Grab a cup of tea, and let me bring you up to date. Go on, I'll wait.
I wasn't going to shoot an update today because I've had so many updates lately,
and I thought, give my viewers a rest, but something just happened and I said this
has to go on record. And I'm going to show you that in a minute, but there's a
lot of things I wanted to tell you that are coming up and also things that have
been going on and I wanted to bring you up to date. First of all, I got a new hat...
and thought I would be optimistic and wear it today in hopes that the Sun
might come out. I have just finished spraying all of my tomatoes and I was
going to count how many plants I had and I forgot to do that. I'll put that on the
screen. I wanted to point out a few things that people have written to me
recently that have made an impression on me and that I appreciate and wanted to
share, because you might not necessarily see a comment that someone else leaves
underneath one of my videos. Now, I think it was my very last video, or so, when I
threw away the root balls of the sweet grass from those planters and the
creator at Kalsin Films, who watches every one of my videos, wrote me
immediately and said, "don't throw out the root ball!" The root ball has so much
going on in it you don't want to throw those in the green bin. You want to
either compost them, at the very least, or plant compost back in to the top and
plant in that root ball. I do appreciate all of your comments, all of your helpful
comments, and I do take them to heart. I don't always have the time to try
everything that people suggest. And I think a lot of the times suggestions
don't really apply to my garden. It doesn't freeze in my garden. I'm
in Los Angeles near the ocean and the spores just fall to the ground and are
very eager to jump back on the plants at the first opportunity, the first little
gust of wind, or drop of rain. Pruning is essential to keep lots of air around
your tomato plants, but there was one plant I did not prune.
I just let it go wild, and I thought, let's see what happens. Well, I'll tell
you what happened. It sprawled out all over there and the leaves are absolutely
covered in white polka dots. So what did I really get out of not
pruning that plant? I wanted to give a shout-out to one of my super fans in
Ashland, Kentucky. Angela and her husband watch all of my videos, and even though
they've suffered injuries and have physical disabilities, they have used a
lot of my ideas in their garden and have been inspired by me, and I want to give
anyone a shout out who's been inspired by me, so please let me know if I have.
Julianne HM in Germany is loaded with great advice. She's very knowledgeable. If
you see her comments under my videos, please take notice. You probably noticed
we got the lavender planted on Thursday. And speaking of Thursday, I was not going
to shoot a Thursday workday video, because, you know, it was just routine
maintenance that everyone has to do, but in the afternoon things got interesting
and so I grabbed the camera. And one of the things we did was plant this because
Eric walked in on Thursday with this planter that someone was throwing away
and he snatched it for me. I am leaving on Friday to go to
Tennessee and I have a one-way ticket because I don't know when I'm coming
back, but I have to be back by the 12th because I'm going down to Oceanside to
see Liz Carpenter and see their fabulous garden down
there. Well, let's just check out what we did on Thursday. Can we move it out? This
cactus? Let's put a plastic bag over it. Good.
We don't need dishwashing soap on Old Man Cactus. Water. Oh, you're already
finished with the soap, okay.
It doesn't have a lot of room to grow. I
think wood is gonna look better on the brick. It's not bad there, it is a corner,
and it will get some Sun. Water? Yes, please.
Please watch my epic cooking video that I just uploaded, Father's Day Brunch. not
only do I share my quiche recipe of 30 years, or so, I do the whole meal. It's a
whole meal cooking video and I really hope you check that out. The story right
now in my garden is figs, olives, some Tomatoes,
the burgundy bush beans, oh my. I have harvested three and a half pounds. The
plants are supposed to produce all summer. I find that very hard to believe
because the leaves are already starting to not look so perfect. Three and a half
pounds out of a three by six foot raised bed, now that's remarkable. My fig trees, I
have two, I had a big brown turkey Fig you'll remember from last year and I
made a lot of fig jam from that tree, and I had a few desert figs.
Because you may recall, I transplanted that fig tree from a pot into the ground
early in 2017, I think, but, oh my gosh. I thought, well, this is just gonna be a
little fig tree and it's gonna produce little figs and a few of them, and, oh no,
it is catching up to the brown turkey fig.
I don't fertilize the fig trees at all. I don't water them directly because I
can't even get in there. It's a complete jungle, so all they get is city water
through the drip line, and not a lot of that because I'm very stingy.
So, oh my. You know, when I first thought about
planting a fig tree, someone said, "oh you can't plant a fig tree, they get huge!" and
I said, "oh well, I've got years to worry about that." Haha. Well, I think between my lemon
and my orange tree and my two fig trees, there's not really gonna be room for
anything else in this tiny front yard. Anyway I just want to show you this fig.
Do you see what I'm looking at?
Look at this.
Oh my goodness! It's ripe!
Hahaha!
First fig of the year.
Wow, I think we should weigh it, and I just happen to have some prosciutto. I
bought it yesterday. Breakfast! So that is,
let's see, 3/8 of a pound.
I did not expect this, but I cut it open and it looks really weird,
so that just doesn't look that appetizing to me.
I am going to give the worms a treat.
I don't think the worms will be too picky about their fig. Someone also was
curious as to whether I share produce with Eric, and the answer is yes.
Sometimes there's nothing to share, and then other times there's stuff that I
can share. So Thursday, he went home with a big bag of lemons, and I still have,
can't even lift this, I can lift it in my left hand.
This, whoa, don't scare me. I've got this. Maybe this is unrelated to gardening, but
something very exciting happened to me this past week and I wanted to share it.
One of the actors I really have admired for over 30 years is Jeremy Irons and he
and Lesley Manville are doing "A Long Day's Journey Into Night" in Los Angeles
this week, and I went to the play on Tuesday night and I got to meet him
afterwards, and we got a photo. And he was very very nice and so was Lesley and it
was a real highlight to get to meet them and spend a few minutes in their company.
The next video that I edit will be my Phoenix video that I did last year that
I never finished, and I owe it to all those beautiful gardens I visited to get
that done, so look forward to that. Thank you so much for watching, thank you for
liking my videos, and sharing them with your friends, and I'll see you in the
next one.