Good morning and welcome to the first official garden tour of 2021
If you're new to the channel I am growing in zone 6a Ohio and focus primarily on things I can eat
with some flowers thrown in for the pollinators.
So let's take a look at what's going on on this fairly chilly first week of may in the garden.
Now right up front here I've got the strawberry bed. This thing is getting kind of out of control
because I've just let the runners go wherever they wanted so I'm gonna trim it back after this year's
harvest but I'm really hoping for a good harvest this year. We lost a lot of our berries to frost
last year, I did have to cover this up because we just had a frost when this was all in full bloom,
but I'm seeing some small berries form and I have high hopes-- wish me luck! Now over
here on the east side of the garden I have a lot of raised beds and I found that I like to
do a combination of raised beds and in-ground and that is because, first of all the raised
beds allow me to get in and plant really early in the spring. A lot of times my clay soil is just
too wet and cold to get in as early as I would like so these work really well for that and also
there are a few vegetable crops that prefer really really well draining soil a really loose soil that
I find I have better results with in the raised beds, carrots are a really good example of that.
So what you'll see in the beds today are primarily a lot of early season cool season crops. So you
can see a lot of early spring crops in here-- lettuces, endives, pansies, green onions, spinach,
another bed of spinach
here were some over wintered onions that I'm testing out this year, those are some green
onions that have bolted, this lettuce was some that overwintered really beautifully,
carrots and more spinach, and some nice endive back here,
some brassica plants and then back here... this is one I'm really excited about. This is 'Little
Ben' gooseberry and this is a dwarf gooseberry and I've not had a chance to taste this variety yet,
but we had some blooms on there earlier and it looks pretty happy and healthy so...
oh there's some blooms right there! Oh we got looky there we got some little baby fruit forming!
So I'm excited about this guy. Back here is a full bed of carrots, and then my big raised beds
up front here I've got a few odds and ends planted but I'm kind of giving them a break
because I had them planted with three successive crops last year.
And then the rest of the garden are in-ground raised rows or beds
Now you might notice a lot of row covers out here and that is not
for frost protection, that is primarily for insect and critter protection. The number one
biggest insect pest offender in my garden are the cabbage worms and these row covers work
really really well because they keep the adult cabbage butterflies from laying eggs on my plants,
which in turn keeps the cabbage worms from hatching on my plants, which in turn keeps
the cabbage worms from devouring every single one of my brassicas! So I'm really appreciative for
these covers. The other pest that this helps prevent is a relative newcomer to the garden.
Ironically just recently a viewer asked me if I ever have trouble with rabbits in my garden
to which I somewhat smugly replied that "No, my wonderful dogs scare all of the rabbits away!"
Well the rabbits have outsmarted the dogs and figured out that if they get into the garden
they have this perfectly safe protected fenced in place to have their babies and an endless
buffet of nutritious vegetables. Just last week I had to relocate an entire nest of baby bunnies
out of my vegetable bed and came out one morning to all of my beets and chard completely mowed to
the ground. So I have found that these covers also keep the rabbits from making a buffet out of my
garden. Now one thing I wanted to point out this is actually a new type of insect netting that I am
trying for the first time this year and so far I absolutely love it. So it does an awesome job of
keeping critters out, but what I love is that you can see through it. With the lightweight insect
fabric that I typically used to use you cannot see through it you have to get down on your hands and
knees take your fabric prints out peek underneath and check on your plants which when you've got a
lot of plants it's kind of a pain in the tuchus, plus this has a nice weight that's a little
bit easier to work with especially if you're trying to put this on when it's at all windy.
So going forward I am going to be switching out my stash of insect fabric with this netting.
I've got onions back here, some collards that made it through the
winter and they're just too pretty to cut down at this point. I love these flowers
and so do the pollinators. This whole row is celery which I did have to cover
back up to keep the bunnies from chewing on them, and this is all garlic that was planted last fall.
Under this netting more endive. I really overdid it on the endive there's no way
I'm gonna be able to eat all this. It's a good thing my chickens like it. Radishes,
more lettuce and brassicas, some late planted broccoli that I just put in.
I've got some spinach back here-- incredibly the rabbits did not touch the spinach which makes no
sense to me at all but I will take a small victory on that. More garlic, got some vetch cover crop
and that will get mowed down in time to plant some warm season crops, got some radishes. This little
radish guy escaped me, looky there. My chard is rebounding, but like I said this was pretty
severely nibbled off and they got everything on that side, so I replanted with Chinese cabbage.
Lettuce down there, again they did not bother the lettuce which I don't understand.
Calendula, some 'Tiara' cabbage, this is a mustard cover crop,
my kohlrabi is starting to form little bulbs down here which I'm super excited about because if
you've seen any of my old videos you know that I may be the world's biggest fan of kohlrabi
and more kale that has gone to flower
I've got some cauliflower under there
peas, my sad little remnants of cauliflower here. This was one that I'm not sure if it was the
rabbits or who it was but someone came through here and just nipped all these off. I had an
entire 20-foot row of cauliflower and I've only got about four plants left.
Luckily I've got some at my mom and dad's as well that did not get eaten. And back here
I've got fennel. This is bulb fennel and this you can see the hoops this will get
netting on it as well because critters love fennel, I've found that out the hard way.
So these two rows are primarily planted in cover crop and these will be mowed down
in time to plant my things like tomatoes and peppers and some of my warm season crops.
I do have some potatoes back here they got a little fried by the frost, you can see those
black kind of burnt edges on there, that's from the frost but they are sprouting up new green
growth and will be just fine. And then the plan for this sad looking batch of weeds back here
is chickens. So we're raising meat birds again this year and I decided this would be a perfect
area to fence them in. I'm just going to allow them to feed and scratch and poop back here
and then either this fall or the coming spring I'll get in and convert this into gardens,
but I figured that'll be a good way to add fertility to the soil scratch up the weeds
and a place to keep the chickens nice and safe. So we'll see how that works. And then up front I've
got a couple more raised beds you can see it's just kind of a mix of things going on in here
a lot of cilantro, this is more cover crop, underneath here we've got some kale,
baby rhubarb plant
more cover crop, collards, some artichoke underneath there,
lettuce and broccoli, these are my volunteer pansies
more cauliflower and kale
these are some carrots that overwintered beautifully. I planted these
at the beginning of last September and kept a row cover over them all winter and they've
put on a ton of growth since the spring started. And not much going on over here- some chard that
overwintered, more cover crop, more volunteer pansies and this is some
wild thyme over here which makes an excellent low maintenance ground cover
and it smells just beautiful
My potato grow bags-- again a couple of these got hit with frost but
they seem to be coming out of it. And then a few edibles going on outside of the garden. This is an
asparagus bed I put in last year so I'll start harvesting some spears next spring. I also put
some strawberries in here because I wanted to play around with the con...[rooster crows] because I
wanted to play around with the concept of using strawberries as kind of a cover for the asparagus
so I didn't have so many issues with weeds popping up in the asparagus bed so we'll see how that goes
Over here I've got more peas
and grass that needs mowed very very badly, and back here is my no dig potato experiment
which I've had a couple of little hiccups with so far but there are potatoes growing.
So the first issue was that deer figured out this was out here unprotected and thought I
had set out a nice little buffet for them so I did have to put up this makeshift netting
to keep the deer from nibbling. The other was that instead of using straw I used hay which tends to
hold more water and get heavier than straw does so I've had to go in here a couple times and fluff up
the hay just to make sure that my potatoes weren't rotting underneath there. But even
back there where you can't really see any green there are little green sprouts coming up
and I've got all of this growth already so I might get some potatoes after all. And this area
will be for tomatoes this year, I've just got it mulched very heavily to keep weeds and grass
from sprouting up through there. This is my big old hügelkultur bed in progress, this is kind of
taking way longer than it should but this is just, I work on it when I get the chance
and hopefully I'll be able to get in here and plant this up with something
maybe later this summer or even this fall. Elderberries are growing strong over here
hoping for a big crop on these guys this year as well
This area is a new strawberry bed. In addition to this spot I also garden at my mom and dad's.
So they have a lot more land there so we typically put our big space crops in so corn and pumpkins
and squash and those types of things. I typically also plant a lot of my tomatoes there as well.
They're a little bit more open they get a lot more air movement so I find that growing tomatoes
there I have less problem with some of the tomato diseases like blight and spot and all of those fun
foliar diseases you deal with in high humidity situations. So there's not a whole lot going on
over there yet but I'll show you quickly what we do have out already. Over here we've got raised
rows prepped, most likely cattle panels for tomato trellises will go over here and we'll
plant indeterminate tomatoes. These rows are primarily brassicas-- things like cauliflower,
broccoli, cabbage and kale, and then some lettuce and spinach in the last row.
And again, here you can see I used that same netting as I did in my other garden
and it's working really well here to keep the bugs and the bunnies away
Some onions with lots of miscellaneous seedlings under the cover and lots of cover crops going
on. Some canola and tiller radish and a strip of onions there too, red clover and walking onions
more onions, canola, tiller radish and yellow clover... for some reason I thought it was a
good idea to put onions everywhere this year. Back here is a big plot that we solarized using a
silage tarp and this will be where the corn and pumpkins and winter squash are planted this year,
blackberries, lots of peas on this cattle panel with fencing again to keep the bunnies at bay
potatoes
and this is where the pumpkins in winter squash were last year
this year. I'm converting it into a fruit plot so I'll be planting things like bush cherries,
gooseberries, currants, haskaps and
probably some other things-- I haven't decided yet and here's some hops I planted
last year which will be staying and it will climb up this arbor really nicely
and lastly the garlic bed
And of course the last little bit of gardening goodness is all the plants that are sitting in
the greenhouse just waiting on me to plant them. I'm waiting till about may 15th for tomatoes
and peppers and things like that but they are ready. So we've got a few in this greenhouse
and a few in this greenhouse
oh and a bunch of fruit plants too that need to go out
Thank you for letting me share my garden with you and be sure to subscribe
if you'd like to see more updates of the garden throughout the growing season.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!
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