- [Narrator] Welcome to the California
garden in the month of February.
This month we reap the winter harvest
and prepare the garden for the upcoming spring season.
We will begin with a garden tour,
we will look at the harvest we made this month,
we will look at some things for you to do in your garden,
and finally, we'll take a look
at some cool gardening products.
So let's begin with the garden tour
starting with the raised beds.
We have our single Black Cobra pepper plant.
We moved the other pepper plant into
the greenhouse as it was very cold.
The rest of the bed just has a lot
of compost that was added
and has been prepared for the next growing season.
On the next bed we have a lot
of beet plants that are growing.
And as you can see here, they are growing pretty well now.
You can see some beets being formed as well.
And I think in about a month
the beets should be ready for harvest.
On the other side we have the broccoli plants,
this is the Green Magic broccoli plant.
And the broccolis have grown really well
and now they're just producing side shoots.
right next to the broccoli plants
we have some cabbage plants that are growing
and these cabbage plants should
be ready for harvest very soon.
And on the other bed we have some
onion plants as you can see.
Next to the onion plants we have some potato plants.
Now these are the potato plants
that we were growing in trenches.
As the potato plants grow,
they will be covering up these potato plants with some soil,
and then they'll be able to grow well
and produce potatoes under the soil.
And moving on to containers,
we have our Swiss chard plants
that are growing really well.
And we have been harvesting Swiss chard till now
and it's been a few months since we're harvesting
some Swiss chard from these plants.
And right next to that we have a tomato plant.
This is our first tomato for the season
and it's been very cold,
so it's not been growing that well.
Same thing with the eggplant as you can see here,
it's not growing that well due to the cold weather.
And finally, we have the cabbages which is growing well.
And that's because it's a cold season crop.
We also have our potato plants
growing in containers that have come up now
and they will grow well through the early spring season.
In our other containers we have our ivy gold plants
that are pretty much dormant now,
our mulberry tree which is growing well.
And the pineapple tree seems to have survived
the winters very well as you can see here
growing well along with the citrus trees.
And now let's look at the harvest
we made this month beginning with bananas.
We harvested our Rajapuri bananas
and the first thing we are doing
is cutting off the dried flowers.
And then we are harvesting the bananas.
And as you can see here, beautiful looking bananas.
They can be used either raw
or they will ripen up very quickly on the shelf.
We also harvested a lot of broccoli,
this is the Green Magic broccoli.
And what you're seeing here is the main
head of the broccoli being harvested.
And the main head of the broccoli
is the largest head in the plant.
And as you can see here,
this is the main head
and this is gonna be the bulk of your harvest.
Once again, here's one more plant.
We planted about five or six plants
in this raised bed and all of them produced
pretty decently sized broccoli heads.
Now once the broccoli has layered the main head,
you will also see a lot of these small broccoli florets
growing along the sides of the plant.
And you can just harvest them by just chopping them off.
Throughout the lifecycle of this plant
as the plant grows larger,
you will see a lot of these broccoli florets
growing along the sides of the plant
and you can harvest them for quite some time.
And this is the best part about growing broccoli
is that even after you harvest the main head of the plant,
you can still keep harvesting the florets from the sides
and you can extend your harvest season
for quite a long time.
Moving on to cabbage.
We harvested cabbages from our containers.
As you can see here, beautiful looking cabbage.
And the weather has been really cold,
it's been cold and rainy.
And due to that I did not see any insects
or any kind of holes in this cabbage.
As you can see here,
this is a beautiful looking cabbage head
and very easy to grow in this container.
Moving on to cauliflower,
we harvested a lot of cauliflowers from our raised beds.
And I think cauliflowers were one
of our biggest harvest for the season.
As you can see here, beautiful looking cauliflower head.
And here's one more.
And this raised bed has a lot of compost
and I made sure that I added more
and more compost in this raised bed.
And the results are pretty telling.
You can see that the cauliflower
heads are pretty well-sized, they look beautiful,
and I love growing cauliflowers in the garden
just because they are so crunchy
and so delicious when they're eaten fresh.
And the cauliflower leaves are edible as well.
You can bake them, you can make them just like kale chips,
can add some spices and bake them.
They taste pretty amazing.
And here is one more cauliflower head.
And as you can see, for the cauliflowers as well
because of all the rains that we are getting,
the cauliflowers hardly have any insects or diseases.
And this is actually the first season
that I've seen that most of my vegetables
did not have any insects on them,
no diseases on them.
Meyer lemons.
Now these lemons are specially grown for making lemonades.
And this is not a true lemon,
this is actually a cross between a lemon
and some other citrus variety like an orange.
And what you get is a lemon that's not so tart,
so it's actually a lemon, it's not sweet,
but it's not tart as well.
So some people really like the flavor of Meyer lemons
and Meyer lemons make excellent lemonade.
If you use Meyer lemons to make lemonade,
put a comment in the comments box below.
Mint, mint is a herb that you can easily
grow in your home garden and containers.
And as you can see here,
we are growing this in a whiskey barrel container.
We are harvesting the mint leaves.
As you can see here, very fresh and very delicious.
Mint is pretty much a maintenance-free plant.
You can just grow them in containers like these
and then harvest them as you need it.
Now what do we do with mint?
We actually make mint rice
where you can add mint and spices to rice
and it makes a great dish.
And as you can see here, once again, beautiful looking mint,
and probably one of the herbs you can easily grow
to get fresh mint from your garden.
Now there's another way to harvest your mint plants,
which is to cut them to the base.
As you can see here, we are pretty much
cutting it down to the base of the plant.
And this will still be okay
because the mint plant is quite an aggressive plant.
And although you are chopping them down to the base,
as you can see here,
they will grow back very quickly.
If you haven't seen our episode on growing mint,
I highly recommend that you check it out.
Mulberries, we were growing mulberries in this container.
This mulberry plant actually started
producing berries very early in the season this year.
And as you can see here,
we are harvesting these mulberries
which go from a red color to black.
As you can see here, they are quite small
and we are harvesting them from this mulberry plant
which can be very easily grown
in this whiskey barrel container.
Now the mulberries usually ripen in spring,
however, this time they ripened in the winter season.
So that was pretty interesting.
Oranges, these are the Washington navel oranges
and we harvested our final set of Washington navel oranges
from our Washington navel orange plant.
And these Alaskan shelling type peas
were growing well on our trellis
and we were able to harvest
quite a lot more pods this month.
And moving on to radishes.
Now we were growing these white radishes in our raised beds
and as you can see here, beautiful looking radish.
And January and February were the two months
where we harvested most of our radish.
And this is a winter radish,
it takes quite a long time to grow.
But as you can see here,
beautiful looking radish, quite big.
Along with the other radish variety,
the red French breakfast radish variety,
this was the other radish variety that we were growing.
Now this radish can be grown in raised beds
as well as in containers,
and most of our radish was grown in raised beds.
Mandarins, these are the Kishu mandarins
that we're growing in a container.
And we harvested quite a lot of Kishu mandarins this month.
As you can see here, just beautiful looking mandarins.
And this is now becoming one of my favorite
mandarin plants to grow,
extremely juicy and delicious fruits.
Moving on to wheatgrass.
Now we had a detail episode on growing wheatgrass.
And as you can see here,
we did harvest some wheatgrass this month.
Wheatgrass is extremely nutrition dense,
it has as lot of vitamins and minerals.
And something that I highly recommend
that you grow in your garden and you consume.
And wheatgrass is just extremely easy to grow.
If you follow our growing guide,
you will see that it's so easy to grow
and it is something that you should
be growing in your home garden.
Now let's look at the things for you to do this month.
The first thing we are doing is we are continuing
to grow our winter vegetables,
like radish as you can see here.
And we are also preparing some seed-starting mix
using compost, vermiculite, and some coco coir.
And what you just do is mix it up totally
and this will form a very good seed-starting mix.
And this is a good time to start
your summer vegetables if you haven't already.
If you've been following my videos,
you would've started your summer vegetables in January,
that's the optimal time to start your summer vegetables.
But if you haven't, it doesn't hurt
to start it in February as well.
You still have about four to six weeks to go.
So all the seeds that we sowed germinated
very well in the greenhouse pretty quickly.
In fact, this is the progress within about a week or so.
We have some gourds, we have some tomato plants,
we have eggplants, some peppers.
So a lot of summer vegetables that are now germinating
and available for transplanting
within about four to six weeks.
And now let's look at some gardening products.
You can see a lot of winter vegetables
for sale at your local Home Depot
and you can also see some summer vegetables for sale.
However, you need to make sure
that you only buy the cool season
crops like cabbage, cauliflower,
now because it's still very cold outside
and you do not want to start your summer vegetables yet.
If you have volunteer plants growing
like our tomato plant, that's a different story.
But if you're buying plants,
you should wait for some time before you set them out.
Now Home Depot also has a lot of fruit trees,
you can see some guava trees,
you can see some mango trees,
they also have a lot of passion fruit trees.
Now the passion fruit trees are extremely beautiful,
they are vines that grow in a constrained space
in your garden and produce these beautiful fruits.
And they also have a lot of bare-rooted plants
like strawberries, raspberries, blackberries,
and some others. So there are a lot of plants that you
can buy from your local Home Depot
and start planting them in your home garden.
So there we have it folks,
that was our episode on the California
garden for the month of February.
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We'll see you again soon, happy gardening.
(gentle music)