alright! this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.comcoming at you in hd from the backyard garden, and today we've got another exciting episodefor you. this is not a fun one, and this one's having to do with pests. pests in your garden,and one particular kind of pest you may be having, and i know i am. now this stumpedfor a couple days and i was like, 'what the heck is going on?' you know, and what happenedwas this. i simply came outside and these are my beautiful purple perennial tree collardsthat under extreme conditions like the nice hot heat they do flower and go to bulbs andseed, but that's alright. you can cut these guys off and they'll continue to grow andi have let these gone to full term and flower, seed, and then produce the seeds and thencut them back and then the pant continues
to grow and this is simply amazing. so, thisyear what happened was they went to seed and this year i came out and all the seed podsare getting jacked up like, 'okay, john, what's going on? usually at the end of the seasonwhen the seeds are finally done and dry, the seed pods will bust open and fall and theni'll have tree collards coming up my wazoo, but in this case the seed pods are lookingall green and they're all messed up and damaged,' and i'm like, 'man, what's going on here?'and i couldn't figure it out until i was walking outside just the other day. so, actually letme show you guys actually what i saw when i was walking outside. so, now i'm about togo outside and show you guys what those little spur dudes are going in my thing. alright,i got the zoom there. see that little sucker?
look at what that little sucker's doing. there'sa little bird, eating my tree collard seeds, little scumbag. look at that. he's snackingout, man. that's a nice fat source for him. totally eating it. so, we're going to haveto prevent him from eating my tree collard seeds anymore. so, here's the damage to thetree collard seeds. the birds basically peck these open like little pods. they eat allthe little beans out. these're not even developed seeds yet, 'cause they haven't been out longenough, but they're a high source of fat to the birds, and yes we can actually also eatthem. wouldn't give us a lot of food. i'd rather save these for the seeds themselves,and, you know, they're really tearing these guys up. i don't know if i'm even going tohave a good yield of seeds this year 'cause
they really picked the majority of these guysup, and, you know, now because it was highly damaged, i might not have any tree collardseeds. so, this is what nature does. so, we're going to have to be proactive and take somesteps that they cannot do this in the future. so, come back at you in a second. so, man,isn't that incredible? you guys say the little bugger, man. the little dude was eating myseeds. i mean, it's all good. i'm glad i could feed nature, but, you know, he needs to beeating something else, not my rare perennial tree collard seeds that rarely go to seed,and these seed are quite valuable 'cause i want to save the genetic diversity to spreadthose to other people so that they can also grow these cool plants. so, i had to figureout a solution so that the birds can't get
in here to eat but also make in convenientfor me to still harvest my tree collards when i want to eat them. so, you know, i couldgo out and buy bird netting, but that would be an expensive having to buy more stuff ori could get hang some cds, some compact discs, on string and that would kind of spin aroundand that could kind of scare the birds because that would be good or you could take somelike milar film like milar balloon, that material, but it up into little strips and then tiethem onto places and that may blow in the wind and scare the bids and keep them away,and while those methods may work, it doesn't really protect your junk in the trunk. i likeprotecting my junk, especially if i'm playing sporting events, but anyways, we're goingto protect my tree collard seeds because they
are important and they haven't even yet developed.they're still babies and they're getting eaten. it makes me so sad. so, let me next show youguys how i'm going to protect my tree collard seeds with a cool item that actually i justhappened to save. so, now i'm going to show you guys how i'm going to protect my treecollard seeds from getting eaten from the birds. i've got these bags here. so, whatthese bags are. they're poly bag and actually i get coconuts in these. i buy coconuts inbulk in the husk, and i guess these bags are very similar to the bags you might bet a bigbag of potatoes or a big bag of onions, you know, or a big bag of oranges sometimes, butthis is like the super huge gigantic size. usually the ones for potatoes or onions arebit smaller, and i don't know where else you'd
get these but i have these laying around becausei really don't like throwing anything out and that could be a thing, you know, if you'regardening and you're single like i am, but it could be a bad thing if you're married,so good thing i got a good big garage and maybe i'll even build a shed here to storesome extra junk, but hey, one mans junk is another mans treasure, and this today is atreasure because it's going to allow me to save my perennial tree collard seeds formgetting eating by the birds, and maybe another solution would be to get a good cat. anyways,so, all we're going to do is take this big bag here, and as you can see there's the opening,and this bag is so huge, it'll fit on me. stick 'em up i want all your vegetables. so,we're going to take this bag and put all these
stalks here that have the seeds growing, ifthey have the leaves i'm not going to keep them in the bag 'cause i want to be able toharvest those guys, and luckily most of the guys that have the seeds are to be segregatedout and i think they're right here. so, we're going o take these guys on plant and we'regoing to bag it on up and to help inside this little bag here i've got a bamboo stick tokeep this straight. hopefully that's going to allow me to put this on a little bit easierso it doesn't collapse on me, and we're just going to go ahead and stick this all the wayin, just like putting a bag over your junk when you're going to use it. so, the lastthing is we're going to go ahead and grab some string here. we've just got some twine.just going to go ahead and roll off a bunch,
just break it off, and we're going to go aheadand tie off the bottom. this is very important so that the wind doesn't blow this off andthe bids won't be able to actually get inside and then get up in there and have free reign.so, we're just going to go ahead and pull this pretty taut. that's a cool word, taut.i was taught a lot of stuff in school, but i'm also able to pull this taut and tie itoff. bet you didn't know i was an english major. actually i wasn't an english major,so don't learn english form me, just learn gardening. alright, so we've got this tauthere. just going to go ahead and put our string around and tie this guy off. alright, we'reall tied off and check it out, this is now my protected tree collard seeds. a coupleare sticking out here. they might be able
to get to 'em, but that's alright. the majorityof them are going to be safe form the bids and i will be able to harvest them for myuses instead of the birds eating them. another thing i was considering for, you know, mothernature and for the bids, because it's really sad in this day and age that the birds haveto come to my garden to eat my perennial tree collards, i mean they are mineral dense mineralrich with trace minerals, probably taste better than anything else they could find in thisbig city, 'cause there's not a lot of nature that could feed the birds anymore, so i didconsider, you know, maybe getting a bird bath and actually a bird feeder to feed them andsupply them with food but then i don't want necessarily to encourage birds to come intomy place because when that runs out hey might
come to my garden and eat and know that thisis a valuable food source for them. so, i don't really want to encourage them to comeso i decided to just wrap this up and let them find some place else to go. another thingthat may happen that has happened to me before is that in the heat of the summer when i havenice juicy plump red tomatoes, the birds are going to come and peck at the tomatoes. now,they're not necessarily pecking to eat the tomatoes. they're pecking for the water. tomatoesare full of water, and that's why they're good for us, besides that they're rich inother things like lipopine and other nutrients. so, you know, at that point i may just havea bird bath to see if i could divert them, you know, to go to the bird bath instead ofpucking my tomatoes for the water, or i might
just se these bags once again to cover mytomato plant if they're small so that i can eat my tomatoes and not the birds. so, youknow, the last thing i want to mention today is that there will always be creatures, pests,whatever you want to call them, whether they're birds, alligators, lizards, moles, boles,cats, dogs, rabbits, raccoons, anything, they're going to be coming at you to you're gardento eat your stuff because you're providing them food, you're providing them gourmet foodthat they can't get anywhere else. some of the best stuff, especially if you're usingsome of my growing practices including a lot of organic matter, the compost and some ofthe trace minerals. man, the foods really going light them up like it lights you upwhen you're eating it. so, but there's always
a way to keep them out. just be persistent.just use your brain and think of creative ways you can use to, you know, keep them out.i wouldn't normally have to go buy some, you now, bird cloth or whatever, and that costssome money, but i had these guys laying around and i always love to find reuses for something'sthat i have saved previously. so, hopefully you guys have enjoyed this episode, you'rea little bit more motivated now to, you know, deter pests however you can. once again, myname is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com. we'll see you next time, and remember, keepon growing.
