- As gardeners, we have our opinions whether you're a flower
gardener or a vegetable gardener or you never grow tomatoes
or you always grow peppers. But with that comes a variety of opinions on the types of plants in a garden that are probably a little bit overrated. So what I did is I asked
a question to you guys, our subscribers here at Epic Gardening. What's the most overrated plant to you? In this video, I'm gonna
go over your answers and discuss where I
actually think you're right or maybe I have a different
take than yourself. Before we get into it, make sure to check out
our store where we offer some of the best gardening
products on the market And let's go ahead and see which plants you thought were the most overrated. Let's kick it off with the plant I think I actually agree with. This is one from Jamie Rice Brad's Atomic Grape for me. I finally got the chance
to grow them this year and we were super excited. They were larger than
expected and okay looking. Didn't have the color
combos, the picture shows and the taste was eh
and the skin was thick. Just not for me, I guess. My
husband liked them all right. Not a favorite for either of us though. So this kind of gets into the question of are you growing for aesthetics? Are you growing for
production, disease resistance, pest resistance, or are
you growing for flavor? Now, if you're Jacque, the garden hermit here at Epic Gardening, he's
always growing for flavor. He doesn't care so much how a plant looks. In the early days of my gardening journey, I was growing for aesthetics and beauty and uniqueness almost exclusively. So I actually had a bit of an experiment with Brad's Atomic Grape and in that experiment
I actually figured out much what Jamie figured out is
that it does look beautiful. Sometimes the colors
aren't quite what are shown on the picture, although that
might just be grower's error but the flavor to me just wasn't there. I think Brad's a fantastic grower, but for me that is a little
bit of an overrated tomato. This one's from S who says bell peppers. It can take five to six
months to get to harvest only two to three semi small bell peppers. As I recall a couple growing seasons ago it took six to seven
months to reap the rewards of growing the plant. I don't necessarily
agree with S's take here but I certainly do understand it. Bell peppers are some of
the more time intensive for the amount you get on the plant. Like they said, two,
three peppers per plant. Of course, you'd have to
plant a lot of peppers to get even maybe 30 bell
peppers for the season whereas you could take something like a shishito throw
one plant in the ground and I got at least a hundred
shishito off of one plant. So it really is more of a trade-off of do you really really love a bell pepper? If so, go ahead and grow them. But I wouldn't fault
someone for actually going to the local farmer's market
buying their bells there because they're honestly quite cheap. And then growing some
of those more bespoke or rare unique peppers in the garden. From the Tobynaetor, we have potatoes. Apios Americana is more
nutritious, flavorful doesn't like to rot as
often in my experience and actually make seed
so you can breed them for your climate. I've heard sweet potatoes are
better than normal potatoes but I haven't grown those yet. Tobynaetor, I'm sorry to say it, but I do disagree with this take. You're talking to the Potato Daddy. That's a self coin title,
but I still wear it proudly. I've grown potatoes in almost every format that you could possibly grow them. To much success and to much deliciousness, and many of you OG followers here, subscribers on Epic Gardening
know I actually survived almost exclusively off potatoes
for a whole month in 2019. So for me potatoes are more
nutritious than you would think. Also, for a beginner, they're
extremely easy to grow so a very beginner friendly plant. You don't need super
fertile soil to grow them. They're what's known as the pioneer crop. So, you can kind of toss 'em
to the ground and let 'em rip and they'll just kind of make their way through the soil and put out
some nice fat tubers for you. Now that being said, I would
agree that Apios Americana or sweet potatoes are a
really fun crop to grow. Both of those are cool. I personally am preferable
to sweet potatoes myself. We grew a big old batch of them this year, and yeah, it's a different
flavor, it's a different vibe. Sweet potatoes though,
take quite a bit longer than potatoes, a little more
babying, a little more heat. So to me potatoes are a staple that are never going outta style. TMo says tomatillos, the only
way I know how to use them is salsa verde, which is
kind of a pain, anyways. I gave away as much as I could
but most went to compost. This take, I have to be
honest, I do agree with. I think tomatillos are a
slightly overrated crop, and yeah it might be because
I struggle to grow them. I've had a couple years
where I haven't had the best tomatillo crop whereas my tomatoes absolutely exploded, and at least where I
live here in San Diego, finding salsa verde,
that's not a hard task. I'm very, very close
to the Mexican border. It is abundant everywhere. So when you're gardening you want to think about
what's accessible to me and what's rare, unique, harder to find. For me, finding some good
salsa verde is not a problem and I struggle so much growing tomatillos that I'd rather dedicate that space to something more productive
for me, like a normal tomato. Jennifer King has a
double header here for us so I'm gonna take 'em part by part. Her first watermelon,
the vine grew everywhere but only had one fruit,
which turned out really small and looked and tasted
really odd when harvested. To me, there's a difference
between a plant being overrated, thus not worth growing or maybe just having some pretty
normal struggles growing it in your first couple seasons of gardening. I can't tell you how many crops it's taken me maybe one
season sometimes even three to really perfect especially
for my particular climate. So for me, watermelons are a staple. I love growing them in the summer. But yeah, my first season
just really wasn't that strong mostly because I didn't know how to treat the watermelon properly. I wanted to grow it kind
of just as a normal plant but not realizing how
much it really vines out. How to know when that
watermelon is perfectly ripe. How to know when it's over ripe. How to make sure that you
don't split the watermelon when it's getting close to being ripe, all these sorts of factors. It's knowledge that yeah, you can learn it before you start that journey on that first crop for that season. But a lot of us are learning
by, by error effectively. And so one season, to me that's not enough to write off the watermelon. I would try to add that back
into your rotation, Jennifer. Her next one, she says a
close second would be corn. Every stalk is gnawed away
at the base by critters so I never actually got any. So with corn I would would say this. If you're in a small space,
certainly like an apartment or a very small townhouse style setup I think corn might not be
the best use of that space specifically because it
does like to be planted in a nice big block at least
four feet by four feet. The wind is pollinating it. There are some pollination issues and perhaps some pest
issues you can run into. But if you do have a suburban
backyard or front yard I think corn's a fantastic choice. Now, a couple things I'll say. You can put a protective sort
of barrier around the base to make sure that any sort of rodent doesn't gnaw away at the stock. That's one way to do it. And then you can actually take mineral oil and when the corn silks out, so when that female part
is coming outta the cob and the pollen's supposed
to be falling on top of it that's how the pollination works. You can actually put some mineral oil on that silk and it'll drip into the top and that's how you can
avoid the corn worms. So to me, corn is a 50/50. If you get it right,
there is nothing better than freshly harvested sweet corn eaten right off of the
plant or roasted in the oven and then eaten for dinner amongst friends. It's an absolutely amazing experience, but if you don't have the space or you're maybe a more beginner gardener, there are some simpler crops you can try. Papa Cat is Interested, says hmm. So far, I think it's the
Malabar spinach for me, called alugbati in our country. It just crawled all over
the vacant lot that I used as a garden for my plants and
killed all my other plants. Good thing we managed to control it now and I'm growing
Calabaza/Calabash in my garden. Hoping it would turn into
a pumpkin or squash patch. There are all sorts of plants out there that are touted as replacements for spinach in hot climates. Malabar spinach, New
Zealand spinach, et cetera. To me, there is nothing
better than spinach, spinach. The classic crop. I love it. Saag paneer, if you're into Indian food, one of my favorite
dishes in Indian cuisine or just sauteing spinach and
adding it into a normal dinner. It's pretty easy to grow. It wants to be in colder climates. And I kind of have to
agree with this comment. I'm not so much into growing
these spinach alternatives. Yet, it might work a little better at a particular time of year let's say right in the middle
of summer, for example. Whereas normal spinach would struggle. But to be honest, I don't
really like the taste of Malabar spinach and I
don't really want to go through the effort to
learn how to like the taste when I could just replace my spinach crop in the summer with something
that actually does well like classic summer crops, like a tomato or a pepper or beans
or something like that. So for me, spinach replacements
are a little bit overrated. Jennifer Jones has my
favorite one of this episode. She says Cilantro, I
struggle with growing it here when we want it, summer, obviously When we do get it going
or buy one from a nursery, it bolts within a week. I guess we can try and fall or spring, but it seems to be not worth the hassle and easier to get a bunch
when needed at the store. Cilantro is an interesting one and based on what Jennifer says, I have to say, it can be an
overrated crop and here's why. She's totally right. When you want cilantro, which
is like a nice summer day, summer evening, you get some salsa going with some friends and family,
that's when you want it. But when does, does it not want to grow? Well, it kind of doesn't want to grow in the summer, like she's saying. It really doesn't prefer blasting heat throughout the day and
extensive amounts of light. So if you're growing it in the summer you kind of have to tuck it
into these like semi shade parts of the garden and just
hope that it doesn't bolt, like she says. There is a variety
called slow bolt cilantro that you can grab that
will, as the name implies, slow it down just a little bit. Some people even still
struggle with that though. So I would say if you have
a colder than average summer compared to some other climate you could probably pull cilantro off with great success. But if you're like me, it
gets pretty hot here in summer and the days are quite long. It's really kind of a challenge. So I'll tuck it in under
things and hope it does well and if it bolts, I'll just
kind of write it off as a wash. Blake Kenley says, for
me as a market gardener, it's summer squash. Well, pretty much any
kind of squash, I like it but not many other people seem to. I'm doing just one bush
for myself this year. I feel like people don't understand that it's extremely versatile
for stuffing or topping. I even put it in my canned
salsa. Weird, I know. But it seems to help the
flavors all come together. Squash is potentially one
of the more overrated crops, in my estimation, if you make the mistake of planting too much and
letting it get out of control without harvesting it
and enjoying it properly. So there's this often quoted
sort of gardener's wisdom or gardener's joke of, you know someone is a gardener when they're giving you squash. Why? Because at the end of the season, you simply have too much and
there's not much you can do about that 'cause it's so prolific. So there's a couple things
you can do to mitigate this. If you're growing those like
paddy pan style squashes that kind of look like
little alien spaceships something you can do
is actually harvest it almost at like a golf ball size,
maybe a little bit smaller. It's very delicate, it's very tender. It's very delicious. You can take the blossom off as well as the actual squash fruit that really young, immature squash fruit. You cut that squash fruit in half, saute that with some butter and some spices of your choosing. That's a very delicious preparation of squash and it prevents you from getting overloaded by
huge ones down the line. You can actually do that with almost any type of
squash that you want. And then what I'd say is
just plant the right amount. You have to know what
that's going to yield because it totally does get outta control. It actually happened to us here last year. I had some center cut squash
in the bed right behind me and I thought it was done for the season and then it came out with
another flush of squash. And to be honest with you, I had too much. I might have thrown a
couple on Jacque's doorstep, little early Christmas present for him that I don't even think he appreciated. So for me, summer squash
can be a bit overrated. What do you think? Was I right? Was I wrong? Roast me in the comments and let me know what you think is the
most overrated vegetable to plant in your garden. We'll do a follow up episode here. And of course remember we have a ton of different resources
here on Epic Gardening. We've got the Epic
Gardening Daily podcast. We have all of our creators,
Jacques, Brianna, and Chris as well as our store. Like I said, we stock the
best gardening products on the market. We try to get them to
you at the best price. So until next time, my friends good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
