This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we're just going to do the garden update, and the tour, a walk through my edible front
yard to show you all what I've got.
You can see the neighbor's house here.
Just a standard residential house and he has a lawn that he's trying to get back green
again.
Then we go over to my house there and you can see, it's just full of raised beds.
So we're going to go over here and I'm going to talk about what's growing as a record.
I was actually walking around this morning and actually grazing off my garden and eating
breakfast and that was delicious and I saw I needed to clip off some white powdered mildew
off the melons so I just got finished doing that.
I figured I just go with the run through today.
So the front bed, I basically have a mixed bed, mixed culture bed and basically doing
square foot gardening, which I see most of the string actually got pulled up.
But we had actually it basically staked off with string.
So you could see the one foot by one foot squares.
Over here we have some tomatoes from last year that over wintered in the greenhouse.
Some basil, more tomatoes, we got some patio tomatoes, golden purslane, I think this is
perpetual spinach chard, maybe some arugula, maybe some malabar spinach, ceylon spinach,
strawberry spinach, more purslane, some kind of lamb's quarter or quinoa, some more basil.
Then over against the trellis here we have Incan berry or cape gooseberry.
We have some sunflowers that my friend Christian gave me.
We also have some cinnamon basil I believe, this is this basil here, some patio tomatoes
which are smaller dwarf tomato plant that didn't get any bigger than two feet tall.
T his is broccoflower stuff, oh it's forming
actually, look at that broccoflower, leaves are edible too so you don't just don't get
this plant and then eat the broccoflower thing in the middle there.
All the leaves can be eaten like kale.
I prefer to eat them raw or usually juice them.
Let's see here.
Pepper plant here, more peppers there that over wintered last year.
This one is cool.
It's flowering, it's called wild arugula and what I was told is if you pop the flowers
off and I like to eat them.
Arugula flower is actually quite delicious and great for dressing up a salad, gives it
a little bit of a spice.
But on the wild arugula I was told that if I just pop of the tops, it'll continue to
grow and that has been the case.
This is actually, it's planted in a one by one and it's really taken over.
It gets long a spindly, but all the leaves are edible like arugula.
This is a nice comparison here is the golden purslane here.
So this is more a cultivated variety versus behind it you can see the regular purslane.
So the golden purslane actually has some nice big succulent leaves and the common purslane
has much smaller leaves.
So this is the front bed, just a very mixed variety bed.
The bok choy did really well.
If I go back along the back here too.
This is Jerusalem artichoke or sunchokes going.
Eggplant we have growing.
This eggplant flower looks really cool, it's purple.
What else, more sunchokes.
Bok choy here.
Another eggplant here.
This is actually called a, it's a cucumber plant and I got this because it's actually
supposed to be a bush cucumber and actually did be a pretty nice bush.
The cucumbers are actually like a Persian cucumber, actually quite good.
Over here we have a Japanese eggplant.
You can see they're just about ripe there.
So that'd be the first bed.
Second bed here is basically a melon bed.
We have, I don't know, half dozen of melon varieties.
It's growing out really well.
We've had to trim it because of the powdery mildew.
Here's some of the melons here, that's all one variety.
Then you can see like a crane melon right there, crenshaw, there's a honeydew on the
other side.
The next bed basically we have currently planted out napa apollo cabbage and bok choy.
Mostly it's napa apollo cabbage which I eat as lettuce leaves and it looks lettuce to
me.
They're a little bit spiky, but they're definitely good raw.
Next bed going back, let's see we have squash which are finishing up and corn and peppers.
So there we have a variety of peppers planted along the back.
Corn here planted for fun in between.
We did a cool thing with the summer squashes, we actually staked them up now.
So you can see the stake, we got a bad one right here, we need to, it's all molded.
Staked it all up and you can see, let's this is probably a better representation here.
The leaves are every other one and then you can see that's where a squash was.
As you can see we vine it up and there's a squash coming out right there.
So we probably should have done that all along, next peppers.
Then along the edge we have some herbs, some flat leaf, cilantro.
This bed is the wild and crazy bed with the huge banana squash primarily.
We did plant some corn in there that got lost, I don't know how it's doing.
But this is basically mostly taken over with banana squash here and some other things kind
of planted on the ancillary, like English lavender I believe.
Next bed we have cucumbers growing, so we have at least a half dozen varieties of cucumbers
from Japanese cucumber that you see there to standard cucumbers.
I think I have market more cucumbers to lemon cucumbers.
In the middle here we had some beans and radishes that we planted, but we just pulled them out
because the radishes took over, because I didn't harvest them in time and I had radish
flowers and leaves to eat which were delicious but then they also attracted lots of aphids.
So we pulled those all out.
Now we've basically just left with the cucumbers hanging.
We're going to replant in the middle with some probably stuff for the winter shortly.
There's an Armenian cucumber.
These actually, guys, are really good.
I love them.
We did plant some carrots down below which didn't do all that well.
So the last bed over here is my mixed greens bed.
We have some cilantro that's bolting now.
Of course my tree kale planted nine that are actually doing really well, they're actually
getting really tall.
We have some other kinds of collards and kale, I think, I believe this to be walking stick
kale is what they're labeled and some other kinds of kale in here.
I'm not sure what kind this is and then we have a mixed greens bed.
So we have bok choy, lettuce, and some apollo napa cabbage I believe.
No, no, that's just regular, no, no, that's napa cabbage.
And mixed greens.
Then we have this cool plant down here.
It's from, I got down in Vista farmer's markets, edible leaf ginseng, I believe.
That's quite good.
These old beds over here are going to be redone, hopefully for the wintertime in the new format.
They're just standard douglas fir beds that have lasted actually six years, so that's
not a bad way to go if you're wanting to do something kind of temporary.
Mainly in here we have stevia and this grew all up from seed, we didn't plant, borage
which is quite wonderful.
Some lamb's quarter over there.
Tomato popped up over there.
Against the wall we have grapes, wine grapes with the seeds, so they're all unique varieties.
Some chard over there.
This is a cool one, I don't know if I've shown this one before, but this is a kale plant.
So this is the stalk, what you're looking at is the basic stalk or I would call it a
trunk at this point, it's like maybe two/tree inches in diameter around, coming out and
this is kale plant that just over wintered several winters and I think it's three or
four years old now and it's just gotten massive and crazy.
I've never known that kale could do this.
It doesn't through off a lot of edible leaves, but it throws off a lot of little small leaves
and it's still alive and still doing quite good.
It's pretty nice and nice and incredible.
Over here we have some strawberries growing, there's a ripe one there.
Some mallow, I did an episode on the purple mallow flowers, quite edible and delicious.
Over in the next bed we have some tomatoes, so we planted tomatoes too close this year
in three rows, next year I'm going to do only two rows in the same four foot section.
Then we'll go to the fig tree here, and underneath it we planted some lettuce and we have a donor
squash plant coming up.
In the front here we have tomatillos growing.
Below that we have peppers, in front of that we have celery, in front of that we have malabar
spinach and then behind that which is totally hidden is more tomatoes.
Off to the side, we'll be finishing up here shortly.
We didn't get the other side but that's alright, this is just the front.
We have some edible greens, cane Kong and we have some more peppers and some more tomatoes.
So I have about another minute and we'll cover this really quick.
Some stevia here that grew from see and then over here we have the wine barrels on the
front which we have two barrels of cucumbers, two barrels of peppers, a barrel of drew,
some artichoke, some tomatoes, parsley, just different edible greens.
Let's see, chayote squash and to round it off really quick, we have some things planted
under the feijoa trees and some tomatoes.
Alright so that's John Kohler with Growing Your Greens.
Remember you can grow your own greens!