(men laughing)
(men sighing)
- Yeah. - Guys.
It's Friday.
It's that time of year, mid-August.
- Brutal.
- It's hot.
The garden doesn't look that good.
Let's be honest with ourselves here.
- I know mine doesn't.
- I know mine doesn't either,
so what we're gonna do today,
(cans opening)
we're gonna crack ourselves a little seltzer.
- Might be hard, might not be. - Cheers.
(clinking glass)
Don't worry about it. - Choice is up to you.
We're gonna take you around the garden
and do a season assessment.
What went well, what didn't go well,
so hopefully you guys can learn from us
and some of our successes,
as well as our failures.
Let's give it a shot. - Let's do it.
Ooh, that's refreshing. - Oh, that hits good.
- Yeah, let's go check it out.
- Let's hit the front.
Here we are in the front yard
where we have experienced many successes
and many failures.
Jacques, I think the first thing
that has done weirdly well despite how bad it looks
is this determinate tomato bed that we planted
really at the beginning of the summer.
- [Jacques] Yeah, and you got a whole lot of tomatoes
out of this.
- Now here's the lesson that I'm taking out of this one,
it's that, yes, it got hit with probably a little Septoria,
definitely has some harlequin bugs in there.
I did see my very first horn worm.
- I saw my first horn worm today.
- No way.
Hey, cheers. - Cheers.
- To the worst pest in the world.
No, they're actually not that bad.
But sometimes it's okay that a plant doesn't look healthy.
- I agree.
- This is still throwing out an insane amount of tomatoes.
It's honestly more than I need.
Do I really need to go in, hack this plant to death,
to spray with this, spray with that,
- To get like 20% more.
- so I can get 20% more than 200 tomatoes?
The answer is no.
I mean it doesn't look pretty.
Nothing in the garden's always supposed to.
So weirdly, a success in our garden.
- Let me ask though. - Yeah.
- Would you support determinate tomatoes next time?
Or just let 'em go like this?
- You know, I probably would.
I probably would.
- Okay. I debated.
- We decided not to because we were like,
you know what, it's a determinate.
It's probably gonna do okay.
So I think you could take like a decent bamboo
and it would be okay there.
It would need to be a relatively thick bamboo at this scale.
- Yeah.
- Or you could throw in like some kind of structure.
Cause this is four tomatoes.
- I was gonna say,
determinate tomatoes are the only time I would use a cage.
- So here's one that we really did sort of fail at.
So the watermelon here looks incredible.
- It does look really good.
- Now this was crazy.
We planted this a long time ago.
Something about either our watering habits,
or maybe just the climate,
it only now started to take off.
I'm talking the last two weeks or so.
And what didn't do well is underneath,
it's hiding the shame.
And that would be these peanut plants.
- They started to come back. But...
- Just not enough.
- Not enough. - Just not enough.
I mean, we're gonna let 'em ride
and I'm sure we'll get a peanut or two,
but it might be like my sad peanut harvest
from many years ago.
- Yeah, I might get one good harvest of peanuts this year.
- I honestly just think in our climate,
peanuts just aren't a great thing to try, personally.
But doesn't mean that the watermelons didn't do well.
And then, what happened in these couple beds,
was mostly sunflowers and corn this year.
So we had these little dwarf sweet corn.
They performed really well, I would say,
given that it's sort of an unusual corn.
We hadn't grown it before.
And then the sunflowers this year were a real showstopper.
So we've planted them- - Huge success
- yet again.
They're over here.
We had some over here.
So I would say those ones did pretty well.
Not a whole lot of lessons or learnings there.
You planted the corn really tight and it did fine.
In this bed, we've now just recently
put in some yardlong beans, some luffa,
very late, but still looking healthy.
- It looks pretty good.
- It looks really good.
And I have a feeling,
and here in San Diego you get
this sort of hot August, hot September,
- Totally.
- unlike many different climates out there.
So I think we have some time to potentially
get at least a few out.
- We basically have two more months of summer.
- Yeah, exactly.
- We just don't have the light.
But we still have enough.
- We'll be losing the light, but we will definitely have-
- This also looks really good over here.
- Yes. Yes.
This bed is probably my most proud bed
I've grown in a while,
just because of the way that it's sort of ornamented itself.
It looks really nice.
The Zinnias are that tall elegans variety that
comes up sort of through things.
And then this melon,
- [Jacques] It's really filled in.
- Weirdly, it almost feels like
the Zinnias spaced the leaves of the melon out
a little bit more and forced more air flow through.
'Cuz I haven't seen a lot of disease on this,
whereas we totally have seen PM issues over here
and over here.
And speaking of,
why don't we hit the center cut squash up.
- Yeah.
- I got quite a few center cut squash.
So many that I actually let a little of them
go over ripe, unfortunately.
But here's what's crazy.
You can see this middle area
- Perfect.
- This is the perfect one to harvest.
So this is why you grow center cut.
You don't really grow it to get it
to that true butternut stage.
It's this.
And how are you preparing this?
- I personally like to
chop it up into little cubes and saute with butter.
- Yeah.
- It becomes like creamy
beyond any creamy texture I could describe for a squash.
- Yeah
- Wonderful.
- Yeah. So I'll maybe try that tonight.
But what's been really interesting here guys,
is this got hit with powdery mildew
after harvesting maybe five to seven center cut.
And I was like, okay, it's done for the season.
It's put out a lot of squash.
And as you can see,
it's come back with a vengeance.
- [Jacques] It looks really good.
- Look, there's a couple more right in there, Jacques.
- Yeah, there's one right here too.
- And what's weird is even the PM infected leaves,
don't really seem to be getting damaged that much.
- [Jacques] And all these new leaves have no PM.
- [Kevin] I would call that some sort of resurrection story.
I don't really know what else to say.
- [Jacques] Now they're cranking out again.
- Let's talk now about this.
This is just a bean-
- This makes me mad.
- Yeah. Jacques, Jacques,
- Personally.
- Jacques had a bean problem.
I think you're about to release that video.
The great bean experiment. - Yeah.
- He didn't have a good time with beans.
I've never had a problem with beans personally.
Anyways, this was a second sowing.
It worked really well for us.
Dragon's tongue beans, primarily.
My absolute favorite bean.
And, as you can see,
- It's an attractive bean.
- Great looking bean,
very productive and very, very delicious.
When you cook it, the flavor is great,
but the color does sort of go away a bit.
But hey, it looks good on the vine.
- It does look really good.
- It's all good.
Yeah.
So, let's take a look at a big success this year,
which was our strawberry patch.
So for sure the most lush and vibrant strawberry patch,
if you remember, guys, from last year.
Yeah, how's that that guy taste?
- I mean.
- Let me see if I can find one.
- They're so vigorous.
- Yeah, we ripped out a ton
if you remember in a recent episode.
But I think, like what's the,
what's the takeaway here?
The takeaway is,
grow a variety that works really well in your area.
Throw a little sacrifice down,
and do some early pruning
of damaged foliage and flowers,
and then do a runner clean out.
But for the most part just let it rip.
I mean, if we wanted to
we could have enough strawberries to grow
for the rest of our lives.
Just off of runner propagation.
- [Jacques] Also this bed,
compared to where it was over there,
had strawberries before.
This is a carpet of strawberries.
- Absolute carpet.
- They never hit that before.
- They never did.
- So irrigation,
probably one of the biggest successes this year.
Was adding irrigation.
- I think it was.
And I just found my little treat.
So let's give this taste. - There's so many.
- It's so good.
Okay, some big successes here.
Let's go ahead and check out the backyard.
Another big success here was just getting this arch
in place and having these roses grow.
It's not the season for them to be throwing flowers out,
but we have reached the pinnacle point
of having them cross each other.
The canes have sort of overlapped.
So next year should be explosive.
- It's going to be, like, incredible.
- Next year should be explosive.
And speaking of, the dragon alley.
As I've said, I think before,
it's for sure the most productive year we've had.
And I attribute that, number one, to better watering.
We've actually moved this into a more suitable climate.
A little bit more sun than before.
We had 'em kind of,
- Oh that's right.
- back there just a little bit.
But, but honestly it's just the fact
that the vegetative growth of these stems
has gotten to the point where they can actually
throw out a lot of buds and support a lot of buds
on that energy.
So we have an incredible amount
of first flowers coming out over here.
If you take a look right here
you can see the very first fruit on this variety right here.
But what I'm very excited about, is look at this.
We have Ecuador palora,
the yellow dragon fruit,
- [Jacques] So many buds.
- You've got a little bud here.
You've got a little bud there and a little bud there.
Now this is the dragon fruit that is known to
be the absolute sweetest dragon fruit.
Flavor complexity is not very high.
Sometimes you just want that hit of sweetness.
It's a beautiful dragon fruit.
- [Jacques] There's another six buds on this side.
- I know it's wild what's happening right now.
I think, if I'm remembering correctly,
you get a nice amount of flowers and fruit
as you move from September to October.
- Oh, okay.
- My very first dragon that I grew,
some of you have seen that video,
that fateful seminal video.
That was October that we got those dragon fruit.
And so there's probably about seven to 10
ripening fruit on this sugar dragon.
- Wow.
- Richard's custom variety from grafting dragon fruit,
my mentor in dragon fruit.
This is sour patch kid.
There's tons of flowers on this one.
It's my first year of that.
As well as Trisha and Red Jayna.
Just take a look at this.
I mean this is absolutely bonkers guys.
We have a fruit that's days away from being ripe.
- [Jacques] You think it is?
- Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you take a look, if you give it a squeeze,
it's softening just slightly.
It's still green.
You wanna see a little like 50% blush.
- [Jacques] Oh really? Okay.
- But then you let it get to legitimately ripe.
Chill it in the fridge because it won't ripen off the vine.
- [Jacques] Gotcha.
- But take a look.
You're seeing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
This are actually a good argument to remove
some of these buds, but we'll see if it can handle it.
- Is that for size?
- It's for size and it's for the fact
that it'll try to abort them anyways.
- Okay
- And so you might as well pull off a couple.
So, good dragon fruit year.
Let's talk about the backyard where we have
had some significant problems.
So as we come into the backyard, we've shown you the pond.
The pond's actually gone really well.
That pond clean out.
Water's clear.
Algae is good.
Fish are happy.
But if you remember, the corn maze, boys.
Well it looks like we got a little lost
in the sauce ourselves.
- [Jacques] Yeah.
- We didn't create the best maze here.
If you remember, what we're supposed to have
is a row of corn here, all the way around,
all the way around the back, and on this side.
We could not get germination to go correctly
and, Jacques, I mean, what do you think the problem was?
- It seems like maybe we mixed in like too much wood
and locked out some nutrients.
Not enough compost.
And probably water. - The soils still a lot harder
than we thought too.
- This is hard. - [Kevin] It's hard soil.
- [Jacques] And it dried out really fast.
- Obviously that isn't an end all be all
because we do have some good corn right here.
- Yeah.
- And honestly it'll be a fun little mini maze.
But it's certainly not the epic maze
that we were trying to do.
So just wanted to show you guys look,
like we're learning right along with you here at
Epic Homesteading, Epic Gardening.
We make mistakes much like you guys do.
We just make them on a bigger scale.
So I don't honestly know if you'd rather be us
or you'd rather be yourselves.
But what else has gone wrong here or gone right?
I think one thing I wanna point to is the asparagus patch.
- [Jacques] It looks good.
- [Kevin] I think it looks pretty solid.
- [Jacques] Yeah. Absolutely.
- [Kevin] It's one of those plants that,
I mean you've obviously grown some successful spears
of your own.
- [Jacques] Totally.
- And it just looks kind of boring
and doesn't really do much for that first year,
year and a half, two years, three years.
- [Jacques] But at this point, this looks good right now.
- [Kevin] Yeah.
- For it's age, it's growth.
Next year, they're gonna be big plants.
- I think they're gonna be in a really good shape.
Now here's what's kind of interesting though,
this is where the gardener's eye is really important.
Take a look at the firn leaf level over here
versus on this side.
- Yeah.
- To me, that that's an indication
that something's up with the watering on this side.
- Yep.
- Weirdly, this is one bed that isn't on irrigation yet.
So we're still relying on manual watering
and we might just not be hitting that enough.
So it's one of those things
where you really gotta keep an eye on it,
watch it and see if you can figure out
what the heck is going wrong.
- It is promising though.
- So as we go over here,
this is the area of the garden that I think
we've had the most highest highs and the lowest lows.
- Yeah.
- We have this beautiful coat of mulching here.
We've spread this.
We went three three or four inches deeper.
So hopefully that'll help keep weeds down.
- [Jacques] I think it will.
- Build soil.
But, for example, you see this empty bed here,
see a couple empty beds back there,
and then you see these lush and vibrant beds.
I mean I've pulled, no joke,
250 to 350 shishitos off of row four plants.
- I believe it.
- Right?
And the sugar rush peach here is absolutely
exploding with growth.
- [Jacques] It looks really good.
- Jacques, your Bulgarian peppers
have have done really well.
- It's so heavy it knocked the plant over it.
- It did.
- Wow, that's wild.
- I've grown five to six bell peppers on a single plant.
So incredible.
And then these eggplant, take a look guys.
I mean these are pristine, pristine eggplant.
Dramatically, Jacques,
the best eggplants I've grown in my life.
- They look really good.
- I've never grown an eggplant even close to this level.
- I've been getting an okay amount of eggplant,
but this has really made me assess the placement of mine.
- Yeah.
- And I need it to be in full sun.
- Yeah.
- Because these grew twice the size of mine.
- We know that eggplant, pepper, tomato are all related.
And we do know that if left
to their own devices eggplant want the most blasting sun.
- Yeah.
- As long as it's not consistently
over 90 degrees Fahrenheit,
they're gonna be very happy at that 85 range.
- And they're cranking,
- Which they're at, you know, and they're loving it.
- The results speak for themselves.
- Absolutely loving it.
Now, some fails here.
This bed actually didn't fail.
This is just, we cleared it out,
we just put in some cucumbers and pumpkins here.
But these two beds back here really had a hard time.
We were watering into them with nothing planted
which means no roots were soaking up water.
Which means that anything we put in there
was kind of getting a little drowned out
and probably going a little bit and anoxic or anaerobic,
whatever you wanna call that.
- Yeah, basically just like no oxygen, everything dies.
- Here's what I did to solve it.
I broad forked it.
I worked in a little bit of organic matter.
I also through some straw on,
but what we did is I said, you know what, it's August.
Like you said, Jacques,
we get a couple more months of summer here.
My tomatoes back there
which I'll show you in a moment, guys,
they're pumping,
but they're coming to the end of their life.
So I threw four more sun golds in.
- Oh cool.
- I threw four sun golds in. Why?
It's one of our favorite fruits.
Favorite tomato.
Fast producing cherry, great genetics on it.
And it's got enough time to actually throw out,
probably not its full crop, as September, October comes in,
- Yeah, but cherries don't need as much light.
- It doesn't matter, right?
And they're gonna get ripe faster.
So this is to me one of those situations
in the garden, guys,
where if you have that intuition,
you'll actually make this play
and you'll get a lot more out of this
then throwing let's say early kale in
that accidentally bolts because the heat wave's too big
or whatever the case may be.
- Yeah, I agree.
That's, it's gonna be a great bed.
- That's a great bed.
Watermelon went in this bed.
This was another one of those sort of failed beds.
But as we get back here, I mean, again, back to success.
Zinnias, peppers, sunflowers.
And we're getting incredible results on all of them.
- [Jacques] They look really good.
- It's been really good.
And your pepper bed, Jacques,
you've had incredible success.
- I've never grown so many large peppers before.
Like I've had decent success with small peppers,
- Yeah.
- but now I'm getting like the 12 inch
like escamillo peppers.
And I have like a dozen per plant.
- Like a nice stuffing, roasting pepper?
- Yeah.
And I actually have enough that I could cook and use them
instead of just like eat one off every once in a while.
- Yeah.
- So I'm very pleased with that.
- So what do you think Jacques, about my tomatoes?
'Cause you have, you've got a great tomato crop this year.
- Yeah, honestly.
- I have a different approach to mine,
but I think it's my best year
as far as success across variety.
- [Jacques] They actually cleaned up pretty nice.
Like a lot of that, you know, as the tomato gets old,
the leaves will wilt back and die.
That's totally natural.
And it looks like you cleaned it up really well.
- I'll tell you this,
- And the top looks really healthy.
- The top and that's the weird lesson
that I've learned this year.
- [Jacques] Yeah.
- Every year you pick up like two or three
major takeaways from the garden.
You know, last year I think one of my big pickups was
brassicas just simply needs to be planted
earlier in my climate.
- Yeah.
- As do garlic and alliums and such.
And I actually got incredible results.
The best results I've ever had in my life.
And with tomatoes, I think the level of patience this year
and coming in, getting meticulous, took the shirt off
got a little vitamin D, had some music going,
had a podcast going,
and spent two hours coming down this line
and cutting out everything
that was foliage below the lowest fruit cluster.
Anything that was damaged, diseased or dying.
Which, in this case, was a lot of the plant.
And so that's why you see
this sort of stripped bear look down here.
And then beautiful clean foliage above.
Because I've done the best that I can at least
of removing all that septoria, that powdery mildew,
that wilt.
- And I'm eyeing these plum tomatoes and they look good.
- Those of you who have watched this channel
since its inception remember, early on,
back when Jacques was a wee garden hand
in the Epic Gardening universe
helping out while working on his PhD,
- It's true. Yeah.
- we planted this orchard here.
And it really started out as this citrus orchard
with only 10 plants.
And of course it's now morphed into this
honestly little monstrosity of a peach
- Yeah.
- which we had a crazy amount of fruit from this year
as well as an apple and
right now the showstopper are these pomegranates.
I'm actually extremely excited and proud
- [Jacques] Wow.
- that I have these to show off for you guys.
- Quite a few.
- Especially this one here, Jacques.
I mean, I'll tell you this,
there is something going on with the formation
at the bottom that's unnatural looking
compared to most poms.
But the structure is good and I'm very excited about it.
- So eight fruit?
- Yeah, it's about eight fruit on a small bush.
The other one's gonna flower out next year.
But I think for us, what I've noticed is,
if you know a plant is not gonna make it,
it's really better to reset that plant.
And instead of praying year after year
your peach is gonna come back.
Look, you've spent 40, 50 bucks on the plant.
That's not a small amount of money,
but it is a huge amount of time to gamble that
two more years it's gonna be better.
- Yeah. You could get nothing.
- You can get absolutely nothing.
So I would say you're not gonna have a perfect take rate
on all your transplants in your orchard.
You may irrigate the wrong, the soil might be wrong,
you might have made a mistake.
In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to say,
Hey look, I made a mistake.
And go and buy the highest quality plant you can
at the largest size you can afford to do
and plant it correctly.
We actually did that in a recent episode a while back.
- Avocados.
- Our avocados.
We did it with our citrus.
We had to replant a lemon.
As well as we replanted a peach that died on us
or a nectarine.
Sometimes you just gotta make that call.
So that's probably the biggest learning I have
in the orchard.
Other than that, Jacques,
I'm actually surprised at how well the orchard's doing
- Honestly it looks great.
You're getting a ton of citrus.
- Insane amount of citrus.
Insane amount of limes.
I would attribute a lot of the success of this back half
to the fact that the gray water basins are here.
- Yeah.
- And I now have the outdoor shower working
which is plumbing straight to here.
- Oh, that's right.
I forgot about that.
- Exactly. - Very cool.
- So something you're gonna see pretty soon here
on the channel,
so I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't,
is we're gonna be extending those basins
all the way to the end.
Because there's too much water to output in this area.
- It's gonna be fun.
- So it's gonna be a fun, maybe not so fun digging project.
- Yeah, maybe not.
- Maybe it's a fall project when it cools off a little bit.
But Jacques and I,
(glasses clinking)
this is our way to deal with garden burnout.
Walk through the garden, analyze it
see what you did wrong, what you did right.
Don't beat yourself up.
- Yeah.
- But just learn.
- Learn from the mistakes and enjoy the success.
- Exactly.
Till the next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
(slurping sounds)
(gentle music)