It's time for an end of summer vegetable garden update.
Hi, I'm Tim. Welcome to the Shades of Green Show.
I had really hoped to do vegetable garden updates throughout the season,
but we stayed busy, busy, busy all summer long.
And between that and vacations and not being able to coordinate my schedule with
our camera operator, it just didn't happen. Sorry about that.
But let's do a end of summer debrief. What went right?
What went wrong? If you remember,
I had a wooden frame here and it was using the string method for my tomatoes.
Never going to do that again. Uh, multiple times the strings broke,
even if I double and triple them up. Uh,
maybe if I used a wire or something stronger, they might've held up.
But the weight of the tomatoes, even with me pruning a lot,
caused strings to snap, the whole tomato would collapse once, uh,
one of them when it fell, it snapped. So, the whole tomato was lost.
The whole plant was lost. Uh, it takes a lot more pruning than I was used to.
And again, the strings, the twine just wasn't holding the weight.
So I'm going to go back to metal cages next year for my tomatoes. And, uh,
we'll do a whole video on that next spring. So,
the string method of trellising tomatoes, epic fail. Won't do it again.
What did work was my cucumbers, as you can see,
we've had the triple digit heat indexes here for about two weeks straight and
everything is frying. Uh, I still have one lone tomato that's holding on.
I am still producing, uh, getting some fruit off of it,
but all this is going to come out in the next two weeks.
As I prepare these beds for my fall crop,
we'll be planting onions and garlic in this bed this year, uh,
and all this is about to be ripped out. Uh, but cucumbers did fantastic.
I had only two plants and we got tons and tons of cucumbers.
So cucumbers was a major success.
Tomatoes had a good crop early in the spring,
but then once we got into June and the string started snapping and the
tomato started collapsing - just went to pot. So I would give my, uh,
my cucumbers an A, and my tomatoes, a B- for this year.
Coming down to our next bed.
This was what I had my onions and garlic in that I harvested back in late
may.
And then I tried to plant some peppers and some eggplants they never took off.
I'm not a hundred percent sure why, uh, probably a nutrient issue.
The zinnias did great. I did plant some flowers in here,
so there would be something living in here.
I do like to have a living root in the ground because all your microbial
activity in your soil happens around the root zone or at least most of it
anyway. So I threw the zinnias in here. Uh, they did really well, uh,
up until the recent excessive excessive heat.
This is all gonna come out and I'm going to put snow peas in here for the fall
crop. That's what's going in here.
We're going to move the trellis that the cucumber is on.
We're going to put it in this bed.
The snow peas will grow six to eight feet tall. They like the cooler weather.
I'm going to get those in the ground in the next couple of weeks. And that's,
what's going to be in this bed.
I had some caterpillars decimate my Pentas.
And then of course in the spring,
if you remember the very first video we did this year of the vegetable garden,
the potatoes were looking gorgeous.
And then I had white flies and grasshoppers and famines
and locusts. And it was just one thing after another. This bed went to pot.
We do have some new Vego Garden raised bed kits that are made out of metal.
One of them is round. I'm going to replace this,
some of this wood isn't that great.
I've never been happy with the soil in this bed.
So this whole bed is probably going to be replaced.
And I'll just let it sit over the winter and not do much of anything,
maybe some violas or pansies, but, uh, I'm going to save this for,
uh, early winter, January, February. I'll try potatoes in here, again,
all new soil and see what happens there. Uh,
peppers. I give our peppers a C. We got some, um,
well maybe, uh, maybe a B on the peppers.
We've got some nice bell peppers a couple of really good jalapenos.
These are all ready to come out. Again, the heat has just been unbelievable, uh,
recently, and it's really taken a toll. All this is going to come out.
I'm going to top dress with some compost and some other amendments,
and this will be, uh, carrots, broccoli,
and spinach and lettuce. in this bed for the winter.
I actually prefer the fall or winter growing season,
way more than the spring season because those vegetables,
they thrive in the cold and I can be harvesting Swiss,
chard and spinach and leaf lettuce for months at a time without worrying about
the, uh, the heat, giving it problems. Anyway, peppers are going to come out.
I would plant these in a lower bed this year.
This bed's too tall for a tall crop like this, but, um, you know,
that's what I love about vegetable gardens.
You learn something new every single season.
And I know that I don't want to put peppers or eggplants in the tall bed.
Eggplants, definitely A+. Tons of eggplants off just these two plants this year,
more than I could eat, more than I could give away.
Very pleased with the eggplant crop. Uh, if you recall, I did have,
as zucchini squash here. Zucchini squash, an F. A complete fail on that.
I never had any female flowers on the plant ever.
I gave it three and a half months,
and it didn't produce anything but male flowers. And because of that,
I never got any fruit, no zucchini. Now the flowers are edible.
So I'd come out here in the morning they're wide open.
I could tell that they were all males. Pluck them. Eat them. They tasted fine,
but I wanted zucchini, not flowers.
So we're going to try something different with the zucchini next year and see
what happens. But as you can see, I'm still still getting eggplant.
Ah, down here, the Blackberry did great.
I'd give the blackberries probably a B+ or an A-. We got a lot of fruit off.
The vine was just going nuts and it was just taken over the space.
It was crowding my peach plant. It affected my peach production.
So I removed the blackberries. This'll give the peach some more breathing room.
Also with that Blackberry being about, um, eight feet tall,
it was putting too much shade on this garden,
and I wasn't getting much of any production of any kind out of this. Uh,
we did carrots here in the spring. Epic fail,
really horrible germination. I've got some tips on that.
I've done some research.
I've talked to some really smart PhDs at Texas A&M and I've got some
information that will significantly help our carrot crop,
which I'm going to plant again here in a couple of weeks.
We're recording this video the first weekend of September.
It's labor day weekend. Um,
and I'll have all my fall vegetables in the ground in the next two to three to
four weeks. Carrots are going to go here again, probably at the end of this bed.
Um,
and then probably we'll also put some more broccoli and cauliflower in this bed.
Watermelon, uh, about a C- is what I'd give us. We got a couple,
they were small, but, um,
the vine kept spilling over here and it was getting trampled by people walking
through here. So I'm going to make sure and trellis the watermelon next year.
I'm going to put it in the sunnier location.
I think I'll get a little better crop, but, uh, again,
that's the beauty of vegetable gardening. You take notes. You watch.
You observe. You learn. You make adjustments.
And every year I do something different in hopes that, uh, something,
uh, goes a little better than it did last year.
You're always going to have winners and losers, losers.
I've never had a year where everything did fantastic.
And I also have never had a year where everything did horrible.
Some vegetables are going to do great. Some not. Talk to any gardener. They say,
oh yeah, my zucchini was fantastic this year, but my eggplant was so-and-so,
or I didn't get many peppers. That's just life in gardening,
especially here in Texas,
where we have such extreme weather conditions and you never know what's going to
happen. So that is our end of summer vegetable garden, I guess, post-mortem.
And in just, a couple of weeks,
we'll be shooting a video about fall vegetable gardening and what I'm planning
to do back here for the fall and winter season.
I'm Tim with the Shades of Green Show at Shades of Green Nursery here in Frisco,
Texas. Thanks for watching.