Make Big Moves In The Garden with Jacques Lyakov | The Beet

first thing you did when you moved in was like I'm putting in trees obviously like that's what you should do first if you start a garden if you want trees cuz they take time so so much time happy 2024 my friends and also to you shck the new year is here and I'm ready to Garden let's let's do it yeah I mean how's the garden looking right now it's actually looking really good is it yeah I got the the Braska Corner everywhere all brasas right now it's pretty much piles of broccoli and cauliflower for dinner every night so yeah yeah I've got and I have them in every different stage I have them like coming up I have them over with the yellow flowers coming out and I have like nice broccoli heads actually yeah I have a couple of those leave it for the bees we leave it for the bees it's for the Fallen haors you know so what I've been doing is there's this restaurant up north in San Diego we really like called campfire and they do a charred broccoli oh and so what we've been doing is just doing that in the air fryer you you just take but you got to take the fettes off really yeah you don't want too much stock in this particular case you want them all even and you just do like a little aoli sort of mustardy type thing and you a little dipper I haven't tried dipping my broccoli yet maybe that's going to change the game a little bit oh it's nice you should you should try it so today we're talking about the staple crops that you've been getting into uh so following in some footsteps here but that's true I think you did grow more of the Staples especially things like wheat before and uh I don't know staple crops are really interesting to me because there are a lot of calories in them the other day we bought a couple bags of like the hazelnuts you know that you could buy around this time of year like or sorry not hazelnuts uh chestnuts oh yeah like and we roasted them and like started eating them with the weird hairy part on them so like the whole shell and everything you have to peel off and we were talking about it we're like this is pretty Filly it's like well it's a staple crop for a lot of people and wherever they when they used to be here yeah and the idea of staple crops to me is really cool so this year you know something that's the majority of your calories basically is how I would think about it I want to grow more wheat and I want to grow more corn to save to make things with later instead of just sweet corn but I'm just trying to expand like the caloric output of the garden instead of just the vegetables even though that's like more of like I guess the biggest benefit I don't know yeah well I I've always thought you could grow for calories or you can grow for nutrient density and sometimes you could grow for both yeah most gardeners grow for nutrient density and flavor I would say I think those are Better Bank for buck for sure yeah yeah well or or if you're space limited for sure that's what you should do yeah herbs right but I like the idea I think I haven't gone as deep as you have in growing corn to save I mostly just eat it though I do have that popcorn outside I want to mess around with but um I kind of want to do some dried beans this year oh and just like let that be in a certain area of the garden because I kind of like that it's easier to process than like the wheat that I've grown or the amaranth or the quinoa which yeah I don't know I I might want to grow some wheat this year but maybe I'll do some dried beans maybe I'll try that corn idea that you been doing maybe for the last two seasons I would say um I haven't thought about trees because a lot of people ask like why aren't you growing Macadamia oh interesting because macademia can grow pretty well here in San Diego in East County there's like Macadamia farms and stuff oh wow uh so yeah I don't know I mean some more nuts some more nuts or some nuts some nuts in general would be great oh by the way how did those peanuts work out for you oh my God the second you started asking that I realized I never harvested them they're still in the ground yeah hopefully they're not rotten oh my god oh no that's that's a mistake see you grow staple crops they're only staple if you harvest them well how do you think they're doing though I think they're probably fine some of them probably rotted but only it's wet enough only if it's too wet I think I brought them in so it wouldn't get wet but it hasn't been raining that's the problem it has not been raining yeah but potatoes like classic staple sweet potatoes you got a decent haul just recently I got a decent haul and I think just it's just fun the thing with sweet potatoes I would say certainly it's my best year yet cuz I had I want to say two separate areas where I got a meaningful amount of sweet potatoes from and not by over planting the slips like normal amount of slips and I got a good amount of sweet potatoes but the thing I have yet to really crack is getting them nice looking when they come out the ground so like they're always a little bit gnarled they're always a little bit like you can tell they've had some sort of scab or like some sort of disease on them but it doesn't make them inedible you just have to cut that piece out and so because remember last time we did the show I was like I want to focus on growing specimen level quality that's right and I'm on sweet potatoes I'm not really there yet so I think it might be a soil mixture thing cuz I know like down in the South where they grow a little bit better it's a bit of a sandier mix as far ASW I think sand and also I think it just doesn't get that hot so they grow over like a longer period of time which then they have like more issues they have more opportunity to have mistakes I suppose Theory yeah so you said you are growing wheat this year I am growing wheat I actually have a hugle culture Mound I built a traditional mound like out of the logs stacked with leaves and compost built it up it's like maybe this tall now oh wow off the ground off the ground and then I decided to plant it fully in wheat and by planting it in wheat the roots are now going to go down all the way to the logs and help that soil that I built up from washing away so I should lock it in and then I'll get a nice spring wheat Harvest and maybe make a little loaf of bread how how much wheat did you plant do you think the whole I mean the whole hill is covered it's probably got like how big is three 300 seedlings or something it's like 8 feet by maybe three but it's fully planted fully planted yeah so maybe two lives Brad one for you one so one of the things this year that I want to add to the Garden is a rain capture system now you've had a quite extensive one put together across different parts of your yard and now that I have the greenhouse I finally have like a clean roof simple lines that I could pull gutters off of and it's actually pretty big it's a lot of rain water coming down so I am taking a little page from your book maybe literally from the homesteading book and doing a rain capture like grayish water basin where I'm digging out a huge Basin I guess it's not Grain water gray water it's just rain water yeah but I'm digging out a basin I'm going to fill it with chips and I want to plant around it and I want to kind of maybe start applying some permaculture Guild ideas I know that's like something we talked about a little bit I don't want to get like too deep into permaculture uh but I want to take ideas from it yeah and like one idea is like energy and capturing it and that's the rain water that's the most permaculture thing you said is to take the ideas from it um well I think you you sent me a little teaser yeah and you can go check Jac's Channel out he'll do a full breakdown of this but you sent me a little teaser of the system because you have an an A-frame Style words I have aan I kind of wish I it's easier to Capt in this case the lean to is more helpful but your style the style it looks great but either way like you've got a gutter now on each side that combines into a macro Gutter It combines both of those shoots under into your garden but the thing that's cool is my capture system whether it be the big sistern or some of the other ones it just goes to storage I have to then choose to put it somewhere else whereas you're opting for like I I know why you called it gray water cuz it it acts like gray water in the sense that it's going to that mulch Basin and then what are you going to put around it so that's where I'm kind of I'm like struggling with because I really want to add trees yeah but the trees will a if they get too tall block light in the garden and B they're close enough to the greenhouse that the greenhouse blocks a little bit of Sun so I'm like I would love to add some like short citrus tree somewhere but otherwise if I don't put citrus I'll put some other sort of short fruit tree that I prune and I want to plant as a guild around it so since it's not gray water and it is rain water it's like cleaner I want to put things like ginger and turmeric maybe in there so that they could be lower IDE they like the moisture they like the shade and um it's not gray water so I don't have to worry about eating the roots cuz usually that's the thing right is if you use grain gray water you don't want to harvest underground I don't know how big of a deal that is really but I think it's a decent woring about yeah I would prefer shower water tubers potatoes yeah I prefer not right so I mean cuz for me my true gray water that's probably been the most productive besides the AR chokes of course is is the orchard right and it looks great and and you had some of those satsumas I mean that's mostly I would say it's mostly shower water even though it does get I believe an hour every Sunday from True irrigation especially in the summer you just need it well in the summer you need it but I should actually think about maybe turning that off now that I but yeah I like the idea of not having storage because the stor is then like you said you have to decide what to do with it also rain storage tanks are crazy expensive I like keep looking at it thinking I'll just get like a 500 gallon one it's like $500 I know like never pay it off I know it's crazy well you can get some rebates to the city usually if if you're watching you can get a rebate most of the time in most places but it usually only covers one yeah I think like even San Diego which we pretty good at these rebate programs you like a 50 gallon tank maybe well you I think you get if it's a sister you get two 300 bucks off but still that sister that I have out there was two grand yeah and so it's 5,000 gallons though I mean it's definitely I think it's worth the price but it's not cheap like it's not cheap at all so yeah I mean I think it's interesting you bring that up because I've thought with my Greenhouse it does have a gutter yeah as we discovered because we had crazy mosquito problems this year and we were like where's all the standing water and we finally found it in the gutter CU we never finished piping out the gutter so it just capturing it was capturing and holding and stewing and probably was the breeding ground for most of the mosquit we had this year definitely so what I want to do is drill into the bottom of the gutter unlock the water and then just pipe it down behind the greenhouse um and maybe just do a little three tree orchard there oh that something small you know yeah like a mini Guild just something really tiny uh and maybe put some stuff in the ground like strawberries or something I don't know that would actually be really cool kind of cool so so that's that's kind of my idea encouraging you guys to come up with some creative ways to think about using rainwater I mean for us it's kind of top of mind just because we don't we don't get a lot we still haven't got any like this year we got like maybe an inch so far by now we should this year season right yeah this season the rain season this year we got a ton yeah early yeah early well I guess time will tell because we'll know in two or three months if we're going to get any rain this year coming year cuz that's it yeah because that's really it CU last year I'm talking now about 2023 yeah um um right in 2023 we got almost as much rain in just February as we got in all of 2022 like actually MH and so who knows that could happen that's true that could happen alino could happen again let's see what the little boy brings well we also got two rains in in the summer this year right and they were like substantial enough that you could measure them yeah it wasn't 0.1 Ines or something like that yeah and we got like a quarter inch in June or something which is just very fastic yeah very weird well you know what I heard is it's it's might be good for our Gardens but Arin noi the CEO of San dieo botanic garden oh that's right yeah he's like it's not great for our natives because they don't know that that's supposed to happen cuz it hasn't happened historically for hundreds or thousands of years here and so it's disrupting their reproductive Cycles becomes like a monsoonal system instead of a yeah and then you get into a situation where it's like well maybe some percentage of those native species are not no longer fit but maybe then some other ones are more fit and now that's the new native and a whole rabbit about natives right so what I want to talk about today is things that you resolve to do a resolution so to speak about this season upcoming and here's the twist you have to include enough that there's no way you're going to do some of them because you know what I mean I already know I'm not doing most of them so what I'll say and I brought it up earlier is I would like to spend more overall time in the garden relative to the time of filming videos and doing some of the business side of of Epic gardening um and I want to I want to run some more in-depth experiments which we created that test Garden in the back so we have a spot you'll see on our YouTube channel we've got a spot where we can run I believe 16 different independent Garden experiments at any point in time be back which is going to be really cool and then I think just on a pure gardening level I want to grow a more pristine result crop so I I want the Tomato to be unblemished I want it to look good catalog tomato catalog Tomatoes exactly like there there's certain crops I can do that with pretty much on autopilot like my peppers are always great true you know my potatoes are always good but certain things like corn almost always I get the earworm thing and it's it's not cuz it's inevitable it's just that I don't do the steps to prevent them to make it actually look the way you want it to so that's kind of my goal and I think maybe I'll discover some interesting lessons some interesting techniques just from that yeah I guess one of my things I I kind of say a version of this every year I don't necessarily follow through but one of the ones that I want to follow through on this year is two things first realizing that our season is weird and there isn't like set time periods where I have to commit to growing tomatoes only now so if I have diseases on my plants I don't want to just try to keep fixing the problem I want to just Co the plant and put start something new so what I've done in the past is I keep trying to fight it because I'm like oh no like this Tomato's been growing for a month it'll come through all the other ones are totally fine right but that one has a problem and I just keep trying to like leave it and then that spreads from that plant to the rest to the rest and then now my whole garden has that problem so this year I really want to be on top of the Z's I want to make sure that if it's a problem that's like clearly obviously I don't have a solution for yeah I want to pull that plant and I'll just put something else in or maybe there'll be a gap and I'll just have more space for my plants to grow healthier I don't know I think that's a very good idea yeah cuz it's something I struggle with a lot I I yeah I mean I think the ability to walk away yeah if you love it let it go we know this we know this from our our favorite band passenger I think they won like an Oscar and that's like it and I've never heard of them again but uh either way know I think it's a good lesson good resolution I think one of the things that I painfully learned last year was uh my garlic problem right my garlic loss and that was mostly due to cramming at a 4 in spacing maybe acting too late oh definitely acting too late but I think like you said that rust problem was not going to go away no matter how much I had sprayed it Etc so this year I actually just did this last week I planted all my garlic out in the front bed in one of our new birdies short beds the 8 foot by 4 foot USA exact so it's a good amount um I would say it was 13 or 14 varieties by six okay so it's actually quite a bit and I will say it's not that much like better spacing than the one in the backyard oh interesting but it's raised so it can drain it's raised it can drain it's still quite tight and I have a mesh metal protection on top no skunks this there's no skunks and I'm going to leave that on and keep raising it yeah until I figure until I feel that the skunk problem might be deterred because they're just like yeah whatever there's nothing there's nothing really there for me um but all that kind of goes to what you're talking about and what I'm talking about really in the pristine crops or the sort of beautiful resulting crops um because I I sort of think the better it looks and not not always true but like the better it looks is a function of its its quality and inherent nutrition as well I think that's true in a home Garden in a home Garden for sure yeah and that's not to say like if your potato doesn't look that good it's literally terrible or anything like but I think like if if it's not been hit by too much disease or too much pest pressure Etc it's a more complete food I feel um I don't know if a study can back me up on that may maybe the stresses increase the nutrients well that's true though maybe that little damage it's like oh I need more like iron in here or something but that and you're you're actually totally right because of dry like dry culture right where you don't where you don't give it nutrients but the problem is it's like you have to stress it just enough to not break it and the point of battling disease or correctly spacing your plants and stuff is to make sure that even at 6in spacing on garlic or 8 in spacing 12in between rows you're still spores are still hitting it yeah it's just you didn't give the Spore a chance because all the little garlic alium leaves are crossing each other with the Morning Dew and then it's just like oh thanks I'll just reproduce you're not giving it like free rate you know so yeah I mean that's that's something I'm really focused on I think another thing I'm thinking about as as we look into the backyard even right now is the looks of the garden the feeling yeah and the completeness of we just put in a new pathway a couple more pathways are coming in we're building a little sort of chill deck in the middle of the backyard garden so I think making it more of a place instead of like a production Farm in the sense of like producing food not producing a video like a production you know Farm look the Aesthetics well this year you're kind of dialing in a lot of those final pieces you already have a pathway in like partial pathway on the garden and now the rest of them are going in yeah it's going to be much easier to keep it how you want yeah I think I mean even for you like with Greenhouse the greenhouse really forced me to clean me up yeah exactly when I heard from a little a little Jay you might be getting a shed or doing a shed or something I'm very very interested in the idea of building a shed and having some more space to actually put things because we don't have a garage a problem I always forget that about your place is you don't have a gar there's nowhere to put anything it's the all surfaces yeah so it's and and that combined with your natural tendency to like save things which is a great one but it can run a muck right the hermit can a little could spill over inside the Palms yeah especially with all the hobbies that we've we've now developed but so for you any final another two more since you told me to give a lot yeah first one is not to leave any spot in the garden empty for more than a week so if I if I just clean something out and I'm like I have some idea I'm going to like do something there but I don't have it ready for another month no just put it in something's going in no matter what direct seated transplant I want something growing at all times second one is I think we've both run into this this past year for some reason is that we have a lot of transplants but we keep starting them at times where we don't have anywhere to put them and then we let them sit too long and then we run out by the time we need them yeah so I wanted better at spacing out my successions and like new sewings because like right now I have a greenhouse full of plants and I'm still harvesting and I have limited space to put them in what do you have in the greenhouse right now so I actually have a bunch of onions um I have uh a couple more cauliflowers some nerum some flowers like Cosmos I decided to try right now a new Hol Hawk variety The Watchman from Botanical interest it's like dark purplish black so it's most like a mix oh and beats a t of Beats and a new secret product the little you'll see eventually uh uh so yeah a lot of little transplants but not that much space right now yeah I mean I think it's hard to perfectly do that yeah because you don't really know it's it's so hard but I do agree like I think for me I'm going to do let's say when I do my summer plantings right so like my peppers and tomatoes I think kind of going to the three things we've talked about M I'm going to just wait a month and plant everything I and start everything I already started because that'll be my true backup yeah cuz what if it rains for like two months and all those plants die now you have a backup CU we don't know what our season's going to bring this year I I truly do last year we couldn't predict it no I truly do not you're right I didn't Harvest Peppers till like August last year whereas the previous year I had a bowl full in Jun mhm yeah my Peppers came in really really late this year but abundantly um yeah no it's okay you didn't have that many well I mean just going to the sh you can see my ress hanging from the rafters no so if you I think if you were really being paranoid and let's say you you had one shot one kill like some people do who listening have three month season right if I'm in that situation I'm over sewing my first summer batch by 50% maybe cuz you're there you might as well and you don't have a backup and and so the reason I'd be doing that is because when I go into the ground for what would be my true and hopefully only summer planting right what if I have a bird come in Bunch what if I have a cutworm Etc now I can hot right so you can hot swap but then I two weeks later or something I'd sew a backup crop just in case um well you got to in those climates you have to sew your like fall Harvest like almost immediately or something it's crazy pretty much yeah exactly well I know we we had Meg from seed to Fork on the show and she will put her brasas in ground in July they would get rested here oh yeah they'd get dest it's probably a problem for her too but what are you going to do I guess it isn't though I mean for the most part she seems to be totally fine because they can start in that heat and then they'll they'll kind of grow because if she doesn't it just get too short and then it snows mhm if you want to get into trees this year specifically ones that bear fruit I think this episode will be for you it's something I've been obsessed with since I can remember but only now do I have the space to actually do it and I'm starting to see the gears turn in your head as well not you don't have an orchard you do you've got some cool stuff actually have great blueberries yeah and your passion for your first too yeah that's right uh and then you've got your chicken Orchard with how many plants are in that I think yeah five trees yeah two figs a mberry a lemon and a low quat how many of those have produced so far um the figs have produced and that's about it so you're getting into Orchards mostly because we just tried the Citrus that we planted two years ago basically and it's finally like really coming in I'll say like Master stroke first thing you did when you moved in was like I'm putting in trees obviously like that's what you should do first if you start a gardien if you want trees cuz they take time so much time now you're swimming in Citrus after only two years like and they're covered so I didn't realize first of all that they could be so prolific when they're kept so small in a backyard Orchard and you're getting like 100 plus limes on One Tree so that convince me um and the other thing is the variety of flavors those limes are just better than any I've ever had and great like they're delicious they're really fragrant the skin is good and you know that you could use it however you want cuz you grew it in a certain way right like it's organic it's in your yard so I definitely want to add more trees and I think part of why some of mine haven't produced well is cuz I've been underwatering them and they're next to two very old trees yeah because of that area that they're in right I'm thinking of doing like maybe setting up some OAS on like automatic water release like could work you need some big ones though yeah it's true maybe just to keep them alive uh in case I forget but I I want to add a more variety of citrus and I want to add a couple Stone fruits this idea of chill hours to me is very interesting because I think we've heard a little bit about chill hours and how maybe they don't matter as much as we thought they did well I think it depends it it really depends depends but I was chatting with Charles of IV Organics and then he knows Tom Spelman of Dave Wilson Nursery legendary he's the one who really has promoted backyard Orchard culture and like put home orcharding in a more realistic sensibility for someone to actually do it and so I learned a lot just from a couple videos watching Tom and reading his site you know voraciously but uh the thing that it seems to be the case is the chill hour requirements is not like absolutely hard and fast that being said you still can't totally disrespect them yeah I think it's like if you're running a commercial Orchard then you want to respect those chill hours cuz every chill hour is money on the table right pretty much like here it's like maybe you get like less but you still can grow it you still get them but you need the space so trees take up space so I think orchards are fun because they give you a lot of chances to observe the plant throughout the year you get to do different pruning Cycles you get to control how to grow it which seems like fun I'd love to try doing like an espalier setup something like that um but I just want more variety I don't want things that come in like bumper crops so I could process like some Jam or something like that opport yeah I'm finally at the stage where low quat well low quats have been a staple here that's what was here when I moved in but I think I'm finally at the stage where with Citrus I could be doing marmalades CU there's enough uh I could be doing um like lemon peel candies like that kind of stuff cuz you have like more than you even need to just use as like lemon juice yeah yeah I mean the the satsumas which are so good I'm eating them pretty often and I'm still there's still plenty more to pick that's amazing that's the kind of thing where I'd love to have that kind of setup where I just have so many things that I it forces you to be creative too yeah it's like what can I do with this I have like 30 lemons you're never going to you're never going to be looked down upon for like going over to a friends for dinner and bringing some fresh oranges you know what I mean I've never seen anyone get mad at that no one's mad they're always really they always stoked and so well so in if if I'm you the way I would approach it is I'd be maxing Citrus first because it grows so well here and it's like the guaranteed winner and I'd be maxing that in places like actually in my mind's eye I know that if you're listening or watching the show you won't really have a good picture of jacques's house in your head but you do have this front walk up that you don't show too much on the channel and there's these two areas you've done garlic and AR choke like on the left side of the driveway so to speak and then on the right side I think you solarized it but you didn't really do much that area could be very interesting to put a little mini Citrus Orchard cuz it probably has plenty of Sun you'll get sun after about 9 10 a.m. you know and so that could be really good um maybe one peach after I saw your Peach I think you got to get a PE crazy you got to get a aa's pride yeah a definitely getting one of those cuz that one was yeah that's a monster cuz the be root season is basically here it's almost here like next month they'll probably start showing up next 30 to 60 days you've got bear root season and if you're unfamiliar with that that means trees that are shipped as the name implies bar root there's they're dormant there's nothing on them they're sort of covered in like a Pete Moss at the it's like a stick with a couple Roots MH and the benefit of that is you get varieties you most often would not be able to find in in high amounts at a nursery especially not like an aged two to threee variety but they're also quite a bit less expensive than a grown-in variety so I've done both I've done Baro and live I personally prefer live because we have good access to them and I'm buying time yeah remember way back when we were doing the orchard like just putting the lemons in that was my big thing is I was like I want to buy a year and now I'm getting the fruit two years in instead of four years in that's a good point actually Katrina my partner is like could we just buy like an $150 lemon tree yeah I was like I don't know if I want to spend that much yeah but you get like at that point you get like three years of time yeah like where you're just waiting for lemons MH so it starts to seem pretty compelling at some point well it the thing that I've never you can't buy time in many ways and that's one of the few ways that that's the thing I've never really understood about the gardening world and the gardening industry is the I think we're just frugal people by nature in general as a gardener which is totally fine it's a decent virtue however um we might not be as Frugal in other areas of our life like we might go out and have a nice meal and this and that and it's like well you could spend the same amount and literally have oranges right year for years more than you would otherwise in your life an extra 2 years at age 35 yeah that's a lot that's a big percentage of life you know what I mean it's a big chunk but the beauty too is in gardening is you could also take your time and do it as cheap as possible and spend almost nothing you could get a cutting start it up grow it for like six seven years and then Harvest that would be the most extreme yeah but you can you can uh or you could just buy the tree and put it or you can buy the tree I would say if if you are messing around with figs you could just graft that totally worth just buy so another if you're listening you're like well yo guys I'm in I'm in an apartment I'm in aony this is something I've seen people do many times if you are if you are planning to like move to own rent a larger space what I did actually and what other people will do is they will start their fruit trees in containers and so they'll start a be root tree or a potted tree and then as it needs they'll pot it up and then they'll literally just move all those to their final location and plant them in you just bought yourself time you just bought yourself more time and so this think of think of your smaller space right now as like a clearing ground for the future I I I know a guy he did this with 50 trees wow and he just moved them all and put them all on the ground and he basically had an orchard immediately now that's exem but yeah I mean I mean my Bears lime in a container is actually I forgot about it is my most productive tree mhm and it's only like a 10 gallon pot Citrus never needs to leave a container in theory it really doesn't try it out yeah like it it might surprise you I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised and also I would say this if you're not in be root season you don't want to shop for that right now hold on to your horses because we have a crazy thing coming in Spring directly from epic and I won't say more but I don't even know you might want to hold your horses on grabbing some fruit trees that's all I'll say so spring is around the corner and a lot of people are probably planning like maybe literally writing out plans I'm thinking about them I should start writing and actually journaling I don't know about you are you a journaler or are you freehand first of all I'm fumming through catalogs right now oh yeah and my voice got real grably right there because because I got excited I got serious you know but no I'm thumbing through cataloges I'm picking varieties I like I'm ordering seed I'm not really going to the nursery too much yet I'm thinking I'm thinking I'm thinking I will usually on a weekend I'll like just wander around outside and keep my phone out and like take notes and I'll just have a big I'll just have a document and I'll be like move banana this way or like cut this down move this path like put this weed out whatever so there's you do it in spurts I do it in little chunks and spurts and then those notes get activated into the weeks worth of tasks right I also have basically I have like two bulleted lists like one will be the tasks of the week or like of the time and then the other will be like oh it'd be nice if it was actually this way in the future so I think about results and then I try to go backwards and how do I get that result I see and I think that's the only way to do it in gardening because you have to think about the end result to get the starting point because of how plants grow yeah and it takes a long time so you really have to have that foresight I mean right now I think for most people they're starting to think about seed starting season right because it's springtime most of these things that we put in the ground like like you mentioned earlier the cold season you start your Tomatoes sometime in January because you want them to get ready to go right away when it gets that spring thaw so in terms of planning I'm like I'm not at the level of I'm planning out what I'm going to grow yet but I am starting to think about where I want to move things cuz I've had a couple disease issues like with like root not nematodes um so I'm really trying to be conscientous of like where I'm putting things I don't want to put the tomatoes in the same place I did last year I want to move them somewhere else and that requires a lot more planning than I thought because if you have like a cabbage there or a Brussels sprout that takes like four months it better be ready to go by the time your tomatoes are ready cuz you get Space limited so the spring planning stuff I'm I'm trying to think of how many tomatoes can I actually pull off that's my usual thing and this year I will grow less I will actually promise to grow less and do a little bit more variety but it's really just coming down to like planning out where I put my long season things like garlic they're not moving until summer and planning around that so that's usually how I go about it is what do I know is off limits for too long to worry about for the next couple months and then I only focus on what's left yeah it helps it helps make the planning job a lot easier like when you said that I think well I have my garlic and my 8x4 in the front yard so that's done like that's completely solved and then you actually just brought over all the onion starts and so I go well where are those going to go and I was thinking I'd put them in the backyard in ground Garden in one of the quadrants that if you're checking out our YouTube channel soon you'll see our new redesign of the back actually really cool to have like a a like triangle of onions exactly I think so I was like maybe I'll put that near um the the greenhouse and do it there uh and so cool that quadrant is basically locked and loaded until basically jish or later um and then what I do and something I'll say is if you're listening and you have certain personality types and certain Garden sizes require or or are optimal with different planning techniques you know what I mean so if you have like I used to basically four to six raised beds in a small front yard I was planning everything down to the square foot right and so I'd go okay well in this bed I'm doing this and then in this bed I'm going to be doing my herbs in this bed I'm doing tomatoes in this bed I'm doing this and I'd have all the timings and i' maybe do a spreadsheet or something like that as the gardens expanded and I have more free space and if I really was maximizing every inch I'd be running a true farm at the scale that this is at I don't need to plan that granularly that's a really good point so I don't have to go to the N degree on a per bed basis even if my personality type kind of wants to do that I kind of want to but what I've realized is a lot of that effort going that granular at the scale of this Garden gets lost in the sauce and and it doesn't return right and and so that's just me yeah I mean if you're a balcony Gardener it's like I have space for like two Tomatoes I'm choosing those two varieties and that's what I'm growing and I'm babying them and like yeah you're right like it's for my personality type being in San Diego and having Space is really nice because I don't have to plan I don't have to think about the seasonality as much and the space of where to put it and um if I was somebody who was much more intense about planning I'd probably actually have a hard time doing that I think it's interesting because you say you're not a planner but I think you're just not a traditional planner like you don't write and journal and do that kind of stuff as much as someone else might cuz I know a lot of people love to create a beautiful aesthetic my garden plan you know and I don't have that too much maybe a little more than you you could if you wanted to I don't feel like I can't want to it's not in your it's not in your brain set well the thing is what you tell me what's going on in your head cuz I don't know but but but what feels like it feels like you're always cycling yeah and so when you when you walk outside I feel like your subconscious is going in and going like I have like a like an in I walk out I'm like scan and then like update my map and I'm like all right that's off Zone like that's next this is what I need to do next yeah but I don't like think about it that much and maybe I am planning more than anything think you're right I think you are love personally okay new personal goal to the resolutions list okay is have a journal and actually just write down what I did like not plan anything just write down what I did that day so are you going to do it in paper or you going to do digital do it I think it digital is better but I hate it I just never do it so then do it in paper do it in paper so if I come back and we have you back on the pod in a month I'll have sheets will you have it are you making that commitment right now yes because you will be coming back so all right I'll do it I'll do it I'll do it you're going to have to show it to the practice yeah all right you guys are going to see it but beyond that the only other thing I'm thinking about is what other tomatoes do I need to buy this here well what which which ones are you regrowing which are you doing again the ones that I'm regrowing uh well uh first of all Cherokee purple and then uh Cherokee carbon yeah I got to have both why grow both cuz um the Cherokee purple I think the Cherokee carbon is a little bit better yeah but this year for whatever reason my purple did better than my hybrid like my okay air my hybrid and I I don't if I have too many Cherokee style Tomatoes you're not that mad I'm not mad at all so I want to have so it's insurance basically Insurance yeah I think the gardener the light cherry tomato that I Grew From bi this year was one of our tops that we want to continue so it's interesting you say that because my indeterminate pole style bigger Tomatoes they did okay this year it wasn't that good honestly um and I planted way less on purpose right cuz I just had that back strung up section so I was like man like my tomatoes aren't that great this year but my peppers were just dominant so you always win some lose some but then through the back door my saucing tomato game was on another level it just came out of nowhere yeah cuz I had the Romas or san marzanos that were growing in the ground on accident that were I think I probably got a hundred off of that honestly and then I had the Amish paste that did really well in where the garlic is now that's when I haven't tried was great it was great um and so but what I did is at the end of the season and this kind of goes to what you're saying about is something ready to be planted in if you have my tomatoes weren't ready to technically leave the garden yet but I needed to reset the bed anyways and so I did what you did is I just called it and I had actually tons of quite green ones and I just let them sit we'll see yeah so I made a batch of tomatoes from of excuse me of sauce from the reddish ones first then I had a big bucket of greens that sat there probably for a month and then they ripened up to red and I made SAU with that and it was great so nothing wrong with it I think the thing that people should consider is let's say you let's say you have space to grow six tomatoes yeah and you have some favorites you should always have like two wild cards mhm like try something new every year CU you might be surprised by what does well something that I I can't think of an example off top of my head but I've had varieties that say they don't do well in our area for whatever reason right and they're like one the best they do so you just don't know until you try it and some varieties just happen to like your soil more you might end up with something that you didn't think you would like that you actually do like and so variety really is the spice of life in the garden it's like try new varieties out you don't know what's going to work you might have a new favorite or you might have something that produces way more than you ever expected I think that's a very underrated tip and if you want some new varieties while there are 27 at banic closers.com we have 27 New varieties for 2024 cream sausage tomato that's a new one I'm adding this year yeah that'll be interesting It looks interesting I don't know if I'll grow that one or not but I'll have it because it'll be at your garden but either way you can request a catalog or shop online at banic gl.com good luck in the garden guys and keep on [Music] growing

Channel: The Beet

Views: 9,644

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Id: _ng5B9yaS1Y

Length: 40min 12sec (2412 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2024