- So last night I only
slept about three hours. It was a very rough night. I don't know what happened,
I just couldn't sleep. And, of course, instead of trying to relax and doing something to fall asleep, I spent the whole time
thinking about what I needed to finish in the garden. So today we're gonna
try to do some of that. Trying to get myself as tired as possible. Might even sound tired already, but there is still a
lot to do in the garden. Right now I'm writing up labels 'cause we need to actually
start some more carrots. I have the Red Cored Chantenay right here and the Shin Kuroda. These are both classic carrots. And I have an empty bed for them so I wanna get those in the ground. Also have some of this crimson clover, we'll talk more about
that a little bit later. I have a really cool idea on how I want to use this this year. And the garlic saga continues. I still have a whole
bunch of garlic to plant and I've kind of given up on looking for different
spaces to put it in. So the other day I ripped out the last of the tomatoes in
the in-ground garden over here and we're going to go
ahead and flip that bed and plant it with garlic. I was trying to avoid
planting it in ground, but I just simply don't have enough space. The reason why I was trying to avoid that in-ground planting, of course, was the fact that I had so
much garlic rust last year. But we'll talk all about
that throughout this. First, let's get some of
these carrots in the ground. I have a couple different methods for how I like to start my carrots and we'll see how this works
out in the following update. So first off here is the bed in question where I had the tomatoes and peppers and this is where we're going
to be adding some garlic. We'll say, overall, everything
looks super wonderful still. Here's the broccolini. I still have a main head on this one. The rest of 'em are now in
side shoot production mode. So all those little side shoots
are the actual broccolini. The main head is a little
bit closer to broccoli rather than broccolini. Now back here, in one of the last vlogs, I planted all these onions out and, honestly, the fact
that they're all upright means that they're going to make it. Now some of 'em look a little bit sad, actually this one right here, something about it just looks very sad, but the rest of them are all standing up, which is fantastic. I think these are all
going to be totally fine. So, like I said, these onions
looked, really, quite bad when I was putting them in,
but they turned out just fine. Now back here... Oh man, that's a bummer. My cabbage! Come on! Snapped at the stem. Honestly, this is probably my dog's fault. Oh, there he is. I think
it was Cosmo's fault, huh? Are you the one who breaks into the garden and likes to prance around? Yes, he can't even look at
the camera, he's too ashamed. So I'll have to find a
replacement for that. What I want to show you guys
was the mound over here. This is the Hugelkultur
in-ground mound that I built. This was actually for
Epic Gardening video. And the cool thing is is
that I seeded it with wheat just from my wheat berries that I used to grind
up to make fresh bread, and all of it has already emerged. So that's going to be very exciting. But we are now at the bed in question, which is the far L-shaped bed here. It's the last one that's empty. So let's get some carrots in the ground. So before we get over to the carrots, I'm going to do this optional step. I'll explain exactly why I'm doing this when we get back over there. But I'm just going to be sifting out some of my leftover potting mix. I think I was growing a tomato
in this grow bag before, so we'll go over that in a moment here. So when it comes to growing carrots, it all comes down to moisture of the seed to get that good germination. Now, I'm going to be doing this in a, kind of, complicated way. You don't have to make
it this complicated, you could just throw
your seed in the ground. Chances are you might
have very good success without having to do anything extra. But I know a lot of people struggle with carrots in particular
for that germination. So all I'm doing right now is I'm trying to smooth off
the bed, make it very even, try to get as much of this
chunky mulch out of the way because, again, we want that
seed to stay well watered and actually moist for
the entire two week period it takes for it to germinate. I'm sure everyone's been here before. You try to water your
bed to get it rehydrated and the water is just sitting
on the surface like this. Very annoying because if I move it, underneath, the soil is bone dry, it's just not sticking at all,
it's entirely a dry powder. So what I like to do is actually introduce a jet into the soil. 'cause that jet helps
actually stir the soil up into the water and helps
the water hydrate it faster. So take a look right here. If I pop this in and pull the soil back, I guarantee you it's
going to be dry underneath and it is, basically bone dry. So that's why we need to give
it a little bit of a stir here to make sure that that water's actually getting incorporated. And this, my friends, is why you should always have
something growing in your beds and never stop watering it, otherwise you're gonna end up with hydrophobic dry soil, like this, that's just going to
be a pain to rehydrate. That took a while, but I feel much more confident that now there is at least some amount of moisture bank in the soil. If I take a handful like that,
it is at least mostly wet. There's a little bit of
dryness still in there, but that's totally fine. The idea is that we
wanna start with the soil as moist as possible. That's just going to increase your chances for good germination. So now let's talk about spacing and making rows to plant the carrots in. We have two different
carrot varieties here and they both call for seed
spacing of about an inch and row spacing of six inches. So the carrots are one
of those wonderful things that you could actually
plant quite close together, which is amazing, just like garlic. So what I like to do, this is the thing that I've
favored the most lately, is I just get a piece of
wood, some dimensional lumber, generally they're at
least mostly straight, some of them are not
quite straight of course. But what I like to do
is just take that board. So let's say that, like, right here is where I want to start my carrots. What I'll do is I'll just
take that board on the edge, I'll just flip it onto the side like that, and then I'll just press right in. Once I do that, I can then
slide it forward like so. And now what I have is a straight
line with a furrow in it. So a furrow is just a channel that you could put your seeds in. Now what I'm gonna do is use my hand, which is, if I go like this,
that's close to six inches, press it in, start making
that furrow, do the next one. And looks like, here, four
rows of carrots across. Here are the four
furrows that we just made using that two by four chunk. But I want to talk next about
the chunkiness of the soil. As you can see, it is
entirely covered in proli. It also has a lot of woody
debris and sort of volcanic rock. And here's the problem. If you put seeds into this, the chances of germination
are going to be a lot lower 'cause there's not going to
be good moisture contact. All this chunky stuff means that if a seed sits up against, like that piece of wood right there, it's not going to have
a good time germinating 'cause the moisture's gonna
have to get from the wood onto the seed in order
to keep it germinated. Now down here is the soil
that we sifted earlier. So if you take a look at the grain size and sort of the particles of this, they're very tiny, very fine. If you put a seed anywhere in here, chances are moisture's
going to hit that seed, it's going to have a better
chance of germinating. So what I'm going to do is take this and sprinkle it inside those
little furrows we made. Seed onto this and then bury it using the
rest of the sifted soil. That's just going to increase our odds of having successful carrot growth. Just for that extra
little bit of insurance, I'm also going to spray this
whole area down with water before we seed. What I'm going to do here is I take the seed packet, just like so, and then I fold it so that I
get a sharp angle right there. I pinch it, and now what
I have is a little funnel for that seed to come up on. All I'm going to do is
tap the back of my hand and the seeds is gonna come out. So the first two rows
here are the Shin Kuroda. And to finish it up, we're just going to, again, cover this all up with
that nice sifted soil. Now, of course, the final step is to water it very, very deeply. Again, we want the soil to be as wet as we could possibly get it. The wetter it is, the better the chances are that that carrot seed's gonna get wet and the better chances are
that it's going to germinate. Now, let's say you live
somewhere windy, somewhere dry, or maybe you're doing
this sometime like spring or summer where it's starting to get hot and the water is evaporating very quickly, what you want to do is something free. You probably got a box
delivery to your house. All you need to do is open it up, lay it down right on top of your carrots that you just sowed. And this is going to stop
any water from evaporating from the surface pretty much whatsoever. Now, important thing is you
wanna check underneath this starting around one
week, maybe eight days. Then every single day
after that, check daily. As soon as you see the
first carrot germinate, take the cardboard off
and the soon will follow. Or sorry, the rest will soon follow. I am definitely getting tired now. This is going to ensure that that moisture doesn't escape to guarantee that that seed germinates. But make sure that you do check on this and you don't leave it for too long 'cause otherwise you're
just going to suffocate your seedlings once they all emerge and they really need
light once they emerge. So there's carrots.
Hopefully this was helpful. Let's move on to the next thing. So you may have seen in a previous episode that I decided to put wood chips down on this side of the garden
and all the pathways. And I've never really done it because I don't like the fact that I can now accidentally
mix them into my soil. Especially right now when
I'm trying to flip a bed, I hate the idea of getting all this wood incorporated into the bed by accident. Previously when I had straw, I would just literally
scrape the straw onto the bed and then bury the straw in compost and just move on with my life. But with this kind of wood chip matter, it's not gonna break down
if I buried in compost, it'll take probably a couple years for that to fully break down. So, now, in order to flip this bed, it's gonna require a little bit more work 'cause I'm going to want to pull as much of this wood chip matter
away from the bed as I can before I start working it just to avoid mixing any of
these wood chips into the soil. Next thing we're going to do
is remove all this drip line by just pulling it over to the other side. So now the next step is
to help break up the soil. All the soil is probably compacted now 'cause it's been sitting
here for quite a while. Some of it unproductive,
some of it productive. So what I want to do now is
help break up any quads in here and also try to get some oxygen in there before we top it off with
some homemade compost. And we'll go take a look at my
compost pile in a moment now, but what I'm going to do
now is grab a digging fork and start loosening up the soil. And that is again, to get
oxygen down into the roots, especially in the wintertime when the soil might sit a little bit wet. You wanna make sure you
get as much oxygen in there when you have the opportunity. And flipping a bed like this or turning it over into a new garden bed is the perfect opportunity
to do just that. Last thing I'm gonna do here is actually try to scrape up some of the soil in the pathways and put it back into the bed. The reason for that is
that over this past season, a lot of the soil that
was originally in this bed has just naturally kind
of slid into the pathways as it broke down, as it got
watered, as it got trampled. So I wanna recover some of that soil to help build this bed
up a little bit taller. What's interesting is that
a lot of the soil here that I just scraped up has
a lot of that old straw from the previous year when I had straw here
instead of wood chips. So that's pretty broken
down, which is exciting 'cause it means it's going to add some nice organic matter
back to the soil here. And that's really what it's all about. So that side's all scooped. Now let's get the other side. So here's where we're at. As you could see, the bed
itself is quite tall now compared to the soil where
we just dug it out from. So all this is where I scraped it up, threw it right on top of this bed, and now we have, like, a
proper raised bed here. So, again, the last thing to do here is to add some compost just to make sure it has the
proper amount of fertility and to help balance
some of this chunkiness. We did get a little bit of wood in here, but not enough to be concerned. So a small amount like this
isn't going to kill the bed, it's not going to steal all the nitrogen, but if we put, like, all this
into, like, one pocket here, well, good luck, nothing's gonna grow right around all those wood chips. So again, a little bit,
one or two here and there, not a big deal, but large amounts, that's where
you're gonna get problems. It's actually been a while since I've showed you
guys the compost setup. It's obviously nothing very fancy, but let's take a quick tour. All right, so this one is the active pile. I actually just reset it. So there's a bunch of
chunky matter at the bottom. I like to make it very chunky down low so that the pile can breathe. Right now it's actually just starting to heat up a little bit. It's in the, like, 80, 90s degree range. And then over everything that was in here was scooped into this area for
that last bit of maturation. So let's see if I can move this. So all of this is properly
finished compost, I'd say. I'm just letting it mature and finish up a little bit more because over here in this bin I actually have entirely
aged, like, matured compost. This is stuff that broke
down earlier in the year and it's just been
sitting here for a while. So this is what we're gonna
grab to top off that bed. I'm just gonna go ahead and scoop it into this black bin here and then we'll just sprinkle it by hand. So actually I forgot I teased you guys and I can't just leave you
hanging, the Crimson Clover. The idea behind it is that I'm making these special little cages that actually will sit on
top of my tree surrounds, just like this. And the way I've made them is so that there's no sharp
hardware cloth sticking up to stab the chickens. But this is actually going
to be the next major project here at the homestead, is I need to reset this chicken run area. I wanna add another tree surround, I wanna plant every single
one of these trees surrounds with Crimson Clover to both
fix nitrogen in the soil and also give the chicken
something to eat that they like. Now the other thing I'm going to do is lift the entire bird netting. Got a whole bunch of stuff to do in here. So that'll be on the next episode. I didn't wanna leave you guys hanging on what this purpose is. So whenever you have the opportunity to water a bed like this, especially when you just,
kind of, turned it over, aerated it like I just did, added stuff from the side, it's a really good idea to make sure you're
also adding some water. This is going to help the
entire bed settle a little bit. It's also going to make sure that every layer is well hydrated so that they're not biting each other. Like when I add this compost, I don't want to add
compost on top of dry soil, I want to add it to already wet or damp soil so that
they could blend together and become one instead of having a wet
layer and a dry layer and then another dry layer, it becomes very difficult
to water your bed later. So whenever you mess around
with your soil like this, just make sure you're giving
it a little bit of water at the very least so you don't end up with weird dry pockets that are, honestly, kind of a
nightmare to diagnose later. So casual little tip here;
always water your soil. Now I'm just adding in some
organic slow release fertilizer. Now, we add the compost
as the final layer. I have to say it already
looks much better. So now what I'm going to do is move all this mulch back in place and get this whole area reset. Whenever you're resetting a bed like this and you're messing with
the soil on this level, I did mess with it quite
a bit, I have to say, especially scooping up the
dry stuff from the sides, putting it on top, forking the soil, adding fresh compost on top, there's going to be
some amount of settling. So now there are a couple things that you could do about this. Really, actually, there's
only one and that is to wait. So I could go ahead and plant today, but if I plant today, there's a chance that even just overnight this bed will settle
some amount and drop down and anything I put into the ground is now going to be a
little bit more shallow than I wanted it to be. Maybe even turns a little bit
as the whole soil settles. You could imagine, like a
garlic bulb might flip over as it falls down with the soil settling. So what I'm going to do, and maybe this is a two part excuse here, is I'm going to leave this overnight so it could properly settle. And also I have to say
I am just too tired. I don't want to bend down and plant, like, 120
garlic cloves right now. So I'll save it for tomorrow
after a good night's rest. Hopefully this was useful to you guys. A lot of tips on starting
carrots, having success with it, and also another classic flipping a bed to get it ready for the next grow.
