Full Garden Tour | Early July 2023

hey guys welcome back to roots and refuge Farm if you're new here my name is Jess I'm really glad you're here and if you're not here I'm also glad that you're here today we are going to be doing a full Garden Tour so if you are new to these kinds of videos I have been making garden tours of my garden it's Gardens at this point it's been multiple Gardens um over the course of the last handful of years and now the garden has grown quite exponentially from how it started and at this point this Garden goes about several hundred feet down our driveway it's about 80 feet wide we have a couple of high tunnels multiple different growing styles that we're doing here for the sake of education and for getting food and so these videos are an overview of course I'm posting multiple Vlogs a week where we will harvest things cook them just go through walks through the garden lots of gardening tips and those Vlogs as well but I think the overviews are really helpful and they're really nice in the winter because you could just put this on and let it play for a long while and get your gardening fix it's actually one of the reasons why I started making these videos was really more for myself because when the winter months came around I really does really miss my garden and so I started to make videos of my Gardens to be able to watch and remember things so this is my diary that you're in my garden log how I keep up with what's planted where when as well as how I share a lot of different information I am growing in South Carolina in the Midlands of South Carolina this is Zone 8A it's kind of right on the border of 8A and 7B so I kind of aired on the side of eight when I first moved here because I was so excited to be able to grow lots of citrus and all of these different things that were zone eight things and we had a very unusually cold winter more like a seven when does the zone seven winter it killed a lot of the Citrus so I think I'm gonna go back to Aaron more on the 7B side of things so our goal in our farm is to grow our family's food that's really the number one goal with what we're doing is trying to provide sustenance for for us for our children which we have a visiting daughter who's starting College this fall as well as five Hungry Boys at home so very much a a full house with a big grocery need and that's how we started in gardening and homesteading but along the way we began sharing here on YouTube and now a lot of the ways that we grow things is definitely affected by that in that we're choosing to do things in experimental ways and trying different things to be able to show people different options so here at the front we have our two high tunnels I'm going backwards on this tour I've been starting on that end but I just needed to mix it up this tunnel is the tunnel where we struggle with contaminated soil we did remediation largely with worm casting tea as well as activated charcoal it has worked really well we actually have some volunteer ground cherries growing in the back of this tunnel where last year the ground cherries were completely damaged to the point of not being really usable so it's nice to see that the soil is actually not killing nightshades but we haven't done anything this tone this year my My Hope was to turn it into a cut flower tunnel sometimes I will have my ideas of what I want to do with like the whole season and some things we just simply can't get to and that's okay the beauty with the garden is there's always next year and I think it's better to have a constant eye out for your overall vision of what you want things to be like look like and just be working towards that rather than what can I get done this year because if you're looking at the overall Vision it's going to serve you better and you won't end up having to redo things later like a lot of times I think when we're looking at what can we do this year we end up compromising what we want to do we basically get in our way later by having short-sighted Vision so we haven't gotten to this as far as making it a this season Garden that's fine I've actually just let everything that volunteered in here grow which has been the only way but I've had cucumbers at all since my cucumbers up in the front were no good they got eaten down by pill bugs but our plan is um not just to let volunteers take over this we're actually going to be building up some low raised beds here and I may plant some things in here over the winter and the fall rather than trying to put cut flowers in right now brassicas and cold weather stuff and here over the winter and maybe some areas I can put some bulbs in for spring flowers and then transition this into being a cut flower space I'd love to have the whole tunnel for cut flowers though it has not been windy all day and I come out here to shoot this video it's a win because it's crazy I had to put my cucumber in the side by side I wasn't planning on harvesting much this evening I really want to have the cut flowers going by the time we have our store open in downtown Batesburg I want to sell cut flowers from our farm that's one of the things that I'm hoping to be able to do is just have a little stand where people can come by flowers that grew here because I think they'd really like that so in between the two tunnels um I've got the dahlias right here my plan is for eventually to have multiple different kinds of dahlias in these middle beds dahlias are perennial here meaning you can leave the tubers in the ground over winter and on the sides here we have strawberries and I will tell you these strawberries have not been nearly as productive as the ones we have in our green stock Towers because we've had really bad problems with bugs with these whereas over here we have them up off the ground and we get to them before they're any like slugs or ants in them this High tunnel over here on the side was all brassicas that are coming out in artichokes that were pulled I'm moving the artichokes out here they produce great in here but they didn't fit well here with the plastic down I just didn't love it I I think we're gonna put the artichokes out somewhere which they can actually handle being outside I'm trying to clear out ample space here to have a very healthy fall Garden under high paternal protection so lots of kale cabbages cauliflowers broccolis brussels sprouts all in these places where we can protect it if we have another harsh winter because last year all the Nebraska's I had pretty much outside they all got wiped out when we had that cold snap and some of the stuff that was in the high tunnel was damaged but a lot of it lived through the cold snap so I'm I'm kind of leaning heavily into this space for fall which I know it's like July but it is actually time to start thinking about that like where are you gonna put things what are you going to put in are we talking about that more in the coming weeks I do think that the peppers are currently the biggest star of the garden [Music] um they're healthy they're productive here are shishito peppers I'm not harvesting a bunch today because we are going to the lake tomorrow we're celebrating some family birthdays having a family day at the lake with some friends coming I am not going to be processing so I'm not picking a lot of stuff today other than things like that delicious cucumber which will go in a salad to the lake but mostly I'm leaving things on simply because they'll hold better on the plant for another two days rather than me picking them now and then sitting on my counter until I can work with them but I have already picked quite a lot of peppers I stuffed a bunch and made jalapeno poppers I still have cowboy candy in the pantry and I still have pickled peppers from last year I didn't have tomatoes last year I had to go get some from the farmer's market I did end up with a good deal of peppers last year but I ended up shopping a lot at farmers markets and because my garden wasn't doing very well last year I preserved a ton of farmers market food and it was way more than I needed so I'm actually deciding how much I want to put up this year because we're still getting three last year stuff that's kind of the deal with peppers which I am going to have in abundance with all of these plants we've already begun sauteing peppers with lots of different meals of course we've made shishito peppers a few times I've got a lot here so here's one pepper that I I would say I'm probably the most excited about as far as being something new now I have grown this a couple of times I've started it from seed at least two or three times but I remember one year I I accidentally gave them all away and so I ended up not having one in my garden and then last year I lost several plants due to the contaminated soil and I don't think I ended up getting any last year but this is the Pippin's Golden Honey pepper now anything with honey in the name has my intention this pepper is highlighted as being like very flavorful very sweet rich I can't recall I think that maybe it's supposed to have just the mild heat maybe it doesn't have any heat but I'm really excited about it I have several healthy plants here with some nice looking fruits on them as you can see oh here's another one that's the Pippin's Golden Honey it's got quite a few fruits on it another that I'm really excited about having again is the lessia pepper which this is that one and of course you can eat any peppers unripe like I could eat these off the plant right now but the flavors are really going to intensify once the pepper is ripe and that's true for hot peppers and sweet peppers if you pull them off unripe still green you're gonna get some of their flavor but you're not going to get the fullness of it that's why like if you leave jalapenos on rather than picking them green and you let them sit on the plant and ripen longer or turn red even especially if they start getting that cracking on the skin that's when they're really going to get a lot spicier and in a lot of cases you get more of the flavor that a pepper's supposed to have a lot of times Peppers really do have very tropical notes very fruity flavors even if they are hot peppers but you really need to let them ripen to get the fullness of that down here on the end is the not a Pinot bed which is the jalapenos which are not hot these are not producing quite as quickly as my kregs Grande's but they do have a good good bit of fruit on them of course these don't get as big what do we say am I brave enough to do it let's hope that it is actually not opinion that was scary because those are like jalapeno flavor it's not hot not a heat I put this one down here so there would be less mix-up have you heard of this pepper mix-up that has happened this year apparently some major seed supplier like big commercial seed supplier that surprise seeds to many of the companies that start plants and ship them around the country actually mixed up and a lot of people who bought jalapenos what was labeled as jalapenos they're actually getting banana peppers so if you actually ended up with a banana pepper they were like wait a second this was supposed to be jalapenos you may have fallen prey to the big pepper mix-up that is another reason why starting stuff from seeds is a benefit however there are mixed up plants in my garden right now because I started from seed and I didn't label well so it only works for you if you work with it so here are my ground cherries this is the pineapple variety Aunt Molly's is another one that's very common they're very similar and you can see they grow in husks they're like a cherry-sized tomatillo and they're called ground cherries because when they're ripe they fall off the plant so you can Harvest them off the ground that's when you're going to get the best flavors when they're ripe enough to have fallen off and we really haven't gotten very many yet just a couple we love ground cherries we call them Garden candy and I have seen many recipes of people making jams out of them and desserts and all that stuff I've never made anything out of grand cherries because literally I've never been able to grow enough at once that they don't get eaten by my family these peppers on the side are um hmm well that's not pepper that's that's a basil I just smelled it it was amazing these were planted later this is lemon basil and I'm actually going to pluck off the flowers of this simply because I want it to stay in this state longer and if I pluck it down to where it's branching here this plant will get bushier it's still usable once it started to go to seed unlike some sweet Basils which really are not great for eating fresh this is still usable for what I want to use it for which is to make tea but I feel like oh this plant is going to last longer and Thrive longer if I don't let it go to seed yet so making lemon basil tea is the same as making any other basil tea that I talk about we commonly use Tulsi basil holy basil is what we have the most of but lemon basil tea is really good too it reminds me of lemon heads so tasty highlighting Basils here's another really cool one this is called lettuce leaf basil so this basil lettuce leaf basil I think that I've seen a variety called Mammoth which is it grows the same as this it has these really large leaves and this plant is on the smallish side the leaves can get even bigger than this I mean they can be like lettuce leaf size this has like a really good classic kind of Italian basil flavor it's not super sweet it's more on the kind of Herby side I'm describing this really poorly you know some Basils are very sweet they're like a very sweet basil flavor and some of them are almost like medicinal this one leans more on that medicinal side like but still very much basil it's very aromatic but it's not super sweet I don't know that it does it justice I love this for putting on sandwiches for doing wraps I basically make some sort of lettuce wrap with like ground chicken or turkey garlic onions herbs soy sauce whatever and then wrap it in these basil leaves to eat and it's really really good so this is good for wraps it's good for sandwiches it's good to tear up in the salads and add that basil flavor or you can also just chop it up and use like you would any other basil or hang it to dry and use like any other basil but the size of leaves really makes it great for the other stuff too here I've got some serrano peppers probably well that one's getting harvested I was going to say probably pretty close to being harvestable I think they usually get a little bit bigger than that and then here these are actually sweet chocolate Bells some of these were planted later yeah but they're still starting to make some fruit again with bell peppers you can eat them green if you've ever eaten a green bell pepper is simply an unripe bell pepper most of them will ripen to Red though you can get other varieties like this one that ripe into like a chocolate brown all right outside this High tunnel lots of different things some different peas and beans that's a squash here is an amaranth and I put these in just because I knew that they'd be really pretty but it has the double Purpose with amaranth um you know I grew this is something that I could feed to my chickens the leaves are edible mine have obviously been very very heavily visited by insects in my experience amaranth has always taken the brunt of insects which in the garden if I plant something that is not something I'm trying to eat and it's drawing a large insect population to it that's a desirable thing because it's working as a trap crop it's bringing the pests away from the plants that I do want to eat so the fact that amaranth gets a lot of the cucumber beetles I mean there's they're on here right now um it gets a lot of the pest pressure they're not on the other things that I want to eat so I think that's fine I mean sometimes it's a really bad look at that but I'm not doing anything about it because I wasn't trying to eat that anyway so a lot of my squash is kind of piddling out here we'll probably reset this soon pull this up I may even plant more squash here I've got squash popping up in other places in the garden this row of zinnias is what dreams are made of wouldn't you agree so pretty I kind of decided to let a lot of the volunteers in this patch just grow here I've got a purple opal basil I've picked pretty heavily off of it's still trying to go to seed but we've used that for a lot of different things I actually steeped a bunch of that purple basil leaves as well as some lettuce leaf basil and heavy cream like heated it up and then let it steep for half an hour and then use that cream to make strawberry ice cream it was it was much applauded I don't get to eat very much of these things but I do love making them with the volunteers I ended up with flowers all over this is all celosha that volunteered this green bean patch the plants are starting to show a lot of stress it's been very hot they've produced a lot I probably have another pretty decent Harvest on here right now that I can pick and then again these will pop we'll pull these out and then replant green beans or replant something else here we have green beans coming up in other places too because if you have a long season one of the best ways to utilize that is succession sewing which means that you don't plant your whole garden at the beginning of the Season you continue to plant your garden throughout the season until you know that you're out of time here is a volunteer spoon tomato which is this tiny little cherry tomato I was so pleased when this came up and I didn't know for sure that that's what it was it's very remarkable characteristics it has very tiny flowers that have very open stamens like because it is a wild tomato that does pollinate these grow all over the place in like South Texas but it has really smooth stems and it's very distinctive so when I saw this plant I thought it was a spoon tomato I was right these cherry tomatoes aren't great for doing a lot of things with that you would do with other cherry tomatoes because they're really small but they are so flavorful I mean like crazy crazy packed with flavor and I really really love them they're piddly to cut in half is what I'm saying like not doing other stuff with them because to cut you know 100 of those in half to make a tomato salad or whatever that you're making with it it would just for the volume it would be a lot of work but just pop it in your mouth and snacking on they're so good some symbiosis happening right here we've got some peas coming up that's grass um volunteer solution here are some ground cherries I did throw these in here at one point and look giving me a fruit before the other ones ground cherries so good here we've got some golden Bantam corn which it is producing it's we're tasseling going well the main thing that has brought me back to this Garden time and again is the holy basil which this is the most brutal pruning job I've ever thought was a good idea and I still think it's a good idea um this holy basil was all going to seed and it was getting to the point of just not being as good to use for tea because the seed stalks were getting really big and it was starting to dry out and so we just came across and just whacked the top off of all of it so it looks really rough right now but I think that it's going to cause these plants to Bush out more and elongate our harvests of holy basil for tea it doesn't look like much right now but I think this is going to look a lot better by the time we have our next Garden Tour or not and I'm wrong also been known to happen kind of similar story in our okra Rose here um things kind of took a little while to take off and had a lot of pill bugs eating seedlings back but we are starting to get a few okras here and there and we have some young plants coming up there's a whole bunch of young plants in there so this will be full before too long just barely enough to make a meal out of here yet and so far we've just been snacking and eating it raw but like tomorrow morning I'll probably have like 15 pods to pick before too long we'll be overwhelmed by it here's some succession sewn squash which I'm going to go ahead and get this one off if you see a squash in your garden and it's kind of on the edge and you think oh it's just almost big enough to harvest just go ahead and pick it just go ahead and pick it so it does not the next time you come out and see it it'll be three times the size here we did go ahead and throw some sweet potato slips in they're going to be kind of late season um where the tarp is I'm gonna leave that tarp for right now oh I need to loop back around because I think by the next time I do a garden tour my beautiful sunflower Steve sunflowers will be past this beautiful point that they're at right now [Applause] these are my favorites look at that it's not amazing all right across the driveway into the Contour in-ground Garden look at this so we admittedly planted this so that it would be a little bit of a hodgepodge a mix a surprise if you will and throughout all of these rows we have cow peas interplanted with sunflowers there are winter squash we knew that we were going to deal with a lot of grass in this because it was a freshly tilled spot that we did not till in time to solarize this field is full of Bermuda grass so we just knew what we were dealing with and we knew that it was going to end up having a lot of grass growing in it so we grew we planted things that would grow aggressively and that would like basically be able to beat out the grass will it beat it out neatly probably not but it will at least continue growing which was our goal look at these awesome multi-headed sunflowers these are so cool so right now we mostly are just watching for what this is going to do that my friends I guarantee was done by deer we don't deal with a ton of deer here but we do we do have them they just don't mess with the garden much because the garden is right here in the middle of this field we have the guardian dogs and our dogs our pets and the Animals the big animals all around but this Garden is kind of up here off to the side and so I was wondering if we would end up dealing with any deer here so over here we did the Horseshoe mounds and this has probably been the biggest thing that we've that we've I mean lost to Bermuda we planted a lot of watermelons in here but we had a lot of rain and we replanted watermelons multiple times and it just it was it was tough we didn't we have some plants coming up we'll just have to see how this goes it might not be pretty but it will probably give us some food and sometimes you know what if that's the standard of gardening that's enough for me that's fine all throughout here we have different winter squashes these are all rambling varieties that are going to produce squash that needs to be hardened I wouldn't have wanted to put something out here that needed to be checked on daily or every other day just with the nature of it and the nature of squash we do have okra out here which we'll have to to you know wait out in and check the okra regularly but with the squash being down on the ground I think stuff that's going to have to harden is better here we do have one watermelon that's an enthusiastic grower I don't really know how well this translates onto the camera but this is doing exactly what I expected I said from the beginning we were going to deal with a lot of Bermuda grass here oh hey look that's another spoon tomato growing out of here yeah we'll leave it and that was that was a correct assumption to expect a lot of Bermuda and I also expect a lot of food I just I don't think that it's going to be as neat and tidy as what a lot of people expect row Gardens to be but I don't think that's what we expected when we made that that's been the hardest month trying to shoot these videos because they take if I'm not harvesting like a little over two hours or so just to shoot them and then probably about six to edit them so it's very time consuming is why I haven't posted them as much video that I'm like harvesting a bunch can take four hours but having a long enough period of time to get through without inclement weather has been the biggest issue so here's my young tomato Rose these on the end are actually for the most part cherry tomatoes which right now that I'm harvesting a ton of cherry tomatoes off of those other plants I'm sitting here thinking why did I plant so many because this is a lot of cherry tomatoes but that's okay I have plenty of people who are interested in extra food that I share with so I never am actually worried about having in excess of something so here are the large barred boar tomatoes and a very attention hungry Garden Kitty Hello zucchini um look at the streaking you can already see on these it's really pretty I'm happy to say we still have a lot of blossoms even though we had a really hot week this week I think it is chilling out just a tiny bit and Maya ordered me some shade cloth to go over these three rows I don't know exactly if we haven't figured out how he's planning on hanging that it can make a massive difference if you're growing in a place that's very hot so I've I've been noticing down here on this end this is the big rainbow variety and it's already setting some pretty promising fruit but it's also showing some some signs of um sickness I I usually don't refer to a lot of this stuff this is disease I mean that's what that is but I usually don't refer to it as disease simply because a lot of people think oh I've got disease in my plants I can't grow them whereas like I don't know anybody who grows tomatoes in a place like South Carolina that's humid and as wet as it is that doesn't deal with some measure of this on their plants when I first started gardening in Arkansas which is very similar conditions to this I remember seeing that stuff early on oh no I'm getting disease and it really led me to believe that I needed to grow like more hybrids and things that didn't get that and what I learned when I started growing a lot of heirlooms is that some plants are just very prone to that and yes it actually comes down to a lack of genetic diversity they just they don't have any disease resistance because they're so purebred because they have been kept from cross-pollinating for all these Generations because we want the heirloom we want the story we want the true to parent fruit but unfortunately a lack of disease resistance can be a part of that brandy wines are usually my first ones to like have to be pulled out of my garden because they just get disease so quickly and easily and people have come up with strands of Brandywine that are that have some resistance to disease but it's kind of just part of growing some of these things so for me what I typically do is I do try to pull off disease leaves as much as possible but I mean like sometimes I can't defoliate the entire plant the new foliage is coming in healthy I don't consider that plant lost if the lower parts of it are starting to get sick you can pull some of it off or just let the plant keep growing to the point that you can actually defoliate the whole bottom you've got a bunch of fruit down there you can't take all the leaves off because then your fruit's going to get sunburned so even if the leaves are a little sickly sometimes I leave them on as long as the new foliage is coming in clean and as long as my fruits are not getting diseased as soon as fruit starts having like blight on it big spots I pull it out like as soon as the fruit is because it doesn't usually make a recovery from that but a little bit of disease I call it fussiness like a little bit of fussiness on the bottom of your plants they'll be fine they'll suck it up just just keep growing I actually just spotted something here we can talk about look at that that is blossom end rot I could probably have a million view video if I would do a video that says just do this simple solution for blossom and rot because people want to know what they can do to stop this happening in their plants blossom end rot is it is caused by a lack of calcium a lot of people will tell you to put like Tums under your plant I've done that before I've actually tried it um it's hard to say experientially because typically Blossom and rot will happen on the first flush of fruits and then it will stop happening typically in most cases sometimes you'll have very persistent blossom in rock but for the most part in many cases it does it on the first fruit set and then produces regular fruit from then on out so if you stuck some Tums in the ground it may have worked but it may also would have gone away anyway just adding calcium to the the general region of your soil is good I tell people to put an egg under the tomato plant because that's what an old man told me I don't actually think that's for the calcium because it would take at least a year for an eggshell to break down I think it's actually for the gases that are produced by the rotting of the inside of the egg as well as the nitrogen and the fact that it feeds the worm a lot of the things you'll see to get rid of Blossom in rot are just adding calcium to the soil when really it's more likely an absorption issue I I didn't have any Blossom and rot on my other plants but these plants were setting all this fruit when it rained for two straight weeks so this soil probably got washed out a lot and therefore the plants were taking up a lot of water that didn't have time to absorb any nutrients out of the soil so is my soil calcium deficient or was there just too much rain blossom in rock can a lot of times be a case of ineffective watering either too much too little or too irregularly it can be a soil issue you can do calcium stuff I've seen people say if you're having a lot of this to put a gypsum in the soil I don't think it hurts to put things like eggshells or Tums or things like that but I would Hazard a guess that most cases of Blossom in rot could be handled by more regular rain patterns or more regular watering by The Gardener here I have some chard that's left over from the spring and there was a worm on this so I pulled it to give it to the turkeys and then he fell off sure that the flavor of this is pretty stout at this point having been out in the heat it's just a little bit earthy and I find that most things that grow well in the winter taste better when they're grown in the winter versus growing them in the summer and that's true for any sort of root vegetables for kale a lot of lettuces get bitter when it's warm outside and chards already slightly unpalatable Earthly earthy flavor gets like borderline offensive in the summer now I actually can still handle eating it but I I'm not as picky as the rest of my family the main reason why that is still there is because we have a bearded dragon who likes salads that's that's for the dragon all right let's Traverse around the massive asparagus beds when I put these here I had multiple people say you don't want to put those there they're going to be terribly unsightly right in front of your beautiful garden and and some days I do agree I'm like goodness but other times I'm like look at it it's so wild and unruly wild and lovely Cottage Garden it's looking pretty good I think I'm not gonna put a ton of emphasis here just because we look at this in Vlogs a lot if you have any questions about this space I'd be glad to answer them but I did want to point this out because I just think this little side is so pretty right now we've got these ornamental herbs this is like an ornamental oregano which smells awesome and has all these beautiful blossoms and this I believe is some sort of thyme it's very different than my other time so I'm not 100 sure of what the variety is but it smells really nice and it's blooming really pretty and then of course this pineapple sage here is massive monstrous and smells amazing that makes a really lovely tea as well all these herbs I love making teas out of herbs and then putting just a tiny bit of honey in them and lemon juice and putting them over ice so good my friend Miss Nina brought me some plants and this is getting ready to bloom this Canna it's gonna be really cool I think my current hope for this Garden is to get a bunch of ground cover like this creeping jenny or Sedum to just take over the ground it's starting it's going to take a little while but the weeds are pretty wild out here look at the blossoms on this perfect storm hibiscus this is going to be so covered with flour they're all starting to open such a beautiful plant I can literally see and hear the storm coming so we've got to get through this here's my Bed full of mint and lemon balm also frequent favorites for me to make syrups and teas into those variegated mint it's just so pretty speaking of slightly sick plants soldiering on here we have that and actually as soon as I'm done with this video I'm going to speed Harvest all of this because that rain sounds like it's actually going to happen in this bed I've got Texas Hill Country okra no Alabama red they're so so similar but it's one of the two I can't remember which one it is another squash plant that is at the end of its time which is also okay because we'll pull this out and replant and these Dragon tongue bush beans are kind of coming to the end of their time I've been harvesting off them for a while and so I'm very close to just tearing them out and on this trellis I have a kajari melon and this one looks okay but this one definitely Fallen prey to something and over on this side I've got several plants that are in much better shape look I actually did not realize that these had fruit on them I miss that I was too distracted by the cherry tomatoes look at melons so Cuca melons are the cutest little fruits they're actually a little cucurbit they taste like like lemon juice infused cucumbers they're very very bright they pop and I found people either really like that attribute or they really hate it and there's like no middle ground like you're really okay with that or you're really not but uh cucamelins are not necessarily the best thing as far as production goes but always give a little space in the garden usually like a little teepee trellis like this and plant a handful of plants because they're so fun to snack on in the garden they're so novel and I also like to do quick pickles like quick fridge pickles with them to put on charcuterie boards because I just think they're the cutest little things the cherry tomatoes [Music] still plugging along look at that that's holy basil randomly growing um these are Brad's Atomic grapes and I would say [Music] those four are ripe this is Malia's most favorite tomato I grow it for her every year and she's actually here she'll be here tonight just got off an airplane she flew in from Vegas to spend the summer with us before she starts college and I'm so excited that those not a single one of those has gotten ripe yet so I'm so excited that her favorite tomatoes are ripe for her to be here so this is why I just can't get along with the whole like idea that disease should be treated as if something that must be completely eradicated from a garden because these plants have tons of fruit on them have new Healthy Growth and tons more fruit to produce now as these lower fruits get done I'll come in with clippers and literally just take off all of this that's diseased and likely this fruit will still ripen for at least a while and there are like good ideas as far as like handling biohazard and handling disease like I guess it's best not to just go ripping all that stuff off because you're making really big open wounds in the plant it's best especially if you've got a disease that's showing up on your fruit that's like diseasing the whole plant not just the lower growth to take those out I've pulled a couple out the other day that were the fruit was coming in disease pull them out it's best to go ahead and put those on a burn pile that's like the utmost ideal way to handle it I I don't know especially if you grow in a very very humid place if looking at all spotting and crunchiness and all that stuff as disease that must be fully eradicated is reasonable or even desirable here's a great great picture here here's my slightly diseased plant looking pretty rough down there look at this that's pretty wild I think I'll let it grow overall it's just not going well for cucumbers at this point when they come in they'll probably taste terrible because of how hot it is but at the very least I'll plant some more and hopefully get a fall Harvest good thing I can't weigh too many pickles last year here's another one of those lettuce leaf basil plants that I was showing you with a much larger Leaf I really love this variety tomatillos and these are starting to ripen and come in will actually took a big bucket of these home the other day I told him I was going to be really busy with peaches and to take what he wanted but there's still a lot on here so I'm going to make some salsa verde with this so here is a sweet passion melon again it's kind of puny like some of my other things have been it was behind it kept getting eaten back so we'll see how it turns out and on this side this is called the lemon drop it's probably supposed to get a little bigger than this I know they're small but man a lot of my melons are looking puny this year my cucumbers haven't done very well I'm not I'm just not really sure I've had a really hard time getting those things off the ground and sometimes things will have a slow start but then they'll just take off I don't know cherry tomatoes I am not having a problem with berries crazy Jerry that's nuts so my lovely large tomatoes are continuing I just saw one here look at this it's not that not about the prettiest tomato that you have seen that is just lovely I would really love to leave these on to ripen on here this rain has me nervous I don't want to risk it I'm going to finish the video I could get so distracted and it'll start raining and then we'll have this done I'm gonna finish this because I can harvest in the rain but I can't shoot a video in the rain so the Tron monsino squash I'd actually like to see this plant is actually turning downward and I'd like for it to go on top usually just a little bit of redirecting and it'll take hold at any point we could go ahead and start eating these like right here I actually think I'll take that one off because it's going to get a lot bigger that'll be really nice cut up grilled with some oil and salt and pepper and garlic powder or you can cut it up and saute it in butter like till it's nice and soft and same like oil salt pepper garlic powder traumancino is not a strong flavored squash so you want to season it really well but it is nicely textured and it does taste good but it's not you know how some squashes just have more flavor than others it doesn't have like a super strong flavor oh I put in a video that I couldn't remember what this was and you guys reminded me because I sewed it on a video I told you it's in my garden journal this is a bitter melon I was like this is some sort of gourd but I don't know what it is I've not really grown for that bitter melon so it was unfamiliar to me and that is why I decided to try it this year and here's another instance of me not remembering what I plant um I'm pretty sure this is actually a cucumber which if it is that would be awesome maybe it had blossoms on it earlier maybe we can actually see a fruit mostly just look like blossoms yep look I'll have cucumbers after all I'm pretty sure that this is a cucumber that I got from row seven seeds which was like an experimental one I can't remember if I put that there if I put a melon there and I've been watching the plant grow thinking please be a cucumber because I'm happy and this is the Armenian white melon which also took a long time getting here um started multiple times or eaten down by pill bugs started these seeds actually in the greenhouse and then the first ones I transplanted got it eaten by something and so this is the second transplant out and they're actually growing lovely dahlias here's some Thai basil here's my green stock Tower full of micro dwarf Tomatoes looking pretty awesome don't you think and these varieties all in this Tower they only get like up to a foot tall and this variety has chartreuse leaves got several of them in here but I was looking at the green stock the other day and I was like man are my tomatoes sick and then I thought no they're actually very healthy it's just that variety looks nutrient deficient it's not it's just here's my one lonely Sweet Basil ended up being the only one I have in the whole garden don't know how that happened these are Thai Soldier beans which are marked on the envelope as a bush bean but in my experience like they climb quite a lot they're kind of like a squeaky Asian Bean so that'll be nice once it takes off more attempts at melons kind of going slow this was a cantaloupe in here also light coming melons which we still have a lot of time we can still get a lot of fruit some beautiful zinnias right here is lemongrass also incredible medicinal herb and really great for putting in teas sunflowers that I threw in for good measure here I've got some little ground cherries and they're just not quite taking off oh there are actually a few ripe fruits on here let's save the rest on here to give to Maya but these just aren't growing super fast which there's so much variation in a garden that most the times I don't worry about it if I've got some plants that are really massive and some that are on the smaller side just because there are a lot of factors that go into like what's getting Morning Sun what's getting the Evening Sun what is taking the prevailing wind how different shadows are cast and how the water flows and it's there are too many factors to go in in my opinion to really worry too much about it unless it's a persistent enough issue that it's actually pointing out something being deficit like if you had a whole bed that wasn't growing well you would want to look into it but for me if certain plants in certain parts of my garden are thriving more than they are in other parts I take note of it and then mostly I just let the chips fall for instance the plants in the high tunnel of ground cherries are like five times as big as any of the plants that are growing outside that I planted there are some massive volunteers around on the property but the plants in the high tunnel have not ripened any fruit yet whereas the ones outside are ripening fruit so there's the shade cloth there's the rain flow there's all these different factors that could go into why those are growing faster but not ripening fruit what I'm trying to say is sometimes there are things in gardening that may spark curiosity that we might want to explore but if you're the kind of person that gets really overwhelmed by things you can still be very successful in gardening and grow a lot of food without having all the answers and whatever approach you want to take that excites you and makes you want to keep coming back to the Garden that's the right approach I can smell that rain and I am really glad that it's here because I chose to shoot this video instead of watering this Garden that actually really needed watering it was going to be an early morning for me which it still will but if it rains will be one less thing to do on my list thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today and all the days that you do you can find this Garden Tour as well as many others on the different playlists cataloging each gardening year and I will continue in the incredible joy in getting to share my garden with you I bless you guys until next time

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 126,394

Keywords: Roots and Refuge, Roots and Refuge Farm, garden tour, growing food, backyard farm, homesteading, homesteading channel, organic gardening, how to garden

Id: Pl9C92Pr3CE

Length: 46min 27sec (2787 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2023