MSU Extension Tribal Extension

My name is Joe Van Olstein. I'm from the Traer Spay bands do Indians, and I'm Crane Klan. I'm also the chairperson for Zibi. Zb is our word for river. Ig is the root word for food. And then wang means place. The place for food grows near the river. We're located in the tip of the mint and Mackinaw here. And this is the center and the food hub of the fur trade here. And Odawa means to trade. That's something that we've always done as a people here in this area. It's very important for us to stay here in this space and continue doing what our ancestors have done. The farm is owned by the little tribes, Pay bands for Odawa Indians, and we're here to provide food sovereignty efforts for the tribe and cultural activities as well. We're bringing the next generation and the youth. We're trying to connect our elders as well. Right now we've got beans growing, squash, growing tomatoes, growing. This is what the participants will get. This is where we start at in here. Hi, I'm Nate Walton. I'm a Consumer Horticulture educator with MSU Extension. We're here today at Zibi Mj Farm. This is some of the plants you'll have in the salsa garden kit. We have tomatoes over here, some hot peppers, little baby hot peppers, and we have pions. One way to think about these different plants is in terms of cool season and warm season plants. Some plants that we grow in our gardens prefer warmer temperatures to grow, and they need warmer soil to do well. In the salsa gardener, you have a couple of particularly warm season plants, the pot peppers and the tomatoes that really like it when it's warmer. One of the reasons we like to start them indoors late in the winter, get a jump start on the season. We start the indoors where it's warm and then plant them out once the temperatures outdoors are more comfortable for those plants. The other plants in the salsa garden kit, the cilantro and the onions, are what you might think of as a cooler season plant. And they actually prefer to be started as early as you can outdoors to get them comfortable out there in the soil and getting going as the soil naturally warms at the season. A good tip for the cilantro is to start early or grow it indoors. It does find like in a window sill in a warm location in your house. Then the onions need to get started as early as possible to make sure that they have the whole season to develop. A couple other things I want to talk about with the salsa garden. There are some disease and pest problems that you might run into. Hopefully, if you're lucky you won't see any of these, It's just a good idea to think about them and to be prepared in advance for certain these issues that might cause you trouble when you get these transplants in your kits, it'll be a little bit of a taller tomato plant than this one is. They'll be ready to go into the ground. Tomatoes are really easy to transplant. When you go to transplant, you'll remove it from the pot show here, just like that, and plant right into the ground. You can bring the soil level up an inch or two above where it was growing in the greenhouse, and they'll love that once you get them in the ground. It's really important to make sure that moisture levels are consistent on this tomatoes. You never want this little plant to start wilting. You'll see if the leaves start to drop. It means it doesn't have enough water and you don't ever want to let it get to that point. Make sure it's always getting a little bit of water. Gets to the wilting point, it will cause damage to the roots. That makes it harder for that tomato plant to make a good tomato later in the season. It's something that can happen when it's a young plant that can really affect the crop that you'd like to harvest later in the season. Trying not to let those tomatoes wilt, just consistent irrigation if you're not getting rainfall, getting out there with a watering can or a hose just to make sure they're getting a drink. Then on the hot peppers, another warm season crop, they'll like warmer conditions when you plant them out, they'll really thrive. In July, once the temperature is really heat up, you'll see those peppers taking off. If at any point along the way you have any questions or concerns about your plants and your garden, I would encourage you to reach out to MSU Extension to go to our Gardening in Michigan website. It's Mi garden has tons of great information about growing these plants. Thanks for watching and have a great time growing these delicious plants and enjoy your salsa.