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 always put those in the comments below and we'll try to answer
them for you
Yall these South Anna butternut squash here are just going everywhere I had
been mowing right along the edge of this plot here to kind of keep them contained
but it's been so wet here the last few days that I hadn't been able to cut my grass and you
can see what's happening here let me give you a little perspective you see the
edge of this marigold right there that's the edge of that plot there so they're
already stretching out some places ten foot or so outside of that plot just
leaves on top of leaves on top of leaves I never seen such a thing with butternut
squash before that Seminole pumpkin that is kind of bread into there makes these
things go crazy and I haven't had any disease problems haven't really sprayed these
guys lately got some nice flowers coming up on them right here there's a big one
right there there's a bee in there working that flower this morning let's
see if we can find some little fruits here look in there don't know if yall can see there's a ton of
flowers where you can just hear the bees are buzzing in there working on them
flowers on them butter nuts over here I think we've got fruit or two over here
Yeah there's one right there, two, another right there
so there are three fruits there in just about a little two to three square foot place in
here so if that production is constant among this whole plot here we ought to
have just tons and tons of these South Anna butter nuts I'm really really
impressed with this variety here if you do grow it I would say give it plenty of
room give it a whole plot or so don't try to grow it beside anything else cause
as you can see here these vines are just prolific this stuff right here does
really well in just about any climate but it thrives in these hot and
humid conditions because if that Seminole pumpkin that sits inside of it and those
vines are about four foot tall in the middle there and just don't look like
they have any signs of stopping but I'm gonna try and get out here this afternoon with a lawn mower
and just kind of keep this contained a little bit on the edge here
looky here folks peppers we're starting to put on and
give us some pretty nice little harvest here now I didn't grow a huge
assortment like I normally do because we had some issues with rowing out our
pepper transplants in the greenhouse we didn't take care of them like we should
so really all I got is bananas green bells I got some purple bells but they
haven't started making yet and peppers unlike things like squash cucumbers
where we got to pick them almost every day we just pick our peppers once a week
usually on a Sunday or so we'll just pick them all once a week and kind of
pick everything in the size range you know from this guy right here which is
pretty decent size down to these smaller ones here
on the bells same thing here we got some real nice big ones there that's
like you find in the grocery store there but we'll also go ahead and grab some of
these little guys too cause they're handy cutting up throw in
a quick meal now in the past I have struggled to grow real big bell peppers
and I've been able to grow ones like that for years but to get these real
real big uns I haven't always been able to execute there but I have figured out
the secret you got to feed them babies you gotta
feed them plants and they really like that micro boost in there
and you can feed them and fertilize them good it seems to help to get you them big
old nice pretty bell peppers that are good for stuffing and all that good
stuff speaking of stuffing that's what I like
to do with these big old banana peppers here like these guys right here cut them
down the side put some cream cheese in them wrap them with some bacon throw
them on the grill got some fine stuff right there we also might try our hand at
pickling or fermenting a few of these here never fermented peppers but have heard that
it does pretty good so we've got plenty of them and you know we'll put a few in
our weekly vegetable bags but we're gonna eat a good many of them and try to
figure out some neat ways to process or preserve them yall I came out to the
garden this afternoon and we had done had a red snapper catastrophe and I
should have took a picture of it but I was just so kind of distraught didn't
know what to do and worried and everything else I didn't get to take a
picture of it before I was scrambling to find ways to fix this but as you can see
here just imagine all this right here leaned over on the ground all except bout
the last two plants on that row there it just got to daggum heavy
these things are just loaded down with fruits biggins at that and the
everything got too heavy we got that tropical storm came through here ole
Cristobal and just laid some slow soaking rain down on the ground just got
the ground soft and they loaded up with those things right there bigger than
your fist and they just fell over now thankfully none of the plants broke but
cause they were all kind of tied up with that weave there so it just leaned on
over now I was out of T post so I didn't really know what to do I got some
T posts that I just pulled some cucumbers up on so I'm gonna be able
use those but meantime I did find these tomato cages I can't stretch them out
and put them over here but I was able to kind of just use them folded up to lean
up against this row here just keep everything in I can't get the
stakes back into their original spot we've just got a mess right here that's
what happens when you just grow to big of tomato plant and just to big of
Tomatoes I don't know next year I need to use some t-posts with these guys or
else just hope for no tropical storms that are gonna suck the ground like that
so I think I'm gonna just come in and put some T posts maybe run some string
around that we're just gonna have to come up with something makeshift to just
hold this in place so we can harvest some of these tomatoes and eat them you
know loaded it down like that hate not to get some good tomato harvest off of them
we got plenty tomatoes out here I'm really looking forward to this red
snapper so we're gonna try to do the best we can to salvage what we can here
but that sure did break my heart coming out here seeing that this afternoon
so these things here are called half runner beans but I don't know about the
half this is the most running beans I have ever seen in my life
so these half runner beans are kind of been around for a while a lot of the old
timers used to grow them and folks was telling us about them so we decided to
carry them on the site and add them and man they produce a ton of foliage they hadn't
got any blooms on them yet that I can tell maybe there's a few there trying to
start out its hard to tell if that's a bloom or just a new growth these things
are just everywhere and when they do start producing beans I don't that's
like kudzu in here it's crazy I remember when we planted these on the
video someone said oh you probably give them I was wondering what the row spacing
should be between them somebody was like well you probably gave him a little too much
space between those two rows and now I'm like did I give them enough space
looks like those two are gonna try to merge together at some point they're gonna
have to just run a cultivator or something through there just to keep
those rows separated and now we did plant these pretty thick I will say I
planted with my Hoss garden seeder and I ran over the row twice just to make
sure I got a good stand and I might've planting them too thick they're just
everywhere in here just covering this whole trellis and if they if the
production is anything like what the foliage is we ought to have a ton of
beans I think I saw a flower yeah here we go
looky there so they are starting to flower some here there's some more right
there so we should start to have some bean production here before too long but
I really like these half runner beans so far we gave them a little bit of fertilizer
early on and once they take off you just stand
back and watch and that Hortonova Trellis seems to be holding pretty good
some reason this second row here hasn't quiet jumped on the trellis as hard as
this first row here but great way to grow food in the garden in a small space
vertically like this he didn't have these on the trellis ain't no telling
how far out they'd run so you grow these you definitely want to put them on some
kind of trellis and hopefully we'll get some good beans here before too long
kind of wrap up the bean growing season before it gets hot we get a lot of
questions from folks and one of the most you know popular questions we get is how
do we keep the weeds down and our garden plots how do we keep them so relatively
weed free now I've got three rows of squash and zucchini here I need to thin
them out to one plant every two feet I'll probably do that next few days and
one thing we do for weed pressure we've talked about this on our previous videos
is drip irrigation we're just watering right where those plants are we're not
watering these empty spaces here well we get some rain so nothing we can do about
that and that's when we'll start to see these weeds pop up look down here we can see some
crabgrass popping up there may be a little purslane right there is two pigweeds trying to get started and we
believe in a process called frequent shallow cultivation so you come in here
when those weeds are tiny and small and just do a lite cultivation on the soil
and that will keep those weeds from thriving or surviving anymore and our
choice tool for that is the ole handy dandy wheel hoe here I haven't got started yet but
I'm about to and I can zip through this little 20 by 40 section about five
minutes so it don't take long and I like to alternate between a slicing tool like
the oscillating hoe or sweeps and then the next time I cultivate I'll come in
here with the cultivator teeth and just go back and forth with those two
attachments but you gotta get got to get those weeds when they small like that
can't be let them go big get a big root structure and go to seed gotta get them
when they small and you won't have any problems and that's the way to keep that
weed seed bank down and it will do wonders for your weed pressure in the future
well that right there is the last squash harvest for this plot right here
for several years actually so I did a YouTube video earlier this week talking
about how for some crop families especially cucurbits we don't want
to leave them in here we wanna get them out of here and you see I pulled
them all up stacked them up right there I ain't got time tonight to it's about to
get dark hall them to the burn pile but we'll hall them to the burn pile
tomorrow and burn these guys some of them plants were absolutely massive you had
to kind of get your muscles behind you to pull them up but we got everything
out of here so we won't plant cucurbits in this plot here for another at
least two years maybe even three if we can make it that far in a rotation and
we've still got drip tape down here where the rows are gonna be so the
first step in turning over this plot is gonna be to rip up that drip tape we'll
probably leave our mainline manifold here just depending on what we're gonna
plant here I don't know yet will rip that drip tape up and there's not a
whole lot of weed pressure in here I mean there's a few tall ones there
grew up you know around where those squash plants were where I couldn't weed but I
can take my wheel hoe or my stirrup hoe a little long handle hoe and get in
here and knock these out pretty quick you'd be surprised I can clean this plot
up here shoot in probably about 20-30 minutes to go and have it ready to go
ready to plant something so I don't know what we're gonna plant here yet probably
something like a cover crop but you know we've been using sun flowers as cover
crops too so we might plan a big plot of sunflowers here we might plant a plot of
iron clay peas here so we're gonna do something to give this soil a break put
a little cover on it and not gonna plant what we call a cash crop here next so
will plant a cover crop or some flowers or something to kind of help our
pollinators out get those squash out of the way
we've got more squash way over there coming along and we'll take these inside
wash them up probably fry some of them up tomorrow
look what got in the mail today got our sweet potato plants here from steel
plant company and we got several hundred these Georgia Jet slips right here they
look pretty good they didn't have to go far from Tennessee
here to Georgia so they look pretty good feel fairly moist right there but it's
gonna be about you know probably in the morning before I get these guys planted
it's afternoon now and so I want to put these guys in a little bit of water to
keep them hydrated so they don't poop out on me when I plant them in the
ground and this is a good idea if you're not gonna plant them immediately kind of
soak those roots in some water so I got me a little bucket right here
let me turn my water on
we just gonna put a little bit of water down in the base of this dirty bucket here
and we gone stack them sweet potatoes in there
and I would say you know even if there's just gonna be maybe a half a day difference between the time you gone plant these things and when
you get them in the mail that's a good idea to put them in water so we're just gonna stack them in here like this right here
hopefully I can stack them here almost like flowers in a vase that way they'll
all be standing up I don't really need the leaves to be in the water all these
plants need to be in the water here kinda like that right there so we'll put all our plants in there
keep them nice and hydrated until we get ready to plant them puppies in the
morning and it'll be go time