- The garden might look good behind you.
I'm pretty proud of it,
but there have been some serious challenges here
at the homestead with some of these crops
you really don't want to mess up on.
So today, I'm gonna take you around,
a little casual tour of the garden,
and share some of the problems that we've experienced,
and what we are doing to fix it.
First off though, we have to say hi to Broody Butter.
She has gone broody once again.
I guarantee she's in here.
Yep, called it.
Now watch, she's gonna fluff up.
Oh, doesn't want me to touch her 'cause she's broody.
Listen to that chirp.
Butter, chill, okay?
Just chill.
Oh, my God.
The first major problem has been in the garlic patch.
And for sure I thought this was gonna be
the best garlic patch that I've ever had.
I don't wanna write it off quite yet,
but it has been getting hit with garlic rust.
This is something that Jacque found
in one of his garlic patches at his house,
and he gave me the heads up.
I ran out to check.
It turns out I had some early signs of garlic rust.
We've already done a pretty severe treatment.
I hope and I pray it's enough to actually save this garlic
'cause when you're growing garlic, guys,
it's like 150, 180 days, six months of a year,
or maybe like 1/200 of a human life.
Think about it that way.
You don't wanna mess this garlic up,
so let me take you down here and show you the signs.
So first off, take a look at the tops.
I really shouldn't be seeing significant browning
at this point in their life.
They've still got at least two months worth of growth
and they're just getting absolutely fried here at the top.
Not because they are mature,
because, you will see,
that I'm actually not getting full bulbing.
It's about to, if it had two more months, it would,
but it's dying at the top, while it's not super bulbed out,
which means that it wasn't supposed to do that,
which means something else is causing it,
and that something else is garlic rust.
Take a look, you've got this
sort of mottled appearance here.
So what we've done is come through
and spray all of this with a sulfur mix.
It's one of the few things that can actually control it.
I'm really not a big fan of spraying anything
if I can avoid it.
But in this case, with this much investment of time,
love, and energy into the crop, I felt it was worth it.
And we isolated it just to this area,
so I'm not really too worried
about any sort of cross-contamination or anything like that.
Sometimes you've got to take measures
in to your own hands to save your crop.
I would much rather do this than lose six months of time
And, honestly, quite a bit of money,
buying all of these cloves and popping them in.
Before we go in to our next problem,
let's celebrate a little success.
And that would be the asparagus.
It's been cut back multiple times, mulched over.
You're seeing a purple asparagus come up,
and over there you also have some green asparagus.
So, these asparagus, I can harvest if I want to,
or I can really let this all grow out for one more season.
And then next year, I'll just have a boatload
of asparagus coming out.
All right, let's move on over to my favorite crop,
the potatoes, which, again, are having some problems.
I'm less worried about the potato issues
than I am the garlic
because these were already getting closer towards maturity.
I planted these in November, it's about April right now,
so they've had a lot of time to grow.
Now, that's actually more time
than a potato would normally need,
but in this case, it was grown through our winter,
or sort of our long fall here in San Diego,
so it's gonna grow slower.
So that days-to-harvest is gonna push out.
But we're just seeing some disease on these potatoes
that is decimating the leaf tissue,
which means that, I mean, effectively, these tubers
are gonna get kind of locked at the size
that they're at because there's not
gonna be enough leaf tissue up top
to generate energy, and throw it down towards those tubers.
So if you take a look here,
you can see it's just getting completely obliterated.
You've got situations like this where, you know,
that's all just coming right off.
And then if we take an individual leaf,
you can kind of see what's going on here.
You've got this sort of mottled appearance.
Now, there's like four or five diseases
that typically hit potatoes.
I believe this one is a bacterial one.
Might be fungal, not quite sure.
But regardless, I mean, you can still see
that there are potatoes in this bed.
There's some potatoes right here.
So, I'm still gonna get potatoes,
and what I've opted to do in this case,
is just let this crop be.
I do not plan to do a spray here.
Some of these are obviously less affected than others.
I'm just gonna wait until this fully dies off,
so that all that energy does go down to the tuber,
and just kind of see what I get.
The issues in the potato bed
have made me potentially reevaluate the timing
that I grow these potatoes.
I was talking with Jacque a little bit,
and he was saying he's thinking about
maybe not planting them through the winter next time,
and instead just, maybe sowing a crop in about February
or March in our season.
So just, basically, a pure spring potato crop,
maybe a late summer early fall one.
And that's about it.
Pairing a failure with the success, artichokes this year.
Damn, are they crazy?
I mean, this is just not even fully expressing
how big they've gotten this year.
This is massive.
This one's getting a little bit old,
but I need to come through and do a harvest.
You wanna harvest these guys
when they are still kind of tight.
You know, when they're starting to open up a little bit,
you actually don't really wanna see too much
of that action there.
This should be much closer towards the unopened flower here.
But I would say this is still probably okay to harvest.
Artichokes to me, is a perfect perennial crop.
I mean, look how these have exploded
in this part shade area.
Probably gets sun for half the day only,
and watered off of rainwater and laundry water.
So, it's really a low maintenance crop.
The most proud plant I have in the garden right now
is actually not an edible plant,
although you can eat, I think, any rose,
I just probably opt not to.
This is the Cecile Brunner rose arch.
It is in full bloom right now.
Never ever looked better.
I mean, come on guys.
That is just one of the more gorgeous things
you'll ever see.
Pretty proud, I'm a bit of an aesthetic gardener now.
Back here in the onion barrel zone,
I've sort of had mixed success
with these barrels in general this time
because the onions are wanting
to bulb a little bit too early
as you can see where we've cut that flower bulb off.
So if you didn't know, onions are a biennial crop,
meaning year one, they're gonna throw up green growth
and they're gonna bulb, that's when we eat them.
But if you let them go,
year two, they're gonna throw up a flower stalk,
and then they're going to actually flower, produce seed,
and thus carries on the circle of life.
But in this case,
sometimes onions can get a little bit confused
'cause they're very sensitive to daylight hours.
You have long day, medium day, short day onions.
And in this case, I think something happened here
where these onions got a little confused
and they said, "Uh-oh, I guess I'm a biennial now.
I'll go ahead and throw up a flower."
So I'll show you one right now,
and exactly what we're doing to prevent this problem.
But really it's not so much prevention,
it's more like treatment and pray because once you see it,
you kind of have to hope that the onion resets itself.
So there's a really good example of it.
You see this little flower bud right here.
The only thing you can do at this point,
you can't like magically make it not do this anymore.
You just have to cut it off.
So, all I've done is just cut right there.
And you can see the plant will continue to grow
'cause this is an area that we cut earlier,
and we cut it at like that point right there,
so it's still grown.
But what I'm concerned about
is I don't want to not see any bulbing.
I want it to bulb up and I'm just not quite seeing that yet.
So I'm hoping that,
because I'm seeing this sort of flower stalk coming out,
it doesn't mean that the bowling has completely stopped.
On some of these other ones,
it does seem like it still has continued to bulb up,
like this one right here or this one right here.
So, I don't know, we're gonna have to see,
but if you see a problem like that with your onions,
that would be my advice.
But with every garden loss comes garden success.
And what we have here is just this boatload of new plants
that we're gonna be putting in, including a tree.
So this is all going in the epic pond,
which we have started to landscape a little bit, but, man,
we've got some isotoma, we have some thyme,
we have some ornamental strawberries,
some California natives
as well as just some nice sages and shrubs.
All of this is gonna come around
and be worked into this area right here.
So, right about here, we're going to break this ground up,
add a little bit more ground cover.
I actually have this bench here
that's in memorial of my dad,
but it's just a really peaceful place,
so what I want to do is beautify this area,
put a couple shrubs right there and right there.
Framing that bench and clearing out that area,
so it like, looks, looks really, really nice.
We'll smooth all of this out here.
This feather grass is looking gorgeous.
Look at that, I mean, come on.
Honestly, it kind of feels like hair.
Almost like a fluffy pet.
If I'm close up, can you tell this isn't a pet?
Because to me it looks like one.
But what we're gonna do is come in place a tree here.
We'll put another tree probably somewhere around here
and we're gonna do more ground cover here,
more shrubbery here.
We're gonna take a couple more of these flagstones.
Go one flagstone there, boom.
And then come up this pathway right here
and then landscape around this with some medium height stuff
'cause I don't wanna block off the passion fruit
that we have growing here.
It's taking a little slower to start than I would've liked,
but basically gonna beautify this entire pond area
because what we effectively have right now
is this absolutely gorgeous natural looking pond
with a very unnatural landscape around it.
It doesn't really fit in.
What we've done is picked some amazing landscaping plants
with Sara Bendrick and some local nurseries
and trying to create a space that feels natural.
It's not all California native,
but there are a lot of California natives in here.
I've noticed a lot of wildlife coming in,
mammals, birds, insects, et cetera.
If I add more around this landscape
to make it look and feel like a natural pond,
I'm gonna see even more of that life come in.
And that life not only brings a lot of beauty to the garden,
I was sitting out here with my girlfriend,
we were just enjoying some dinner
and there was like a five hummingbird battle going on
right down there at the pond return.
It was an incredible site
just like little entertainment from nature itself.
We're gonna do that and then maybe even think
about adding a pergola in this area
which we can grow grapes over.
So we have some shade in the entertaining zone right here,
but then we have natural landscape
over here and going on back.
Because there used to be a big hole there,
we filled the hole in,
and I think that means there's a lot of space
in the ground to create a beautiful backdrop
because I'll show you, you wanna look and solve
for that eye line when it comes to the pond
and really any garden space.
So I'll show you the eye line right now
and you'll kind of see what I mean
by looking a little bit drab.
So imagine you're coming into the garden,
you say, "Ooh, nice greenhouse, ooh, beautiful."
You've got this beautiful garden over here, coop, et cetera.
Then you turn this way and you say,
"Oh, look at this amazing pond patio area."
But then when you look beyond it, you just see nothing.
There's nothing to kind of stop the eye.
In this area here.
In this area here, you got a little bit
of that feather grass doing that.
There's no bench there, there's no shrubbery there,
no back of that landscape.
Higher textures, different colors, lower textures.
And so, you know, there's blank area right here.
I'd love to block that cistern off a little bit more.
And of course, have something wrapping around up here,
making it feel very lush and filled in.
And so, I am trying to get more into that landscaping.
A few struggles, a few failures,
but a lot of cool stuff coming here at the homestead.
It's the beginning of the season for a lot of you,
so I'm really curious,
let me know what your biggest struggle is this year
in the garden or in your homesteading journey.
Comment down below.
I really wanna hear from you guys.
Love hearing from you guys.
And until next time, good luck in the garden,
and keep on growing.