(piano solo)
Hi there! It's Sunday morning and blissfully quiet in the neighborhood.
We had a big workday on Thursday, and of course Erick did 95% of the work, and I
supervised and filmed. But I want you to check that out, and be sure and come back
because I have a couple of viewer questions I'm going to answer, so stay
tuned!
Tomato plants in January? Check! These are all volunteers that have
thrived with our warm winter this year, and this is the sunniest spot in the
garden, where this particular vine has taken off. We staked out the sprawling
vine and removed leaves covered in spots. They still get powdery mildew, so I'm
spraying weekly with Neem oil spray in hopes of keeping it in check. Ideally you
should spray at dawn or sunset to avoid bees, and possible burning of leaves in
hot sun, but with a broken arm, I don't have that luxury. I need help from Erick.
So we did this project first. This wild cherry tomato, one of a few Butingghan's
that reseeded, was spreading out on the ground, so Eric installed a cage and
cleaned it up, and used clips to train it to grow up. This is my smaller parkway
garden, where I have been systematically planting more perennials. Milkweed always
recedes here.
This is another volunteer tomato, an Indigo Rose. I tidied it up, then Erick
staked up the longevity spinach, now five feet tall.
Between the vigorous perennials Mexican sunflower on the left and the African
blue basil on the right, the walkway is always closing in, and I have to prune
them back. Here's my to-do list for today, written with my left hand.
Pruning continued on the trapezoid raised bed.
Yeah! I had to get in there and prune back the
two orange Thai chili bushes. I took off most of the remaining leaves and took
them down to about four feet. I didn't last long though and Eric had to finish.
Here's mine. Ha, ha.
Make contrast.
Elaine from Sunny Simple Life wrote me she lives in Southern California and she
saw the last video where I was showing this green manure that I'm growing. And
she said, "What do you do with the green manure?" In the past, I have sowed my
raised beds with the legumes for green manure and I have a couple of videos a
year ago on that, which I'll put the link right above. Now that I have wood chips,
I can't scatter legume seeds. So since I had all those empty cloth containers on
the side, I would just very quickly sow some seeds in those and let it grow. And
I'm going to do one of two things. I'm going to cut it and use it as mulch and
put some in my compost for green manure, then I'm also dividing them in half and
putting chunks into certain areas in the raised beds and in the garden. And
presumably that's going to spread and the, the legume roots will nourish the
soil in the raised bed, and of course the green tops you can use in your compost,
or just as mulch on your beds. So that's what I'm doing with that. This Pequin
pepper is turning out to be my strongest fighter against the dreaded disease that
has inflicted my peppers.
And I have another question from Jennifer Parler and she says, "Okay, just
gotta ask and hope it isn't a stupid question..." by the way, there's never a
stupid question with gardening because everyone is learning at a different
level. There are no stupid questions, or stupid
answers. "You mentioned kind of as an aside that you don't have weeds. How do
you NOT (all caps) have weeds?" Well, first of all, I have a very compact little
garden, very manicured, very compact. When we first started it, when I first started
it, I had the grass (quote-unquote) "weeds" removed all the way down. Once I did that,
I covered it in I covered it in alfalfa two or three layers of alfalfa that
first year, thick, and it just beat down into this soil here. And now, all of this,
it's all compacted down. It's really just dirt, and it's very hard compacted in
between the beds, and nothing ever pops up. Occasionally I have a weed here or
there, but it's literally, we found two weeds on Thursday, you know, two little
weeds. I'll show you. I left them there to show you.
One was like a dandelion, and you could actually eat that, and one was just a
grass weed.
Now one thing that does come up, that I have to really be on top of, is the, it
looks like really big clover. The roots come out of a tuber and boy does that
spread.
Once you start using four or six, eight inches of wood chips, they just, it
suppresses weeds really. In between the bed it just all gets compacted down.
And the other thing is, it doesn't
rain here. Obviously if it rained all the time, I would have a lot of weeds, but it
doesn't. So we have a little bit of rain in the winter and that's it. Without rain,
and I'm not watering any of these areas where I'm walking, and they just don't
come out and the rest of everything is covered in wood chips. It's kind of a
long answer, ha, ha. So thank you so much for your support, and remember to give that
thumbs up, and watch till the end of the videos, and I'll see you in the next one.
(music ends)