Hello everyone, we are back. It's been a while since we've done a vlog episode,
Jacques is here surveying the scene. And you can see, look at this - new fence,
new fence. That will be its own episode. Today actually,
we're going to do a lot of planting. Some corn, some peppers,
some miscellaneous stuff, a lot of harvesting.
And just kind of come along with us as we do a day worth of garden tasks here at
the Homestead.
So this here was my potato bed and we got a ton of harvest off of that.
It's actually all hanging out right over here. Look at that,
big yields, but we're putting in corn now.
So this is Astronomy Domine corn. It's a really interesting looking corn.
We're going to put 36 in here. Garlic is looking good.
I want to take you back here to show you what we're going to do with the
peppers. Just sort of hydrating this.
This is an interesting little manifold irrigation system that John from
GrifTek sent out. Just sort of testing it out, seeing what I think about it.
But what's nice about it right now is it's hydrating this compost and native
soil mixture, which is little bit hard to rehydrate.
So we're just going to leave this on for about 30 minutes, 40 minutes,
let it soak up and then we can plant the peppers. So our first task is corn.
Jacques has laid out the rough spacing here.
And the thing with corn is you want to plant it in blocks because it's a wind
pollinated plant. You have the tassels up top and you have the silks down below.
So the male then the female, the tassels will rustle in the wind,
the pollen will fall down, it'll hit the silks.
And then each individual grain of pollen will travel down the silk into the seed
and pollinate and fertilize one actual grain of corn,
which is really interesting. It's a fascinating plant for that reason,
but let's just show you what we have laid out.
So what we've done here is create blocks. So we have five by three,
15 here. We have another 15 here and a bonus one here.
A couple that didn't germinate. So always overseed your corn.
But these are planted at roughly 10 inches apart,
or will be planted roughly 10 inches apart.
And the wind comes through just like this.
So the wind travels from west to east most of the time.
So we're going to get a good amount of wind flow through here.
These are going to go in the ground. You guys probably see this gap right here,
just cause we didn't have enough corn. So maybe we'll put bush beans in here.
We could put a of row peppers.
I mean really any summer crop you can make work there.
So all we need to do now is just get these in.
So Jacques and I, we're putting in the corn. Basically
exactly what we talked about. We're just going to dig some holes in,
in this amended potato bed and just kind of get things going.
I'm putting in some cottonseed meal, he's got blood meal over there.
Actually might be an interesting test because they're both relatively high
nitrogen. This is a 6-2-1, blood meal is a 12-0-0.
They're both from Espoma Organic. We'll see which one does better,
but regardless the whole point was to put in something with a good amount of
nitrogen for the young corn, which is going to need it. Yeah.
It's really important at the beginning to make sure corn has enough fertilizer.
Yeah, it's a grass. Remember, it's a grass. So what does a grass grow a lot of?
Leaves. What do the leaves use a lot of? Nitrogen.
So it's pretty simple when you think about it that way.
But you do have to remember to do it.
Nothing really too fancy about transplanting them.
Just don't break up the taproot if you can avoid it.
Try not to damage the taproot. Other than that,
I think you're probably just popping it in. Yeah.
And this bed is like nice and firm so we don't actually have to worry about
walking on it. Right? Yup.
I mean this is going to transition more towards a no dig, I would say,
as the years go on, certainly. Okay, these kneelers guys,
they might look a little ridiculous, but honestly they feel amazing!
They save your knees so, so much. They're from Corona Tools.
I think they're called Kneelos. Yeah,
actually I think I'm going to put mine on too. Yeah. The kneeler gang.
Okay, corn's in. Time to water.
Not going to mulch right now because I have an earwig problem.
And I'm just going to let these get a little bit stronger before I put the mulch
on top, but it will be GardenStraw that I'm adding on top most likely.
That middle row, TBD. We'll see what we add into it.
I'm just really making sure I get this nice and moist.
Sometimes it can be hard to rehydrate the soil. But we're onto the next task,
right after this.
So we're waiting for the pepper area to hydrate before we transplant.
It's a lot of compost. Takes a while for that to rehydrate.
In the meantime though, a lot of dragonfruit got pruned.
So these are the dragonfruit that got pruned up. What you're trying to do again,
is you're just trying to bring them up, get them up as quickly as you can.
Over the trellis tops, you can see a couple of them were actually peaking over.
I'll show you those in a second.
But that means taking off a lot of these laterals, which I did.
And it was a little bit hard to do, but you still do it.
I took like five off of this one just right here.
So now you can see I've tied all these up.
So they're actually starting to finally get above,
with this summer heat coming in. This one, I had to tie up a lot.
This is Richard's Sourpatch Kid. It's his own cultivar.
So I took off maybe 15 shoots down here. I'm gonna try to root those up.
This one, pride and joy. This is Tricia.
One of the coolest flowers you're ever going to see and look at that growth.
Are you serious right now? I mean, that is looking fantastic!
A little bit sad over here. We're not going to talk about that one.
But I'll show you what Jacques got going on over here.
We're just labeling them up. Here we are. So it's a simple process.
I have a whole video on the main channel about how to do it.
But everything you take as a cutting, you can just propagate.
So you can either cut this piece right here, this is the bottom.
So this is where it would have attached to the plant, right?
You can cut this off, let it dry and root it.
Or you can just put it in just like this.
It's easier to just put it in just like this sometimes,
that's what we're going to do.
Not too concerned about the cutting taking rate on this because they're all just
going to go into the compost otherwise. So let's just get these ones potted up.
A little production line going on here. So with these it's really easy,
like I said. All you do,
take the side that was closest to the main stem. That's the bottom of the plant.
Pop it in. You can be pretty rough with these. They don't really mind at all.
Put your label in and you're good.
These just want to be in the shade once you're done.
You almost don't even have to water it, but I would water it in a little bit.
So you could root this one as is, or you could cut it into one,
two or three different chunks.
So I'm just going to cut it directly in half because I don't really care about
getting a really huge one. I'd rather just have more. You've got the knife,
go straight through right about at that halfway point.
The only hard part about this is getting that center where all the
water travels up. It's very hard in the center,
especially with an established cutting.
But sometimes what I like to do is come in,
cut it all and then come in with some snips and snip the rest.
And now I can just come in and make a really quick cut just like that.
And the whole thing is done. So these ones have to dry.
We're not going to root this one yet. All right. Onto the next task.
Okay. Now there's a lot of different seedlings. Some have come up, some haven't.
We've discarded some of the ones that haven't come up.
But a lot of these are looking just slightly chlorotic or a little bit starved
of nutrients in the Epic Six Cells.
Mostly because they've a little bit outgrown. It's time to pot them up.
So that's exactly what we're going to do.
We're going to pot up all of these into these guys right here,
which are the three and a half inch from Greenhouse Megastore.
Thanks to them for sending that out. They're not the super heavy duty ones,
but we don't have those yet, just on the market in general.
So these are all going to get potted up right now. So this is cool.
Jacques actually, did you carve this? Yeah,
I just used the chisel and a little plane. Okay.
Woodworker Jacques carved it up.
And it actually fits perfectly into one of the six cell trays.
And why is that important? Hand me one of those.
What you do is you can just pop it in like this,
assuming the soil is a little bit more moist,
but even still you have the perfect transplant plug.
So it'll make transplanting a lot easier with the six cells.
So I just want you guys to see how handy this little tool is.
It's very makeshift, but it works really well.
So you just cram it down in there. Nice and hard.
Grab your plug, slot it in,
perfect fit.
You don't need to mess around with disturbing the soil or like holding the plug
up and like putting soil around it. It just works really well.
And you can snug it up and you're good to go.
So you guys think this is ready to pot up, or what? It looks like an alien.
Some sort of seaweed or algae. Yeah. All right. Well,
we might do a little root pruning there. All right. It's pepper time.
You can see the row right here. We've got the tomatoes,
they're actually doing quite well.
In front of them we're going to do the peppers. 15 peppers,
13 varieties spaced 18 inches apart. I'm going to show you them right now.
So we have Jimmy Nardello, ancho poblano. We have Omar Sky combe.
We have, what is this one here?
Yellow Biquinho, Chervena Chuska,
a Bulgarian one.
Jacques is Bulgarian and he's hunting down as many Bulgarian peppers and plants
as he can. And so we're going to do that in his honor here.
We've got the large red Antigua. Bulgarian carrot pepper. Interesting.
This one is a cayenne.
We have a Pacific Northwest sugar rush peach,
yellow bell monster - yellow monster bell, fish pepper.
That's the variegated one. We've got a Chervina Kamba, Italian large red,
ancho poblano again and then another Jimmy Nardello.
So they're all going to go in right here.
This gives us some space to actually walk through here if we want to.
You don't have to because you could come on this front side.
But I have a backup of maybe 25 different peppers that I might put in right
here. So we're here. We're going to plant the rest out. Jacques,
my garden manager, is at the other end. I guess I'll meet you in the middle,
Jacques? Sounds good. All right, let's do this.
We're in, we're in.
We've got a nice little row of peppers here. I'm a really,
really stoked about it. 15 different peppers going down the line.
Probably we'll end up trellising that.
You'll see that on one of the channels here.
But the next thing to do while the weather is still nice and gloomy,
which for me is really nice because it's nice and cold,
cool breeze in this early May day,
is we're gonna go out to the no dig bed and put some.
Stuff in the ground there.
In our no dig bed, threw some more compost on, mixed it in.
You guys saw how much you have to do to actually hydrate that mixture.
Pretty crazy. But we've got cucumbers in. So two cucumbers on this side,
two on this side. We may end up doing some sort of A-frame style trellis.
So it's gonna make sense to plant them on the edges here.
But we're just planting guys. Nothing fancy about planting a cuke.
So we are in with the cukes and man, I am very excited.
These are both pickling cucumbers.
So you're going to see some pickles here at the Homestead. These ones,
I forgot the name offhand, but you will nevertheless see those.
We're on to the next task, but let's just take a look at this front yard garden.
It is looking real good now.
I know you guys probably remember what it looked like when we first moved in aka
nothing. And it looks really, look at these sunflowers.
Actually starting to get one blooming. Jacques actually,
why don't you share kind of what we did to that bed.
So we were noticing that the leaves, especially these ones up here,
looking very yellow. Yeah.
And so what we did is we pulled off all the mulch and we scratched in the Espoma
Flower-tone and also some other, I believe it was like the Earth Dust.
But basically we put in some sort of nutrition specifically for flowering.
We scratched that in. Watered it very deeply. And like, I mean look at this.
This is, there were no lateral flowers. There was, it was all yellow.
It's hard to.
Describe how much worse it looked. It looked basically like these peas look now.
Maybe a little more yellow and less pale. These peas are just,
these were healthy peas. They're just on their way out.
But it did have almost that tone to it.
And usually you don't see that come back so vigorously.
So it makes me feel like we had a nitrogen/we knew we had a calcium issue.
But it's really crazy how much they've come back.
And what a unique bed planting combo.
You've got dwarf sunflowers all the way up to these taller ones over here.
And then alyssum. Sweet alyssum's in the middle with some cosmos back here,
which I probably need to deadhead.
But really interesting little bed planting combo. Check this out actually, guys.
We put in some Tiny Tim tomatoes.
These are some of the smallest container tomato varieties that you can grow.
So if you're in a small space like this,
like literally if you only have this much space, you can grow a Tiny Tim.
So I put in six all around here.
And actually check the video description cause GreenStalk has a crazy sale going
on right now that I'll put in the video description,
if you're watching this at the time of release.
I think it's 99 bucks for like this five tier one,
which is their old school model. So if you want to pick it up,
I'll put it in the description. Okay, I'm up here surveying the scene.
I'm on a sketchy little bench, so hopefully I don't die, but it's sketch.
Jacques can see it and he's vouched that it's very sketchy.
But we do it for you here at Epic Homesteading. Anyways,
we got a LOT done today. Today was a planting, potting up, strategizing,
thinking about summer type of day. We even got some dragonfruit stuff done,
Jacques. So it's been very productive.
These types of days where it was like hot early in the morning and then it kind
of mellowed out and almost a little bit of a misty breeze,
really nice day to get a lot of work done. Yeah. It's hard to pass up. And yeah,
thanks guys. I really appreciate you guys sticking around.
I know it has been a while since I put a video up on the Homesteading channel.
I promise it will be more regular. First of all, let's appreciate the chamomile.
The chamomile's looking crazy! So anyways, thank you so much, guys.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.