water moves really fast.
00:48:29
Speaker
like what's coming off of, you know, collected roofs and gutters to have rocks and hard skipping there, something to slow the water down, things like that. And like you had mentioned with the, you know, not exactly like terracing, but in places of a lot of slope to have those kind of strips of ground cover that is not getting tilled to kind of hold onto things and preventing it from, you know, digging a nice quarter mile rut or
00:48:55
Speaker
Yeah a lot of the trails I worked with like a like multi-purpose community trails like the one thing we would do is do something simple like deburring a trail is like when it starts to form a gully the first thing you do is put a little slope on that of what slopes towards the downhill because
00:49:09
Speaker
you can't you don't have a lot of manpower to maintain these miles of trails and so you design them in a certain way to shed water it's all about water the velocity and the magnitude of water that's that and the soil type that's what defines you know how you design these trails but yeah it's just what you're saying it's the engineering and a lot of times it's just simple things you can do you don't want water to ever accumulate
00:49:30
Speaker
and gains me because in bad things I guarantee will happen and it will be like the field I had growing up that my father let me manage for the first time that I ruined.
Erosion Control Strategies
00:49:41
Speaker
It's like the Grand Canyon. I look at that and I'm like somebody messed up. Somebody messed up. Who designed this place? Who designed it? Yeah.
00:49:51
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I'm thinking of the phone calls we're going to get Alexis when we get these wet spells as being county extension agents. Do you ever get any calls about things that look like fingers growing out of mulch or like fairy rings and lawns? When we have wet spells, it really does spark a certain type of phone call into extension offices. So it's like the period of molds and mushrooms. Dog vomit fungus.
00:50:16
Speaker
A lot of stuff appeared in my yard. I ran out and ate several handfuls of it. What is going to happen? We get a lot of people like, can I eat this? No, no, you cannot eat it, but will you survive? You can eat it once. Yeah. But I just wet, wet period brings out a certain type of phone calls, diseases and other stuff. A lot of, a lot of pictures come through my email that if anybody else were to see, they might be like that.
00:50:45
Speaker
might be inappropriate and i'm like it's it's a fungus i swear
00:50:49
Speaker
Yes. And it smells terrible. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want certain people going through my email in the spring for the mulch phone call. It's, it's amazing. And some of these things just look otherworldly. So I get it. If you've never observed like, and you have fresh mulch and you've all of a sudden got this glowing yellow mass of slime. I mean, people call with a high amount of concern and I get it. It does. Some of this stuff looks wild.
00:51:15
Speaker
And usually the solution to that is in most cases is aeration or just somehow drying that area out. Because once again, it goes back to moisture. Remove it with a shovel, throw it in the garbage can. That's my answer. Yeah.
Summary of Rain Management in Horticulture
00:51:33
Speaker
All right, well, let's kind of sum this up here briefly. Basically, if you are preparing for, you know, if you have the luxury of having some time to do some things, you can look at, you know, how do I slow water down? How do I get my plants kind of above any sitting water with raised beds?
00:51:56
Speaker
Do some drainage or like put in some drains if you need to and just kind of look at the way water flows and try to work with it, not against it, I think is the easiest thing to say. And then if you're already planted your stuff and you're like, oh crap, you know, if you can plant future things a little further apart, if you're worried about disease issues, especially if you're organic and you're really limited to what you're spraying, you know, making sure you can dry out those things is really important.
00:52:24
Speaker
but you can also do pruning techniques, get some airflow through there, and then prevention is key. So looking and watching the weather, getting preventative sprays down, again, whether that's organic or conventional, is going to be really important to get you through the season. So I think that's mostly it. Just to reiterate, when it's wet out there, don't run out until, and when all the flames are wet, don't run out there and hug all of them.
00:52:52
Speaker
Don't do pruning when it's wet. Don't do tillage operations. Try not to pick either.
Food Safety Concerns in Wet Conditions
00:52:57
Speaker
You know, there's nothing worse than like, even if you, if you're not doing flowers, it's especially true. But like tomatoes, if you pick in a bunch of wet tomatoes and you put them in the bucket and you come back later and they're real weird, right? So try not to do that. And if any of your plants have been underwater, if any of your lettuce or your tomatoes or melons have been underwater, you might not want to eat those and you certainly don't want to sell
00:53:22
Speaker
because you can get E. coli very easily from things like that. So just a little extra tidbit about how not to get E. coli this year or give someone E. coli this year. All right. Anything else, guys? I think that's it.
00:53:36
Speaker
Awesome.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:53:37
Speaker
All right. Well, the usual ending spiel. Uh, thank you so much for being here. If you have any questions about like, you know, this, I know we threw the little equal I think at your last minute, but if you have more questions about produce best practices, trainings, all of us on the podcast can help you with that. And, uh, actually Brett, I think train helped train me. So.
00:53:58
Speaker
you know, we're all fairly educated and can help you with that. And you can send us an email, hortculturepodcastatl.uky.edu. That is in the show notes. Follow us on Instagram. You can also message us on their hort culture podcast.
00:54:13
Speaker
and see what we're up to. I try and throw some things up on that, but you can also send us messages if you've got questions. We like to share a lot of information about other great organizations out there that we work with. You might pick up some cool things from Oak or
00:54:30
Speaker
some of these other places that we work with. So we appreciate that. And if you want to leave us a review and tell us that you are not going to drown any of your plants this year, that would be excellent. We would greatly appreciate it. And we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you will join us next week. Have a great one.