hey y'all this is travis with hoss tools and this is a little segment we do called garden
goodies it's just a compilation of short videos that we shoot on our phone throughout the week
as we're walking through the gardens harvesting things weeding doing whatever we have to do to
maintain a vegetable garden so we can grow our own food I really hope you enjoy it and if you have
any questions always put those in the comments below and we'll try to answer them for you
so I'm a little late on doing this but I want to show y'all a little trick to do with zinnias to uh
help them not get blown over by the wind make the plants a little stronger stand up a little
better so we got two double rows here I plant a double row so they can kind of lean on one another
you see some of them are failing falling over a little bit wind got them and young has been in
here uh cutting flowers for mama so they uh they might trample a few here and there but no big deal
but uh if you can get these things to have more bushy growing habits than a straight you
know real tall growing habit they'll be able to withstand some wind and stuff like that
and they're right chloe always sitting over there watching me so what you want to do
and like I said you want to do it earlier than what I'm waiting to do here
is when you see that first bud or that first flowers you want to cut it back real aggressively
so let's take this pink one right here for example and look right here see where it splits off there
so if you come in here you know cut it well I didn't cut it all the way try that again there
we go cut it right there cut it all the way back to that point there and what that would do is that
it promote more kind of lateral growth to more vertical growth let's try this one right here
if we can do a little bit better so we see right there where we want to cut it coming here
right here cut that off right there like that and if you keep these things fairly
aggressively pruned in early stages like I said they'll make some nice wide bushy plants
and once they get kind of wide and bushy you can just let them go and harvest them as you
want for cut flowers and just let the blooms you know fill up your garden with beauty and
man usually the butterflies are all over these things I've seen a couple already this morning
I really like these ice queen ones right here i've never grown these before but I kind of
really like the coloration on those in that pretty but uh trim them back hard initially you can
save your bloom there just take the stalk strip the leaves off of them stick them in the water
they usually last inside for a pretty good little while to make you a nice little um table
design there put them in a mason jar put them on your table
prune them back in the beginning and you'll have some nice big bushy healthy plant I'm out here
waiting on it to start raining it's raining a little bit waiting on it to
show enough start raining you might hear a little bit of that on the microphone but I decided to do
a little scratching on my sweet taters spin we planted these middle to the end of may
here it is beginning of september so we're working with about 90 days or so maybe a little more
I got in here scratching on my georgia jets and let me show you what i found looks good
I didn't scratch a ton out but just scratch a little spot there and look at them right there
them's pretty pretty pretty sweet potatoes here I got three nice ones just out that
little spot right there and that's about the size let's even put them in my hand there
that's about the size I want there now you can let them keep going you can make some show enough
big old sweet potatoes if you want to but them biggins is tough to cut that right there
that's perfect baking size and so looks like these puppies may be ready to dig about right on time
uh you know right around 100 days 110 days I might scratch a little more next few days
on that uh other end of the row over there and see if those are kind of doing the same
thing if I scratch around and see that we're doing this number right here everywhere I scratch it's
gonna be tater digging time now I usually don't like to dig taters when it's this hot outside
I'd rather be a little cooler but I don't know if temperature's gonna break anytime soon or not but
I wanted to get them out of the ground when they about like that that's that's perfect size sweet
potato right there this one here is a little smaller that's still good eating size right there
let's see if you let them get too big they're hard to cut up there's perfect size for baking
or um we like to cut them up in little chunks put them in the airfryer
don't want to let them get too wet and uh I think it's getting about time let me know how
y'all sweet potatoes are coming along you done dug them are they getting close about this size
let me know where you at well we've almost picked all of our muscadines getting close to the end of
muscadine season around here in south georgia we've got four or five maybe even six different
varieties here they all come in different times and one of the last varieties to come
in which I don't know the name of I'll show you here in a minute is my favorite
to eat and these last two that come in are the most plentiful of all the varieties we have here
these here you see them down there in big old clusters just growing these massive clusters
and this is a kind of a medium-sized purple muscadine so I've got some of the real big purple
ones and they're good too but these little kind of medium-sized purples are my favorite ones to eat
and like I said there's just so many of them there you can harvest a bunch of them at one time
just come in here and just stick your bucket underneath there and rake them off into it
because they grow in these huge huge clusters like this let me come on down here and I'll show you
the other ones that are the last ones to come in now these are tiny but man they
are bountiful look right here see all those guys there now these are smaller smaller
than that little purple one I showed you earlier they're good to eat tastes just like a muscadine
got seeds in it skin just like a mustache just a smaller variety but you get a lot more of them so
uh you got to eat a lot more of these to get full then the bigger ones but this is a great variety
in my opinion for uh making wine making jelly and stuff just because you get so many of them you
can just rake them off and uh just do whatever you want to with them look there just load it in there
everywhere you can get you a five gallon bucket of those in no time
I don't know what variety they are if anybody's got any clues to what these smaller bronze ones
are I'd sure like to know what kind they are look at there goodness gracious at the muscadines
I need to get in here and pick all these if you know what variety these are let me know
if you got any kind of clue maybe you know it's one of a few if you just give me a couple name
suggestions be nice to know what these are called because I really like them even though they're
small because they just make and make and make the most abundant muscadine variety I've ever seen
well we're getting ready to do a little sunflower transplanting this afternoon got a couple
varieties here that uh we've never grown before doing a little trial see if we like them and if
we do we'll be adding them to the site within the next year or so so I've got this little spot here
half of my pepper plot here right by my beehive there so they ought to enjoy this
got me four rows dug out here took my double wheel hoe with the plow set on it and
made me four planting furrows there about three foot apart or so not super exact with it we got
two varieties here we got five varieties in total Greg's growing three in his garden to try and I've
got these two here one called gypsy charmer and then one called uh terra cotta that's the gypsy
charmer there that's the terra cotta they look pretty much the same as transplants now usually
we would direct seed these guys but since we had just a few seeds and we want to kind of get
the most out of what we had as far as the seeds we grew them as transplants in the tray and um
we'll pull those babies out of the tray there and they should come out pretty easy there let's see
tug on a little bit there we go and a nice little transplant there we'll put those guys
along this row here pretty close I'd say probably six inches apart maybe stack them in here pretty
thick and I should have a nice little early fall crop of sunflowers going in can't wait
to see what these guys look like as far as the head color on them and everything how they grow
how they branch all that we'll be sure to keep you updated with these if you've ever grown any
of these two varieties definitely let me know this gypsy charmer or the terra cotta I think they're
going to be great varieties for us but we're going to give them a try first and then we'll be glad
to share them with all y'all well we've had our tarp on this plot here for about a week now
where we mowed that cover crop of iron clay peas put the tarp on it kind of kill all that off
and uh start getting ready to plant for fall you can see in the middle there
now that some of that vegetation is starting to die this thing's kind of flattening out a little
bit see a few little bumps in there a little bit of standing water for some rain but that stuff
dries up pretty daggone quick I want to show you what it looks like here a week after this
occultation process so if we look down here we can see things have started to die off a little bit
there things have started to break down some of those leaves still have a little bit of green to
them but they're yellowing a little bit the ground here is still nice and moist which is what we want
to see because that's gonna make any weed seeds there on the surface germinate when they germinate
they're not gonna have any light because light can't penetrate that six mill black plastic
and so they're gonna die as soon as they germinate and that's going to give us a nice kind of
weed free surface there when we plant now I need this to die back a little more before
I come in here and compost it my goal is to try to not have to till or cultivate
this plot here I always try at least one time a year experiment with some no-till methods and just
kind of see how they work I think they're a little more labor intensive but it's always
worth to try to see if it's worth the payoff or if the payoff is worth the effort I should say
so hopefully once this stuff dies back a little more I can come in here and dump me a good big
load of compost on it you know three or four inches of compost and then plant right into
that and just leave all this stuff here leave all that root structure there and everything
we're going to see how well it works but uh the breakdown process has begun there and uh
a little cornerback put the bricks back on top of it and let it keep doing its thing so our peas
that we planted along with this sorghum sedan grass here with this cover crop cocktail are
barely hanging on about to get overtaken by the sorghum sedan grass if it hasn't happened already
so we planted iron clay peas and sorghum sedan grass together here and uh this was our weediest
plot so we're not mowing this one we're just kind of letting it go trying to break some
of those weed cycles really get some good weed suppression in there by having this thick dense
cover crop and we knew the sorghum sandgrass was going to get taller than the peas eventually
and shade them out but the goal was hopefully the peas to keep up with them long enough for the peas
to get decent size now on the edges here you can see more of the the pea leaves because they can
get some sunlight on this edge here but even if we look in the middle here on the interior of
this plot we can see some of those pea leaves in there so some of them are hanging in there okay
they'll probably get shaded out pretty soon but I'd say this was a definite success
as far as mixing these two cover crops they seem to have a similar growth rate in the beginning
as long as you can get the peas to kind of get tall do their thing than the sorghum sedan grass
um just keep growing and do its thing some of this sorghum here is five foot tall some of that
in the middle there probably closer to six foot tall you can see how dense and thick it
is in there well there's not anything that can really get in there so we get some really good
weed suppression that's why we like to plant it so thick now if you don't plant it this thick
you can plant it in rows like corn almost and the stalks will get nice and big like corn but when
you plant it thick like this the stalks don't get very big but you get a lot better weed suppression
because it's just it's like a jungle in there nice green jungle and we're going to let this plot just
keep doing its thing keeping those weeds from thriving in there and probably just let it go all
the way until the sorghum goes to seed and then we'll cut it down at one time but really really
happy with how this cover crop is doing so far and this doesn't get much prettier than that folks a
lot of us asking about harvesting sunflower seeds especially since we started growing a lot of these
plots of specialty sunflowers as a couple crops so this is where we had our
joker sunflowers and our chocolate cherry sunflowers and they've done their thing bloom's
died and I came in here and mowed it all down a few days ago and folks been asking can you harvest
and eat the sunflower seeds from these guys and you certainly can let me show you over here
this is a head I was harvesting something from earlier snacking on so you see down there
we can we thumb our thumb across here we can get those seeds out of there see them right there
now they're not huge but you can pop them open eat them tastes just like a sunflower seed
nothing wrong with it at all so yes you can harvest these guys and they're good to snack on
I'm not gonna go in and harvest all these but I will grab a few here and there
the other thing people wonder is can you save the seeds here and replant them well that depends on
if it's an open pollinated or a hybrid variety of sunflowers so this joker here is a hybrid
and if you replant these no telling what color sunflowers you might get you you get a sunflower
but it might not be true to variety and that's the case for planting any seeds from hybrids whether
it be sunflowers or vegetables so just check you know the particular variety you got if it's an op
variety you can save those seeds and replant them they're easy to harvest from these old dead heads
sunflowers here either way whether it's hybrid or op you can eat them and enjoy them as a little
snack so not only do they provide a good cover crop good ground cover you can see we didn't get
that much weed growth popping up in through here as we grew these four cover crops so
nice ground cover weed suppression and even a little snack afterwards