hey y'all this is Travis with Hoss tools and this is a little segment we do
called garden goodies it's just a compilation of short videos that we
shoot on our phone throughout the week as we're walking through the gardens
harvesting things weeding doing whatever we have to do to maintain a vegetable
garden so we can grow our own food I really hope you enjoy it and if you have
any questions always put those in the comments below and we'll try to answer
them for you
if you live in town if you have a small lawn or smaller and you still want to
grow vegetable garden I'm gonna give you a tip today on how you can grow plenty of
vegetables on a small area one of the crops that lends itself well to vertical
gardening which is using a trellis whether it be a cow panel or some other
type of trellis system it's cucumbers cucumbers have to be trained a little
bit but with just a little bit of encouragement they can grow straight up
they lay fruits on there and you can get a lot of harvest off a small are
pole beans are another one pole beans love trellis so plant them on trellis and
they grow up they have nice pretty flowers on them and they give you an
abundance of green beans and you can even let them mature out and eat the
beans themselves tomatoes now most people don't think about tomatoes in vertical garden
systems but when you trellis them using this string system here with a post and
you encourage them to grow grow straight up they take a lot less room
so if you have those small areas and you still want to grow vegetable garden don't
be discouraged just think about growing up right instead of down right think
about growing with vertical growing systems so there you have it get out there and give
it a try we got a boatload of pickles right here and we bout to try our hand at
fermenting some pickles I got all them I got them two bags I got eight more in
the fridge we got a big old five gallon fermenting crock there we probably won't fill
it up all the way but good to have plenty of room in there if we need it so
the recipe we're gonna go with is from this book here we got called fermenting
vegetables and we're gonna try this recipe here called the New York Deli
style pickles we have plenty of cucumbers
garlic we got some elephant garlic here we grow it in our garden this year
that's gonna come in handy we've got some bay leaves here we're
gonna use what else do we need there some red chillies we got some of those and
we need some pickling spice got some of that there and then we need some brine
so we got some pickling salt we're gonna make us a little brine with and then the
last thing says there we gonna need some grape or horseradish leaves and I got
a big old hundred foot long muscadine vine out there loaded down with leaves
so we'll top them off with some of that so I got my mandolin here and the first
thing I gotta do slice all these pickles we're gonna get all this stuff added to
this pot here supposedly these only take just about six or seven days to ferment
good so I'm really excited about trying these fermented pickles you've ever
tried any fermented pickles out there let me know how you like them and
there's anything about this recipe that you might change it's getting late in
the evening here but maybe y'all can see this these are my indeterminate tomatoes
here some ones we've been doing the florida weave on they got a two
varieties of cherry tomatoes right here Sungold and red variety called Sweetie
and these things are taller they taller than me some of them over there seven
eight foot tall and I've been doing the Florida weave on them as you can see
here running string every so every six inches or so along those t-posts there
and I have run out of post so they get any taller I reckon they're just gonna
have to fall over can't do anything else I guess I could have put some even
taller T posts there but I fear they would outgrow those as well these things
here are loading up I got a little bit of disease or something on the very
bottom of them and that's typical with tomatoes here in the south and
let's walk down here we can see those right there really tall they loaded up
with blooms and looking real nice and healthy for the most part and I wanted
to show you what we got here here's some right here so we can see
some of those Sungolds there I know its dark loaded up and I just picked my
first harvest of them right here check those puppies out ain't those
pretty now this Sungold here in my opinion is the best tasting tomato out
there now it's not very big it's a little cherry tomato but man the flavor
on these is awesome the cool thing is is you can pick them when they're about
light green or let them get kind of all the way orange this variety will tend to
split a little bit if they get too much water and so you have to be kind of
diligent about getting out here and getting them little Tomatoes before
they split but you can let them get kind of bright orange just depends on how tart
or tangy you like them we like a little bit of both so we just kind of pick
everything in that color range there when we're picking them and I'll take
these inside and let my little boy tyty have them he loves these things and
he'll be appreciative of this first little snack coming off our tomato rows
here we got our sunflowers in the ground for the sunflower showdown 2020 that
we're doing with a few other channels /pages including ourselves Adler farms
Four kids in a farm The Naked hog Coghill farms and Deep South homestead so we
thought it was only fair to give those those other guys a good little head start so
those are bigger right now but uh we'll catch up pretty quick everything starts
with some really awesome transplants you can see here nice big ol sunflower
transplants we grew them in our 162 cell trays
now we came in here and put down a heap some good gin trash compost just gonna
feed them good we buried our drip tape and when we buried our drip tape we also
put some secret sauce in that furrow there give them a little more feed you
know we got them planted one foot apart along this row I went ahead and grouped 40
of them it's a 40-foot Row one plant every foot figured I was just looking
going to beat these guys with one plan I'll beat them with 40 and I planted
them pretty deep and I might even hill them so I'm gonna lose a little height
there but I think it's gonna promote even better root structure and make
for some stronger taller plants some of them other guys their plants are gonna
get tall and break off but we're gonna make sure ours stay real tall and strong so
you know stick along with us and we'll give you some updates as to how these
things are going and how they're growing and for those other channels involved if
you guys want some good transplants I got a few left here if you want to
really step up your game all right so on a previous little short video we talked
about how we were going to ferment a bunch of these pickles and you got my
five gallon crock here probably a little more pickles than we need but uh heck go
big or go home so I got the big crock we made sauerkraut in here and now we're trying
this new york-style fermenting pickles let's see what we got take our lid off
here little straggler in there pretty good so far get our weights out of there
and put those grape leaves in there on top to hold down everything in addition to
the weights keep the pickles from floating up the surface you want them to stay underneath
the brine let's get our grape leaves out of here
look at them ain't they pretty now the recipe said they would lose a little
color which they have lost a little color but they still look quite nice sitting in
that brine there I've sampled another one there really good and crunchy I got kind of
that fermented twang to them - which we like really good for you like probiotics in
here and for our first try I can't complain about that right there pretty
good little recipe we did so now what we got to do is we got to get these things
into some jars and get them in the fridge supposedly they'll keep for like
a year or so in the fridge and put them in jars now the one thing that maybe I
I wish I would've did different is and it might be different when I get to the
bottom here but tasting some of these on the top they don't have quite as much
garlic flavor quite as much pepper flavor as I like so let me show you what
we're gonna do come over here
so we got some jars here we got some normal wide mouth mason jars when I was
at the hardware store today I saw this guy and I thought man that would be
really cool put some of these fermented pickles in so I'll probably put some in
these to give away and then my stash is going to go in this big jar here we got
me some more my elephant garlic right here them big old cloves I cut them in
half man them smell good got my band got plenty of dried peppers here so
we're gonna put a few more garlic's few more of these dried peppers in there kind of
kick it up a notch and then I'm also gonna add some of this pickling spice some of
this hard spice now the spice we used before was kind of stuff you dissolved
but this has got some cloves and stuff in it so I'm gonna throw in a little bit
of that in each jar and we should be good to go really looking forward to
trying seeing how these keep in the refrigerator I don't expect the taste to
change a whole lot hopefully they're completely fermented and I still got
more pickles on we're picking buckets full of pickles every day so I think
once we're done with this batch we're gonna try another batch we
might change up the recipe just a hair maybe add some things and just keep
playing with this fermenting is really really easy I like it so much better
than the traditional hot water bath canning because it just doesn't take a
lot of time you just put everything in that big crock you let it roll and then
you just put it in these jars and put the refrigerator it's a lot less effort
and it's a lot better for you too as far as vegetable gardening goes one of the
prettiest things you can see in the vegetable garden in my opinion is some
freshly hilled sweet corn this is our plot of temptress bicolor
quad sweet corn we got planted here and looking good so
far it's probably about a foot tall and normally I would wait a little while
probably got about 18 inches tall for a hilled it the first time
some reason this plot right here compared to all the other plots I've got
here amongst my Gardens this plot has the worst weed pressure and especially
the crabgrass you see the crabgrass brick right there now you can't see them
now because I've already come in there hilled them and smother them out a
lot of crabgrass coming up in between them corn stalks and you could get in
there and pull weeds or try to use a hoe and not damage your plants if you
want to but best way to get rid of them was just smother them out and hill
them up and it's gonna help them plants grow some better roots stronger roots be
a little bit more stable some of them are a little bit lean right now just
from that hilling process but they'll stand right back up straight you know we
got hurricane season coming in pretty soon here in the south it seems like
every year every other year we get some pretty strong winds so we want to make
sure we support that corn good and so this is my weapon of choice when it
comes to hilling right here my old high arch wheel hoe plow set
I can straddle that corn right there come along throw some dirt to it smother
out them weeds give some nice support to them plants there and you ain't hilling your
corn you should be if your corn gets laid over by the wind because you didn't
throw enough dirt to it now we'll probably hill this again one more time
when it gets about two foot tall probably have to do that with a rake but
that hilling sure does the trick and you'll see them corn plants pop they
like it they like that soil being thrown upon side of them stalks like that
we get a lot of questions from folks and one of the most you know popular
questions we get is how do we keep the weeds down in our garden plots how do
we keep them so relatively weed free now I've got three rows of squash and
zucchini here I need to thin them out to one plant every two feet I'll probably
do that in next few days and one thing we do for weed pressure we've talked
about this on our previous videos is drip irrigation we're just watering
right where those plants are we're not watering these empty spaces here but we
get some rain so nothing we can do about that and that's when we'll start to see
these weeds pop up down here you can see some crabgrass popping up there may be a
little purslane weeds and we believe in a process called frequent shallow
cultivation so you come in here when those weeds are tiny and small and just
do a lite cultivation on the soil and that will keep those weeds from thriving
or surviving anymore and our choice tool for that is the old handy dandy wheel
hoe here I haven't't got started yet but I'm about to and I can zip through this
little 20 by 40 section about five minutes so don't take long and I
like to alternate between a slicing tool like the oscillating hoe or our sweeps
well then the next time I cultivate I'll come here with the cultivator teeth
and just go back and forth with those two attachments but you gotta get gotta
get those weeds when they small like that can't you let them go big get a big
roots structure and go to seed gotta get them when
they small and you won't have any problems and that's the way to keep that
weed seed bank down and it will do wonders for your weed pressure in the
future