so what do you say we spend a little time in the garden today all right all right all right i don't
know about where y'all are but where we are here in south georgia it has been cold and it has been
windy now i can't take as much cold as some of y'all can but 35 degrees down here in a 20-mile
hour wind is cold and we haven't made any garden videos in about a week or so because it's just the
weather hasn't cooperated it's either been raining it's been too cold for me to want to get out here
or the wind's been blowing 20 miles an hour and you couldn't hear me because of the wind so
finally got a decent day out here supposed to rain tomorrow we got a decent day where it's warmed up
a little bit and we can get out here in the garden need to harvest some things today we need to do a
little thinning on our onions and just kind of see how a few things are going in the garden
let's start off here with some of these turnip greens if we need to harvest this is a variety
called all top turnip and the name suggests it doesn't make a root at all but it does make up
that's a decent size of the root there now i'm not a huge fan of turnip roots so i don't know if i'll
eat these or not may find somebody who does like turnip roots but these things produce a lot more
top consistently and are more of like a cur cut and come again crop as opposed to a standard say
purple top turnip now we transplanted these but you can direct seed and we transplanted
these because dad had grown some transplants out in the greenhouse and had some extras and they
were a little slow to grow at first because we've had such a cooler than normal winter
and seems like it's raining every three or four days i really haven't been able to fertilize
things as much as i'd like to um you know i don't really want to be pushing a lot of water injecting
a lot of water through this drip tape here if it's already wet and the ground's pretty wet right now
and with the cold weather they don't the plants don't respond to the fertilizer
like they do when it's a little warmer so these have been pretty slow growing but we
finally got some decent leaves here enough to harvest a lot of times with these guys
as opposed to something like collards and i think it's just because the leaves a little more tender
i'll get a lot more pest damage on these or i have to be a lot more proactive about spraying them
now i haven't sprayed these with anything in the last few weeks
you can see there we got a few little holes in that leaf there but not a lot of damage and uh
i'll eat that right there all day nothing to worry about but i have seen situations where the bugs
would come in here and just clean these things out so we have to keep an eye on them and be kind
of proactive with spraying if we start seeing some serious problems so this all top turnip is
kind of it's a little milder than a traditional term to me it tastes more like a mustard green
than it does a turnip and when i cook greens i don't like i know a lot of people they like to
cut up the roots and put them in there i'm not really a big fan of that i just like the greens
like i mentioned this is a cut and come again variety so we can just uh we don't have to pull
them up we can just cut them and the leaves will come back so i'm getting a good little
harvest of these today just come in here kind of cut them off at the base some of these leaves are
a little bit yellowed at the bottom we'll sort those out when we go to clean these things up
throw those away we're going to just come in here and cut us a good mess of them
we got this guy here we sacrificed to show that root
but i think a basket full here probably do us a good little mess of turnip greens
be nice for these cool nuts we're having here so i'm gonna work my way along
this row here and see if i can't fill up this basket because i know that today holds more
yeah so much more
so much more well we didn't make it all the way to the end of the road but we got us a nice little
mess here that's what we say here in the south some people use actually quantitative measurements
to tell you how much they harvested but uh down here we just said we got a mess that just means
we got enough to get a pot hot and uh cook a pot of green so we got us a mess here another thing
i like about these all top tournaments whereas traditional turnips can have some little spines
on the leaves there and be a little prickly these have a few but not near as much as a traditional
like purple top or a white turnip um so the leaves are a little more tender and you don't
have a lot of those spines on them and uh just my favorite turnip to eat we hear that from a lot of
our customers too if you give these a try i think you'll uh like these greens a lot better than the
other varieties now let's talk about our onions here behind me so we've got an onion trowel going
on with about i think eight different varieties of short day onions which is what we plant
down here in the south short day onions they start bulbing when the day length reaches 10
to 12 hours so some of these we plant in late october some we planted early to mid november
some of the ones i'm about to show you are the ones we planted in late october
and we're starting to see some bulbing happening there now right now just check my phone we're at
about 10 hours and 48 minutes of daylight per day so you know the boiling starts between 10 to 12
hours but you kind of figure on the longer end of that for most of these so the ones we planted
later aren't showing any signs of bulbing yet and we can still kind of pump the fertilizer to those
these ones that are bulbing we're not going to give those any more fertilizer just going to let
them do their thing hopefully we've gave them enough thus far got some good vegetation there
to make some big bulbs so let's take a look at some of these we need to thin out and give
room for the ones we're going to leave there to make some nice big softball sized onions so this
here is the first row of onions we planted back in late october and this is a variety called plethora
i've been really happy with it so far uh there's a fellow down the road that bought his onion plants
from a local feed and seed store planted before i did and mine have now outpaced his i really really
like this variety i know he didn't plant this variety because they don't have it at the feed
and seed store this is one we carry on our website and uh we grew our own transplant for these
you can see there that the onion is starting to boil bulb the bulb is starting to enlarge there so
it's entered the bulbing phase which means that it won't produce much more if any vegetation
here it's just going to devote all its energy to this bulb now now some people have asked do you
wring your onions or scoop the soil away from the base of the onions
and i don't do it intentionally sometimes it will happen as we're coming through here and kind
of weeding with our single time cultivator but i don't purposefully do it the theory is that you're
giving a path of least resistance there to that bulbs that can get larger but this soil is pretty
soft and as these things grow they'll kind of push yourself up and outwards out of the soil so it's
nothing i ever really plan to do uh if it happens when i'm weeding then it happens if it makes you
feel better go for it but um i don't ever really purposefully get out here and do it so we plant
these things pretty thick on purpose we like to come in here and steal some of these green onions
and we also like to kind of thin them out and cull some so we leave these here that look like
have a little more promise to make some massive softball sized onions and pull some of these
smaller ones in here that are a little bit behind these you know the transplants could not been
as strong could be several reasons why this one isn't quite as big as this one
i think they're all probably eventually get the same size we'll go ahead and get some
of these out of here so we'll come in here and pull every other one like this one right here
and use those as green onions eat them raw as a snack
or put them in soups stews all kind of good stuff like that
so we'll take these that were thinning out here and we'll just clean them up a little bit
cut those roots off the bottom of them nice nice good root system there
kind of pull back some of these dead leaves here
trim that off a little bit and then i won't save this whole green top here because it doesn't fit
very well in the fridge so what i'll do i'll just come in here and uh get my knife around it
just cut them like that and then we'll put those in a little bag in the fridge
and those will store for at least a week or so and we'll eat them before then
a little dirt on there but uh that's a dang fine onion right there nothing wrong with that
so we'll get every other one down this row here throw them in this basket throw them in the fridge
have some nice fresh onions while we're waiting on these guys to get really really big while we're
out here i wanted to show you guys my spinach we put this where our basil suffered to the cold
this is our avenger spinach yes we planted it real thick in there but uh i'm not going to
thin it just looks kind of pretty to me hopefully it'll get nice and filled out there between that
double row starting to get some true leaves on it right there and uh man even though it's been
cold this avenger spinach germinated super super well really happy with that and looking forward
to eating a bunch of that and we planted some more spinach over here in this no-till plot you
might have seen that video abram helped me plant a row of spinach here this is our fan tail spinach
and this is he planted it so he um was very very liberal with the seed application there
we ended up with a decent little straight row there and filled out nicely and that's starting
to put on a few true leaves as we see there so uh that looks promising good germination here
in the no-till plot and also these vulture beets that abram planted have came up well
i see a few little spots in there but uh i have to give it to him he did pretty good sprinkle
along that row there a few little weeds we need to pull out of here but uh looks like we're gonna
have a good stand of beets and spinach in our no-till plot and for the rest of the no-till
plot we've harvested just about everything out of here that we planted in the fall there's a few
heads of cauliflower there i'll show you in just a second a few heads of red cabbage over there
everything else has been harvested chopped and dropped and we'll soon come in here with another
big load of compost except on that end there we'll let the spinach and beets do their thing
with the rest of this we'll come in with another thick few inches of compost
and just continue our no-till experiment here now we've got all the white cauliflower out of
here we got all the yellow flame star cauliflower out of here and this purple was the last to mature
and this is my last good one right here the latest one to the party they end up making
a pretty decent head considering we didn't have a whole lot of nutrient inputs in this plot and
right there make a nice little snack nice little healthy side dish there so this variety is called
graffiti and sometimes you grow these and they're real dark purple sometimes they're a little
lighter i think the colder the winter it seems like the uh you get a little discoloration there
whereas uh if it's a little warmer it seems like they're a little more dark purple but
either way dark purple light purple anytime we can eat something that's got some color to it we
know it's full of good antioxidants and gonna be good and good for us so not a whole lot going on
in the garden right now considering the weather we've been having i've been absolutely itching to
plant another round of english peas and direct seed a few more cool weather things but man
with these spells we've been having just been a little bit too nervous to do it because worried
i wouldn't get that great of germination with some real cold soil temps uh looks like tater
planting might be pushed back a little bit this year uh doesn't look like i'm being wanting to
get those in the ground on february 14th like i normally do and like if it keeps being cool it's
going to push our whole spring planting schedule back a little bit which is fine you know we'll
be prepared for it but you know we'll just have to see it doesn't look like it's going to really
warm up anytime soon still having frost probably every week they're talking about we could possibly
even get some snow that's coming up friday but we are able to get out here and still harvest
some goodies that we planted in fall take care of our onions a little bit thin some stuff out and
enjoy a lot of good vegetables from the backyard garden so let me know how your garden is doing out
there are you still harvesting some stuff from fall maybe you've got onions in the ground that
are starting to bulb like we do let me know how those are going i know a lot of you are itching
to get some plants or seeds in the ground and the cold weather may very well be holding you back a
little bit like it is here i'll put some links below to all the varieties we harvested today so
you can head on over the website and check those out if you enjoyed this video make sure to give me
a big thumbs up don't forget to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already and ring that bell
so you get notified every time we come out the new video and if you did enjoy this one check out
these other two videos right here i think you'll really enjoy those as well we'll see you next time