a tour of our raised bed garden some harvests we made some things for you to
do this month and a lot more in today's episode of California gardening we will
begin with a garden tour, we will look at all the harvest we made this month
will then look at some things for you to do in your garden we have a recipe for
you and finally we'll take a look at some cool gardening products so let's
begin with the garden tour as you know we were setting up our raised beds and
finally we completed setting up all our raised beds we got some good quality
farm soil our contractor was able to get this in his truck this is really good
quality black farm soil that is a mix of sand clay compost and it looks really
good so we took all this soil and added it to a raised bed so as you see the
raised bed was about 50% topsoil already the topsoil that we had in our garden
and then we added on this really good quality farm soil and eventually over a
period of time all this soil will get mixed in the soil below the topsoil
will also get all the nutrients it needs and we started planting our
Tomatoes we have eight tomatoes that we planted in this raised bed and before we
planted we used some all-purpose organic fertilizer some worm castings which will
help uptake of the fertilizer and for the calcium we went with gypsum although
you have a lot of choices for calcium sources in your soil but I do recommend
that you choose some source of calcium because tomatoes and peppers do need it
now to plant the tomatoes we just made a little planting hole and remember that
tomatoes need to be planted deeper as deep as possible and the first thing we
are doing is adding some worm castings these are the VermisTerra worm castings
and I'll provide a link to all these products in the comments below and the
video description as well we are now going to be adding a calcium source
which is gypsum and once again you can use other sources
I tend not to use garden line because it does alter the pH of the soil but any
other calcium source should be fine and this is some all-purpose organic
fertilizer once again you can use any fertilizer that you like you can even
use compost tea or warm tea every 15-20 days but when I'm planting my Tomatoes I
do want it to get to a good start and which is why I am preparing this
planting hole with some nutrients the soil the planting soil or the soil which
we got from the farm this is actually some commercially built soil so they
call it farm soil but it's pretty much a blend of everything that you want in
good quality soil which is compost and sand and clay a little bit of everything
so we completed planting all our Tomatoes just like you see here in the
planting hole tomatoes are the first thing I planted just because the grocery
stores these days are running out of tomatoes and I do want to have a good
supply of tomatoes in our home garden these are the varieties that you see
here we are trying some new varieties this year and I'll let you know how this
goes for example the slicing tomato is a new variety and there are a couple more
new varieties that we are trying the Bonnie original I have no idea how this
one grows but it'll be a good experiment to find out and the big boy is something
that I have tried previously as well it's a very prolific tomato and the
super-sweet 100 is a cherry type tomato which is also very interesting one so
all in all some new tomato varieties this year and we will see how this goes
I'll let you know which ones performed well versus which ones that didn't do
that good but overall I'm very happy to have planted tomatoes next up is onions
we got some onion sets and it's actually quite late to plant onions I still
wanted to plant some onions just because we wanted some for our own use at home
and by this time most of the onion sets would not be of good quality so it's
important that when you buy onion sets you choose the ones that are
good and we have done this before as well when I showed you how to plant
onions from onion sets you want to make sure that anything that is squishy or
doesn't have a lot of meat in it should be discarded and only keep the ones that
are nice and sturdy and even then you're gonna have some failure you will see
that some of these onions will not sprout into plants but you can just do
your best just make sure that you're sorting out and making sure that the
onions you have are good quality we are also planting some okra seeds now
what I did realize is after I planted the seeds in this raised bed I planted
about two rows and my son was very helpful to plan this out for me a little
bit as to where the seed should go and we're planting this approximately six to
ten inches apart and the rows are about six inches apart so just two seeds in
each planting hole and that's all you need to do and you can thin these out
later now one problem that I did have is we still had some construction activity
going on around the raised beds and some of the contractors put some pavers right
on top of these seeds and even though I mentioned that these are seeds I think
they are not very aware and they are not as plant loving as some of us are so not
really a huge deal but I hope the seeds still germinate and we'll see how it
goes now we also planted some peppers this
season we are trying out some new pepper varieties now I haven't been very
successful in growing peppers in the past few years but there were a couple
of varieties that I did want to try out this one that I'm planting right now is
the candy cane pepper and it looked very interesting the peppers looked quite
beautiful and I thought I'll try this one out and we are also planting another
pepper variety and the planting technique for peppers is pretty similar
to how you would plant tomatoes you basically have a planting hole with
everything that I mentioned earlier the all-purpose fertilizer worm castings and
some calcium source in this case it's gypsum and we are planting this one just
like you would plant tomatoes but not too deep you
need to plant peppers too deep and these are the two pepper varieties as I
mentioned and I'm really looking forward to growing these two newer pepper
varieties this season and as far as cages go for peppers you don't really
need cages but I had two cages lying around in my garden anyways and I
thought it would be put to good use by just staking this pepper plant with this
tomato cage now remember this is the smaller tomato cage tomato / pepper cage
which has three prongs and this is not very usable for tomatoes for tomatoes
you need the four pronged cages but for peppers this is good enough and make
sure that you water your pepper plant or tomato plant anything that you plant
right away because the plant needs to settle down especially with the
fertilizer that we are adding it helps to make sure that the plants are well
settled in and the roots will start forming soon and we also have some
cayenne peppers that we are planting these are organic cayenne peppers and I
have saved the seeds from a previous plant that I grew in the past few years
and this is an excellent very prolific cayenne pepper variety and we had been
growing these indoors just so that the peppers get a good start before we plant
them outside and now that they have grown into a little mature seedling we
are ready to plant this outside and once again it's the same kind of planting
technique that we discussed for the tomatoes as well and these kind peppers
don't need to be staked they have quite sturdy stems so that concludes all our
planting that we did this month and this is our raised bed area once again you
can see that we have a lot of plants that we planted and hopefully this will
keep improving we will keep having some more plants and we also did plant some
fruit trees in the ground these are all dwarf fruit trees and they shouldn't
grow very tall they should just grow to about 6 to 10 feet and hopefully these
will get settled in quite fast
and now let's look at all the harvest we made this month beginning with radish we
had this early maturing radish variety that we were growing in this whiskey
barrel container and we were growing about 4 or 5 radish plants in this
container and we were able to harvest all of these radishes from this whiskey
barrel container and as I mentioned this is one of the survival crops that I
mentioned in my previous episode tomatoes radishes these are all great
crops to grow they don't take up too much space and we also harvested
tangerines this is the gold nugget tangerine that had been growing in a
container this is a great variety of tangerine to grow in a container and it
grows well in the ground as well and we harvested all of these tangerines
we have been harvesting it for quite a few months now and even through March
you can see that these tangerines are quite nice
moving on to tomatoes we were growing this one lone cherry tomato variety in a
container we were growing this indoors and then we finally moved it outside to
this container and we did get a few harvests now the weather is still a
little cool for tomato production but as the weather warms up in the next two
months or so we should start getting a lot of tomatoes not only from this plant
but also all the other plants that we planted in the raised beds but overall
cherry tomatoes are easy to grow in your garden
and now for the things to do this month we will show you how to clean the
hydroponics grow kit the grow box that I discussed in my previous videos this
grow box the greenjoy hydroponic grow box was extremely useful in the past
month and we grew a lot of herbs and vegetables in it and at the end of the
growing season or the growing cycle you can see that there's a lot of algae on
the base of the reservoir the water reservoir and you need to get all this out
and disinfect it before you start growing your next set of plants so the
first step to do is to just clean the algae that you see on the surface it's a
little stubborn to clean so if you want you can use something like a scrubbing
pad or a cloth a microfiber cloth to clean it but I just cleaned it a little
bit let it soak in the water for some time so that it loosens up and after
some time I was able to drain the water and then clean all the algae that was
there on the surface now it may take multiple attempts or multiple tries for
you to clean all the algae that's there on the surface of the tank and a good
way to do this is to use a microfiber cloth just use a microfiber cloth and
then just start cleaning it the benefit of using the microfiber cloth is that it
not only cleans all the algae it also lets you absorb all the water while you
are cleaning it it takes in all the water and then you can squeeze it out
and you just keep repeating it till all the algae is clean from the surface of
the tank now it's very important that you keep the water tank clean and I also
recommend that once you finish cleaning the water tank you also use a
disinfectant you can use some bleach and just using some bleach cleaner here
which will disinfect this very well now another thing you can start doing this
month is to plant fruit trees now if you have missed out planting on fruit trees
in the past two months this is still a good time to plant fruit trees because
the spring season has arrived and this is a good time to plant fruit trees so
that they can take root and they can get off to a good start here you can see our
mango tree this has been flowering and now for the recipe section in this
month's episode and it's not really a recipe but we're gonna show you how we
use all the harvests from our garden to juice it and we have this juicer this is
a very handy juicer and as you can see we are putting all the harvests that we
made into this juicer this juicer is quite cheap it's about 50 dollars or so
and you don't have to buy an expensive juicer I have tried a lot of juicers and
just this $50.00 juicer that you can easily buy on Amazon or Target or any
other store is good enough now when I'm making my juice I not only add all the
fresh harvest from my garden but also add a lot of greens in this case I'm
adding spinach you can also add kale you can juice wheatgrass kale a lot of other
healthy vegetables and greens and some people have asked me a question about
juicing and they are asking me whether just juicing is enough or you know you
need to consume the fiber as well and the answer to the question is you need
both juicing lets you extract all the vitamins and minerals from these plants
and consume it and it boosts your immunity right away whereas consuming
the fiber is also a good choice but it has a different purpose and that's to
keep you full and these times it's very important to make sure that your
immunity gets a boost and as you can see it's a beautiful looking juice that will
give you a lot of vitamins and minerals to boost your immunity
now let's move on to gardening products a lot has changed in one month but when
I went to Home Depot the beginning of this month they had a few dwarf avocados
they also had a lot of mango trees a lot of fruit trees actually the mango trees
can be grown for either their leaves or the fruit most people draw them for the
fruit and there is this Manila mango as well so all in all a lot of different
fruit tree varieties there's this pink tropic guava so Home Depot itself has a
lot of varieties of fruit trees for a decent price like the dwarf peach fruit
tree and a lot of nectarines so all in all great collection of fruit trees at
your local Home Depot but I would recommend that you stay indoors during
these times just avoid going to the store unless you really need to buy
something but if you do need to buy a fruit tree right away then these are
your choices so there we have it folks that was or California gardening episode
for the month of March I hope you'll stay safe and take care of yourselves
try to boost your immunity by drinking fruit juices and eating healthy fresh
fruits and vegetables and while you are at home continue to garden with your
family and these are good times to be together so make use of this time stay
healthy have fun and I'll see you again soon happy gardening