Hello everyone. It's been a while since we've done a vlog episode.
Sorry about that. But the sky is finally sunny. We're doing some gardening.
There's been a lot of updates, this corn is taller than me now.
But today we're going to do a lot of planting in some beds that we have recently
cleared out. The garlic is cleared out, except for this one right here.
The wheat's cleared out, I'll show you that in a second. But Jacques is here,
the hermit himself. Let's get to it. So here's the wheat harvest.
These are sheaves, sheaves I believe, sheaves of wheat.
Not a bad harvest. I think I might get enough to make like one loaf of bread,
which sounds a little pathetic, but hey, it is what it is.
So we're letting these dry for about two or three weeks or so at which point
we'll have to thresh the wheat, which will be its own process.
So stay tuned on that. I'm going to show you the garlic now.
There are a few new additions in here,
one of which is this freeze dryer from Harvest Right,
which I'll show you guys in a completely separate video.
But here we have the potatoes.
So here's the leftovers of the harvest.
Still making my way through this massive crop of potatoes.
Great way to store them though. And then, look at that. We've got the garlic,
letting this cure in here. A couple of different varieties - Killarney,
Inchelium red, German white. I'm kind of over braiding garlic,
mostly cause I don't know how to do it. And I just tried a million times,
couldn't figure it out. But these are curing in here. They're looking really,
really pretty. If you're curious.
What this is, this is the produce rack from Gardener's Supply Company.
It's the nine tier one, kind of nice.
A little old school vibe here in the kitchen now.
But let's head out and actually get to planting.
The first task of the day is to water the tomato and pepper bed,
which needs a deep water at least once a week, maybe twice,
especially as the sun is finally coming out here. We had some crazy June gloom.
So I'm going to show you exactly how to do it,
but first let's admire some of these tomatoes.
The one I want to show you is beauty king. Living up to its name,
huge huge globular fruits on this.
Really nice hang. And they are so tasty! I mean,
this one's basically ripe right here and it's nice and firm, not overly juicy.
But a gorgeous, gorgeous tomato. These guys are ripening up.
We haven't had too many of those yet. But over here,
we're going to be swapping these ones out.
They got hit by so much blight it was really crazy. Still harvestable.
This is a long tom right here. And then I actually forgot the name of this one.
But the Florida weave section right here just got hit with blight so bad.
But then as you go over here,
what you can see is some serious lower and lean power on these guys.
So we've been pulling tomatoes off of these for a couple of days now.
But let's get these all watered up.
Did a little more than watering,
scratched in some horticultural charcoal and some Bio-tone and Garden-tone,
just to fertilize throughout the season.
And then we realized there's no good reason why we haven't mulched this section
yet. So we're gonna mulch it up right now. And
there we have it. That's gonna really help as the summer temperatures come in.
And the best part is we only used effectively one bag of the big GardenStraw,
which is now available on the store.
It's hot enough out here to rock the straw hat.
And we are finally going to be planting some trees.
So I have a couple of stone fruit. I think one's a nectarine.
We have two peaches and then we have an apple.
And basically we didn't plant these because I thought I would have a more robust
landscape plan by now so I'd know where the pathways were and all of that.
But at this point, it's either let these trees die,
which I don't want to do cause they were each at least a hundred dollars,
or plant them and just make a plan afterwards,
which is exactly what we're going to do.
So I'll show you where we're putting them.
So the idea here is we have our citrus hedge that you guys remember.
We got the four and the four and then a couple more down there.
I do have two pomegranates in here. There's a parfianka and a wonderful.
And then remember from the greywater project,
this basin right here and that basin right there,
there's going to be abnormally more water in this area than there would be like
let's say right there.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to run straight down the line here and
we'll put the stone fruit in like this.
And what's nice about that is it's still going to be an evergreen hedge because
this side is all citrus, which is evergreen. So when this fills in,
you know about from here over, you won't be able to see anything.
And then when the leaves fall off of these,
you'll see straight through them into the citrus.
Something we noticed is that there were some aphids on these apples.
So take a look at that. It's kind of hard to notice, but they're there.
We spotted them. So what Jacques is going to do is what is always recommended,
just blast them off.
Just blast them off before we plant in.
It's probably just that the aphids found an opportunistic plant that was
struggling a little bit and they wanted to munch.
Another thing we're going to want to do is take some of that mulch and fill in
this mulch basin. Cause if you take a look,
you can tell it's a little bit sunken down. So if we fill this up,
we get more capillary action as the water flows in from the shower.
So it's going to come up more, spread out more and water both of these sides.
The hole is done.
All we're going to do is just kind of rough the sides up so the roots don't
encounter a false wall, so to speak. So a little hand madock is fine for that.
And we're not going too crazy on the hole.
We're just trying to fit it to the actual plant,
which is right about here. So why don't you help me here, Jacques.
Yeah, let's do a test fit. Just make sure we know what we're doing.
I think that's fine, just mounding a little high is probably fine. Alright,
cool. Okay, cool. Yeah,
let's give it a little quick pop on the sides.
I think it will come out easy, yeah.
Actually we can probably just, there we go. Oh, that's rootbound.
That's pretty rootbound. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to have to do some,
let's look at the bottom. I mean the bottom is not that bad actually.
That's true.
So let's tease the bottom open a bit and kind of open the
whole thing. Yeah, they're not that bad.
It's worse because they are so white. It looks worse, I think.
They're popping apart pretty easily. Yeah. Okay, cool. This is the like,
look at this. This is kind of what we want to avoid,
this huge taproot being curled like that.
I think we want to avoid that. Yeah. Okay. In we go.
That's slightly high. Wanna go a little deeper? I don't think so, because look,
we'll come in, we'll fill it up, we'll mound it what, an inch? Yeah.
And then we'll mulch it like four inches. So I think it's fine actually.
So should we just get the graft where we want? Yeah. Yeah.
We want the graft on the north side and the graft is here right now.
But the other thing to consider is the growth of the plant.
So I actually think we want to break this rule in favor of this rule because the
growth is so strong on this side and we want to even it out by giving it more
sun exposure there. Yeah, I think so. Plus we have this blocking too.
Yeah. Okay. So let's just fill in. Right there? Yeah. Stuff it it all in there.
What's nice is you'll always have enough soil to fill it in, you know? Wow.
It is so muddy. It's crazy. It's like barely, clay test.
Yeah. Not exactly what you want to be seeing, but you know,
we'll work with it over time.
One tree down.
The trees are in and I think they look fantastic.
It's going to be so nice to have these grown in.
But what you'll notice is the little white marks on the bottom of these,
that's a whitewash paint. I'll show it to you right here.
I'm gonna go with a green this time. I want to coat all the way up.
So it's going to protect against sunburn,
especially for these young trees with a bare stem like this.
But you want to go all the way up to the first branch.
So I have to paint all these trees with this gray whitewash.
All right, they're in, they're in, they're painted up. Honestly,
it looks pretty nice.
And you just have to see the future when you're working with an orchard.
So in a couple of years it's gonna look really good.
So we are going to change this bed out cause the sunflower heads are all spent.
But I'm going to save the heads because I think I can use
most of these seeds. The birds have actually gotten to some of them.
I'm working on a full sunflower guide for the main channel.
But I'm going to regrow them from seeds. So for now,
these just have to get chopped up.
And decapitated.
In this bed, we're going to go in with some Espoma Organic Raised Bed Mix.
One interesting thing is if you have a plant that's still working,
just leave it there and plant everything else out.
We have a lot of the horticultural charcoal. Try to lighten the soil up,
just a test we're doing. And then Plant-tone,
gypsum and kelp meal has become one of my personal favorite amendments.
I use it all the time. It's a 1-0-2, but got a lot of trace minerals in it.
So amend away.
So both of these beds have been amended and varying levels of success were had.
The sunflower bed was actually amazing. This bed,
you may remember from the vlog, we'd planted beans,
soybeans and I think champion beans. Either way,
they did not do that well. These ones did okay. The soybeans failed twice.
So we said, let's just re-amend it. And we'll give up on those for now.
Clearly they don't like being in this space or in this bed.
And I'm going to do flowers in this bed now. So what I have here are some suns.
We got velvet queen, skyscraper, which I'll probably put on the corner there.
We'll do velvet queen here. Well, we've got a couple of skyscrapers.
Maybe we'll just go every other here. So I'm going to arrange it
high to low stadium seating style, I guess,
because we've got the south facing sun coming in right there.
And then what do you got going on?
So here I'm going to do three different pumpkins. We're going to do the,
I'm probably going to pronounce them all wrong. The Jarrahdale pumpkin,
the Galeux d'Eysine,
which is a peanut pumpkin and then a strawberry crown pumpkin.
So it might sound like a lot,
but the idea is that it's all going to cascade down and kind of come into the
grow bag area and maybe provide a little bit of shade. Yeah,
especially because I mean,
that is quite dense for a raised bed for pumpkins.
I mean typically you plant pumpkins may be like on a mound like four feet apart.
But we don't think it's a huge deal cause there's a huge amount of soil in here.
We can add extra fertilizer if we need to. And like Jacques said,
it'll just spill,
which gives it more effective growing space than maybe it normally would have if
it was planted in the ground. So you know what, we'll see.
Trying to cram as much as we can in, as per usual. But should work,
should work. I mean, we have 30 inches of soil. Yeah, exactly.
Well, not quite, because some of them, we've got some logs down there.
But it's still a decent amount of soil and we heavily amended it.
So now in my bed I've got nasturtiums, cosmos and zinnia.
I'm going to throw a nasturtium on a corner up here.
It's a great corner planting cause it'll bush over.
So we can just pop one of these out. Honestly,
I don't like nasturtiums from a flavor perspective.
I really actually hate the taste. But from a planting perspective,
they're such a great one to just slot in on these little alcoves of your garden.
And they do so well. They don't really need much at all.
So just pop one in and you're in a good spot. So another thing we are doing,
as you notice, is we did not start these ones from seed.
At least the ones in my bed. Why? Because we didn't have enough time,
pretty much. I mean, there's no other way to say it.
We just didn't have the time and/or we forgot. There's nothing wrong with that.
Great idea to supplement if you just didn't do it,
because otherwise you've got nothing in your garden. So what's worse, really?
So there's some sort of purity type of approach where if you didn't start it
from seed, you're not legit. Who cares? Just start,
do what you want in your garden. It's supposed to be there for you.
You're supposed to enjoy it. And so if you enjoy it by buying some seeds,
there's nothing wrong with that.
You're doing like a mounded approach over there? Yeah, I'm not sure why,
but it just feels right. Hey, if it feels right, sometimes it is right.
That's not always true but I feel like in this case, I believe in you. It
just feels like the right mood, it's a theme. Yeah, I mean,
typically you would plant a pumpkin in a hill like that. Yeah.
So why don't try to mimic it and see what happens, I guess. Yeah,
helps drainage. It's not really a problem here and a little warmer,
which could be nice. It could be nice.
So I'm not being super specific on my spacing here.
I'm just kind of, I guess I'm in Jacques' mood. I'm putting it in.
Where the mood pulls me.
Not a perfect grid for once in my life.
All right. Well, more beds to plant.
By the way,
this apricot is actually producing fruit and it is absolutely delicious!
Look at that, juice level 10 out of 10. Now that the front yard is done,
we have to turn our attention to the back. Like I said,
that garlic is still hanging on,
but I think we're going to do some bush beans right there.
And then the melons that you guys saw us plant, I believe in the last vlog,
they did not do so well.
So I'm going to show you really quickly what we're looking at.
So it's not all of them that didn't do well.
These ones will come along and they're actually quite a bit bigger,
but we lost that one right there.
And we're getting a little bit of skimpy growth on this here.
So we're going to put an insurance policy out and just direct sow right next to
them, just in.
Case. So I'm going to transplant some beans in this bed.
Jacques on the other side is going to do some direct sowing.
You've got Roc d'Or bush beans and royal burgundy bush beans.
So both of those from San Diego Seed Company,
a purple and a sort of a waxy yellow.
And then here we have all sorts of different types.
This one here is purple queen.
We've got dragon's tongue and we've got
contender. So some really good bush beans.
Something I learned when I was at Charles Dowding's house in England,
is that you can transplant beans pretty deep.
So they said it's no big deal if they stretch like this transplant them to here.
So that's what I'm going to do. It seemed to work for him.
Charles Dowding is one of my personal mentors. So I'm going to do that.
And maybe Jacques you can say a little bit about direct sowing beans. Yeah,
so you know, I sometimes will follow the packet.
In this case the royal burgundy actually recommends a slightly larger spacing of
seven inches instead of five on this one. So I'm going to go with that.
I'm going to just push them about an inch deep.
Sometimes what I do is I'll just lay them on their side instead of actually
trying to angle it.
It's a little easier to guarantee that they're going to have an easy time coming
up. So that's what I'm going to go for. Got it.
And I'm just going to see how many I can get in this little slot here.
Should have enough to get at least most of the way back on this little strip.
It's kind of interesting because the garlic, what is that one?
That's Romanian red. I believe so. Yeah, that's the only piece of garlic,
the only variety that we have that still is in the ground because
just seems like it needs a little more hang time. The necks aren't floppy yet.
They're not quite dying back as much as the other varieties.
So I'm hoping I get a little more clove separation on that one.
But some of the hardnecks I grew - still fantastic, still great eating,
but they didn't get as much clove separation as I might've wanted.
It's been a long day. The beans are in.
Jacques and I today were at the warehouse this morning,
unloading a new batch of GardenStraw, which has an extra cubic foot in it.
So go check that out. It's a bigger bag.
But we're going to cap the day off just taking a little tease,
a little quick peek at one of these garlic.
This one here looks decent to give it a shot. Gotta be careful.
It's so deep down in there.
Ooh, that's pretty good. Look at that! Look at the,
that's decent clove separation on that.
I still think we can leave these a little bit longer.
But this is a nice Romanian red.
So I know it's been a while since we were doing vlogs here on the channel, guys.
Sorry about that. Things have been absolutely insane.
But I promise a lot more and maybe some really cool,
exciting stuff that's coming soon that you'll hear about. So until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.