- Welcome to Oklahoma Gardening.

Today we look at the OSU Student Farm post Harvest facility and lettuce bubbler.

We learn more about the seedless watermelon research with biostimulants and walk through the steps of setting up a fertilizer injector.

Underwriting assistance for our program is provided by the Oklahoma Department of agriculture, food and forestry, helping to keep Oklahoma green and growing.

Oklahoma Gardening is also a proud partner with Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Shape Your Future provides resources for Oklahomans to make the healthy choice, the easy choice.

Oklahoma Gardening 50th anniversary.

I love sharing with you guys the cool things that plants can do.

- People in Oklahoma love their gardens.

- I feel like this is the People's show.

We all know we're working towards the common goal and that's to produce the best quality television and information for our audience - With the OSU Student Farm where we're growing acres of vegetables and that really necessitated the need for us to have a post-harvest processing facility.

So I'm here with Parker to tell us a little bit about it.

Parker, we have this facility really have four main purposes.

What are they?

- You bet.

So kind of the four main purposes of this facility.

The four, the four big needs that we have filled through this.

We need tractor parking, we need kind of a garage workshop tool storage area.

We needed a place for cold storage of produce, get 'em, you know, get 'em in out of the heat and and cool down.

And then we needed a wash area to wash the produce.

- All those things are important for a working farm, - Right?

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

- First talk about the cooler.

You know, how did, how did we get coolers in these buildings?

Were they bought this way or did you have to install 'em?

How did you get those?

- So we got the coolers as kits.

Kits from CoolBot and they came in on pallets in pieces and they kind of fit together like a giant Lego set.

So we got 'em in, we marked out the area on the floor for 'em and, and started by gluing down the foundation and putting the walls up and the roof on and, and then some more professionals, you could say, came in and put in the AC units for us.

- Okay.

So these are special cooling areas, pretty large.

You can walk in there, right?

- Yes sir.

Yes sir.

- You have two of them.

Why?

Why two?

- Well, some produce needs a different temperature than others.

So for instance, tomatoes, you know, you don't want 'em to be as hot as they are in the field.

You want 'em cool down to around, you know, 50 degrees or so.

But if you go cooler than that, they start to get damaged greens on the other hand, and you know, other, other crops, they could go cooler.

They could go closer to freezing, you know, a little warmer than freezing.

But, - So you can control it two different temperatures because you have two different coolers, - Right?

Yes, sir.

- And it looks like they just have window units or something in there.

So can I just go anywhere and buy a window unit or are these special or - These are, these are special.

So yes, they are window units, but CoolBot makes a system that kind of, you could say hacks the programming in these window units that allows 'em to go cooler than they normally would.

So there's programming and hardware that goes into this that - Changed.

So they have some heavy duty units and they can handle the cooling.

- Yes, sir.

They're much more heavy duty.

Yeah.

- Now what if, what if say they quit working or the power goes out, how would I know?

- Well, these have wifi enabled receivers or transmitters and so you can hook it up to your phone and you can monitor all the time, whether they're working right or not.

You can set the temperature.

So - That's, that's pretty handy then.

Very handy.

Pretty important too, - Right?

Yes, sir.

Yep.

- Okay.

What about the washing station part of this?

Sure.

How does that work?

- Yeah, so we've got a greens bubbler over here for washing our greens.

But then for other farmer produce a little bit tougher produce.

We've also got what we call the, the vegetable car wash.

- All right, I like that.

- Yes sir.

Got a conveyor system that feeds the produce into these misters misters, kind of rinse it off and you got brush rollers that brush the dirt off.

And then there's also one large brush in there that kind of really gets it clean and, and then once it goes through the actual, you know, wash part of this washer, spits it out onto a round table that spins slowly and that just allows people to stand around the perimeter of this table and sort produce, - Get it sorted and packed.

- Get sorted.

Yes sir.

- So really that's, you can take it from the field to market ready right here at this facility.

- Yes sir.

That's right.

- That's pretty neat and pretty important.

- Yep.

- What else would you say about this?

Do you think it's large enough for a acreage in a small farm like this?

- Plenty large.

Yep.

I think, you know, this is kind of top of the line for a small farm, but we can wash and, you know, sort quite a bit of produce in a day with this equipment.

It's very handy.

- Thanks Parker.

I really like this.

You can take it from the field to the market, all with this facility right here, - Right?

You bet.

Thank you.

You bet.

- We're at the OSU Student Farm today and we just harvested some lettuce and so Parker Lasovika is gonna show us how we would take this lettuce from the field to the market.

So Parker, what do we have on here?

What is this device we're standing in front of?

- Yeah, you bet.

This is our greens, bubbler greens washer.

So that's what we use to clean all the dirt and debris off of our lettuce.

- Okay.

So what does this thing do?

Is this like a jacuzzi for lettuce or what is it?

- Well, basically, yeah.

So the way we use it, it's just a stock tank with some PVC, that's our air supply pipe and it just bubbles.

And as it bubbles, it agitates the lettuce, agitates the debris off the leaves of the lettuce and they kind of sink to the bottom and then we're able to just grab 'em out and dry 'em off and send them on their way.

- That's great.

So you just went to the farm store, bought a stock tank.

Did you have to modify it or do anything to it?

- We did, we modified it a little bit.

So this is your standard 110 gallon stock tank plastic stock tank.

We got it from Tractor Supply, but you can, you know, get, get 'em from anywhere that, and I, - And I see a hole at the bottom or a couple of holes at the bottom.

What happened?

Couple holes?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So they come with a drain hole installed, but we got to looking at it and it's not quite on the very bottom of the tank, - So it'd hold a little water.

So - It'd hold a little water.

Okay.

And we don't want that.

We want it to drain completely clean whenever we, okay.

- So what'd you do for that?

- So for that, we just retrofitted a bathtub drain in there.

Got that from Lowe's and just cut a hole, plugged it in there.

And so that's, that's pretty much all that we had to do to the stuff.

- So now you could get all the water out.

- So yeah, we can get all the water out.

- So what about this water is, is, do you put any chemicals or anything in it to wash the lettuce - A little bit?

We have to put sanitizer in it.

Okay.

So we use a food grade bleach.

You wanna get that somewhere between 50 and 200 parts per million.

- Okay.

So really just like a, a teaspoon per gallon to a tablespoon per gallon.

So not a whole lot.

- It doesn't take much.

Yeah, no sir.

Yeah, you don't want to just nuke the plants or - Anything.

Yeah.

- But, - And then, so you're basically give them, giving them a nice bath in the bubbler and that bubbler that action.

What's it do for like, you know, there maybe there's insects and things here.

- It's, it knocks knocks 'em all off it, it just tosses the leaves around.

It really is.

You said jacuzzi, it really is like a jacuzzi.

Yeah, it just bounces the leaves around and that loosens up the dirt and the bubbles - And the debris.

So how do, how do you get the bubbles?

- The bubbles, right?

Yeah.

So you could actually use a jacuzzi pump.

Yeah, but what we did is we bought a shop vac that's got a blower function on it.

- Yeah.

- And it's cheaper, it's more portable, it's more accessible.

So we plugged the hose from the blower up into the PVC pipes that we've got fitted in here.

And then we took, and we drilled holes in the PVC every so often and have that submerged and weighed down.

And so that way when we turn the shop back on the air gets forced through the PVC out the bubbles and that's where you get your, your jacuzzi.

- Okay, well let's see it in action.

- Yeah, you bet.

- Okay.

- So it's, it's real easy.

Just take the lettuce, toss it in there.

It's gonna float at first, but it gets tossed around in a sink as you operate it.

- Guess I could help you.

- Yeah, that's all right.

Is my job right?

You don't wanna fill it too full 'cause then the, the greens won't move around, but yeah, you just toss 'em in there.

And then once all your grains are in, you just flip the on switch.

You may have to kind of push the le lettuce down a little bit, help it agitate, take them out and look at 'em every once in a while.

See, it's looking, looking pretty good already.

We've got a lot of the dirt knocked off a lot of the bugs, still a little bit sometimes with the head lettuce, you kind of gotta really shake it around and get in the inner leaves.

Get those spread apart.

Yep.

I said we're looking pretty good now.

Next we dry it, we gotta get the water off the leaves.

Gotta get the water out.

Okay.

Yes sir.

- Yep.

- Okay.

Parker, we got 'em all bubbled washed, all - Bubbled, all clean.

What's next?

All right, next we gotta dry 'em.

So with the greens in particular, you really want to get the water off the leaves as soon as possible because that, that just makes them wilt faster.

Makes 'em go bad faster.

- Sure.

- So the way we do that, we've got this sa it's ba basically a giant salad spinner, but it uses centrifugal force to pull water off of the leaves and, and drain it out.

- So this one, not a, not necessarily a farm or commercial size one, but a good one for our small batch here, right?

- That's right.

You just load it with lettuce.

There's a basket on the inside that's kind of, that's set on a spindle that, that spins and then you got a hand crank here and you just turn the hand crank and that it's got a gear mechanism so it actually spins, the basket spins faster than the crank does.

- Sure.

- And so it, it spins and pulls all the water off - So well, so where does the water go?

- It goes out to the outside.

Take the lid off here.

So it goes to the outside bucket pretty much.

And then out a drain and - Just Oh, in the bottom for it to drain out.

- Yes sir.

Yep.

- How long do we have to spin these things?

- About a minute.

That's something you can look at too.

You know, if you lettuce, if you didn't shake it off enough coming outta the bubble, you may have to spin it a little bit longer, but you want to give it a good spinning, you know, 30 seconds to a minute.

- Now, would a consumer still wanna be careful and once they get this home, wash it at home and everything too, - Right?

Wash it.

That's correct.

That's right.

I mean, it's growing in the soil.

You know, this, the bubble does really good, but it doesn't get everything.

That's also partially why we put a sanitizing agent in there.

'cause that, you know, life is dirty, a little bit of dirt, never hurt anybody.

Right.

But you want to get the germs off.

- But we wanna be safe with our food.

Right.

- Safe with our food.

Yeah.

- So, so we sanitize it, bubble wash it, spin it, dry it, ready for the market, the market, still wash it once you get home.

It's - A good idea.

Yes sir.

Yep.

- All right, well thanks Parker.

- Yeah, you bet.

- We are out here at the student farm today and this summer we are growing seedless watermelons.

It's actually our first year to do seedless watermelons.

In the past two years, we've grown all seeded watermelons and we've had a lot of public interest for seedless.

We get asked quite often, are you gonna grow seedless year this year?

And we just haven't.

There's a few reasons why we haven't.

Seedless watermelons can be a little harder to grow than your, your your traditional seeded melons.

The variety we have this year is Anza.

It's a smaller personal sized melon, about three to five pounds matures in about 85 days.

A few things that take note, if you're gonna grow seedless watermelons, they can have inconsistent germination, a poor root system, and they don't produce viable pollen.

To get the best germination they need consistently high heat.

If you can provide bottom heat and 85 to 90 degree temperature consistently, you should see a better, a better rate of germination and for their root system.

One of our retired professors, the state vegetable extension specialist, Dr.

Lynn Branden Berger, he came up with a way to help support the seedless watermelon roots.

If you drop in a wheat seed into the cell with your, with your watermelon seed, the wheat seed will germinate and it'll wrap around and fill in your cell and it'll give support to your watermelon seedling.

So when you take it to the field, it'll have a nice root ball instead of, you know, spindly subpar roots.

When you get the amount to the field and they get to growing.

Another thing to note is they need a pollinator seedless.

Watermelons do not produce viable pollen.

So what we have done is grown a seeded larger melon crimson sweet as our pollinator variety.

When you do order seedless watermelons, most seed companies will send you a pollinator variety along with your seedless order.

A lot of times that pollinated variety is not edible.

It's basically there just to produce pollen.

So out here at the farm, we would rather have everything edible.

So we decided to grow two rows of seedless watermelons.

And on the outside of those two rows are our seeded watermelons.

So as they grow the seeded, the seeded watermelons will grow into the seedless and able to pollinate our seedless.

So if you're a home gardener, you can intersperse, you could do two or three plants of seedless, one plant of seeded, or just just how we've done it.

You grow it in close proximity to your seedless melons.

So if you're trying to grow seedless watermelons at home, we hope these tips have helped and have a successful harvest.

- We are at the certified naturally grown plots here at the OSU Student Farm, and today we're gonna talk to Sam about building some healthy soil, growing some healthy plants with microalgae.

So tell us what you're doing out here, Sam.

- Well, currently we're gonna be growing some cantaloupe in our field and testing to see if this microalgae is gonna improve the nutritional quality of those melons and the productivity of those plants.

- Okay.

So why microalgae?

What, why do we wanna do that?

Why is it important?

- Well, our goal is definitely based in the soil health.

So when we're adding this microalgae to our soil, it kind of acts as a communicator, a handshake, if you might, between the microbes and the plant itself.

- Okay.

So part of healthy soils we want, we actually wanna have microbes in the soil.

- Huh.

- So some of those microbes are good, some are bad.

How do we, how does a microalgae help?

How does it know?

- So this microalgae doesn't necessarily attract any particular microbe from the soil.

Its goal is simply to make nutrients that those microbes might make more accessible to the plant.

Its primary goal, in essence, is to just make things more accessible.

- Okay.

And if it's more accessible, how does that help the plant?

- Well, there's lots of nutrients that are what we call immobile in the soil.

They're stuck inside the soil structure.

So our plants can't take it up and they can't use it to grow.

So if our microalgae makes a healthy environment and makes that nutrient accessible, our plants can use it to be happier and healthier.

- So tell me how, how do you look at these cantaloupe and know if microalgae helps?

Do you like set up different treatments or how does that work?

- Yeah, we have a few different treatments for this experiment that we're doing this summer, we've got a hundred percent our recommended rate, which is what the company's bottle recommends.

We've got 200%, 150 and 50%, and of course a control.

- Okay.

So looking at all the different rates, seeing how the plant responds.

- Exactly.

- How do you know how the plant responds?

How do you test that?

- Well, for the leaves on these cantaloupe plants, we're gonna be testing their chlorophyll count.

So that will allow us to know if the plant's been more productive and making its own food through photosynthesis.

And we're also gonna be testing the fruit itself to see if there's more nutritional quality with vitamin C and what we call carotinoids, that orange color you get inside your cantaloupe and it's just general antioxidants.

- So I've heard this a lot, you know, when you're talking about maybe organic or certified naturally grown and you hear about nutrient dense food.

So is that real?

Is that a real thing?

Can Mike Raji help that or I guess you'll find out soon.

- We will.

We will.

Hopefully, yes.

Yeah.

- Okay.

So, so what do you think now as, as a student researching this, do you find validity in that, that you can have nutrient dense cantaloupe if we have some, some neat treatments?

- I think it through more testing with the actual fruit that we're gonna be harvesting, when it comes time we'll have more secure and solid evidence that tells us that.

But in the past, in this past fall semester, spring semester, we've done some research on leafy greens with similar treatments with this microalgae, and we could notice some improved growth in the leaf structure and the root structure as well, which is really important to the health of that plant.

- So it's probably true, you build up the soil, you're gonna build up that soil health and probably have better plants for it.

- Yeah.

If you have a healthy environment for the plant to inhabit, it's gonna be happier and better for it.

- All right.

Well maybe if you could just show us what this microalgae looks like and then Yeah, of - Course.

So this is just a bit of the treatment and a bit of water.

You can kind of see on the inside.

There's a few particulates floating around.

It's green, it's got a bit of color to it, and it looks a little murky like pond water.

It's just like the algae that you find in your lakes, in your stack - Ponds, I guess that makes it looks like kind of green, like pond water.

It's got that.

Exactly.

Okay.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

- So how, how are you gonna actually get that to the plant?

Are you just gonna pour that on the plant or how does that work?

- Well, as of right now, based on our previous findings in our research, we're trying to determine if a foliar application with a spray wand would be better or if a soil application directly to the base of the plant would be the best way to get the algae - To.

Okay, so different application methods too, so it's not just the different rates, different application methods and see how the plant reacts.

- Exactly.

Yeah.

- That's great Sam, I look forward to an update soon.

- Thank you.

- Alright, thank you.

- Today I am going to explain how to set up a fertilizer injector and timer on a frost free hydrant.

I work out at the student farm and so everything we have here is set up on hydrants and timers.

And what we do out here is on your frost free hydrant.

First we get a timer.

These timers are readily available at any of your big box stores and online.

The timers are really efficient because you can leave your hydrant on all summer long and these timers will be able to come on at whatever time you want 'em to and however long you want 'em to.

I will say that some of these timers, you do have to check 'em regularly.

They run off of batteries and sometimes the filters get clogged in them and they stay on and they won't work properly.

So do be sure and check them after you put the timer on.

The next thing we like to have is what we call a pressure regulator.

Out here we have over a hundred pounds of pressure on our water line.

So if you have a high pressure, you definitely wanna get something to lower that pressure.

And it also depends on how many lines you're running in your garden.

If you're running on well water, you may not have a high pressure where you may not have to have this.

It all just kind of depends on how much pressure you have on your water line.

After we put that on, we put on a backflow preventer.

The backflow preventer is really useful for if you're concerned about putting fertilizers or anything in your injectors, and it may go back into your groundwater or into your water lines depending on it, whether you have well water or rural water.

We have a large backflow preventer here at the student farm and our hydrants are uphill.

And that's something to keep in mind if you're putting in hydrants at home, you don't want 'em to be down in the bottom of it where stuff does back up.

So try to put your hydrants on the top of the hill rather on the bottom.

Then once we have that on, we'll hook up a just a regular hose.

We use some heavy duty ones, but you can buy just regular hoses.

And then this hooks just directly into here.

And from there we go to our fertilizer injector.

This particular fertilizer injector is actually a swimming pool chlorinator.

It has an inch and a half size fittings on it.

These are available online mostly if you're trying to fertilize your plants, you can put anything water soluble in these.

This holds about two and a half pounds of fertilizer.

So we'll fill these up depending on our plants.

And certain plants require a lot more fertilizer than others.

We usually fill 'em up about once a week.

Something to note on, this is the flow meter, you need to know we're working this direction, our water source would be here and we're working that way.

So your flow would be that direction.

Another thing there are, instead of using swimming pool chlorinators, there is readily available mostly online, just garden type ones where you can hook it directly up to a three quarter inch hose and you do not have to do the fittings.

And those are probably good for home gardens.

So for us, we do this, we'll usually use tape or some put type of putty to make our connections so we don't have any leaks.

We've got a little barb here that goes on our hose.

We'll put that in and then that connects to this one.

That goes up to inch and a half.

And then from there, we're going out and we're just using a threaded barb.

And then we'll put that it's an inch and a half size.

We'll put that in using some putty and so forth.

And then we go to a filter.

This filter's purpose is to keep us from if like after the fertilizer goes through, if there was some contaminants or some chunks of something, it will get it out and block it into this strainer.

And that way you don't have it going into your irrigation system and blocking up your drip tape.

So from there we go over to here and another part, it's an inch and a half barb threaded into there.

And once again, we're using putty or tape and we go to, what we have is lay flat.

We use this out here because we usually have about 10 to 15 rows on each system.

Usually what I do is I get the clamp put on the lay flat first and then connect it to this barb, and then obviously tighten up your clamp real good so it doesn't leak.

And after you've done that and you've got it laying out and your drip lines are all in place, and then you're going to poke holes into this lay flat to put your emitter valves on.

And then our drip tape goes from there.

And if you're at a home scale, you can always do this just with the drip tape and not with the the header row.

The lay flat is good for driving over with a tractor a lot of times, and that's what we're doing out here.

So if you're not on a larger scale and you wanna use just home garden type stuff, this works great.

I strongly recommend that you use drip irrigation in your gardens.

It's a huge time saver and it makes life a whole lot easier.

- There are a lot of great horticulture activities this time of year.

Be sure and consider some of these events in the weeks ahead.

Next week on Oklahoma Gardening, we'll be showcasing some beautiful backyards.

You won't wanna miss it.

To find out more information about show topics as well as recipes, videos, articles, fact sheets, and other resources, including a directory of local extension offices.

Be sure to visit our website at Oklahoma gardening dot OK state.edu.

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Oklahoma Gardening is produced by the Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service as part of the division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at Oklahoma State University.

The Botanic Garden at OS U is home to our studio gardens and we encourage you to come visit this beautiful Stillwater Gem.

We would like to thank our generous underwriters, the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, food and Forestry, and Shape Your Future, a program of the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust.

Additional support is also provided by Greenleaf Nursery and the Garden Debut Plants, the Oklahoma Horticulture Society, the Tulsa Garden Club, and the Tulsa Garden Center.