Full Garden Tour | July 2020

[Music] you [Music] good morning everyone we are doing a garden tour today we are well into July is July 13th and lots of things in the garden are off to a great start we're gonna head inside this is inside of our garden we have 9 raised rows two perennial beds and a high tunnel this is our second year gardening here in Alaska we are in zone 3 where we're at that means we have about 110 days of growing so very condensed so a lot of food in here because this is pretty much all you know our one shot in order to grow food for the entire year we're gonna first walk you through our high tunnel which is a 12 by 36 we absolutely love this thing it totally helps us grow warm crops in the last consumer this is what the entrance of the high tunnel looks like we have two fans we turn them on during the day if we need to today it's not that hot of a day so I'll probably just turn this one on later we also have a window in the back and we have a pretty big door on the front that we can open up to allow some good airflow going through the high tunnel last year we had Shake walk which I actually do still have but we don't have it on this year because it hasn't been that warm we had some warm weather in May but pretty much all of June was cooler and rainy and we've actually been starting July off with that rainy cool weather so it just hasn't gotten too hot in here if you guys saw our garden last year this was quite a different layout we had corn in here and we also had all of our squashes and zucchinis and you know all the winter squashes so lots of trellising going on and I actually found that even with their honeybees and the doors being open we just didn't have a good enough pollination here so we opted to put all of that stuff outside this year and we ended up putting more peppers and tomatoes gave us a little more room to for some other plants as well this whole south wall has I think about sixty or a few over 60 tomato plants and we are growing a lot because last year we grew about half that much and we didn't get anywhere near the amount we needed for all of our canning so we're hoping this year with the varieties we're growing we'll get enough Tomatoes I'm pretty happy with the way they're growing so far especially since this year you know we started them side early and by the time I finally got them out they had been through a really rough time so I think that they actually looked and they have a lot of flowers as you can tell all of these are you know the first half are a Roma type of tomato for sauces and they already have set their fruit so there's a lot of fruit on them which I'm really excited about for how early it is in the year I'm also a little more familiar with growing indeterminate kinds of tomatoes that we trellis and will usually prune them whereas these are more like a bush or like a shrub type tomato and they set all of their fruit and ripen at once I think that's gonna be really advantageous to us and I'm not quite sure if they're gonna get bigger they may get a little bit bigger as the season you know continues in the previous year I grew some tomatoes that did really well for us in Oregon but this year I switched it up and I have lots of different varieties in here that are quicker maturing and more determinate varieties right here and they're like the early type so they're a smaller tomato they all have fruit as you can see this one too it's really heavy I have to actually string it up these are more early Tomatoes right here and then we have a few indeterminate kinds and I think they should go I think the maximum I have is like 70 to 80 days which is pushing it for our season but um we may get some Tomatoes off them too they have flowers so this is the back of the high tunnel which you can tell we're just not utilizing that well or at all and that's because we had originally planned to put some sort of like heating method in here for starting seeds in the spring right now we've just been starting them in the cabin and honestly it's absolutely horrific because we live in a really small space and with our dogs and our cat it's just it's honestly a nightmare for a few months but you know it works and we get to grow pretty much all of our food for the year so I think we may continue to do that until we can figure out a better solution heating you know putting a heat source in here like a wood stove or like a rocket mass heater it's just not that efficient and this is a you know plastic high tunnel so we just don't have it airtight and we're gonna be really working hard to heat it and I can already imagine it's just not gonna hold that much of the heat another option is to actually add some more dirt back here and take advantage of this space by using it for planting so that's something we may do if we completely rule out the heating option these are peppers to my left and these are all bell peppers at first then we go into our banana peppers and our hot peppers we have like 80 peppers it's so exciting I'm really excited about it they're a little bit small lots of leafy green growth and definitely probably a little excess nitrogen honestly but lots of peppers I'll show you guys if you want to look close up so even though they're a little bit small they definitely have lots of flowers and they're setting a lot of peppers and this is what we found last year we had really good luck with all of our peppers we got dozens upon dozens from each plant I was really really impressed I think it's definitely the heat in here so this is a perfect example of my style of gardening I like to cram things in so we have a nasturtium right here and last year I was able to kind of ask them nicely to trellis up this pole it's a little bit hard to have to do it lots of string or twine and but they tend to crowd out the peppers that I have right there next to them so next year I need to not do that but I did this year and what will happen is just the peppers closest to it will be shaded out a little bit on this north side we first start with the tomatillos and they got huge last year they actually surpassed 8 feet so I'm thinking that may happen this year again it's a cooler summer so I don't know if they'll get as big but this one is definitely getting off to a good start behind them I have eggplants they're doing pretty good um you know it's it's eggplant and we're in Alaska so I find that they attract the aphids the most because they're probably stressed out honestly it's just not warm enough of an environment but we do have eggplants on here we got quite a few last year not as many as I would have hoped for I really like eggplant so we'll see these ones do seem to be off to a better start and since we're on the topic of aphids we actually found a really good solution for them so last year I discovered neem oil you guys have probably heard of that before and although I really like neem oil it definitely you know it kind of is a pretty strong thing to use on your plants can't use it that often it coats them really you know like in this thick polish so I found that I wasn't actually a huge fan of it this year I did some more research and I found some essential oils that actually work really well for an aphid spray now I'm not big on spraying anything on our plants even if it is organic in my mind this is their home this is where they live you know we've created this garden and it just makes sense to me that they're gonna be in here but when a feds get out of control as you all know I mean they can really do some devastation pretty fast so we had some on the peppers took care of that right away and I have had some in this area of the garden on more stressed-out plants too and I found that like just a little bit of essential oil and a gallon sprayer with a little bit of like biodegradable soap and sometimes I mix in the neem oil I kind of alternate it I spray it maybe once a week really really was effective it worked really well and got them down to more reasonable numbers the oils that I had researched were rosemary oil lavender and peppermint definitely notice the lavender and the rosemary oil seemed to work really well and they're pretty potent though so I would again just offer caution essential oils is a really concentrated oil that you wouldn't find just naturally you know in nature so again that's just my philosophy on spraying because when you're spraying the plants you know you're getting rid of the aphids but you're also definitely affecting a lot of other bugs that are living in your garden too now the rest of the garden is off to a little bit of a rough start we had the tomatoes and peppers started early eggplants tomatillos too but things that I like direct so beans cucumbers stuff like that you know it got started in June I think that's when I sowed it and we had some really cool weather so stuff was just not feeling that at all and this is the result our cucumbers are definitely a little bit small but they're going and there's actually a nice cucumber on that one and on the topic of cucumbers we switch the varieties we're growing this year I had some open pollinated kinds in here last year and I didn't realize that those were not good for inside of a high tunnel so we now have the kind that are more appropriate for a high tunnel and they don't really need to be pollinated this is you know the perfect area for them we have our green beans next and they are going looks like there are some sort of bug damage when they first came up I put some of that essential oil on them too and they seem to be doing better now I actually had to do those twice the first round I think it was just too cold and they didn't come up I also have some twine to my left and I'm trying to do some green beans in the middle that will actually climb this now this is probably the worst area of the garden this is where I tried to grow something named okra and I've tried to grow okra for several years it didn't really do that good in Oregon so I'm not really sure what made me think it would do well here but um this is the result so you can see it's doing really well here I also planted some edamame totally not working either so this is just a sad section of the garden but that's okay our basil is doing okay and it's definitely it seems a little stunted it's problem I guess is it just doesn't like the cold weather but I think as the summer goes along it should be fine and then some other random little plants they have here sunflowers mr. sim still we have lots of dill that receded itself too from last year and we have one cherry tomato right back here I have it by itself so we can get to it pretty readily we are going to be heading outside and checking out the rest of the garden this is the south end of our garden it is quite a bit shade here over here we have mint separated so it doesn't take over the whole garden and perfectly will anyways and then we have our asparagus to my left this asparagus is on its second year it's doing okay some of the plants didn't actually or the crowns didn't actually make a comeback I think there was probably about three or four that didn't I'm not sure if it's just a too cold of an area to perennial eyes I mean most of them did make a comeback so we're gonna kind of monitor it we really probably won't be harvesting from it until year four kind of sad but that's just the way it works with asparagus let's head over and check out the main area of the garden this is our first row outside and it has lots of celery in it celery actually did really well last year I was really excited about that and we made lots of things out of it one thing I wanted to touch on is just kind of what a rows are made up of if you haven't you know seen some of our previous videos first off you're gonna see a lot of weeds there's a lot of weeds in here and that's just true we do go through and weed but they still grow prolifically when we moved here this was just bare soil so we really didn't have anything you know to go with as far as you know gardening so we brought in a lot of material a lot of amendments it's mainly a lot of compost there's hay we've got some spent barley and just lots of you know organic matter and topsoil too and so that's what's making up the mass but when you bring in newer and uncommon ou're you're definitely going to get weeds and I think in general in Alaska the compost here just never gets that hot so you end up with a lot of weeds not a big deal I just go through and pick them and I don't compost them personally because I don't feel like they break down so I don't want to you know introduce more weeds back into our garden so I don't know if you could tell there are two different varieties of celery ones Utah once tango and I believe tango is a bigger one I believe tango does better here so we may only grow that one in the future we're gonna bump over to the radishes we got started on these a little late this year so some of them are bolting because of the long daylight hours but they still are putting on nice bulbs I'm gonna go ahead and pick out a few for later today so you can tell some of these are already bolting which means they're naturally just not gonna have as big of a bulb last year we got really lucky with our timing we got a massive radishes I mean this was like a small ranch compared to us last year and this is pretty much the biggest what I'm seeing now but you know if there's still a good-sized so definitely gonna eat these I'm gonna go ahead and get these rinsed off and that's just the way it is with gardening it definitely comes down to timing and weather I can't predict the weather unfortunately so I always have to just try and do my best job as I can on timing so these are potatoes you can tell they're off to a great start they've been growing for quite a while now and I just can't even keep up with them we held them we usually do it two to three times during the season just depending upon growth last year they got massive I mean they literally came out to the other edge of the row same thing on the other side so probably gonna do them just twice this year and what we first do is we go along with soil and he'll the meth and then we come through with straw and the second time I usually just do straw some of these are starting to fur too we don't always see the potatoes set fruits but that's what that is this is an example of what a potato looks like that we already hailed we've already added several inches of soil and some straw or hay onto it and but it's still continuing to grow and like I said I'm just not going to be able to keep up with that and we really don't have to you if you do a few inches you're gonna get some extra potatoes out of them but more potatoes this these have also been hailed but these are the fingerlings and they have not don't know if you can tell but that's just soil down there so Eric and I are gonna come along today and he'll these up in this row right in front of me we have all of our carrots germinating um they actually germinated pretty nicely I have some bare spots that I went through and sprinkled some more carrot seed further down we have more root crops let's go check out our beets beets are off to a fairly good start this year I've already come through and thinned them once I'll probably thin them one more time we thin our beets because we like them to get really big you I mean it's you can do it and like clusters but you have to come through and pull them out as they're growing in order to allow the other ones to get big so we just find it's easier to do it now and then we'll up with nice-size beats at least that's the ball so beats in general and Swiss chard when you plant a seed you get three out of that seed and if that makes sense you get three plants so you'll be like what is going on here I have so many seeds that germinated and so you really have to come through and thin them and what I mean by that is in a cluster like this you know I'm not gonna get any big beets because there's just too many growing hair so I'll probably pull this one and I'll probably pull down one it's sad but you need to let and in fact I should actually thin this little middle one too but I may leave it just for now but you need to do this in order to get big beets these are our parsnips that have germinated those are slow and they take a long time to grow and then we have our turnips next to them we're growing salsify for the first time this year and we'll just see how that goes I've never crowed it I'm same thing with this winter summer savory it's summer savory and it has a beautiful like purple flower like purple flower it's just stunning this is like kind of a really shamble of bed here I just I'm I just kind of like threw in things that I didn't have space for and other stuff and there's lots of things that have sewn themselves or like receded these mustards were one of them we let these go to seed last year way over yonder and found them everywhere this year so if you're seeing these purple plants that's what happened there we've also got some really big spinach here it is bolting we're still getting really nice sage leaves from that and right here I have some fennel going I've never been able to get the fennel to produce really big bulbs but hopefully we'll get a little bit bigger bulbs than that we really like fennel it's super delicious cooked and we really like it with olives and feta cheese this year we changed things up with our herbs I had a few perennial eyes which was really unexpected actually some of them perennial eyes that I wasn't anticipating which is oregano thyme didn't perennial eyes or I didn't give it long enough the same thing with the lavender but chives and mint did this is parsley right here we have time oregano and tarragon and tarragon definitely fertilized so we have lots of that but we decided to put them in little grow bags and I do have a lot of them over our other garden with the trees and that's just because I wanted them out of the main you know garden where we're growing our crops they just get intermingled and for ease of harvesting this works out really well so this is one of the oregano plants that actually overwintered I believe this is two but it's massive so it gets so much bigger when they overwinter um I don't really know how that happened since its zone five but we must have mulch pretty thickly it would be my guess we have some sage and mint right here it's actually really pretty Apple mint I believe and I don't think this will perennial eyes that's why I have it in a container but really nice leaves off that one we're gonna head next into our leek and onion and shallot bed this first section is our leeks and I have a bunch of cilantro that have receded itself it's bolting but you know we just pull it up as we want it to eat it fresh and we're gonna be healing these up a little bit more as they grow maybe a little rough start on our onions this year I don't know if you remember that and I did end up buying some little sets and bulbs so those are doing really well too Eric and I have had some really crazy weather what I'm gonna call crazy weather we had like three separate hail storms and lots and lots of rain and the hail was so intense that actually did damage point leaves this is mr. shim so it has really delicate leaves and but that's what it looks like not a big deal to me it's just gonna you know move on and keep growing but it was it was pretty extreme so if you see little white spots I'm actually seeing them on the onions it was from all of that hail we've got our red onions here and right in front of me we have Cortland which is believe it's a yellow onion and then I have Walla Walla down here with some shallots and green onions Walla Walla and Cortland are doing the best I you know I think we're gonna get decent size bulbs last year everything was really pretty good for the most part we had lots of good growth up top and we got fairly you know nice sized bulbs and they flopped over just like they showed in the fall they were all cured for the winter this year I'm hoping everything goes as planned we may end up with a little bit smaller of bulbs though since I had some struggles earlier in the season these are our green onions we're gonna wait until the end pretty much to harvest those these are some shallots growing and these are these sets that we transplanted so lots of different varieties there and the bulbs and the bulbs are doing really well on the end to this whole row we have squash growing and so it's winter squash I also have some summer squash down at the other end and last year we grew these in the high tunnel had the issue with pollination so I just said let's grow them outside this is kind of a trial and error year for us I have plastic on the row and that seems to really be helping them because we have had cold weather and they were a little slow to go we talked about putting like a little low tunnel on it but we just couldn't figure out how to do that with a trellis so as it is they look really good they're depending upon the year they're if they get you know rigorous growth they're gonna way surpassed this would be my guess and we'll just see if we have enough time for those winter squash to mature these are delicata and Buttercup squashes buttercups a new one for us this year I think it's going to mature in time and it's a really you know small compact winter squash we have some summer squash and zucchini right here you probably notice they're extremely compacted as far as like how close they're planted and again this is just trial and error for us we're trying to see what varieties do best in a cool summer and then from there we're gonna you know space them out better in the future I just want to see how it works outside in Alaska and this is a really great year for us because of the cool weather these ones are starting to flower and form their fruits we also have a yellow variety doing the same thing over here so this is our corn and as you can tell a cold wet year has not been good to it so we had a little low tunnel on it and these were actually started a little bit earlier I had some issues with germination so this is that's why these are a little smaller but I suspect we absolutely will not be getting caught up it's easier we have some tasseling on these ones which is way too early because they're gonna tassel now and they don't have their ears form with the souks so the pollination is just not going to meet up and again I'm just not for seeing like lots of warm weather in our future so it was you know we knew we knew it was kind of like a trial and error I think it would have worked better had we done the plastic on the row and then planted the corn in addition to the low tunnel so that's something we're looking at doing next year last year this corn over eight feet tall in the high tunnel but we had major issues with pollination so onto something a little more promising we have our garlic which makes up the rest of this row we started it in the fall and it came up in the spring it's looking great these are hard necks so they put on or they put off scapes and in just a wee bit when they curl over once more Eric and I will come along and nip all those the garlic still has quite a bit more time to grow before we harvest it you know back an organ we harvested it in the summer but I'm thinking here we're gonna be probably closer to the fall and I'll go buy the leaves once they start turning yellow and kind of dying that's an indicator when it's time to harvest it this is a variety that didn't do as well you can tell there's some spots where not all the cloves came up in fact I'm not sure what variety that was but the other varieties did do really well it looks like most of them survived that lovely winter we had so with all this cold weather we've been having and the the moisture of brassicas are actually absolutely in love with it this is a cauliflower leaf and they're doing freaking awesome I mean these are doing way better than last year I'm super stoked with their growth and they have their little cauliflower heads if you guys want to come in here I can show you one so this is a little cauliflower head forming still has lots of time to go usually we get really lucky with cauliflower and get some seriously nice heads and so I'm foreseeing that should go well this year we also have some purple cauliflower next to it and Veronica those are doing well again this year last year I started these a little early they may have been a little bit root bound when I transplanted them and or possibly we had some cooler soils when I transplanted them so they were off to not a very good start and this year just totally opposite they're really doing a great job I'm very happy but of course there are always things that happen that we don't plan for and I had a bug this year I don't really know what bug it was but it was when our plants were out here kind of hardening off they ate the growing point of the plants and I saved one for you guys to see because I didn't notice it until it was a little bit later along in the season and we lost by like a dozen plants and we lost quite a bit but we just always planned for extra you can tell that we cramp our plants so we really have a lot to go from if we lose a few so this is another cauliflower we have forming we've got another one next to it and then next to it have I think it was brought it was Veronica in fact I'm not sure but this is what happens so they they grow like they're normally supposed to but their Center has been chewed out and so there's almost like no evidence that even a critter was there because it happened when it was really young and I hadn't happened to two cabbages last year and I totally thought they were duds because this is a new variety for me and it's just like this is just really not very good cabbage seed apparently but no it happened to kohlrabi cabbage broccoli cauliflower this year so I now know that it was a bug and I'm really not sure what kind it was maybe like a grub or Caterpillar of some sort but it didn't leave any other markings and the plants continue to grow and of course I noticed as they got a little bigger so we're gonna be giving this one to the chickens so Eric and I really like cauliflower it holds up well to canning and freezing all of that we tend to grow more of that compared to the broccoli the broccoli is doing pretty good we're getting lots of side shoots even off of the plants that the bugs chewed but this is like a head that's forming I'm gonna actually snip this probably today you can tell it's going to start to flower soon broccoli is awesome because you can continue to get those side shoots even once you've harvested the main head that's not the case with any sort of cauliflower and that's why I have to get rid of those plants when they're growing Center was chewed out they're pretty intense the flavor next we have a really beautiful plant too called auric it's one of my favorites Eric and I were introduced to it like a decade ago I think when we got a CSA box and it's called mountain spinach Orcas about oh our ACH that's a really nice big leaf damaged by hail you can tell and it also grows in the screen color too even though this is a purple variety we tend to get some greens in there too is it's like a little denser it does get a little velvety sometimes in comparison to spinach and it holds up so well to canning and you know cooking we've done pesto with this and we also just eat it fresh in salads so I absolutely love this one it flowers and it's it's gorgeous and it will reseed itself everywhere too just so you know this is our Swiss chard and we are having some volt I don't know why that happens to us here I have tried to start it a little later start a little earlier all sorts of things and I still end up with some of them bolting I think it's variety based and just our long light hours and I never had that happen back in Oregon but we do have a few varieties that aren't bolting so we're just kind of pulling from all of them and I'll probably try to figure out which ones do better with the weather here and try to grow those in the future this is our lettuce pack we buy lettuce for the entire head you can definitely come along and pick the outer leaves and it'll continue to grow until it finally goes to seed but Eric and I just like to eat it like while we have it which is only for about one to two months honestly we have about 40 heads here we're eating through these are Romain's really really nice lettuces then we move on to a butter head which is a really nice crisp early maturing lettuce and we have iceberg and some loose-leaf lettuces upend the harvesting them is super easy when you do this because you're just coming in and taking in the head and then we're gonna go ahead and give that a little rinse and that will be for dinner tonight but one thing we really like to do is chill our vegetables or rinse them in this cold water I usually let them sit for like twenty to thirty minutes I mean you can even let them sit for a few hours and it just like really crisps them and keeps them in that state when you go to put them in storage Bianca's going down your fridge for a few days we're back at the lettuce bed and the rest of it pretty much was and is mustard greens I have a few other randoms in there you know arugula mizuna we've got spinach things like that and most of them have bolted because it's just you know really long light hours and we already got to eat a lot of them I like to leave them even though it gets really messy because the bees absolutely love the pollen and the nectar and butterflies and just whatever else you know this is like a feeding grounds for our friends so I leave it for a while but soon I'm gonna come along and nip all this and in fact this is going to be our garlic grouse going to be where we put the garlic in the fall there's three greens in here that don't bolt very fast one is these Italian I think they're Italian dandelion and I just come along and I nip them and they'll regrow back so these don't bolt for a very long time this is a really awesome salad green to grow and there's also Sorrell that we're growing we have two different kinds one's got these red veins and ones French Sorel it's like a more light green lemony Sorel and both of them do not bolt very quickly there are awesome greens to grow if you're looking for something to stand in your garden for a long time so this is some of our spinach we're harvesting even though it has bolted it's still putting on really nice sized leaves I'm not sure what variety this is I have like six different varieties in here but they get they'll get really big kind of like a mask so I don't know why you would do that but if you want to there you go this is the other Sorel I was mentioning the first variety it's really pretty it's got this these little red veins as you can tell probably its name or why it's named that and again this one doesn't flower in fact I don't even remember this flowering its first year last year I could be wrong on that and behind us we have some French sorrel and that actually perennial eyes so those are the original plants I had I put some more dirt and planted corn on top of them and they have actually come back I'm gonna actually harvest one of these finishes and go ahead and gave the rest of the plant to the chickens I try to show you guys this iceberg he's getting they're really awesome to grow your own little iceberg lettuce isn't home this is that French Sorrell I was talking about that perennial isin came back I think it's like a zone five so I really don't know again why that happened but it's just growing back on the side since I totally put dirt all on top of it this is our pea trellis right here we have snap peas and snow peas growing I had some lemon cucumbers over here but those didn't like the weather so they're not growing very well this is our bunch of kale and they are doing really well we have Toscana this is one of our absolute favorite kales it just holds up to it caning and cooking very well this is another variety just with a purple rib I think it's called dazzling blue and this one grows really well here and then we have a few other random kinds that I grew from like a mix I believe this is Siberian kale and then one of my favorites is actually these real frilly ones that look like this continuing on this row we have our Brussels sprouts and collards really have two Collard plants because they are very prolific plants and we tend to not be able to keep up with them our chickens absolutely love all the extra greens that we have you know so if there's something we're harvesting and we can't get to the greens they devour eight they love it and it helps us with their feed costs too so we're moving on to the kohlrabi which is doing really well with this weather and in fact we were saving this Goliath this is delicacy white and I don't think it usually gets this big at least in our experience growing this for several years you never had one get this big but they just like love this weather um so progress in this one today and when they get really big they can get a little woody and they don't taste as good but we have found that they still are super juicy and delicate on the inside so this is just freaking massive we're gonna alright eat this with a few meals we're also growing purple Vienna which is just a purple variety takes a little bit longer to mature but it it's another really nice variety of go Robbie next to our kohlrabi we have cabbages and there's just a few missing here there where the bugs you know chewed them out but they're doing really well and they're very closely spaced we do that for production and for weed management clearly we have a lot of weeds but it actually does help when you have them touching each other because there's less bare ground for weeds to grow so we found that works really well and what I do is I just come along you know once they've grown and I get rid of these big outer leaves in general they don't really need these big outer leaves to grow I mean if you can if you have great spacing then go ahead and leave them but we found that we can prune them and the heads will still form really nicely on the inside so this is I believe this is called presto this is from territorial seed it's an early a green head we have Express and Copenhagen down there and this is a late maturing likes a void leaf cabbage so these ones hold up for well for winter storage and just again huge leaves doesn't need them so I'm going to get rid of them and give them to the chickens and I'm really just doing that so they don't overcrowd the neighboring cabbage really big cabbage leaf chickens are gonna love this at the end of this room I have a little broccoli transplant that I plugged in and we're kind of seeing if we can get two to three rounds of our cabbages I planted a while back I started some of the earlier maturing kinds and have them planted throughout the garden I just want to see if we can get some producing midsummer and late right before the fall this is a parsnip that we apparently thrilled to pool and I'm gonna let it go to seed and try to collect those seeds this year this is our strawberry Roe we planted these crowns last year and this is their second year some of them are the baby you know runners from the mom plants and they're doing really well this year they're putting on a lot of growth not too many flowers yet even though I did put bone meal on them so I'm thinking in the future they'll do better as they you know keep perennial izing and what we're doing this year is going along and snipping runners because we don't want them to put that much energy into that so this is a runner right here it's a little you know shoot and it's trying to form extra strawberry plants but when they do that they take away a lot of energy from the plants themselves and towards fruit production and that's what we're after we don't need more of these I'd say we have well over 50 strawberry plants in this bed we're finally working our way to the last bed in the garden and I wanted to point out one thing that I found very interesting Eric and I didn't add or amend this row or this row very much I mean in fact we amended it very very little because they had perennials in them and I didn't want to death a whole bunch of soil whereas these other beds got you know inches of manure and aged manure compost and some other amendments too and so I just thought it was so cool because this bed right here in this bed clearly you can tell there's absolutely no shortage in nitrogen in fact I think this year all we needed to do was uncover our mulch and directly you know transplant or so our plants so for next year I'm not going to be amending these beds that much since I feel like we have plenty of nutrients in them so in this bed we have artichokes which we're trying this year probably not a great year to try them catnip that perennial eyes we have lots of little cabbages this was my late round of cabbages to see if they're gonna go in time I think they will I have a few cauliflowers and broccolis the catnip is not something we want to have in this garden indefinitely I'm I wasn't in fact expecting him to perennial eyes so I have a lot of them and we've moved a few over to our other garden these I'm probably going to be harvesting at the end of the year and actually digging up the roots because I want this to be for crops for food and the only thing that I really know you know I like this for tea and it also works really great as a mosquito repellent so I just don't need this much of it we've got one more bed to go over behind Eric and there's a lot of stuff in it we've got lots of stuff in here flowers predominantly extra little plants I have and this is also our raspberry has cat bed I've got a rose Virgo so right on the corner here then we have four of our hats caps they put on a lot of growth this year they look really good we've got borage and chamomile and then we also have some shallots and onions that we grew last year we replanted them this year because we wanted to try and take some of the seed from them this year and then next we have our raspberries Eric built this cool little trellis and the raspberries are gonna get bigger but they've already put on a lot of really nice growth and then I just have more flowers in here I have some salvia marigolds and nasturtiums and the nasturtiums are ones that we collected from last year so I'm really excited about it because we have you know we had all sorts of different colors and we still have all sorts of different colors from the seed they're doing really well and this is a gooseberry we added this this year I definitely think it's means another year to look a little better you can tell the new growth it looks a little better than the old growth this is exciting for us because we haven't really had this before and we're gonna wrap up with showing you guys how the orchard is doing so we're over at the trees but I just want to show you guys some of the nasturtiums that I found this one's like my favorite it's got like a tie-dye color and there should be some red ones or more crimsoning colored ones but I have yet to find those so hopefully I got seed from those ones these awesome as snacks you know we put them in salads they're also really good dried and teas they're like a great source of vitamin C so we really liked that last year if we felt like we were getting sick let's go ahead and head in and see how things are looking everything's looking good in here so far the fruit trees and the plum trees all look really healthy they already look like they put on some new growth or they're at least getting greener and leaf here which is awesome really excited about all the rain to that we've been getting I think that's really advantageous for them the back bed we've already translated some of our flowers that we had in the garden things like bee balm catnip even a few others that oregano those did perennial eyes so we went ahead and transplanted them in here this is echinacea that we started last year and it did overwinter which is awesome I'm hoping that flowers this year we've got some comfrey down here I'm really excited for this one just have one comfrey plant this is creeping thyme got some lemon balm in the back these are some more herbs this is a chive plant we have that's doing really well next to the ginormous oregano and just more more flowers a lot of the flowers we want to add to this bed are actually going to be things that I sew next year in this spring I'll probably always keep like boorishness err shimmer marigolds over there but this I will add lots of other perennials and maybe even some annuals that the bees will hopefully like we hope you guys enjoyed the garden tour and we will be doing another garden tour in August and of course be doing lots of canning and harvesting from it this summer so we will see you next time [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 787,106

Rating: 4.943532 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, cabin life, off grid cabin, sustainable living alaska, homestead off grid, summer in alaska, daylight alaska, gardening alaska, high tunnel garden, growing your own food, vegetable garden, garden zone 3, alaska garden, alaska homestead, high tunnel alaska, greenhouse cold climate, greenhouse gardening, lasagna gardening, no till garden, gardening tips, growing potatoes, tomatoes greenhouse, raised rows garden

Id: ouVn-pD5FPc

Length: 39min 15sec (2355 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 14 2020