Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Information Sources For Selecting Varieties of Fruit, Vegetables, and Flowers
109 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we'll talk about the best places to find fruit, vegetable, and flower variety information. Whether you're looking for a new type of tomato to grow, a rare orchid to admire, or a tasty berry to snack on, we'll tell you where to look and what to look for. We'll also share some tips and tricks on how to choose the right varieties for your climate, soil, and personal preferences.
Fruit and Vegetable 2021 ANNUAL RESEARCH REPORT
Vegetable Cultivars for Kentucky Gardens
HOME FRUIT VARIETY RECOMMENDATIONS
Vegetable Production Guide for Commercial Growers
Questions/Comments/Feedback/Suggestions for Topics: hortculturepodcast@l.uky.edu
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Hort Culture
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Hort Culture, 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. Hey, everybody. What is up? How's everybody doing?
The Perfect Mug - A Lighthearted Start
00:00:20
Speaker
Josh, Ray. Wonderful. Feeling good today?
00:00:25
Speaker
I'm going to ask you all the consistent weekly question and it was one that I have had asked of me relatively recently and it is, what constitutes a good mug? I'm looking at us right now, you can't see us listeners, but I can see them and we all have mugs in our hand of coffee or tea or whatever it is.
00:00:49
Speaker
So what constitutes a good mug for you? Like if you're going to spend money on a mug, what are you thinking about? Cat dad, Josh's cat. Yeah. Some, something clever on it.
00:01:00
Speaker
Um, it's good and doesn't have a hole in it and keeps drink warm or cool. Whatever. So very, very basic requirements definition of a mug definition of a bug and keep it warm. Okay. Plus I'm using, I'm using like something. Okay. Amusing something provocative. Got it. Yeah. Cat dad. Ray, what about you?
00:01:24
Speaker
I like heavy mugs. Uh, here lately I've been into like the hand thrown mugs. We've got, uh, some local mud places that, uh, do their own pottery work, but they're heavy. But Josh already said it, it kind of insulates naturally pretty well. So it keeps the, and I never thought about this before, uh, in this way, but it keeps like, you know, whatever's hot in there, hot longer, my coffee tea, whatever. So I like, I like a mug like that. And one that's got a good thumb thing that I just, um, you know, the perfect thumb hole. That's that's important. I've got it.
00:01:54
Speaker
What do you mean? The handle. There's actually a lot of the hand thrown mugs. You'll notice they have a thumb peg on top to rest your thumb because they're heavy. They provide a little bit of leverage. So I'm enjoying that on all my pottery mugs.
00:02:11
Speaker
I have small hands. So I, it has to have either like a good like handle that I can slip like half of my hand through to really hold a big mug or, uh, has to be kind of small enough for me to be able to, to hold with one hand, but also be big enough to hold all the coffee that I require, uh, as a daily allowance. I have some suit mugs that I drink coffee out of. Hold like a.
00:02:41
Speaker
They have like the two holes on the side where you like. Yeah they need to because they're just right for about.
00:02:47
Speaker
You know, half a 12 cup pot of coffee will fit in one. It's perfect. I have a mug that I use every morning for coffee. Like it is my coffee mug. I use it every morning that I'm at work. So I have my weekday coffee mug on my weekend, and then I have a travel one as well. So am I drinking while I get ready? Am I drinking it on the couch or am I drinking it in the car? So those are three separate mugs and they are very different. Traveling mug.
00:03:11
Speaker
and style requirements. We didn't talk about that. A mug that will fit very well into the console of your vehicle. That's important as well. Travel mug. Good point. I have three different ones, man. Just gotta have it. It takes a mug for every occasion. That's a really good segue. A mug for every occasion. Also plants for every occasion, right? Because we are the Hort Culture, not the mug culture podcast. So we are, I promise, talking about plants today. Eventually.
Cultivars and Selection of Apple Trees
00:03:40
Speaker
What we're talking about today stems from a listener bringing it up. And it was something that we were kind of going to round about, talk about a little bit. And so it gave us some more specifics to think about. And so we're talking about cultivars and specific, you know, heirlooms versus hybrids versus all these different things. How do you select the apple tree that's right for you? This sort of sort of situation. And I think a lot of the things we're talking about today are
00:04:10
Speaker
bits and pieces from other episodes that we've talked about, right? We talk about disease, we've talked about insects, but we're kind of bringing all of that in to make good selections for your vegetables or your flowers or your fruit trees, kind of this whole big spectrum of, at least that was my plan. I don't know what you guys were going to talk about. I've heard of it online. This is the plan.
00:04:32
Speaker
This is the plan. Very diving a little bit more into the science, the biology of it all, which is of course where you're going to hear me talk the most because. Yeah, I was going to say Alexis can I guess a good place to start would be framing the conversation before we talk about selecting specific varieties for like fruit and veggies.
00:04:50
Speaker
and other things there's a lot of garden terms that i see in magazines that i'm getting constantly this time of year lots of words on there related to specifically like the home vegetable gardens but can you kind of throw out some common terms there and go over those so we can get started off on the route track alexis
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So, uh, I think first I, I always think of things right as a timeline point eight, a point C kind of thing. So I think it's easy to talk about heirlooms first and heirlooms are a very big buzzword that we talk about right now. And so these are sort of like the word natives, right? The word heirloom often to me is people who love natives love heirlooms. They seem to go together, but these are these varieties of fruits, vegetables.
00:05:33
Speaker
Whatever if you know there's flowers there's all kinds of these things that have been around have been grown and cultivated by humans for a long period of time and they have very Reliable stable characteristics to them. So if you go by like purple Cherokee tomato seeds It's a very popular one or pink brandy wine or ones we hear a lot you're gonna keep getting pink brandy wine now granted tomatoes are a
00:05:59
Speaker
mostly self-pollinated, so that's the reason why. They're not crossing with a bunch of other things, but these are ones that, you know, your grandparents grew as an example, like, are what we think of heirlooms. And then we get into where I see the most confusion are hybrids versus GMOs.
Hybrids vs GMOs - Clearing Misconceptions
00:06:19
Speaker
And so those are two very different things. So hybrids are crossing, and I like to give these an example of like a golden doodle.
00:06:26
Speaker
So to make a golden doodle, a dog, right? You have a poodle and a golden retriever and they, mom and dad come together and they make a little golden doodle, right? That golden doodle is a hybrid of its parents. And the same can be true. We have been hybridizing plants for thousands of years. And they've been hybridizing themselves.
00:06:45
Speaker
They've been hybridizing themselves, right? Usually when we say hybrid, we're referring to human interaction there, but like technically speaking, right? A watermelon that accidentally crosses with a cucumber because they are, they can cross, they're both cucurbits. The product of that would probably not be anything very tasty, but it is a hybrid of its parents, right?
00:07:05
Speaker
that is what a hybrid is. And we often see names like in those seed catalogs, we'll see the names with like some numbers next to them, like F1, H1, things like that. And that is just a way of identifying that it's a hybrid. And so then we talk about GMOs, which are genetically modified. And so that would be like, instead of a poodle and a golden retriever crossing, we are taking a poodle and we are inserting squid genes so that that poodle can change colors, right? So we are
00:07:34
Speaker
modifying it at a DNA level, most of our vegetables are not GMO. So, and you would certainly know that. So I just want everybody to like, I get a lot of people who are very concerned. They're like, Oh, I don't want hybrids. I don't want that bad. And I'm like, people have been hybridizing plants since, you know,
00:07:52
Speaker
Like that's how we got here. Yeah. Right. Like pink brandy wine, the tomato, that's an heirloom. We considered an heirloom now probably was a hybrid at one point. Well, it was because tomatoes have been bred and cultivated from wild nightshade plants. So technically our heirlooms were at one time hybrids, but we digress. I get very emotional about that. I was going to say you mentioned like on a seed variety.
00:08:21
Speaker
It'll say like F1. For trivia's sake, what does the F stand for? I don't know. I used to know that. I don't know that now. I'll be honest with you. Josh knows that bit. I hope Josh knows and that I don't look like a complete idiot, just blank airspace on here. Right, right. Filial, which, yeah. No, filial, it means of or due from a son or daughter. But the F1, also the one, means the first generation of crossing.
00:08:49
Speaker
right? Because there's this association with when you take two things that are different and breed them together, that very first generation gets what they call hybrid bigger and you kind of tend to get is to be the best of the both the best of both worlds. The F ones are like the super crosses. They're like the good original OGs.
00:09:08
Speaker
And so sometimes you'll see like F2, which would be the golden doodle crosses with another first generation golden doodle and gets, you know, a second generation. Right. And so, which leads me to pointing out that you can
00:09:25
Speaker
often, unless it's patented, save seed. We'll talk a little bit about seed saving today, but save seed from those hybrids, but they are not usually as good because of that hybrid vigor. We're not getting the best traits of mom and the best traits of dad. We're getting the mediocre traits of the child, and now I feel bad about myself. That first generation of vigor fades away, and then you're starting to get
00:09:50
Speaker
Yeah, just kind of less, less emphasis on the best of both worlds and more emphasis on just kind of what is the way I've had to put to me. You don't live in the castle anymore. You live in the village after a while. Yeah. Yeah, I suppose. And then, you know, you can hybridize your own plants. Yeah, sorry. I get excited. I'm so excited. Well, so would you say that the alternative to open to I just gave away the game there.
00:10:18
Speaker
But the alternative to hybridized would be open pollinated. And what does that mean? Yeah. So open pollinated would be that nature is essentially doing that hybridization for you. So it's like wind or insect sometimes, you know, it could be water, whatever it is. It's taking the pollen from this one plant and bringing it to the stamen of the other. And so. Or the same, the same, like, like an heirloom, like,
00:10:46
Speaker
heirlooms being open pollinated because they're just breeding back to the same variety. Right. So they stay the same, I guess. Not all plants are, this is where it kind of starts to get confusing. Like not all plants need open pollination. So corn as an example is wind pollinated. So it can cross, which is why when you're planting heirloom corn, you need to be careful that if you're surrounded by someone growing grain corn, you don't want your grain corn
00:11:13
Speaker
a neighbor to pollinate your good sweet corn because you're going to have really gross corn, right? So even though you planted sweet corn, it can cross and you're eating corn seeds, right? Let's remember. So it can be not as good. So you want sweet corn to pollinate sweet corn, but not all plants need that. So tomatoes as an example, which is why it's a lot easier to save seeds from something like a tomato because they are
00:11:40
Speaker
mostly self-pollinated. Sometimes you get a bee that goes in there and it's, you know, gets in there a little early before
Open Pollination Explained
00:11:47
Speaker
that happens or you yourself can cross and hybridize plants. But open pollinated, we see a lot with like cute kerbits, you know, your zucchini, like I said, can cross with a cantaloupe technically if you wanted it to. And so that's why people tend to use row covers if they're collecting seed and
00:12:07
Speaker
more careful with those open pollinated type plants. And that has a big impact on and seed savers I find are pretty good about if they're effective seed savers then they've been doing it for a while. They really know what they can and cannot save out of their garden effectively and even if they're doing something like a sweet corn they're very careful to only grow that variety in a small space.
00:12:28
Speaker
If they have large acreage, of course, they could grow two different sweet corn varieties that are isolated enough through space to still keep those true to top. But most gardeners, I find that if they are seed savers, are pretty knowledgeable in this discussion that we're having today. It's the seed savers. I love talking to them. I mean, the tomatoes and peppers that come back more true to top, you know, that's more commonly saved. But when you get into vine crops and things like corn,
00:12:54
Speaker
much more care needs to be taken to keep two distinct parents from crossing because that's essentially what's happening there. And Alexis, I want a golden doodle seed. I'm seeing this golden doodle seed. Is that like a donut seed? We joked about that earlier. Yeah.
00:13:13
Speaker
Yeah. It's just like, it's, it makes the most sense for people. Like dog breeding is such a normal thing or horses or whatever. Um, golden doodle. Cause those two are very different. Uh, it just, yeah, it brings like, when you say you have a hybrid dog, people would freak out. But like,
00:13:31
Speaker
That's what it is. It's like the terminology usually is different for animals. They talk about crossing, right? Rather than like- Whatever. It should all be the same. Habbard vigor is the same. Say you grow. I often find myself, because I'm used to talking about plants, right? Growing crops, growing, I grow. Oh yeah, they're growing goats out there. And I'm like, oh, I mean, I guess they're technically raising them, but you all know what I mean. So that's how you know a plant person versus an animal person.
00:14:01
Speaker
But I think also what you will see, and so speaking about seed catalogs and some of these things that you see in there that can be confusing, there's some other, other than F1, those hybrid names, there's things like All America Selection. So sometimes you'll see the term AAS, which stands for All American Selection.
00:14:22
Speaker
Uh, these are winners. So these are plants that have been hybridized. There are no GMOs in this. So this can be anything from your petunias to, uh, vegetables, you know, peppers, tomatoes, kind of this really widespread of different things, uh, that have been, uh, tested around a region as well as around the United States. And so, uh, like an example, our, um, Arboretum at university of Kentucky does trials.
00:14:51
Speaker
for AAS and so they get these plants sent to them.
00:14:55
Speaker
from that organization and they have to plant them in a certain way because it's research, it's a research trial, and then the arboretum and whoever is getting these plants, we used to do them at the extension office as well, would report back on, okay, I only water them once a week and they did really well or they really needed deadheading or the Japanese beetles attacked them. Whatever that looks like, how much fruit you got off of them,
00:15:23
Speaker
fruit, veggies, whatever. So there's these research trials done all over the United States on these plants, and then there's data collected, and then they say to you, hey, this variety of pepper does really well anywhere in the US. Sometimes they say it does really well in this region.
00:15:41
Speaker
And that can be really helpful when you're looking for a plant. It's really overwhelming. When you open a book and there's a hundred different types of peppers, of hot peppers, it can be really overwhelming to select the one that's best for you. So sometimes that can make your job a little bit easier because you're like, well, I know it's a regional winner for my area of the country, so it's going to be good.
00:16:04
Speaker
assuming you take care of it, that is. There is different levels of winners in there. And I think, what is it, performance? There's the gold medal and then the regional winners. And every single one of those are kind of the cream of the crop. The AAS is such an interesting organization. I think more people know them for their flowers, but they also do vegetables. And they're the oldest organization of their top in the US. From 1932 on, they've been doing this every single year. I think Kentucky has two listed, Boone County, maybe Arboretum. It's associated with an extension service up
00:16:34
Speaker
in Boone County, and then of course the UK Arboretum that you just now mentioned, Alexis, but such an awesome group. And they're absolutely one of my go-to that I look for when I'm trying to make planting decisions personally even. And it's also a group that I direct a lot of people to, to look for those AAS winners. I think there are 80 plus trials going on in the US at any one time.
00:16:58
Speaker
from this organization. It's an old organization. They're very well organized and they do a great job. That's all they do, isn't it, is flowers and vegetables. I don't know that they get into anything else. I don't think they do shrubs and stuff like that. I don't think so. So you're looking more at like bedding plants. I think they do some perennials, like herbaceous perennials. They used to, at least a few of them, but mostly annuals, whether that's vegetable annuals or
00:17:24
Speaker
annual flowers are kind of their predominant ones, but I want to say they have some like AAS Echinacea and some like that, but maybe I'm making that up, don't quote me. Yeah, I'm not for sure. The thing I love about them also is they are not, I've had people approach me and say the AAS company, I'm like, well, it's not a company. No. Another cool thing about them is it's a nonprofit.
00:17:43
Speaker
So they are, they typically, I consider them almost like the consumer reports of the plant science world. As far as trials go and being non-biased, they're not affiliated with any... Right. The non-bias is really important. They can often be confused with proven winners, right? Because we hear AAS winners and a lot of people confuse them with proven winners, which is a company in itself. So you can buy a proven winner shrub or tree. So I think that's sometimes the confusion.
00:18:09
Speaker
And this isn't to say that only AAS are, you know, the good ones. But what is cool is you can look back to see some of the winners over the past, you know, like since 1932, like they have them. But it's not to say that those are the only ones or even necessarily the best ones. Those are just the ones that research is being done on. It's one good source as you're trying to make planting decisions. You feel confident. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good one.
00:18:37
Speaker
That's a really good one.
Utilizing Extension Services for Gardening
00:18:38
Speaker
But for Kentucky, so for extension and, and I have found these for just, I mean, I've found these for North Carolina, all the County States that are surround us. So I know that they have these four States that surround us from the extension services. They probably have them for probably all 50 States if I had to guess, but I know here at UK, we have.
00:19:00
Speaker
a list of varieties for vegetables as well as home fruit. And so when you get into commercial, a lot of them will be similar, but they have different kind of goals and different standards of how they prune and do things like that. But I think for a lot of our people that are listening in their home or small commercial scale, so this can apply to you. But there are some great fact sheets that are on
00:19:26
Speaker
these good varieties that we can recommend because they have things like disease resistance or they are adaptable to our soil. And we just talked about natives and talking about how great natives are. It's kind of like that version for your annual production. And I use these a lot. I don't know about you guys. I use those for references a lot and one that I'll just throw out that I use a lot. And when you go and find this, you will notice that it's vegetable cultivars for Kentucky gardens.
00:19:53
Speaker
and the letters to look that up further is ID-133. It's just a publication number that we give things, but once again it's called Vegetable Cultivars for Kentucky Gardens. You will notice that the last time that that was significantly updated was 2013. Even though it is somewhat dated, it is still super relevant. All of the varieties that are listed there, it may not have the latest releases that are unproven from specific seed companies,
00:20:19
Speaker
But a ton of research went into this publication. I refer to it all the time, even though it's over 10 years old now. It is my basis of recommendations for Kentucky Gardens as far as specific vegetable cultivars that are well tested, tried and true. And as Alexis already said, there's a lot of great information beyond just recommended cultivars. It also goes into a lot of detail. It's one of the reasons that it takes so long to produce this publication.
00:20:44
Speaker
But they go into a lot of detail on the disease package that each cultivar has, what it's resistant to and the level of resistance in some cases.
00:20:53
Speaker
So a ton of great information. There's lots of, Josh, I know you're going to get excited. There's lots of tables in this publication. Data organized very well. It's a very dense publication. It's just a few pages, but the level of information in this publication is pretty incredible. But once again, vegetable cultivars for Kentucky Gardens. Look that up if you're new to gardening or just looking for more information on very specific
00:21:18
Speaker
varieties that do well in our area of the state because all the research that went into this publication is all local to Kentucky for the most part. So it's a great publication and one that I use every week in the spring. It's a good one. Yeah. And it's, it's really got everything. It's got asparagus, you know, kind of all the way through watermelon and you know, even just looking through this, like you said, it is 11 years old now, but pretty much all of these that I'm looking at,
00:21:46
Speaker
are still available, which is good, right? It tells you that people are growing these. It's popular. And you know, maybe there's a couple that's not. And if you're not sure, if you're like, I really want to try this variety, maybe it's an AAS winner or maybe not. And you just see this cool heirloom or something that you want to try because these are mostly going to be hybrids, I believe on this list. But you can compare and contrast them, right? So you're going to plant
00:22:11
Speaker
a certain type of onion that you saw, a new onion variety and compare it to one that we have done research on that says is a good variety for Kentucky and compare and contrast those. And you might find a new one and that's great, but this can help with the overwhelm that is seed catalogs because
00:22:27
Speaker
I don't know about you all. I still get overwhelmed by seed catalogs and I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. I'm wrong to anything with a pretty picture. So yeah, it'll get there and a good picture, but maybe even what the picture doesn't tell you that it's only for sandy soles and very dry environments. If you have a wet year, it's going to collapse with disease. It doesn't say that, but it has a pretty picture.
00:22:50
Speaker
Some of those are pretty specific, but I know there's some other publications we can talk about. And one thing I kind of wanted to bring up is you mentioned heirlooms earlier, Lexus, and we're talking about cultivars here in some cases, cultivated varieties. That's sort of a, you slam the two words together, cultivated variety is cultivar.
00:23:08
Speaker
But some considerations for those growers that are interested in heirlooms because there's lots of order sources for heirloom seeds. We talked about disease resistance, which is part of the information that's in this publication, this garden publication we're talking about currently.
00:23:24
Speaker
But heirlooms are a little different. Is that correct? When if you've never grown an heirloom and you put an heirloom tomato on your garden, you kind of have to be cautious of that and be aware that maybe some of the disease resistance have not been bred into those heirlooms.
Heirlooms vs Hybrids - Pros and Cons
00:23:39
Speaker
Heirlooms have a bunch of awesome traits. I love heirlooms myself, but I know that I have to be kind of cautious and understand
00:23:49
Speaker
that heirlooms may not be as resistant to certain diseases. Did you guys find that to be the case? We talked about this with sort of natives when we were talking about when you are thinking about
00:24:02
Speaker
What are your goals for planting natives? And there's a lot of breeding that's been done to create bigger show wear flowers in native plants. But the pass off can be that they are not great nectar sources or something along those lines. And the same is sort of true that we have seen in heirlooms is that heirlooms usually taste really good. They save
00:24:25
Speaker
their seeds save really well. Some of them do have great disease resistance, which is where we pull disease resistance from when we made these hybrids, right? So it's not to say that all of them are bad. A tomato may not ship across the country as well because the wall is more thin. Exactly, exactly. And so the goals of those heirlooms and the people who were growing those was very different than a lot of the goals that we have now. And you know, our climate has changed from what our grandparents had. So
00:24:51
Speaker
something that may have never gotten a blight when my grandparents grew it, the same plant would get a blight on maybe even the same farm because the climate is very different. We're much wetter, more humid than we used to be. We know we're in a whole new zone now. We've talked about that before. Kentucky's in zone 7 and 7B where we used to be solid 6A.
00:25:17
Speaker
I'll throw another one at you, Alexis. Hot tunnels and heirlooms. Oh, that's exciting. But that's trial and error when you go, because then you're not only dealing with a different moisture profile, you're dealing with a different heat profile. And a lot of it's trial and error with heirlooms. I know some information's coming out about which heirlooms you could possibly use. But boy, that gets really interesting when you try to grow heirlooms in a situation where they have never been tested in. Right. They may do very well in the field and even on a commercial scale.
00:25:47
Speaker
If you try to take an heirloom that was developed mainly for home garden planting with eight plants and put that in a planting of two to three, four acres, however many acres, it may not behave the same. That's not to say it's a bad plant. That means you're putting in a different scenario where it may perform unexpectedly.
00:26:07
Speaker
So just when you're dealing with heirlooms, just know there may be more TLC needed. So you need to have eyes on the plant a bit more. You can't just let them go because they don't necessarily have the quote unquote immune system that some of our hybrids tend to have now because they've been bred in a newer age with newer climate and things. So I don't know. Some people tend to get a little
00:26:30
Speaker
defensive when you talk about heirlooms. Don't be, because there are plenty of gray heirlooms out there that do have good disease and insect resistance. That's where we got it from. We had to get it from somewhere when we hybridized, but also remember that the climate and area is different.
00:26:50
Speaker
than when our grandparents grew it. And so it's nothing personal. It's nothing personal heirloom people. I love heirlooms. I'm just saying. There are benefits to growing some of these hybrids if you need to be a little more hands off or if you're organic, right? We don't have as many sprays. You know, maybe you're growing in a high tunnel where you don't have as many options, whether organic or not, on what you spray. So you really need that disease resistance.
00:27:13
Speaker
And I think it's especially important when we start talking about perennial plants. So when we start, we also have a publication from, it's a little bit newer 2019 on home fruit varieties. And so we go through, I mean,
00:27:27
Speaker
We don't recommend almonds here, but technically it says almond on there and it says we do not recommend them here. But almonds, apples, and a lot of them are on there that we don't recommend, but they're on there to tell you, hey, we don't recommend this, which can be very helpful. Which that's good knowledge to have. And they save you some time. Don't grow honey crisp here.
00:27:46
Speaker
I don't know how many times I have to tell people don't do it. It will never do anything. It's so sweet. Don't do it. Yeah. But you know, there's even things like currants, cherries, elderberries, figs. There's a lot of things that we can grow and it's.
00:28:04
Speaker
I would say really important to look for disease resistance on those perennial crops because they're not moving and they're going to be there a while or at least that's your goal. This is absolutely my go-to publication, Alexis. That Home Fruit Variety Recommendations 2019 that you're referring to. The call number for that is Hortfax3003 if you're here in Kentucky.
00:28:24
Speaker
If you're not in Kentucky, check with your local extension service in the state that you're in. And the odds are they're going to have something equivalent to this. But this is such an amazing publication to me because it not only contains variety informations and whether or not almonds, we recommend you for growing. But it also contains something like super important to me and that's average ripening date in Kentucky. That's really important for homeowners to know that.
00:28:47
Speaker
And kind of some of the uses for the different varieties. If it's apples, can you use it for sauce and freezing or one or the other? It's all really good stuff to know. It has special comments on each variety that if there's a special consideration or use for that variety. But man, that's an awesome publication and there's so much research over so many years went into that publication.
00:29:07
Speaker
But it's a it's a good one and I consider that one really up to date as being 2019 even though it's a couple years old because once again we're talking about perennials that don't change quite as often. This is a good one. And you know you want you want that research to show five ten years worth of.
00:29:23
Speaker
research, right? Because that's the goal with a lot of our trees and our perennial fruits and nuts is to have them for that long a time. So you want someone to be like, yeah, after 10 years, it was fruit and just as well as it was, and it's still alive. That's what you want. So that's why you will see much bigger gaps in time on a lot of those perennial crops. But Joshua, you've worked on a pub, not this one, but similar. Yeah, it's similar to the one that Ray has mentioned. It's Hortvax sheet three.
00:29:53
Speaker
3002, but it's also like a year newer. It was updated in 2020 and it's focused on
00:30:01
Speaker
those same fruit and nut cultivars that are recommended for, you know, commercial production in Kentucky, but where to find them as far as nursery sources. Oh, nice. Very like extensive kind of article that also there's a companion kind of interactive map to it. So you can open it up and find close sources if that's what you're looking for, but it's, it's a nationwide map. So you can, you know, once you find one of these recommended sources,
00:30:28
Speaker
Or one of these recommended cultivars you can find the source and it also he said that covers fruit and nuts Josh fruit and it also does list the Disease resistance and stuff like that in it as well but as far as like I would say for looking up and finding the cultivar you want the one that Ray mentioned and then once you kind of settle on some cultivars this one is kind of the companion where to get it and
00:30:56
Speaker
The veggie one we talked about actually has a list in it as well on Kentucky seed companies as well as catalog seed companies. So again, where to find these, because that's always the second question. It can be a lot easier with veggies, but it can be really hard with fruits and nuts to find these kind of specific varieties. And one other thing that I love that we kept talking about disease resistance
00:31:20
Speaker
And you know, things that insect resistant, things like that, but ripening.
Selecting Fruit Varieties - Climate Considerations
00:31:24
Speaker
So with things like fruit in your vegetables as well, but ripening can be so really important. So the same reason we don't recommend you grow apricots here is because they bloom too early. And with our late frost, uh, the tree survives, the tree is beautiful, but you will never get fruit off of it. It's like peaches only worse. Yeah. Actually one of our, one of our specialists I'm going to pick on him.
00:31:49
Speaker
Dr. Besson, he has a beautiful apricot tree in his yard that blooms beautifully, very healthy trees, had it for 10 years. It's never got fruit on it because every year those blooms are killed. He's a plant nerd like us, so he just enjoys the tree. It's something where when you're looking at, as I was scrolling through the pub while I was listening, looking at things
00:32:13
Speaker
That's really important because there are some that won't bloom till late and we may freeze nine times out of 10 and you won't get a crop. So maybe staying away from those. Also from an insect perspective, we have an insect now, we need to do an episode on spotted wing drosophila, which is a tiny, tiny little fruit fly that will get into your soft fruits.
00:32:36
Speaker
Berries are really, really susceptible to them. So the recommendations we have now are very different than the ones we had before Spotted Wing Drosophila, which has only come up in the past 10 years or so, because we only recommend fruits that are being picked before Spotted Wing comes out.
00:32:57
Speaker
It's not to say that those other plants aren't good. They'll write, they're great. They might adapt really well to the weather, but you're going to have tiny little maggots in your fruit. So if, if you don't spray for them, so try looking at those types of things are also really important when you think about cultivars. And again, if your head is spinning right now and you're overwhelmed, that's why we have great tables for you to look at because it can get really overwhelming to look at it all and piece through those. And then.
00:33:24
Speaker
You may have the table and if you come down in a couple of varieties and you're trying to pick between them, that's when you call your extension office. You say, hey, can I get some opinion about this one versus this one? If we don't know just because we've done it before, we can contact a specialist who maybe did the research themselves, or we can do some more digging for you to help you pick which one's best, especially if you're doing a commercial planting.
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, it is a lot to take in at one time and commercial applications are a lot different. The considerations are different. The variety recommendations are going to be different versus homeowners. And along that same lines, another publication that I'll throw out and I don't want to confuse things because what we talked about earlier was the home garden variety recommendations.
00:34:09
Speaker
what I'll mention now is ID 36. That's the vegetable production guide for commercial growers, specifically in Kentucky. It's just been updated. It's updated on a two year cycle. And that is the go to information. It's not only
00:34:25
Speaker
variety recommendations which it does have that in there. It's got insect control recommendations, fertility recommendations and specific crop profiles on all the common crops that are grown in Kentucky. It is the one-stop shop for commercial vegetable producers in the state and it's one of our most popular publications there at the office. It's a smaller number of of course commercial growers but this is the one publication
00:34:49
Speaker
they want every single time. So we have a fruit version of that as well. So if you're wanting to do commercial fruit, and I will say that, you know, it's one of those, like, uh, I was thinking of it as like, is it a square versus a rectangle situation where I don't necessarily recommend commercial varieties to homeowners because like Ray was saying earlier, things can behave really differently in a commercial scale. And so, uh, you know,
00:35:19
Speaker
If you're a homeowner, it's not to say you can't grow those, but also there's a lot bigger of a world open to you if you're going five tomato plants versus 3000 tomato plants. Your goals are different. And so you don't want to miss out on maybe some really great varieties that'll be good for five to 10 because you're looking at the person, the varieties that are recommended for a thousand.
00:35:42
Speaker
You know, for, for you all, I would recommend those homeowner ones just because like, man, you'll miss out. You miss out on some good stuff. Yeah. The homeowners, there's a lot bigger leeway there. I feel like commercial producers, like the rubric I pick on tomatoes all the time. And it's not a bad thing, but tomatoes have to have a cell wall that can stand up to shipping and, you know, packing.
00:36:01
Speaker
operations whereas a homeowner that's just not a consideration and a homeowner may plant a commercial tomato variety and it's fine if they pick it fairly early in its life stage but they may be surprised if they let it go to full maturity and it's got a very thick wall that they're not expecting versus something like an heirloom oxheart variety or something like that with a very thin wall.
00:36:23
Speaker
But yeah, every variety has its own use. And that's why we try to differentiate on the discussion here. If it's for homeowners or if it's for commercial producers, it's always good to know that. Yeah.
00:36:36
Speaker
One thing we've not touched bases on here in the discussion and something that is pretty unique to the Extension Service is what we call the Horticulture Research Reports.
Latest Insights from Horticulture Research
00:36:45
Speaker
I need to mention that here. Just because it is actually new, new, new knowledge, it's oftentimes knowledge, well, it is knowledge that is generated
00:36:55
Speaker
through the Cooperative Research Extension Program in your state. In our case here in Kentucky, we have these reports that come out pretty often. I don't know, guys, do they come out every year? I don't see them every year. The research reports, the most recent one, and there may be one that's more recent, the most recent one that I have,
00:37:14
Speaker
printed there at my office I think is 2021 but lots of great information in there and all the information that's generated in there it goes beyond varieties. The last time I referred to one of those I think I was looking at you know salt mitigation in high tunnels there was a whole research you know report on that but it's report on new information from research that was done through our organization that's pretty exciting to me because it's information that you're not going to see
00:37:41
Speaker
online right away that you're going to commonly find by using your favorite search engine. But you can get that information a little bit quicker by calling our office and requesting, in this case, the Fruit and Vegetable Annual Research Report, the most recent one that we have. Lots of great information in there. It covers fruit and vegetable production, tree and shrub production, greenhouse and floriculture production, and
00:38:07
Speaker
Uh, landscape horticulture is the last category. That's kind of the four big categories they cover. And that's exciting information because to me, because it is, is new and fresh information. Right. So it's not necessarily you're going to that for something very specific. Uh, you're going to see what it has to offer. So I think that that's a way producer. Yes. You're probably reading those with interest. You're looking at the top of what you can update. If you look up the one from 2016, you will see one done by yours truly. So just.
00:38:36
Speaker
That piece that you did in the 2016 one. Yeah, so I looked at alternative media sources for hydroponic cucumber production in a greenhouse. That was my master's research. I almost died with the sulfuric acid. Oh, I should not laugh. I'll take it back.
00:38:57
Speaker
I had sulfuric acid blow up in my face, so fun fact about that. Was that one of those adding things in the wrong order? No one told me when I was prepping my, because it was hydroponic production. You give the plant everything that it needs and we were looking at cedar mulch.
00:39:20
Speaker
I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic, but I mean, I spent a lot of my life in that greenhouse. So just fun fact, we looked at something just like a basic potting mix and versus a more of a barky media that actually it's, I think it was called Barky Beaver, a more of a landscape nursery type media. Yeah. Remember that big pile at South Farm? Yeah.
00:39:44
Speaker
And then in comparison to like a strip cedar mulch by, you know, just literally the stuff that came out of a mill, uh, just their, their crap pile. And so looking at, can I grow?
00:39:58
Speaker
you know, cucumbers and a hydroponic way in these different medias. And, you know, because those medias, media is really expensive. And so how do I get better in coconut core? I think was the other thing we use. But anyways, if you would like to read up about that, the 2016 crop research report, you can read on that and you can find my, my data.
00:40:22
Speaker
And that's what it is. It's lots of data on all these research products. And I always find those interesting when one of those, we get a flag on email that one's available. I go and kind of page through that. I'm not always interested in every single topic, but there are always topics. I'm like, Oh gosh, they're reporting on results from something that's never been done before, or there's very little information. And that's pretty exciting to me as kind of a field facing practitioner.
00:40:48
Speaker
In Extension, we work with actual producers out in communities. It's pretty exciting to me because it gives us more tools to work from. It's good information. It's not only available to us as Extension agents, but it's also available to folks out in communities. You can find them online or you can request a copy through your local Extension office. Either way, they can be somewhat thick and somewhat substantial, so you may want a printed copy. You can request those either way.
00:41:18
Speaker
And if your County agent doesn't know what those are, find us and we will get that for you. They will know what they are. I'm just teasing, but sometimes it's, we don't deal with them a ton. Not frequently requested. Yes. Not frequently requested. So, uh, just remember you can always contact us at hortculturepodcastatl.uky.edu. Again, that's in the show notes and you can shoot that email and we will just send you a link to that or
00:41:43
Speaker
If you need a paper copy, we can mail you one, so that's not a problem. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, but that's exciting. Well, anything else, any questions that you all might have as listeners, if you all have questions about varieties or you're not sure what some letters mean or something like that, you can always reach out again to your local county extension office or you can reach out to us.
00:42:06
Speaker
on Instagram or via our email. We say this all the time, but we really do mean it. And when people have reached out and said, we want to know about native plants or we want to know about varieties and all these cool things, you know, we try and try and hit those needs. And a lot of time they're already on our list, which is always exciting because we get to bump those up to the next, you know, next most episode lists. But any other thoughts you guys have?
00:42:30
Speaker
No, I love the discussion. I mean, there's got to be some way of making decisions for what to plant, when to plant and how to plant. And these are just some of the tools that we use and that we recommend for others. So there's lots of other sources of information, but these tend to be local that we gave you today, highly researched. So we, we feel pretty sound about the recommendations that we've mentioned today. Yeah. So go with those recommendations, but then pick something to experiment with because that's the fun, right? Every year I try and pick something different to experiment with.
00:43:00
Speaker
It keeps things fun and interesting and sometimes it's really good and sometimes you're like wow that was garbage i should trust my accent. I always try new varieties and varieties that we have no information on that's brand brand new i wanna be on the forefront of that in my home garden i would not necessarily say make that statement commercially.
00:43:20
Speaker
But in my home garden, it's like the island of Dr. Monroe out there. It's like a zoo. There's one of everything and it's nothing matches. So yeah, I have a zoo in my backyard and I love it, but that's part of the fun of gardening. I call those my pet plants. Anytime I buy something for the farm that is like, I'm going to just experiment with it. And if it goes wrong, it's okay. Cause it's my pet plant. That's how I, uh, I need like a line item in my budget for my business of pet plants.
00:43:48
Speaker
So don't do that with your labradoodle though. Don't do that with that. The earlier example that Alexis threw out. Yeah. Yeah. Labradoodle, golden doodle, whatever it is, you know, nothing wrong with that. I have a straight species, Corgi, uh, personally speaking. Josh is a hybrid cat. Your cat was definitely open pollinated. That's for sure. Came in on the wind. Yes. The wind blew and the cat came in the window. I love it.
Engagement and Feedback
00:44:18
Speaker
Awesome. All right. Well, don't forget always, uh, you can contact us, leave us a review. If you want to know something more, uh, if you just had a lot of fun, if you just want to tell Brett, hello, we swap where we haven't kicked him out. He's got, he's just got some stuff going on. Uh, but he will be back to join us because he actually does like us, believe it or not. So, or at least he tells us he does. I assume he says so. Or at least he likes talking to you, all the listeners. So, um, he's got, we've got that going for us.
00:44:46
Speaker
Thank you all so much for being here with us today. And we hope that as we grow this podcast, you will grow with us and that you'll join us next week. Have a good one.