This class will get you ready for vegetable gardening, stressing organic techniques with strategies and tips for advanced as well as newer gardeners. The class covers aspects of planning (such as location and soil testing), crop selection, creating in-ground and raised beds, timing of crops, crop spacing and succession crops, building productive soils, and more. You will leave with at least four electronic handouts full of great information.

Good soils are vital to growing healthy plants. This class will review physical and chemical structure of soils, pH, organic matter, and techniques for improving the soil you have. We will also cover soil testing and test results and address selecting fertilizer products (both organic and traditional), reading labels, and calculating application rates.

Whether you are new to gardening or eager to refine your seed-starting skills, this class will get you growing. We will cover soil media, optimal temperatures for vegetable germination by crop, up-potting, light sources, and more.

We will cover cultural techniques for growing various popular vegetables and will briefly discuss some specialized gardening techniques such as square foot, straw bale, and lasagna gardening.

Composting is a great way to dispose of leftover crop material and turn it into valuable organic matter that you can use later to improve the structure, water-holding capacity, and nutrient content of your soil. We will cover basic composting theory, troubleshooting, and several methods of composting at home.

Brian Hudelson, Director of the Plant Disease Diagnostics Clinic, will speak about common diseases of vegetables and their management. You will get tips and strategies for preventing disease as well and digital copies of a number of fact sheets on various common vegetable diseases. NOTE: THIS CLASS IS NOT RECORDED

Dr. Russ Groves of UW-Madison Wisconsin Vegetable Crop Entomology will review the life cycles of common insect pests for a variety of crops and give you techniques to handle them in the garden. You will receive a number of electronic fact sheets on insects covered during the talk.

Learn how to identify various common weeds in the vegetable garden and use their life cycles and other techniques to manage them. Cultural techniques will be stressed, but organic and traditional chemical control products will be briefly discussed as well.

Cover crops bring extra nutrients to the soil and help control weeds. Some also attract pollinators, which can help increase your crop yield. This class will focus on different types of cover crops to use in different situations, as well as when to plant and how to remove them.

Learn how to plan for and select fall succession crops. We will also cover companion planting as a technique, how companion plants work, and some good pairings. We will finish with a review of some season extension techniques that can be used in spring and fall.

Learn how to successfully harvest and store seeds from a variety of crops. Success is more likely with some vegetables, and less likely with others. Learn which are the easiest and most reliable for getting the results you want. We will also cover proper storage of seeds.