- Looks like we're back here at the homestead, guys.
It's been a while.
I was gone on my first vacation in a long time in Hawaii,
but we're back. (dramatic music)
Wait, what?
What are you doing with my staff, dude?
- Oh, is this yours?
- What are you doing with my staff?
This guy.
- Good and strong.
I go for eight days
and he tries to steal the dragon Daddy K staff.
It's unacceptable.
But what is acceptable is today
we're gonna take a look at the garden.
We're gonna do some chores with you guys.
Kind of assess what's going on.
And there's a lot of work to do.
So come along.
So here we are in the backyard
it's come a long way since you probably saw it last
during our Berry Bonanza Berry Fever episode.
Let's just assess kind of Jacques,
what's happening in the backyard.
So last time we planted out these random beds.
- Yeah. Remember?
- Kind of a random mix.
- Yeah, but they're starting to look fine.
Like- - Yeah, totally.
- [Kevin] These two tomatoes,
the eggplants finally popped off.
- [Jacques] Eggplant's really filling in nicely.
- [Kevin] It takes a while.
- [Jacques] Yeah. They like the heat.
- [Kevin] They like the heat,
the heat wasn't here for a while.
Fortunately, we do have a sunny day here in June.
Over here, the peppers again
they took a little bit of time,
and now they're really starting to pop.
The shishito is going off.
- Doubled.
- Yeah- - In like two weeks?
- I don't know what's happening there
but that one's going absolutely off.
Now you will see a couple gaps here.
So this one right here
I technically planted some potatoes in here
but I don't want to grow those throughout the summer.
So I'm gonna dig those up
and we're probably going to put some okra in this bed today,
over here, Jacques, I'm curious what we think.
So we could put something else here.
We actually have more peppers from our friend Jim Duffy.
Yeah. So we have couple rare peppers.
Maybe we'll do yet another pepper bed
but I actually wanna show you, come over here.
- We have quite a bit of peppers going here now.
- Yeah. This is the pepper bed for the season.
So I did three rows on the outside,
the middle and the inside edges of this bed.
And then I did a criss cross of zinnias throughout.
- Oh, that's gonna look so nice.
- And I did pro cut orange, yellow, pink
and I think maybe white or basically four different colors.
And they rotate the, the whole way around.
- That's awesome.
- And I space these,
I would say somewhat aggressively on the peppers.
- Yeah, I think that's good. - But we'll keep them,
We'll keep them well pruned. - Totally
- Mulched it, put it on irrigation.
You guys saw that pretty soon.
- Yeah, honestly, also though,
I found that the peppers do better
when they're closer together.
- Did you really?
- I think like they like their little micro climate
that they mix.
- Yeah. Well they certainly don't push.
They don't push as much as tomatoes anyways.
So the tomatoes are in, so I think first chore Jacque.
- Yeah.
- We probably need to string up this
with one more row on the Florida weave,
and start hitting the below with a little cleanup pruning.
- Definitely need some pruning
- And you'll be proud Jacques,
I put in some alyssum down this row here.
- Oh, very nice.
And I also threw cucumbers in over there as an interplant.
- You really wanted to try that.
- Yeah. I really wanted try that out.
So let's go ahead and get some snips and get to it.
This is a big old bag of tomato twine,
but I didn't know you could do this Jacques,
- There's a belt loop on the back.
- There's a belt loop.
So you're gonna strap it to your body.
Honestly, I have to say I doubted,
And now I don't doubt
'cause that actually seems pretty.
- 'Cause it's really annoying actually
- Actually seems pretty handy.
- When you do it, it's like dry.
- So I put in, this isn't like my
my best application of a Florida weave
because they had different size tee posts here
eight and seven feet.
But I feel like the middles ones
are probably fine to be at this height.
- Totally.
- And they're in about two feet total,
'cause I'm six-four.
This is an eight foot tall post.
So it's in over two feet, right?
I think it's gonna be fine.
- Yeah. I did the same thing when I had the seven,
since I already had the eight sunk deeper.
- Yeah. - I just left this one
Not as deep.
Yeah. It doesn't doesn't matter.
- That's doing most of the work.
- What did I end up putting in here?
- The Principe.
- Oh yeah, the borghese.
Borghese.
Actually taking a good deal of-
there's a lot of suckers down there actually.
- Yeah. I feel like there's so much leaf masks now,
that you could probably go pretty hard.
- Yeah. I can go pretty hard.
I think I'm gonna take a hybrid approach compared
to last year of taking every sucker off.
Always. - Yeah.
I think up to about, at least a foot right now.
You could take every sucker off.
Once you get past about two
and this is trellised out.
I think just let it rip.
- I agree. You know?
Like this was a significant sucker that I just removed.
So yeah, would it have been better
if I took this off earlier?
For sure.
But just didn't have the time.
- [Jacques] Changed my strategy here too.
- Oh yeah, what are you doing?
- I may actually go low,
and instead of weaving it in between,
I'm going to just do a basket like,
just do a line straight up instead of intertwining.
- Oh really? Just bring it in.
'Cause it's a little bit loose on the bottom.
The only thing I like about the intertwine
is when you wrap it to the next post, you can crank it.
- Yeah. And force it to come in.
Yeah, I'm gonna do an intertwine on the top layer.
But I wanna do a cleanup on the bottom first
- And I'm actually seeing down here,
which you're never gonna avoid on the stem.
I see either powdery or one of the other fungal diseases.
So it's a good thing at least right now,
that I'm clearing out some of that plant matter.
(ambient music)
- [Kevin] Pretty good.
(ambient music continues) (indistinct conversation)
- But what you'll notice is I didn't remove anything
except for this one right here
that had a flower cluster that was already developed.
I left this one right here,
which is the first flower cluster on the plant.
That's setting nice cherries,
as well as this one right here.
And so yeah, this does look a little sparse right now
but I think, especially as you let this rip up
and you let these suckers here grow,
production's going to be fine.
And it's not like I'm trying to maximize every single one.
'Cause I have 20, so- oh, hold up.
Looks like we might have a little treat here.
I think this is sun gold.
- [Jacques] Yeah there are double sun gold
somewhere around there.
Oh yeah.
- It's ripe
- [Jacques] A day early maybe?
- A day early?
You can tell from that far away?
- [Jacques] Yeah.
- I'll tell you, it's just right.
What's your perspective on giving chickens, tomato scraps?
- So you can't give them leaves.
- [Kevin] Can't give them leaves 'cause of the-
- It's toxic. - Yeah, that's what I figured.
- But they do love tomatoes.
- Yeah. Throw them some fruit in another episode guys,
they go wild for it.
Tomatoes are done.
We actually have a really exciting project.
You've probably seen it by now on our main channel,
but there are four more
sweet potato whiskey barrels to plant out.
And we actually got official Jack Daniels, half barrels.
And it's not one of those marketing things
because it looks like it's actually made in the USA
and these things look aged and you just did a drill.
- Yeah. When you drill it
you could definitely tell there was whiskey in there.
- Yeah, I saw Jacques-
I saw Jacques- (slurping)
trying to lap it up.
It was kind of awkward.
It was kind of weird.
- I'm just inhaling the fumes.
- What we're trying to do here is
because it's so heavy when you fill
there's not a really easy way to like move it.
My thought at least is you start laying them like:
one's here, you go maybe between the lights there,
you know, and- - okay.
- keep rolling them down this way.
We could put them a little closer than this.
- Yeah. - Cause we have five of them.
- Just leave enough space for a wheelbarrow.
- Yeah, space for a wheelbarrow, like 30 inches or so.
And then there maybe goes here.
- Yeah.
- All these we wanna level.
And then you're saying it's a good idea
to raise them slightly?
- Yeah, 'cause it's wood on the bottom.
So if it sits wet, this will just break down faster.
- Do you think, I mean,
do you think how it's an Oak barrel right?
One season?
What do you think?
- One season will probably be fine
especially in our climate.
- One season.
I think one season let's just leave it.
- Okay.
(Ambient music)
- [Jacques] Can't get away from it.
(Ambient music continues) (shovels scraping)
- Nice to be in San Diego.
Gotta say it's only like 72 degrees today.
- I know.
- I think this is a half inch drill bit.
So if you do a half inch drill bit,
something like a wine barrel,
you probably want at least nine holes.
If you use a bigger drill bit like three quarter inch,
you could probably get away with just six.
So I'm gonna start with probably a couple like
two in the middle and then do a ring around the edge.
And you could definitely have not enough holes
but you probably can't have too many holes.
- Ooh.
- Yeah. Right?
- You're going in for a second deeper one.
- Hold on, I'll be back.
I got a bottle to hit.
(both laughing)
- It's really interesting though.
Smells good. - Smells real good
Smells like good with- - And I don't even
like whiskey that much, but it smells real good.
- Yeah. Honestly.
Okay. So if you've seen the main channel video,
I encourage you to watch that cause it's gonna be a repeat
but just a little more casual potting soil.
You want a nice loose mix here.
Only way we're doing that is by adding a little bit of sand.
So it's a half bag of paper sand
and then I gotta go grab some compost
and then we're gonna use Jacque's favorite method
for mixing the soil up: the power planter.
(Ambient music)
- All right, so we have our placements.
I think it looks pretty dang good.
Eventually we're gonna get a refresh of the mulch
on the ground and then Jacque's gonna be putting in.
We debated going between the garden straw,
which you know we love.
Actually guys, pretty soon,
we just finally got this confirmed,
but we will have the big bag on the store pretty soon.
And you'll save a little bit of money
if you go with the big bag on a per cubic basis.
So stay tuned for that,
but actually opted to go with the micro bark here,
because I just think the aesthetic on a
on a whiskey barrel is just kind of nice, you know?
- When you look at that
it actually does look pretty nice.
- Looks pretty clean.
- It's a different brown.
- Like the closer you are to the home for me,
the more I want it to look like a decorative planter
and the less I want it to look like a farm.
That's just me, you know?
So I think it's gonna look good.
I'm just kind of coming around.
- [Jacque] It already looks good actually.
- [Kevin] Rounding a little bit of this stuff out here
and then we have some more okra
and we have some more peppers to put
in those two beds right there.
All right, we have two more beds to plant out.
Feels like it's never ending.
We too much space here, honestly.
Okay. So the okras gonna go in a different bed.
These are some of our remainders from Jim Duffy.
We saw last year actually, some of you guys saw that.
So why don't we just start getting these in.
Chile de agua. - Perfect.
Excited about that one.
We have the farmer's market jalapeno.
Actually, I'm very excited about this.
Cause this last year, this one didn't do so well.
And the cool part about this one is that
it's sort of a little bit bigger jalapeno,
but the corking which is our, those like white lines,
go horizontal and vertical
and they go all over the jalapeno.
And according to Jim, at least,
it's like a little bit of a sweeter jalapeno, apparently?
- It looks really cool.
Roots look great here.
And we have seven peppers.
- Aji pineapple.
- Oh nice.
- Two yellow pecan peppers.
- Oh, I'm excited about that.
And then pimento Kijo?
- Ki- - Kijo.
- Kijo - Kijo.
and Saraga giant sweet chocolate.
- Oh you have that? - I know you were excited for-
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nice!
(Ambient Music)
- [Kevin ] Yeah. So these are all ones that we got.
I'll put the other perfect.
So these four?
- Okay, okra on the other one.
Let's do it - Let's do it.
- Alrighty. It's popping.
In we go Annie Oakley okra.
- Now later when we do the okra guide
we'll talk about spanking the okra.
- Yeah. Yep.
You gotta spank these boys.
- You'll find out.
- You'll find out, Jacques' all about it.
- Then I think eventually we'll add some flowers in here.
- Yep. Every bed now here at the homestead
is officially planted out.
There's like half of one bed in the front.
Let's get a little clap.
(Clapping)
- Done.
(both laughing)
- Thanks for watching guys.
Glad to be back.
Stay tuned.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
- [Jacques] Spank that okra.