hey y'all this is Travis with Hoss tools and this is a little segment we do
called garden goodies it's just a compilation of short videos that we
shoot on our phone throughout the week as we're walking through the gardens
harvesting things weeding doing whatever we have to do to maintain a vegetable
garden so we can grow our own food I really hope you enjoy it and if you have
any questions I always put those in the comments below and we'll try to answer
them for you
we're excited to have something new this coming year and we've gathered the seed
crop today we were lucky enough to acquire just a handful of this squash
and I call it the al squash but it's gotta longer name than that but well you know
my benefit we're gonna call it al squash this is an old heirloom that's really
went by the wayside so when we acquire these things we're excited to try them
out so we grew 200 feet as a trial now a couple of things that had to meet for us
it had to be productive it had disease-resistant they had to add something
the cause we didn't want to bring something out that nearly didn't add
nothing and didn't have benefits to it so when we look at this it had to
be productive if it had have good taste to it it had to be somewhat disease and
insect resistant and it met all those qualifications
now the productive part of it I want you to look at here this came off of 200
rows I mean we had two 100-foot rows that's a total of 200 foot of one row
and look at what we got off of that now we've eaten a few of them there so there
was a few more added to this but this morning we went through there and we got
we left some culls out there there were some that didn't meet you know that was
misshaped or whatever we left in the field these is what we considered the good
ones that come out there and man look how much of a harvest and two 100 foot
rows now we had them on drip but I'm telling you I was blown away with how
productive they were also they really good to eat now these be in the Peppo
type squash they have really short vines they don't
sprawl out a lot so doesn't take a lot of room to grow them and also they have a fairly
short growing season you don't have to cure them when you harvest them you can eat them
now when they're ready to harvest they look just like this right here they have
some green on them the belly will be orange and they will start getting some
orange on them when they get purely when they get all the way ready
and you put in the storage they turn a kind of bright orange but you can eat
them when they're like this right here this one could turn continue to turn a
solid orange they store probably six to eight weeks
ready-to-eat straight off the vine like this right here we've been eating them
and they're really good so there you have it something really excited about this year
al squash you see that right there that's the last of the yellow squash and
zucchini for this year just picked what little bit we had left out there the
heat and the pickle worm was just getting after them too much so picked
what was left cut our losses and gone enjoy what we can out of it we don't can
squash but we sure enough do like to eat it when it's fresh so on the menu
tonight is some BLTs fried squash and eggplant we got us some black krim
tomatoes here we're gonna use on our BLTs and got our eggplant squash ready right
here now if you gone fry squash or eggplant it's a real good idea to come
in here you have anywhere from 15 30 minutes before you plan on bread in it
and salt and pepper it and what that's gonna do is it's gonna make these things
sweat a little bit it's gonna give a little moisture there and just make that
flour or whatever using for breading stick a little better we're gonna use whole wheat flour
on these so I come in here with some fresh ground black pepper some fresh
ground Himalayan sea salt and a salt pepper good and you can see that
moisture coming out of them now and it's gonna make that whole wheat flour stick really
good we've been using a lot of this King Arthur whole wheat flour makes a real
good breading eggplant especially after this because eggplant is really really
dry when you coat it and so when you you see that moisture coming off
when you salt it like that you get some moisture coming out of it makes that
batter stick a nice little fries there now my eggplant I like to cook little worm
tried to get in that one don't let them get too big they get kind of pithy and
spongy so we like to cut them up about this size you do a lot of different
things with eggplant we really like it making fries out of them like this so BLT's
fried squash eggplant fries can be some good eating tonight folks it's sweet
corn harvesting time this is our Plot of temptress quad sweet corn that's a
bicolor corn now it is weedy in there I know I got some issues I got to take
care of once I'm done with this corn this stuff is ready to pick we've been
coming in here getting it out here you can see the most silks is dried up like
that that means it's time to get it so we've been in here getting it I done
got about six and a half seven of the eleven rows I'll show you what we got over
here so we've been getting about a little over a five gallon bucket per
30-foot row loading up here and I don't know if I'll pick it all today but I got
at least half of it picked so we're gonna put this up we're gonna cream this may
whole kernel a little bit of it and we gonna put it up in the freezer now you know I
preach to you all the time about how to spinosad works great own corn earworms
and it does I didn't have a single ear worm on my first crop but sometimes the
weather just don't always cooperate with you and as this stuff was getting ready
to the last two weeks I swear we had a little shower bout every afternoon
and I didn't get to spray this but about one time whereas I should have been
spraying it you know at least twice a week when it gets hot like this and that
worm pressure builds up so what we got here is we've got a little bit of worm
damage on the ends there let me get that fly out of there so you can see just on the tips here now
city folks won't eat this corn but if you like us and you grow it up in the
country you know that right there ain't gonna hurt nobody
we'll just take a knife we're gonna cut off that tip anyway when we go to cream
it and it'll be just just fine so we're not gonna sell any of this corn because like I
said them city folks won't eat it but us country folks we know better and we'll
eat the fire out of this right here look up nice full ears they're pretty
bicolor corn already filled out nice and good there we've had a little bit of
this on the cob I snuck a few ears this weekend and boiled some this is some fine
eating sweet corn so we go cream this up freeze it up and we'll have plenty of
sweet corn to eat we'll try to take you along the ride there as we kind of process this
bit so that's our second plant the sweet corn probably won't plant another
one until end of August we'll plant one more crop this has made me a believer in the
fact that you can succession plant this stuff year-round if you got irrigation
you can feed it with drip tape you keep fertilized
you can grow this stuff in the heat worm pressure is gonna be a little bit higher
but it can be done so we can at least get three sweet corn crops this year and
I believe a fella could get four or five if he tried real hard
so got us a little corn station a little corn process station set up
underneath the garage here let me turn this fan off so yall guys can hear me
need you a good fan if you're gonna be doing this especially if you in the south and got gnats
flies and everything else we bout alittle over half way through that first picking we
did which was a little over half that thousand square foot plot and what I'm doing
is I'm just shucking them here got me a little bucket I can keep all my trash in
here I've been known to make a mess doing this I might have to blow this off later
or else we will have flies and stuff everywhere but anyway got me a bucket shucking bucket
right here and got my corn right here just kind of piling it up gone try to
shuck a majority of it get them flies off of there and then we gone come in here and silk it
we got our corn silking brush right here we got these on our website
nice little tool it's got real soft bristles on it use a brush with too hard
bristles you gone booger up your corn bad just need your nice soft brush good corn silk
brush right there made in the USA that will see many ear corn it's gonna see
many more ear tonight some of these ears don't look quite as long as you'd expect
that's because some of that worm pressure we had we had to cut the tips
off of them but considering that we've got some fine-looking corn right here
and I believe once we get it all cut and cream and everything we will have a good
little freezer full so this temptress corn is looking good I have or I will
admit I have snacked on a ear or two raw here and there just to keep my energy up
and nothing wrong with this stuff here this ol quad sweet corn is good
it's just something about bicolor corn I like white corn I need to cut that out
right here I like white corn I like yellow corn just something about this
bicolor corn man it just looks good and it is good so you know next step after
shuckin will be silken and thern it'll be creaming time it's time for a little
update on our sunflower showdown 2020 here see we're starting to get some
blooms on up there and this is a competition we're doing several other
YouTube channels we'll tag them in the description here for this video so this
is our American giant hybrid sunflowers and as you can tell they have started to
bloom nice beautiful blooms wailing up there the bees have been just all over
these things this morning I quit pruning the side leaves because felt
like they were tall enough I didn't need to do that anymore but you can see we've
got nice and cleaned up down here along the base of this row got that drip
irrigation feeding them very well I've been letting the drip run overnight on
these guys every time I water them bout every 2 or 3 days these things can just
soak up some water so we've been laying the water to them we fertilized them one
more time with some of that complete organic fertilizer kind of threw some
soil up around the base of those stalks that kind of helps stabilize them a
little more I got this one little nub right here
my son Abram was helping me prune some of these lateral limbs a few weeks ago
and he accidentally cut the top out of one of them
that one there it may make some blooms on the lateral shoots but uh we got 39
more of them here to count on these right now are about nine feet tall if
you go to the top of that bloom up there and I presume that they're going to keep
growing every picture I've seen of everybody else's from our customers and
stuff looks like these things will just keep growing and growing and getting
taller so about nine feet now and hopefully we can see them get on up
there in the teens as far as height goes the leaves on these things are
absolutely massive let me show you put my hand on this guy and you see how big
those leaves are they're huge the nice big leaves and just you know we grown
these things for the competition but I just really really like this variety and
I can't wait to uh next year maybe or maybe even this year I might plant me
several rows of these almost a whole plot of them they're just so pretty and
if I plant them again and not doing the competition I'll probably leave those
bottom limbs so we just get some nice coverage there
shade out some weeds and stuff but super happy with our giant sunflowers so far
and y'all make sure y'all go check out all the other channels involved and see
how theirs are growing I know many of the others is already blooming as well
and hopefully we all grow some real tall pretty giant sunflowers here we always
get questions what do I need to do after my garden is quit making in the
springtime our tomatoes our peppers and all that is gone it's middle of the summer time
what do I need to do now today I'm gonna give you three options of what you can
do when those crops are gone to fill in that gap before with the fall gardening
season starts number one is sunflowers look at these babies right there
we've used sunflowers as a cover crop but they also give you the wonderful
flowers for cut flowers and I always like to mix it up a little bit put a few
different colors in there these babies grow fast you can plant them plant them
thick they gross shade out your weeds so it's a
cover crop slash cut flower best of both worlds next is the buckwheat now this is
standalone cover crop and the pollinators just absolutely love it you
can see the bees flying around them there now buckwheat it's great because
it grows fast shade out those weeds it's easy to cut in makes a good cover crop
and it loves the heat so that's a good one for the summer time also and lastly
number three iron clay peas iron clay peas or a legume and what that means
they attract nitrogen out of the atmosphere and attach it to the roots of
these plants so you get free fertilization from Mother Nature so we'd
love to grow these in the middle of summer times they like the heat also we
grow them they easy to cut in and when we cut them in we've got that nitrogen in
the soil that waits on our other crops our cole crops have already got nitrogen
in there waiting for them it's a great soil builder and all three of these
cover crops here in zone eight you can plant up to heck probably the first of
September so there you have it these heat loving plants cover crops cut flowers
that you can grow in the summertime fill that void between your spring garden
and your fall garden yall check this out right here this is a newly planted cover
crop of iron clay peas this is where we had our Avalon sweet corn in the spring
and we got us a good nitrogen fixing cover crop down there we we planted
these on a YouTube video which will be upcoming in the next few days you can
see how we planted these and we'll talk a little bit more about our cover crop
strategy here but really happy with the stand we got here coming up really nice
we always like to plan our cover crops really really thick and watered these
guys in good after we planted and rake them in and got us a good stand there
should make some nice dense ground cover throughout the summer months here
and we can turn around and some cold crops there come fall once it
cools off and late September early October or so will be doing some more
cover crops over here that's where we had that temptress corn I showed you
it's it's been mowed down and we'll let all that break down a little bit and go
in there and cultivate that get another cover crop down so cover crops going in
everywhere we got our sunflower cover crop over here and on another upcoming
YouTube video I'm going to be showing you how we inter-planted a flower cover
crop called lacy a celia in the middle of these so we can
kind of get some ground cover in these pathways here you see there's two little
lines there that's where we took our seeder and planted some of this lacy
phacelia cover crop which is supposed to be just
awesome for the soil so lots of good cover crops coming in that way back
there we still got to pull up one row of tomatoes we'll be planting more cover
crops and cover crops everywhere to rehab our soils during these hot summer
months when we can't grow a whole lot