It's been the most productive summer in
the garden of my entire life here at the Epic Homestead, the
first full summer here. So come along with me
as I harvest bed by bed, going into the backyard and absolutely
taking as much as I can out of the garden and sharing my successes
and failures along the way. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic
Gardening. Man, it's a beautiful, beautiful summer. It is
transitioning into fall. So I'm going to figure out exactly
how much I can harvest at one time, a James Prigioni style harvest.
A shout out to my friend, James. You really should go subscribe
to his channel as well. And for those of you who cultivate
the Like button and drop a Comment, I'm going to walk over there.
I'm going to pick up a luffa, I'm going to peel the luffa. I'm going
to cut the luffa into eight slices, and then I'm going to turn those slices
into a bar of soap with the luffa as an exfoliant. And I will mail it out to eight of you
who Like and Comment on this video. I don't know if there's a better
incentive than that on this earth. And let's get into the video. Right
here, kicking it off at the beginning, is probably the most
precious plant in my garden. Many of you who've been following Epic
Gardening for a long time may recognize this plant right here. It is ginger. It is the ginger from the most popular
video on my channel of all time that I released, more or less, right
when the world went into lockdown. So this video, really many of you
who are watching this channel, you came because of this video,
because of this plant right here. So it is kind of a special
moment. It's been over a year, maybe a year and a half
since I've been growing this. So I'm a little nervous about
what I might actually find, but it's been growing quite
significantly. So with ginger, you can just harvest off chunks at a time. I want to harvest the entire thing
and kind of start a new chapter here. So let's just pull it up
and see what we get. Okay. This whole thing might
be ginger. You know what? I think I might need the help of
someone who is very soon to have his own YouTube channel here on the Epic
Gardening universe - Jacques, the garden hermit. And here he is! Okay.
So I thought I could do this on my own. I actually can't. So maybe
we can. Hold it. Well, you think it's a hold or do you think
it's? Maybe we cut this? Yeah, maybe. Let's dig it out. Here, let's use this.
We'll cut this. Come in and just slice. So now we're separate. Cause we got, we're gonna harvest the sugar
cane pretty close after this. So at least we're separated.
You know what it is? There's a lip and it's hard to get out. It's growing right here. Yep. Right? Oh, you can see them. Look at that.
Look at that. Yeah. Oh, I hear it. I hear it. I hear it. You got it. You
got it. The muscle, Jacques the muscle. Ooh, look at that! Okay. Well let's do some excavation and see
what we actually get out of this. Okay. So we're going to try to wash it all
clean and just see what we're left with. You can see, we scraped the
sides of the ginger there. But there's just so much and this was
almost a set it and forget it kind of crop. So there's a lot of these roots that are
just actual roots and then the rhizome chunks. We want to see
how many we got of those. I suspect probably a decent amount, but less than we could have gotten
if we had put it in the ground. Because it'll want to go horizontally
and just keep developing. Next up on the list is corn. It's my
second batch of corn for the season. So I did do some things that are a
little bit different from the first corn video that I released earlier in the year. The first thing that I
did that was different is, all the offshoots that come out
from the bottom of the corn stalk, I actually cut them all off for
this crop of Martian jewel corn. So one single stalk and it seems like
we got bigger and better ear production, but we're only gonna know once we harvest
it. Silks are nice and brown. Corn, good size. That's all you need to know. Just crack it off the
stalk and you're good. Just for good measure I'm going to take
one of these ginger from the front yard and harvest these out.
Cause this is a true ginger, the ginger from the original videos
of Alpinia galonga or a version of lesser ginger. So let's see how
this one goes. Look at that. That's what I'm talking about. That's
what we want to see right there. I'm going to take one more, just give you
guys a sense of, so that's how ginger, classic ginger is going to grow. You're
going to see these rhizome chunks, right? So we planted basically this right here
and then it shot out like this and it looks absolutely
incredible. Wow, beautiful! I'm gonna let the rest of these
mature for another month or so, but these are gonna be
delicious in the kitchen. Over here this tiny little fig tree
actually did produce this year. This is a yellow long neck fig. And so the figs actually don't turn
a purple color, they stay yellow. But you'll know they're ripe when you
can squeeze them and they're pretty darn plump. And when they come
really easy off the plant. So this one actually is ready.
Actually think most of these are ready. With figs a lot of the times you want
to prune off any fruit that exceeds maybe five-ish per stem, and
you'll get a better yield that way. But this again is a really young plant. I'm lucky I even got any
fruit off of it this year. I'm going to have to do some pruning
and shaping and hopefully next year and next harvest, it's going
to be absolutely massive. Over here in the Birdies round tall bed, I've got a mixture of bok choy and
radish. They're both, unfortunately, ones that get destroyed by cabbage moths, which has happened. But
the radishes, it's fine. We're eating them for the
bottoms. They'll be just fine. I'm going to salvage what I can of some
of this bok choy here. So, you know, here just come in, grab the
roots. Comes out nice and easy. You can eat the ones with holes in
them, just give them a nice wash. It's up to you. I do see quite
a bit of insect eggs on these. So if I'm going to eat this, I need
to give it a pretty healthy wash. But we'll take a couple
selections of the bok choy here. Maybe these two guys and
let's pull some radishes. Radishes are really easy to know when
to harvest because you can just feel around the base and feel how wide that
root is. And then if it's good enough, just pluck it out. Let's grab a couple
of these and see what we're working with. This guy here seems good. And yeah, there we go. It's a nice looking
variety right there. Pristine. We're ready for a salad. Ooh. Even bigger. Even nicer. Here we are
out in the luffa arch. This is my best year of luffa yet. I
could have given it a much bigger arch. Luffa can go 20, 30 feet or so. I just
didn't need that many. And I have about, I dunno, about eight or nine really
solid ones here. So let's do a harvest. Let's grab a couple. You can let
them dry on the vine if you want to. This is almost ready to go. This
is the Thai extra long ridged one, which is different than the one I
grew last year. But man, hefty, hefty. These are the ones. If you cultivate
the Like button and you drop a Comment, you might get a custom luffa soap straight
out of the Epic Garden. So do that. But let's harvest this. Take a look at that! That's pretty good. Mixed between really dry
ones and somewhat fresh ones. But let's just say your boy is going
to be showering in style for quite some time! It's been a really
good year for flowers for me. I've gotten into them quite a bit. Zinnias as being one of the ones
I had the most success with. Queen lime being my favorite
variety. This is not that. But I'm going to build a
little harvest bouquet as well, along with some cosmos and some dahlias. Cosmos is one of the flowers that
I've grown for quite some time, probably one of the easiest starter
flowers to grow. It's going to do this. You can deadhead it as much as you
want. I can clip an entire little sprig, just like this, for my bouquet. The rest of it is going to keep on
going until the winter kills it off. So tons of different varieties
of cosmos. Beautiful, beautiful flower and very easy to grow. Let's grab one more zinnia here
and into the backyard for the big kahuna. This was my first year
growing dahlias. I have to say, I'm now an addict. I will be growing
them every year from here on out. I mean just look at the color
on this. Absolutely gorgeous. What I'm going to do though is harvest
it. There's tons of new buds coming out. I can push this into maybe
October or so where I live. So I'll take this one off. It'll allow the plant to have a little
bit more energy to grow the rest of these little flower buds that are coming out. And I'll grab another one
of the varieties down below. Gorgeous color on this
one. But it's coming in, in for the season. Out back here, this is the biggest bed
I've ever planted inground. There's 42 varieties of
peppers and 14 varieties of tomatoes. The tomatoes are kind
of on their last legs right now. We'll push them for about another
month and a half. But these peppers, there's a mix of the most
mild peppers of all time. So I think I have one that's 1.5
million on the Scoville scale. So if you want myself and maybe I'll
bring Jacques the garden hermit in to eat those on a video at
some point, let me know. But what we noticed with the peppers
this year was it took a little bit more water than I expected to
really get them established. We had a very mild summer and now
in this hotter than average fall, all the peppers are starting to pop off. So I'm going to run through
and harvest as many as I can. Toss them in that bucket right
there and we'll see what we get. I know I just harvested some
watermelons earlier in the month, but there's a tiny little guy here.
It is the size that it's mature at. So this is mini love, another one to
add to the stack. My fridge is like, I think I'm four watermelons
deep in my fridge right now. So if you have any watermelon recipes, let me know cause I got to start
using these pretty quickly. The late summer harvest is abundant and
I gotta be honest when I'm telling you, I don't think we even harvested a third
of everything we could have harvested. But I only have one fridge. I can only fit so much in the fridge and
it's already kind of full already with watermelons and other things. So let's talk about a couple
of my favorite crops for
the summer. First of all, this shishito right here.
So, I mean I'm half Asian. I eat shishitos like they're going
out of style. Amazing, amazing plant. There's a bunch of different
varieties of shishito you can grow. This one's a little bit longer and
it's a little bit less wrinkly, but it's still quite nice. You blister it, you put some soy sauce and some
salt on it, you're good to go. Next up we have the one I'm very
afraid to even touch, let alone taste. This is the Armageddon. So this
is the one that if you guys want, Jacques and I will do a
taste test from mild to hot, and this will be sort of the final one.
We'll do our own version of Hot Ones, if you're familiar with
that show here on YouTube. The next one I think is kind
of a sleeper hit unique pepper. This is called a mad
hatter pepper. This one, I mean the name kind of gives it away. It just has this funky little
alien spaceship type of look, but it's a pretty mild pepper. It's
pretty prolific. And it's quite bushy. I've seen success overwintering it. You have unlimited options when you're
growing the mad hatter pepper. Next up, we've got all these ancho poblanos. These
are great for splitting and stuffing, carving the top off and stuffing
something in, roasting them, smoking them. All sorts of different
things you can do with these. These weird ones here are tequila sunrise. So they're ripe and ready to go when
they have this sort of orange beautiful color. But man, it was
a productive summer. It's by far the most productive summer
I've ever had in the garden with all this new space here at the Epic Homestead. If you want to see what we end
up doing with all this produce, head on over to the Epic Homesteading
channel, which is way more about cooking, preserving, all of the
systems that run the house. Trying to be as sustainable
as possible in a modern way. But I've got to get this inside. I'm probably going to roast this corn
up for dinner. I'll see you guys soon. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
