Another mid-November day, another 82 degrees Fahrenheit,
really hot day here guys. And we've built a lot of beds here at the Homestead.
More than we thought we would build by this time of the year,
which means yet again, we have undersown seeds.
Which means I need to hop in the Epic Mobile,
pick up a little garden hermit named Jacques and head to the nursery. Well,
there he is, the hermit himself.
There he is. We're ready to shop. I'm ready to drop some bills. Yeah,
I asked Jacques if he had anything he needed and he said, what'd you say?
Probably. Probably. Doubt. You can always find something.
Can always find something. Okay, we're sticking the hermit on flowers.
Be gone. I might do a little pickup here. All right.
Let's see what we've got over here in the edible section in November.
I cannot not not get Japanese greens,
so we're going to get some mizuna and we're going to get a different type of
mizuna here. Looks like this one's called red kingdom.
Great little stir-fry ingredient right there.
Here's something I would pretty much never buy, carrots at a nursery.
Doesn't make a lot of sense. Why would you sow them like this, even?
I don't understand why they do that. Just completely worthless.
Won't grow at all. Now this I'm in on, baby bok choy.
Great stir fry. All right, we're coming in with the cabbage.
I think you have to get a Savoy if you're growing cabbage.
So we're going to get one Savoy and I'm going to get one
Brunswick or do I go with
grand prize? Okay.
Enough said. So my favorite flowers in the winter are definitely a calendula.
I really like this orange one. And I like this one right here.
I haven't actually seen this one. It has a dark center,
this like really nice yellow with orange fringe on it.
So I'm definitely gonna pick up a lot of calendula.
They're actually really good in tea and pollinators really appreciate them in
the winter too. All right.
So Kevin's over there grabbing some broccoli and stuff,
but I've got a couple different pansies. I really, these ones stood out to me.
I like the kind of more intense colors.
And then this one kind of reminds me of the amazing grey poppies.
And then check out this calendula, like that right there for me is stunning.
Got this yellow, this one's a little mixed pack.
So that's a pretty good start for flowers right now.
Continuing on with the brassicas.
I think I have to get a broccolini just because I grew up eating it.
So I'm going to grab this guy right here,
and I need to get a couple more brassicas just to make
sure that I'm covered in case anything goes wrong.
So this premium crop looks pretty good.
We'll grab one of these guys and then the most popular brassica,
especially if you live in SoCal and you are gluten-free,
we're going to get the snowball cauliflower.
You can turn this into pretty much anything. I just want to pick the right one.
When you're picking a six pack,
you just want to make sure you look at all the six of course.
See if we have actual plants coming out of all the six cells,
what the health looks like. Do we have any holes in this? Not really.
So this one looks pretty good. All right. We're here at the alliums now,
my favorite. Now I'm planning on planting a lot of these direct,
but I'm going to buy a couple of these because I don't have the seeds.
King Richard leeks.
Gonna grab one of these and I'm going to grab these Tadornas because I want to
show you something you can do with the nursery to dramatically increase the
value of this. I think this is like three bucks,
but every single one of these you can separate out.
I'll show you how to do that at home. Finally, for me,
just a little lettuce pick up. So I'm going to do a classic Sierra,
just all green ruffles. Let's grab that.
And then I'm going to get romaine mix. That looks good.
Nothing too fancy.
I just need a couple extra lettuce for the garden that's mostly easy to direct
sow. Let's go. Come on. There we go. Okay, my cart is full.
Jacques is looking at some strawbs. Pretty loaded up over here. Choo choo, bro.
Let's go. Let's get on up there.
I picked up a ranunculus. Yeah, what'd you get? So calendula, calendula,
calendula, two pansies,
ranunculas I think they're called. Yeah, ranunculus. Yeah, and then hollyhocks.
There you go. So that'll be a nice mix of different colors. Cool.
The flower papi over here.
This is why you don't look around after you check out.
Looks like we have to do a little potato shopping.
Where's potato papi over there? Looking over here at the tulips. Okay,
I can't resist.
So there's some things that we've grown a lot of like these French fingerlings.
These are bigger than the ones we've ever grown, for sure.
Maybe we do some of these. German butterball. Don't mind if I do.
Stop it, get some help! 99 cents,
99 cents, 99 cents.
The weird part is it''s more than the potato would cost per pound at a store.
Absolutely. But that's not why we do it. So let's come over here.
I don't, I'm not going to go crazy,
but there are some ones that I just want to see how they go. Because look,
they've got huckleberry gold. Yeah. They've got the all blue.
Should we do a couple of all blues? Yeah, I think we should. Let's do,
how many did I put in there, five or six? Yeah, who's counting.
Nice! Good point. I got a major in accounting,
but I'm not an accountant here. Oh man,
you kind of have to go with Norland reds. That one did really well for you.
Norland red is by far my most successful potato variety here in San Diego.
2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Oops. All right, let's check out. Back from the nursery.
Time to plant out the front yard raised beds,
which they've been dormant for a little bit too long, my friends.
So let's figure out how to get these pumping once again.
When I transplant,
I like to pop a finger into the bottom really quickly just to
loosen these up. Yes, it is kind of a shame that,
I mean you can reuse these and oftentimes I put them in a big pile and
eventually we donate them if I don't reuse them.
But it is kind of annoying that they're made out of this really cheap and flimsy
plastic.
One thing you can do to make your spacing game a little bit easier is just rough
place them before you go. So I have 12.
I'm just going to go in rows of four
and take up about four, five, six inches between.
You can plant lettuce pretty close together.
The only thing that you have to think about is the closer you plant together,
the more you're probably going to want to harvest often as like
baby leaves so that they don't start really encroaching upon each other and
getting stuck together. And it can cause some disease issues, et cetera.
So you can plant really,
really close or you can give them even a foot if you want to.
All depends on how much space you have.
Crucial that you come on in with the water wand or whatever you use
to water afterwards, especially on a hot day.
We've had a weirdly hot mid-November, it's about 89 degrees today.
Finally cooling off, but I give these a nice deep drink, especially lettuce,
especially transplanting into a somewhat hot day.
First of all, you want the soil to center around the roots. But second of all,
you just want to cool that soil down cause it's been sitting here unplanted and
sort of unbuffered by anything, just kind of baking away.
So in goes the lettuce and we're onto the next. Next step we have the mizunas.
I think these are a bit underrated but you just have to figure out the right way
to use them in the kitchen.
Which hopefully on a little Kev's Kitchen episode here on the Homestead channel,
we'll do. Jacques, I've been learning a lot from on cooking.
He has a lot of really simple recipes.
Oftentimes they are Bulgarian cause Jacques, despite his French name,
is actually 100% Bulgarian or very close to 100%.
He told me he did one of those genetic tests and his genetics were like 99.9%
Bulgarian.
So he's got a lot of these cool recipes from Bulgaria or inspired by
Bulgarian cooking.
And then I've got some from my Filipino heritage and I've got friends who have,
you know, Hispanic heritage.
And you just mix all these different things together and you get some really
interesting recipes. Of course, mizuna and Asian green,
I like to use it in very simple salads where the spice and
the pepper of the Asian green,
you mute it down with like maybe some oils or some cheeses or something
like that. Because I don't really like a super spicy salad,
I don't know about you guys. Let me know what you like.
And let me know what you do actually with mizuna.
I'm curious because I'm always looking for better ways to eat healthier and all
that. It's kind of funny because as a gardener you think oh,
Kevin must be eating, you know, he must have the best diet on planet earth.
I wish I could say that was true. I sometimes really struggle with my diet.
I love tasty food and, you know, with stresses of life and all that,
it can be difficult sometimes for me to eat extremely healthfully.
So I'm really trying to work on that. So if anyone has any tips on that,
just let me know. But in go the mizuna,
I'll plant them at roughly the same spacing.
Something that's interesting about these plants is if you have one where the
base stem is sticking out a little bit, you can see this part right here,
you probably are going to want to bury it up to where it really starts to branch
out. And a lot of these damaged leaves, you can see this one's broken here,
it's probably best to just take this off right now so the plant doesn't struggle
and try to keep up with something that's guaranteed to die.
Like here's a really good example.
You can see this kind of came undone a bit and I'm going to want to bury it back
down to that point right there to make sure that I give it its best chance of
survival. Otherwise it can easily snap off in a wind or something like that.
So you just want to make sure that you do that.
And it won't harm the plant to bury it just a little bit deeper than normal.
You can see how this one sits a lot nicer now.
Here in the backyard,
I told you I would show you something you can do with any sort of crop that you
get in a nursery that's bunched up like this. So I just did it.
These are the King Richard leeks.
I just did it over here with the Tadorna leeks,
these guys right here. So all you're going to do,
as you can see I've separated these all out and cleaned off the roots.
I turned one little single pack into let's see
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12,
like 15 different leeks for three bucks,
fully started probably at least a month old.
That's actually a pretty good value if time is your enemy,
which it is for us right now.
So the basic process is to just remove it out from its pot.
You can be somewhat rough with the roots and you're going to want to either wash
or brush off all the roots and then gently start to tease these apart.
What you'll notice is they're all clumped and grown together.
So if you tug them, you're going to rip off all the roots.
So you kind of want to find the ones that are on the outskirts and just gently
tease those apart. And then everything else becomes easier.
You can wash these off and then we'll go ahead and plant these right now.
So there's only one real secret you need to know when you're planting out leeks.
And it is that leeks,
the part that you typically use is the white part down below.
But that white part, when you get a harvested leek,
is a lot further up the plant. So how does that happen? Well,
I will show you right now. Leeks want a nice sunny area,
decent amount of growing time.
And what we want to do is take this leek right here.
So we're going to bury this leek at least to this point right here,
which is the base of the first green leaf.
You could make a case for burying it even deeper.
Of course you can just hill it up later. What I like to do,
especially if I've separated out, is I'll do this,
kind of hold it in place where I want it to end up at the soil surface.
And then I'll brush all the soil back around it. That way, at least in my mind,
that's keeping those roots in a more organic,
natural growth pattern than they would have if I just kind of jammed them into a
small little hole. And then spacing wise,
I'm going to go at least about six inches apart.
So I'll probably do triangular style spacing.
I'll do a row like this and then I'll come in and do one like this and like
this. I'm seeing a couple earwigs in here. Get out of here, guys.
Hopefully we don't have another bad earwig season.
But let's get the rest of these leeks in the ground.
Let's give it that magical rain from our fan nozzle,
which is probably my favorite hose nozzle of all time. It's from Hoselink.
And we're slowly going to be planting this out, but sun's getting low.
So what I want to do is show you the coop, which just arrived.
So I know it's been a long time coming up tease - the coop for many, many moons.
Look at this.
We have almost all of the parts just hanging out here in the awning
and also the garage, which I'll show you right now.
The rest of the parts are hanging out right in here.
We've got the cupola for the top of the coop,
all the different pieces of structure.
And what I'll do now is show you where it's going to go.
So we've got to build this. I have to paint and prime this.
Make sure it's in really, really good condition before I construct it,
or maybe as I construct it.
So what I'm thinking about for the coop is to have it go right over here.
But it's only six feet wide and 18 feet long.
So I think what I'll do is I'll have it line up to the back edge of this shed
here. This side is going to be where the run is.
It's going to come all the way out over here.
The hen house is going to be right in this area. And what that does,
that means that once six feet comes out, it's probably only to about here or so.
So what that means is when you're looking at this area,
what you'll see is the shed face, the rainwater.
There'll be a bit of a recess going to about there or so.
And then you'll see this beautiful six by 18 foot coop right here.
What that allows me to do is to open up this outdoor run area and create a
little mini landscape.
So the plan is to build this over the next week or two.
I want to make sure I do it right, because I'm very, very paranoid
I'm going to mess up the build somehow. It should be pretty simple though.
And then I'll build an outdoor run.
And I actually recommend you guys go check out Jacques' channel pretty soon,
because he's going to show you how he did an outdoor run and integrated what
he's calling his chicken orchard.
So you can either check it out on his channel or listen to it on the Epic
Gardening podcast, which just came back after a month hiatus. But guys,
it feels good to be back. I'm in better spirits.
I'm ready to produce a lot more content for you guys,
especially as we go into fall. Let me know what you want to see.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.