Hey Gardenerds, I'm Christy Wilhelmi from Gardenerd.
It's August, and I wanted to give you a bit of the good, the bad, and the garden ugly. Because
this is a little bit of a reality check. I know that you're probably used to seeing
pretty photos and beautiful Instagram posts of pretty things all the time in the garden
year round. But it, that is not the reality of a southern California garden in August. And even
if you live in a warm winter climate elsewhere, you have a really long growing season. And for us here
where I live, these plants have been in the ground and flourishing since late March early April and
so things look a little sad right now. So I'm going to share with you what worked and what didn't for
the year for this growing season and show you some of the good, the bad, and the ugly, starting with the
volunteer pollinator garden that you see right here in front of you.
These are filled with there's some clary sage and some comfrey that's doing well but the rest, not so
much. I can see some seeds starting for nasturtiums and calendula but all of the parsley and
celery and some of the older marigolds are not looking so good. But we leave them
because we want them to go to seed and reseed next year. So it's okay to let them get a little
bit ugly... oh, and you'll see some milkweed in there too. So it's okay to let these things get a little
ugly and they're going to reseed themselves next year and you won't have to work so hard.
Let's move on. Let's talk about some of the bad. We had a lot of bad this year. I want to say 2020,
when we all went inside during the pandemic, the rats and squirrels and other creatures took
their time and they repopulated like crazy. So if you experienced an uptick in vermin
in your garden you are not alone. This is my tree kale. It has been decimated, absolutely decimated
by rats. So those are our rat traps. We have 20 that we set including a live trap that never has been
triggered. We've tried electronic traps, we've tried the snap traps, we've tried just about everything
and this year the rats are really winning. I just want to say that so if this is happening to you
you're not alone. Also we have two beds with squashes planted and every single squash has
been eaten by rats. At one point we put up a night vision motion sensor camera and we took pictures
of how big the rats were and they were enormous way too big for this little snap traps we've been
using. Anyway just want to give you a reality check. This happens even to professionals even to people
who know how to deal with this kind of stuff it still happens. So let's move on to some of the good.
some of the good things that have happened in our garden or rather things that worked
despite all the other stuff that was going on this year basil. We grew eight different types
of basil and I've made at least 10 pints of pesto that are going in the freezer.
These are just starting to succumb to downy mildew. Usually that happens a lot earlier
in the year but we're really lucky this year and the basil has paid off. Also behind it the tomatoes
they look a little bit sad but basically we cut down all of the parts that weren't doing well and
after the first flush of tomatoes and now there's new growth that will hopefully bring us some late
summer tomatoes. Also come with me. I don't know if you remember I did a quick video (IG Story) on the tomatoes
in the pots here that had been eaten through the stems, had been completely eaten through by rats.
Well they all regrew and they're all flowering and setting out some fruit so we're hoping
again for a little bit of a late season flush of tomatoes. We'll see. Now let's go look at the beans.
But before we get to the beans. Green onions. Now we kind of treat these as perennials and recently
I discovered they were all covered with rust so I cut every single one of these green onions down to
the soil level and they've all grown back sans rest. So we're doing all right on this. We turned
something ugly and bad into something good. Now onto the beans. This year one of the really good
things about the garden has been the yard long beans. These are all just getting started they're
only about you know 12 to 15 inches long but uh some of them, like this guy, is even longer
and they have so far only been nibbled on a little bit by the rats. But for the most part we've been
enjoying them. In fact we just had some for dinner. Now let's talk about some of the things that we're
going to be doing to prep for fall. Come on. So this is our corn. It did pretty well this year.
The rats did eat many of the tassels and that made for a lot of toothless sister-cousin corn
where the ears are not quite completely filled out because they didn't have any male flowers to
pollinate the silks. Still we got a pretty good harvest and now it's time to cut these down to the
soil level, leaving the roots in place, and we're going to put them right over there into...just to
give you perspective how big this pile is. This giant pile of biomass that we are going to shred
and turn into an active batch thermal compost pile that will cook over winter and we'll have
really nice compost biologically active... biologically active compost ready for spring.
Finally, a lot more good. Our citrus trees are going gangbusters this year. Our navel orange
and our Meyer lemon. And even though they have yellow leaves on them, that's just because they're
really starting to put the effort, the energy into the fruit production. I could feed
them more but they don't need it. as you can see there's just...this tree is full of fruit and even
the newer trees that I planted in preparation for my new book Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden,
they're doing well too. Once the holidays roll around these are going to be ripe and ready
to pick and we'll be enjoying citrus all winter long. So that's what's going on here at Gardenerd
headquarters in the heat of summer in the middle of August. It's kind of our dead zone and it's okay
if your garden looks like that. Once the cooler temperatures roll around you can put in your fall
crops and enjoy what is my favorite growing season. If you like this video don't forget
to like it and subscribe and Mittens is here. Hey girl, how's it going? Yeah she loves the spotlight.
Share this video with your friends and don't forget to like and subscribe. I'm gonna have to do this again
Oh you know the drill: like and subscribe and share this with your friends.
Consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to support all the free stuff that we
do here at Gardenerd. Of course you can find more information about growing your own food
in my book Gardening for Geeks, and of course learn about how to grow fruit trees successfully
in my brand new book Grow Your Own Mini Fruit Garden. That's it, happy gardening!