i was tagged in the the good the bad and the ugly uh garden
challenge i guess it is by jules gardening
and of course they couldn't do this video without paying homage to the great
clint eastwood classic but i thought i'd use this opportunity
to just give an update of the garden at about what are we mid almost mid
august here so we're gonna take a look at what's
good what's bad and what's real ugly in the garden right now
here's a good we've got these tomatoes on cow panels here
cattle panels and i've got a pink beef steak and a red beef steak
and they're doing really well let's see we've got a lot of big fruit ripening up
already
our cucumbers have also done extremely well
this year we've been picking for like a month
and everybody is sick to death of cucumbers
and they just kind of keep producing we can't keep up with them
and this is our drops grape tomato which got
much bigger than a typical grape as you can see we've got a lot of fruit on
there the emerald towers basil which i
talked about in a recent video they are really happy interplanted with these
tomatoes in here
and then our sweet corn over here is doing pretty well
we got i've got two varieties planted in here solstice which is a bi-color and
then i've got the new a new one it's wild violet it's a purple
and white bi-color corn sweet corn and that one is pretty close to maturity
we already picked the solstice the peppers are
doing good i've got a purple bell pepper in here it's got some good
sized fruit on it both of these plants do see that
lovely color
and then all the rest of these are different types of serranos and
jalapenos and you can see we've got quite a bit of
fruit in there
melons are doing well so far back here this is one plant
that is pretty loaded with fruit
and some okra
and then my watermelon is just kind of taken over the world back here
my chinese five color pepper is looking lovely i love all the colors
this thing shows as it changes tomatillos we've been picking for a
while
my luffa gourd is growing like crazy oh we got another
one i was gonna say i only saw one fruit on
here so far it looks like we got another little baby
there
and my compost pile pumpkins are doing pretty well so far
i was a little worried about these guys but we've got some pumpkins
already coloring up a little early these guys are going to be harvestable
by september but era come on out of there come on
come on come on out of there come on
and then i've got my little um honey nut squash down here
these are fairly close another couple weeks these might be
mature this is a personal butternut squash
very very sweet very delicious these are a lot of fun we got some
castor bean plants here and they are about
might be taller than eight feet i can't really tell
but they will continue to grow and grow and they'll put some really cool red
flowers on you can see how giant these leaves are
i got caught in a rainstorm the other day and i was able to use this plant as
an umbrella and my straw bale experiment was a
good thing this year everything went pretty well
i've got a shishito pepper here orange marmalade this is like a
compact plant with an orange these will color up to orange
you can see one starting to color up back there
i've got brad's atomic grape for some reason these got much bigger than grape
size this year some other grape tomatoes down here you
can see the blade or the septual leaf spot is
starting to sudden here as well and i've got a whole bunch of beans
and my potatoes just kind of keep growing in here most of my potato in
fact all of my potatoes are done and harvested already except for
these guys another good is all these lovely lovely
flowers that are doing so well in the garden
this year
my little hedge sunflowers are pretty much done but those looked really good
earlier in the season
we've got these lovely queenie series zinnias
some ornamental peppers down in here these will turn bright orange
look like little pumpkins you can see more this is the queenie lime orange
there's some of the just queenie lime in here
these lovely little this is a pink buckwheat
mixed in with my white buckwheat cover crop i just think those are adorable
this ornamental millet
there's a few little sunflowers hanging on here
there's a little homer hey little homer what you doing
what you doing little homer
i've got some calendula still blooming mr shums
there we have it cosmos
i love these dors sulfur cosmos
these are some of my favorites this is a cignet
marigold and they're this really really fragrant i don't know almost like minty
grapefruit i don't know how to describe the foliage but it has a
very intense smell these tiny little blooms i've got this inter-planted with
this holy basil which again is a really really pungent smell i love this
but i think it's one of those like you either love the smell or you hate it
but all of these the the basil the cignet marigold and the buckwheat
just bring in the pollinators and the beneficial insects like crazy
i've got a couple lone little uh this is a sombreros in yeah
more of the sulfur cosmos this is the wild violet petunia
and some zahara zinnias tucked in here amongst my
cowpea cover crop more of the um i can't remember if this
is indian summer or orange marmalade at rudback yeah
just extremely floriferous back over here we've got jasmine
scented nicotiana which starts to send up this really wonderful fragrance at
about this time of night and then finally one of my
favorite fairly recent finds this is malabar spinach
this is actually edible the greens you can use like spinach
they have a more succulent texture than a typical spinach would
but they're extremely heat tolerant they love the heat in fact they won't really
start taking off until it gets quite warm and i actually use them more
as an ornamental than anything they're extremely fast to
climb you can see they've got these lovely red
stems and they will put on just a ton of these
tiny pink blooms and then black almost black berries which are
quite lovely and i think everyone who walks into the
garden asks me about this plant i really really like this one
you can see these things they really should be on a taller support they could
be climbing up that trellis over there they get so tall
now unfortunately a reoccurring bad that i seem to keep
doing this entire gardening season is not
providing my plants with proper support so you can see here on my container
tomatoes i tried to stake these cages up but they
were way too flimsy and this whole tomato is going sideways
i think the only thing holding it up at this point
is the uh mountain mint plants behind it and like i said i've been doing this all
season i started with my peas this spring not giving them
enough support these were doing really well they were
standing up beautifully like so big wind came through and
so next year i will be using my cow panels to plant my peas
on i'm glad these have done so well but i'm very sad that they are all
flopping over so hopefully by next year i will have learned my lesson
and of course a reoccurring bad every single
season are the bad guys and i kind of always have the same crew
of offenders you can see here the handiwork of the tomato hornworm
we have potato beetles every year there are squash bugs every year so i
just try to do the best i can to encourage the beneficial insects to kind
of level out the balance between between
good and bad so this section is good
at first glance because all of the winter squash and pumpkins in here are
doing incredibly well
but i'm gonna put this in the bad category
because i did a terrible job spacing this out
and now this path that i've made between these archways
you can't even really get through and everything is so overgrown in here
that i'm never going to be able to find a pumpkin
you can see we do have a few squash in here
look at that giant guy
there's one peeking out there some of these
trombonchino types
but in the back corner here i've got this was the
lunch lady gourd mix and we've got some really fun ones
growing in here
so over here we have got the ugly now at first glance
maybe it doesn't look so ugly because i if you're like me the first thing you
notice is the really great fruit set on these
tomatoes but when you look a little closer you
will see how terribly defoliated these are by
septoria leaf's spot and this disease set in early and it
just kind of moved down the whole row of tomatoes and it's one of those
diseases where once it sets in there's not a whole heck of a lot you
can do about it and the problem with it is
because of this defoliation that's happening it's gonna affect fruit flavor
big time so the tomatoes that you get off of plants that are defoliated like
this do not taste nearly as good as a plant with all of
its lush healthy foliage cabbage worms finally caught
up to me i was so happy because they did not show up
till so much later in the season than normal
but they are here and they are here with a vengeance and it seems like the
cross-striped cabbage worms are actually the ones doing most of the damage at
this point as you can see over here my poor poor
brussels sprouts just eaten up and we did get an
application of i used both spinosad and bt on these but it was after a lot
of this damage was already done so these will grow out of it but they
look real bad right now
more ugliness here we've got japanese beetle damage
all over these grape leaves
but this guy is fun he may look bad but he's actually a good
guy it's a big old assassin bug right there
there is another tragically tragically ugly
happening in the garden this year these are from my no dig potato
experiment and while i did get some lovely decent
sized potatoes i also discovered
that voles really like potatoes and this is what happened to
a lot of my lovely spuds so hope you enjoyed my
good bad and ugly garden tour and be sure to stop back for more garden
updates thanks for watching and i'll see you
next time