- It's fall here at the Epic Garden.
We had a great season this year,
but next year could be better.
So in this video,
we're gonna go over nine things we did this year
that we won't be doing in our gardens next year.
The first thing that, quite frankly,
I don't wanna do next year or any year
in the upcoming seasons is buy bulk soil or compost
without vetting the source very carefully.
Last year, I bought some compost
that just wasn't that great,
and then earlier on in my gardening journey at my old house,
I bought some soil that I put in all these Birdies beds
back in the early days.
They gave me one season of good growth and that was it.
So what I recommend is,
if you're going to buy a lotta soil at once,
where a truck's coming to deliver it,
you really wanna get a small sample,
give it a test, you can even send it in to a soil test,
and see if it's actually good.
'Cause otherwise, you've just committed your entire garden
to potentially years of poor performance.
(air whooshing) - One of the hardest things
to do as a gardener
is to walk away from a plant once it's done.
These shishito peppers, for example,
are now well past their prime,
as we are now in November,
and they're not really doing anything for me.
There's quite a lot of them on the plant
because I kind of got sick of them,
(laughing) 'cause I ate way too many in the summertime.
So, what I should've done is come through here
and removed those plants when I knew
that I wasn't gonna be eating any more.
Instead, I've left them here to slowly die and wither away
and really just take up space, nutrients, water,
and sunlight that I'm never gonna get back.
Because we are now going into winter
and the sunlight hours are decreasing.
And that's why it's so important to get your plants in,
like your garlic or your brassicas,
like I have in that bed behind me.
And so, it's really a critical thing to know
when to walk away from a plant,
and that could be a personal thing.
Maybe you just got enough shishito peppers,
you don't need anymore,
or the plant is looking very sickly and dying
and it's time for it to go.
So, just remember, it's important to know
when to walk away from a plant when you're done with it.
(light music continues) (air whooshing)
- One thing I should've thought through a little bit more
was the use of this large eight-by-eight spot
that's in full sun.
It's flat and it has pretty decent soil.
So, at the beginning of the year,
I was really excited about growing a whole bunch
of neat cereal crops, like baby corn, sorghum, millet,
teff, oats, and even rice.
But after a whole summer of waiting,
this was all I could harvest.
So this is some rice, and as you can tell,
yields like this out of a spot this big
is really, really awful.
Even though I love experimenting with different plants
in the garden every year,
next year I don't think I'm gonna dedicate
so much prime real estate to growing plants
that may not be great performers in my area
or may not be great with yields.
So, in looking at this space,
I know I can definitely fit at least 10 tomato plants,
some cucumbers, squashes, beans even,
especially if a bunch of them were grown vertically.
So, that would've really changed up the yields
and how I felt about this space.
Because I just felt that this area
was not really a waste of space,
but it wasn't very exciting
because there wasn't really anything that I could harvest
from it throughout the season.
- These rows that I'm standing in here
were one of my biggest mistakes this year.
Now, it might not look like much right now
because all of these dahlias are dead
and we're getting ready to dig them up.
But when these were growing,
this was a major mistake that I made this season.
Even though I'm in my fifth season here of farming
and growing dahlias, I still make mistakes too.
And the spacing between these two rows was much too close.
So the spacing and getting down this walkway
to get to these plants and get them maintained
and get them cut back regularly and dead headed
was really problematic.
So while our spacing between dahlias
is usually about a foot
and we made our walkways two feet,
if I were to put dahlias next to each other like this
in rows again, I would definitely give them
a bigger walkway and make sure they each had enough room
so that we could get to them.
Spacing is really key in the garden,
so make sure that you're planning ahead.
- The next thing you won't find me doing next year
is starting the right amount of seeds,
which sounds absurd.
How could you have a good garden
unless you start the right amount of seeds?
I'm gonna start way more seeds than I need, my friends.
Why?
Look, I was just out here a little bit ago
and it wasn't raining and storming.
The weather can be weird.
You can lose seedlings to weather.
You can lose them to disease.
The seedlings might not look super healthy.
So if you plant 100% of what you think you need
and that's all you plant,
chances are, you're only gonna get about 75 to 80%
of these things to be nice and healthy
by the time it goes in to the beautiful garden.
And let me tell you this.
The health of your seeds from germination
all the way up to the seedling stage
is the most important time
to be really paying attention.
Because if you have any flaws or potential issues
at this point,
it's just gonna grow out that way in the garden.
So I'm gonna start roughly twice as many seeds as I need.
It doesn't take a lot of extra time.
You're already in that mode when you're planting
and starting your seeds.
Throw a couple trays on.
You'll thank yourself in the season to come.
(whistling)
(light music continues)
(intense music) Wait, Jacques,
aren't you supposed to be at your house
telling everyone what they shouldn't do next year?
- Yeah, but we said we were gonna do that sponsor section
in the middle.
- The sponsor section?
Why don't we just sponsor the video ourselves?
Guys, you know that we are supported by you.
Whether you're watching our videos
or you're purchasing some of the products
that we've started to carry.
And I think most of you think
we just sell these raised beds.
- Yeah, we definitely sell a lot more.
- We sell a lot more.
We sell this, we sell this, we invented this.
So what we're doing is sponsoring our own video,
saying thank you for watching,
and also saying that we have a Black Friday promotion
going on where on our store,
if you buy $500 or more worth of gear for next season,
you get $100 digital gift card for free immediately.
And we've got a couple bundles that Jacques, I,
and some other creators have put together
to kinda get your brain going a little bit.
And see if there's something that
either you wanna gift a friend or grab for yourself.
So, thank you for watching our videos.
Thank you for supporting our products.
Jacques, why don't you get on back over
and teach 'em what to do?
(Jacques laughing)
(air whooshing)
- Now that we got that outta the way,
I can now share with you my next mistake.
This mistake involves compost
and it's probably something that a lot of you guys
have done in your garden.
That is using too much compost
and not really using it in the right way
or at the right time.
This right here is actually my first major no-dig bed
that I built, and it was built originally off a pile
of cardboard and a bunch of compost.
Now, this did end up working in the end,
but at the beginning, it was quite rough.
I'll have to say that nothing really did that well.
So let me bring you to another bed to show you
how you could actually fix this problem in the future.
Let's leave that no-dig behind and take a look
at this gigantic no-dig bed right here.
Now, this bed is almost entirely made out of compost
that's been layered on top of the native soil.
What you see here is that most of it
is actually totally uncovered.
And what I mean by uncovered
is that it's just compost sitting on the surface.
And what happens is that,
when the sun hits that compost,
it immediately dries out and it stops it
from being moist enough for microbes and things like that
to live in it.
If those microbes are not in your compost,
they're not breaking it down.
What that means is that unfinished compost
will actually lock out nitrogen from your plants
and end up stunting them from their growth.
So, the secret to actually fixing that problem
is to simply mulch it on top.
You could use anything like straw, fallen leaves,
or wood chips, whatever you have available really.
But what the straw will do is actually create
a little vapor barrier.
And as you water that bed and it starts evaporating,
it'll hit the straw and re-hit the surface of your compost,
making it nice and moist for those microbes
and earthworms to actually break it down
and make it available for your plants.
(air whooshing) - In the spring and fall,
I usually like to grow an assortment of cover crops,
especially in those beds
that are looking a little bit vacant.
And field peas are my favorite
because they grow really fast and they create
a nice, lush, green cover.
And it looks really pretty,
especially going into the fall and winter months.
However, this year, I kind of missed the window
for sowing the peas.
So, springtime is not so much a big deal.
Because if you sow them in the spring while it's still cool,
as the temperatures rise,
the plants grow quickly and there's still
a good enough window for growth
before you need to put the warm season plants
in its place.
However, for cover crops to do their best work
over the cooler season,
they need to enter this cooler period
at a more mature state.
So, unfortunately, my first round of field peas
didn't germinate or they were eaten.
And because everything got pushed back,
if I sow them now,
they are not going to really grow into that nice lush cover
that I was talking about.
So, next year, definitely,
I need to sow at least a month earlier.
That way, I'll have a nice green blanket.
But for this year, thankfully,
I have a whole bunch of leaves and straw
that I can use as mulch.
(air whooshing) - Now, it might not look
like much right now
because it's late fall and a lot of this is dormant,
but this is an area that we've been working on turning
into a native grass prairie.
And we're incorporating a lot of different plants into that.
But what we've been doing is planting in plugs.
And we got some advice that we should plant a oat cover crop
in here to help keep the weeds down.
Which sounded like a great idea at the time,
but this ended up being one of the biggest mistakes
that we made this season.
What happened was,
we planted in the oats and the oats actually did so well
that they ended up choking out a lot of the plugs
that we had planted.
So the plugs that we had planted
that were all these native grasses and native plants
had trouble getting sunlight and getting water
because the oats were so huge.
We actually ended up having to cut down the oats
and even then, they regrew a couple of times.
So it ended up making a lot of extra work.
In hindsight, I probably would've just hand weeded this area
because it would've been less work.
- I'm emerging from a corn field
that we thought would be an incredible success here
at the garden this year.
And in fact, it wasn't a failure,
but guys, it wasn't awesome.
We wanted it to be this huge amazing maze.
And it brings me to my point here.
I'm not gonna really stress that much
about some of my major failures in the garden.
In fact, I made a whole video on this on TikTok
about how things just don't go to plan
a lot of the time in the garden.
And in fact, that's where you learn the most.
If you messed a tomato up,
you get way more information
about how to be a better gardener
than if you actually succeed with the tomato.
So those are our tips.
If you wanna know some crops we also don't plan
to grow next year, check this video out.
And don't forget about our Epic Black Friday sale,
which is going on right now.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
(light music continues)