I've been wanting to do this for a while and I touched on it in my biodiversity
episode in the last season of Late Bloomer,
but I love when you have a small space garden to mix it up. When I was in
England last year, of course the focus was on flowers in most of the gardens I
visited, but everything was so mixed up, heights and colors and shapes and sizes,
and I came back with this desire to completely mix it up. And I also got the
bug from Epic Yard Farm in Phoenix. Of course, Jacq Davis loves to mix things up
and keep things really interesting and compact and densely planted. I just
wanted to go through my garden today because we're not having a work day this
week. Eric is doing some traveling and I wanted to give you an idea of the crazy
wild of mixing it up I did this year in my garden, some of which happened by
accident, volunteers, some of which was planned. So, here we go.
Now this is a volunteer potato. This is the Sweet Annie I planted. This little pepper
packs a punch.
Oh, what do we have here? Those little black dots are pheromones that are scent
glands that attract the female. And this is the beauty of growing milkweed,
because you turn around in your garden and you see one of these beautiful
creatures that has just eclosed from its chrysalis.
Not sure what that is. German chamomile is growing out of the strawberry pot.
These petals are edible and the sweetest edible flower you'll eat.
Now we have a damselfly, or dragonfly, which is a beneficial insect right here.
In this pot we have a tomato, sweet potato..
There were sweet potatoes growing in these pots and I cut all the leaves back
because they looked terrible so the sweet potatoes are coming back. I have
basil and tomato over here. I have, I believe this is garlic with a little,
what's left of a pepper plant. This is a volunteer squash plant that Eric
repotted when I was gone. He putted it into here and there's something else
growing in here, some kind of flower I think.
These are my green manure legumes starting to grow back after being cut
back, and in each one of these pots right in the middle I put a squash seed. We'll
see what happens with that. This is chard left over from the winter.
I get sun in my back driveway in this spot from about May, June, part of July, so..
These are my asparagus pots, I have five of them, and as you know asparagus does
nothing for nine or ten months out of the year and then it sprouts up in the
spring, and so I thought let me use the surface of those pots to grow arugula. So
I've been eating that for breakfast every morning and now it's getting
hotter and it's all starting to bolt so that's pretty much done, but what's
interesting is in almost all of these pots I have a volunteer winter squash
coming up. I suppose the seeds we're in my compost. I don't know, but I've got one
here, I got one in here, I've got a big one here coming up in this pepper plant, and
a big one coming up in this sweet potato planter in the back. These are my sweet
potato planters. We cut all of the vines and the leaves back because they looked
horrible and as they were coming back, I decided
to just put my new pepper seedlings in there to get them up off the ground and get a
little more sun. So I have about 37 of those pepper seedlings. I don't know how
many of these things are gonna do well, but we'll see, but all together we have
sweet potatoes, winter squash, arugula, asparagus, peppers,
and I have two apricot sprouts here from my neighbor's apricot tree. I'm sitting
under my only birch tree. This and my pine tree are really my only two trees that
aren't fruit trees. And I love this birch tree because it's pretty, I have my
hummingbird feeder here, my hummingbirds nest in these bushes right behind it and
it's a great cover for wildlife. But the problem is, where I'm sitting and this
whole section where I'm pointing to, the roots of the birch tree, I tried for
years, nothing that I planted there would work, so I had to put in weed barrier or
I have to grow in pots. So that's what I've got going here. These are pots, this
is weed barrier, pots and so forth. So I created this little bed about that
big of garlic, which you saw in a video, and underneath it it has the, the cloth
to keep the roots out and one little borage sprouted up in the middle, and I
thought I'll let that go. One little sprout, and that is the result. The
thing about borage is it grows so fast, and it gets so top-heavy, with these tiny
little roots, that once it gets to be about three or four feet tall, it starts
to droop over, as you can see with this plant.
Now this bed, which I call my Back 40, it was my sweet pea bed. Sweet peas were
a complete bust this year, except for about three vines, and that was the
second planting, so when it was time to put in tomatoes, I didn't take the peas out. So
I've got the tomatoes, the peas, all this borage, and then I've got the shallots
down the middle and garlic down the side. I've got shiso, basil and I guess that's
it. You find a way to make things work together, to mix it up. Another funny
thing that's happened is, some by accident, some not, is, for example,
in this one pot with this Snapdragon, there's a potato volunteer, there are
Jerusalem artichokes, because I think that I planted the Snapdragon in the pot
with some Jerusalem artichokes. I don't know if you remember, but I mentioned
that I was going to be planting some squash seeds out in the valley at a
friend's house. That never happened, so I thought I haven't planted any winter
squash, I haven't planted a single cucumber seed.
And so the other day, I took a handful of various seeds and I just went around any
pot that had a little bit of an empty space in it, stuck it in there, so we'll
see what happens. But I just like to keep things interesting because when you walk
out and you just go, wow, there's that, and that, and that...
It's a feast for the eyes. This is lemon verbena, which is blooming, and it is
beautiful and smells divine. So make sure you get some lemon verbena in your
garden, that with the little tiny white flowers. These white flowers behind me
are all cilantro that I've let go to flower because I want to collect the
seeds. These pots that we planted a couple of videos ago are really doing
well. This is shiso. This is Sweet Annie, which is one of your best smelling
things in the garden.
Another reason to mix things up is it confuses pests, or so they say.
If you see a whole bed of cucurbits for example, the cucurbit pests are gonna go,
"Oh, it's a field day!" but if you mix things up, it confuses them and they
won't destroy your whole crop. Now I don't know if that applies to mildew. It
probably doesn't, because mildew is rampant. If you study
mildew online, it says that there are different mildews for cucurbits, for
roses, for tomatoes, and they're all different strains and just because you
have a squash plant beside a tomato plant, it doesn't mean that the mildew
here is going to be the same mildew here. I find that very hard to believe, but
maybe it's true. But we have been vigilant spraying this year and the one
thing I forgot to remind Erick to spray was my sweet peas. The leaves are covered
in mildew, so what I'm gonna do today is, I'm gonna harvest these sweet peas and
spray them. That I will do. One thing I'm really concerned about is my orange Thai
chili, which I love to have every year. You know I did a major serious pruning
on a one-year plant and a two-year plant, and they do not look good and they look
like they're coming back with that same disease that I've been struggling with
with my peppers. Another reason to mix things up is it
gives cover for wildlife. You can easily register your garden or yard with the
National Wildlife Federation by providing food sources, water, and cover
for them to raise their young. I did, and the other day I saw hummingbirds, lizards,
of course, I always have raccoons here, but I'm not usually up when they're out
prowling, and they're not really welcome. While I was in Sierra Madre, my pineapple
guavas exploded with blooms! I have never seen so many blooms on any plant in my
life! The pineapple guavas, oh my goodness! I don't have enough bees to pollinate
all those flowers. You know maybe if I didn't have them so obsessed on my
African blue basil they might all be out on my pineapple guavas. They're a
wonderful fruit tree for our microclimate here.
They do really well here. There are moments of tranquility in an urban
garden and this is one of them. I don't hear a plane, I don't hear a
garbage truck, no one's driving back and forth, no delivery trucks, no weed
whackers or leaf blowers, which you hear all day every day except Sunday, and it
brings peace into your heart. I am so in love with gardening now that even if I
wasn't trying to produce food for myself I would be doing it just for my own
mental health. When you live in a big city, like New York or where most people
live in apartments, almost everyone lives in an apartment in New York, I lived in
an apartment in New York. I didn't have a balcony. I didn't even have a window box.
We were on the ninth floor. There was no chance of gardening unless you had an
indoor plant, so I'm very fortunate to have this opportunity at this part of my
life. Even if you have a little tiny corner,
even if it's on your desk in your office... You can get an air plant on your desk in
your office that doesn't even require soil! But just to see plants living and
growing before your eyes, it offers you some some peace in your heart and some
serenity in your soul that nature provides, and I don't know much else that
can do what nature can do in terms of....
Parrots.
Little do they know I have planted some sunflower seeds. Now they're in pots,
because everything out front is packed. So we'll see if they have the nerve to
come within 5 feet of my front door. Thanks so much for watching this channel,
liking my videos, and sharing them with your friends, and I'll see you in the
next one.