It's the end of June garden tour, welcome to my garden! These are our sweet
potatoes we're trying out this year. This is the, I believe it's called the
Treasure Island series and they are ornamental and edible so you get kind of
the beauty of your typical sweet potato vine but they're also going to produce
supposedly good sized edible tubers. This is my little Bubbyman I'm growing here.
Say hi Bubbyman! Hey you've got to look at the camera. Can you say hi? Hi! So here's a purple
one over here... but I'm liking them so far. And I'm trying figs again in containers.
I've got Lola Martin here and this is Fantasia I believe. Now I've grown figs
in containers before but because I'm in zone 6a these can be tricky to
overwinter. And I'm hoping just to put them in my greenhouse this winter and
have better luck with them. I lost my other ones after about three or four
years because I wasn't providing them proper winter protection, but I'm hoping
to take better care of these. Say yeah, more blueberries huh Bubby? They're not ready
yet, soon! Over here my goumi berries are ripening up-- and if you want a fruit
which absolutely thrives on neglect, does well in horrible clay soil, this is the
fruit for you. Now honestly they're not the most exciting flavor in the whole
world but the fact that this thing can bear like this and I've never done
anything to help it along is pretty amazing.
I'm really excited about these. I've got two, these are Razzmatazz grapes in
hanging baskets and had an awesome fruit set on these last year, overwintered them
in my unheated greenhouse. I actually thought they were dead
because I figured it had gotten too cold for them, they're only hardy to zone
7, but they are back this year and they're looking better than ever. And
there is a lot of fruit set on these guys so I think, I'm thinking these start
to ripen in about August here, I will give an update on these. But Razzmatazz
is exciting because it is a cross between a table grape and a muscadine. So
it's got the disease resistance and toughness of a muscadine grape, but it's
got the texture of a table grape. So it doesn't have that thick slip-skin and
seeds like a typical muscadine does, but it does kind of have that really
interesting flavor of a muscadine. And this thing is a continual bearer so as
long as, basically for as long as your season is, this grape will continue to
set new fruit along the new growth which is pretty cool. So I will definitely give
an update on these when the fruit is ripening. We've got some potted peppers,
this is kind of my herb/pollinator garden. I wish I could remember the name
of this lily because this thing is really striking.
Some potted tomatoes. So the main garden is over here. This is a fun little experiment
I'm trying. We had a tree go down in a big windstorm and my husband cut this up
and it was all this, it was all hollow, and I looked at them and thought 'it's a
perfect perfect for a planter' so I'm giving it a shot.
My elderberries are going nuts this year. I had to hack them back last year so
unfortunately we're not gonna get a whole lot of flower set and fruit but we
have a little bit going on. The straw bale garden is an experiment for me this
year I've never attempted a straw bale garden before and I was not. I was pretty
skeptical about how well this would possibly do, I just did not expect good
results, but everything is looking pretty good so far.
I've got potatoes, these are willow leaf butter beans, I've got some additional,
these are like a Roma type pole bean. We're getting some flower set already
and they look pretty healthy. And I'm doing tomatoes and peppers and
everything's going pretty well so far. I've got my cow panel trellis back here.
I'm doing cucumbers, I've got all these crates in here just kind of hoping to
deter the critters from nibbling on these while they were young. I'm gonna
get these out of here pretty soon. And I've got a few castor beans which will
get enormous. And then I'm doing some of my indeterminate tomatoes which will be
trellised along this cowl panel as they grow. I'm excited about this experiment--
so you may have noticed like I did that the
compost pile pumpkins are always the best pumpkins, so I decided to just kind
of work with nature and plant my pumpkins directly in the compost pile. So
basically, I'm not a great composter, all we do is just pile stuff up back here.
And when I was getting ready to plant I just scraped the top layer of everything
back to the back section to expose the good rotten compost that was underneath,
kind of forked it up a little bit but really didn't do much else, and planted
my transplants right in here and then gave it a good cover of leaf mulch. You
can see I've got I actually have several volunteers in here still. That's a
volunteer, I planted this- it's Autumn Frost winter squash. This is Butterbaby
it's a small personal size butternut squash, that's a volunteer and that is
Early Prince, just like a jack-o'-lantern type pumpkin over there. And then I've
got a wall of sunflowers behind it. I had to net this off to try to keep
again the critters the rabbits and the deer and other things off but you can
see chipmunks and squirrels like to get in here and dig up this leaf mulch. And
then we can check out the main garden.
And so my daughter did the Harry Potter themed illustrations for this door. She
chose the, Professor Sprout's herbology class to keep it tied in with the garden.
Strawberries are pretty much done at this point and we're kind of in a
transition time between the cool season and the warm season crops. So most of my
cool season crops are kind of coming to an end and I'm transitioning out with
warm season stuff. As you can see-- peas, this is my poor pea that I did not
provide a tall enough trellis, but we're still getting sugar snaps off of that. A
lot of my carrots are being picked now. And a lot of my cool season herbs have
gone to, they've bolted already. Got some Kossack kohlrabi down there and those
will get giant eventually, at least twice the size of this one.
This trellis I've got pole beans planted on one side and a loofah gourd on the
other so those will climb up as the season goes. I've got these swallowtail
butterfly caterpillars all over my dill in here. More of the Treasure Island
sweet potatoes. We've got a tomatillo in there,
a lot of calendula blooming now, I've got some cucumber starts that'll climb up
this little trellis here. My poor little bumblebee guy I don't know what's going
on with him but he's kind of droopy I'm hoping he revives. These peas will come
out and that will get planted in a buckwheat cover crop. This whole bed is
mostly ornamental peppers, some ornamental millet, a lot of zinnias and
see my cilantro has bolted and I love to let this stuff bolt because the
beneficial insects just love these little flowers. My fennel back here with,
a it's a mixed fennel and nasturtium and pepper and endive bed. I've got my
Chinese cabbage really needs harvested here that it's getting a little hot for
for that. And I've got some regular ball-headed cabbage-- a purple type- Omero
and back here is one of my favorites- it's Tiara, it's a like a
baby heading cabbage. I've got a Little Ben mini gooseberry which I'm pretty
excited about. Over here I'm trying some container sweet corn-- so it was sweet
corn that was bred specifically for containers and I looked at it for the
first time last year and it actually did really well for me, I need to get in here
and thin these out, but I'm doing six plants, ultimately I'll do six plants per
container and I've got a white, a yellow, and a bicolor sweet corn, and then I have
my large planting of sweet corn at my mom and dad's place. Back here I'm trying
a no-dig potato, so basically I just popped the cut potato pieces on the
ground and mounded, and have been moundng them up with grass clippings
and straw and chicken bedding and all kinds of stuff so they're looking pretty
happy, and I'm actually interested to see, I'm going to compare the results from
this no dig method to a traditional hill method which I have planted at my mom
and dad's house, I've got potatoes in containers back there and then I
got my potatoes in the straw bale garden over here and that way I'll be
able to kind of get an idea of what how well each method does for me this year.
So again, more carrots, my broccoli starting to bolt. Over here I've got
peppers, peppers in here, lettuce, chard, borage which is just starting to
form some blooms. My onions are coming along. I've got pretty good bulb
formation on some of these- not too much longer they'll be ready to harvest. I've
got- this one's fun- this is a Purple Queen bean. So it is a really beautiful
dark purple pod and I love these plants because they do have this purple, the
purple blooms and then the stems are kind of tinted purple. Back here is, it is
a little bug eaten, but I've got Joy's Midnight chard which is a really neat
one, it does stay that dark purpley-red all season.
Of course my lacinato-type kale here. Here are the potato grow tubs, and I've
never had potatoes grow quite that tall in grow tubs, so really ideally this
would have been nice to grow in like a potato tower basically and keep adding
bedding as they grow or adding mulch as they grow. I'm just gonna leave them at
this point and see how they do at harvest time. This was my Burgundy
sprouting broccoli and I had a green- this is Montebello sprouting broccoli
over here. My romaine harvest is underway, just kind
of cutting these heads out as we need them. My herb/mixed flower bed
here. This-- I'm really excited about this is my Mulberry cauliflower and that
color it's just stunning and I've grown this one in the spring and the fall and
it always does really well and that color is always like that. And then back
here is most of my warm season stuff-- so we've got cucumbers, a whole row of
peppers planted here, some sunflowers and I've got my watermelon, and then what do
I have back here? Mexican mint marigold, I've got a little okra coming up here,
some zinnias. Yeah these are all hot peppers, we go through a lot of hot
peppers here. Snd then over here got some safflower, celeriac, this is a just a
flower mix, more beans. And then back there in the last row is mostly
determinate tomatoes, a few summer squash, some basil stuck in there. This tarped
area, pretty soon I'm gonna pull the tarp off, I was solarizing this to get rid of
weeds. I'm gonna pull the tarp off, I'm gonna do this whole area in a buckwheat
cover crop and then this is where all of my fall planted vegetables will go. But
that's pretty much it for this garden location-- stay tuned because I'm hoping
to give an update on the even larger vegetable crop planting that I have at
my parents house because we've done a lot of work over there and I've not
really been able to showcase that yet, but hopefully soon! And be sure to stop
back for more garden updates. Thanks for watching and I'll
see you next time.