Welcome back everyone to the Epic Gardening podcast. Hope you are doing well and the garden

is at the very least starting to kick off indoors with some seed starting or something

like that. But today we have Susan Movilhill back. She is a master gardener from Spokane

Washington and the author of the upcoming book, The Vegetable Garden Past Handbook. So

yesterday we talked about really an overwhelmingly comprehensive way method to identify bugs

in your garden. So let's say you've done a little bit of that. You kind of know who's

out there, what they're doing, and some of them are causing some problems for you. Well

today Susan, we're talking about cultural practices to reduce insect problems. So maybe

we start out by just defining what a cultural practice would be.

Yes, and I definitely want to do that. So you know in the first chapter my book I wrote

about cultural practices and some folks might not be familiar with that term. But essentially

it's things you can engage in in your garden that will either reduce or prevent pest problems

in vegetable gardens and actually in your whole garden altogether. But there are simple

steps that don't cost anything except a little of our time if they make such a big

difference. So these cultural practices are things that we do in our gardens that help our

plants grow and produce well and they enable them to better withstand bug problems. So once I

start explaining these different cultural practices you'll say, oh yeah, that makes sense.

So locate your garden in the best spot so that your vegetable plants will get enough sunlight.

And the general rule of thumb is six to eight hours of sunlight minimum each day.

But there's some ways to get around this. You can do vertical gardening like growing something

up a trellis so it's going into more sunlight. You can put pots on casters so that you can move

them around to follow the sun. And there's even some veggies that tolerate a bit of shade.

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