Secret Tips for Higher Vegetable Yields 🍅🥬️🥦🌽 Less Work and More Food

in this video I'm going to show you my vegetable garden and go through some secrets that you can use in your garden to grow better vegetables I used to have my vegetables in my formal garden but I find vegetable gardens are just not the neatest Gardens so I decided to move it out back here in the back of the property and as you can see it's pretty much surrounded by trees and shrubs and a lot of weeds so in my garden I had problems with the weeds but I also have a lot of problems with animals I have deer going through here and almost every other kind of road and animal that you can think of wants to come and eat my garden so one of the first things I did was built myself a fence it's just a simple wood structure with chicken wire on the edge the chicken wire is buried in the ground about six inches to keep things from digging underneath the fence I found this works really well I don't get a lot of small animals going into the garden to eat things the big problem out here are deer they would come and eat all this stuff and if you look at this fence it's really too short for deer they recommended fence for deer is about eight feet tall and I thought well that doesn't make a lot of sense is there a different way to keep deer out of your garden and the secret is you can use a low fence provided the area inside the fences kept small deer don't like jumping into an area that's too small for them the width of this garden is about 16 feet the length is much more than that so to make those small compartments I decided to put a couple dividers down the middle that gives me an area that's too small for deer to bother with but it also gives me something for my vegetables to climb up so I maximize the space I have this has worked really well for deer when I started this garden this was sloped and I had to level it for the garden now you might wonder well why did I build it on a slope this area is called rolling hills and everything is a hill there's really no flat ground around here so I didn't really have any other choices as a result of this the garden is sitting in kind of a valley and the hill goes up this way and it goes up this way behind the cat and this does give me an advantage I'm in zone 5 and it's fairly cool here this small valley is enough to warm this area more than at the top of these hills these hills aren't very high but this small amount of slope is enough to make this a warm spot which means I can plant earlier in the spring and it stays warmer in the fall I decided to make a small raised bed outside of my fenced area and grow my garlic here animals don't like garlic so they leave it alone I've never had anything common bother the garlic so it doesn't need to be inside the barrier I can use this extra space here now I have a separate video that will show you how to grow garlic but here's a little secret I plant the garlic in the fall I cover the ground with straw and that keeps the ground warm in the fall this allows the bulbs to make roots and keep growing longer in the fall then in the spring I come along and I move that straw off because now the soil is cold and I want the Sun to come down and warm it up to get things growing once the garlic is 3 or 4 inches tall I put the straw back again because now I don't need extra heat but I do need to preserve the moisture in the soil and so now the straw is keeping that soil nice and moist and constant I almost never water this bed although some water runs down if I water is there I love growing strawberries and I decided to keep those outside my main garden area I build a little bit of a raised bed here mostly to keep the weeds out from the bed the strawberries were growing really great that first year and I was looking forward to a great crop the second year and then the deer came through here walked all over it in the winter time ate everything that they could then the rabbits came in and finished him off in the spring and pretty much decimated the whole thing so I had to come up with some way to protect the strawberries and you want to protect them both from the animals and from the birds who come down and damage the fruit so I came up with this little idea I covered the whole thing with a frame that has chicken wire on it so that allows pollinators in what keeps the birds out but now how do I get in here well this is split into two pieces so I can just lift it up pick my strawberries do my weeding whatever needs to be done and then put it back and this is where it great now I have no critters in here and the strawberries are doing fine one of the things I really like in a vegetable garden is some permanent lattice system now you can get some poles and build some teepees or you can use string to make a lattice system is really nice if you have a permanent structure this is a wood frame with these metal pieces that I found I just have this permanently here it's ready to go every spring I don't have to set it up I don't have to play with it I've been using it for about eight years now and it looks as good today as a day I got it nearly spring I grow peas on this side because I can plant those really early and they'll get harvested about the middle of summer I'm in zone five here and so we have a fairly cold climate the peas are now this high and I grow sugar snaps so they'll be up to about here by the time I pick them the tomato plants on this side and I just planted those about a week ago usually I have sweet 100's here which is also a vine and so that grows up this side I don't have to tie things once I get the pea started they clinging by themselves and the tomato plants I just take the new growth and push them through the holes I basically weave the tomato plants in and out of this lattice system that makes it really easy to control the plants and what's nice about this system is that I harvest peas well the tomatoes are growing by the time the peas are finished the plants are dying down the tomatoes need the space they get extra room plus they get some extra nitrogen hopefully from the peas that have left it in the ground although the amount of that nitrogen from peas is pretty small but even a little bit will help I only grow indeterminate tomatoes because I want Tomatoes over a longer harvest I don't want a whole bunch at once we can only eat a couple large tomatoes a day so I don't need more than that but I want a long growing season so here I grow my other tomatoes and I'll just train them up these poles by the end of the summer the view both this height you'll notice that outside my fenced area we have nothing but wild flowers well I prefer to call them weeds because once those flowers produce seed it all blows into here and I would have a terrible time weeding this place I'd have to do it on a weekly basis that's way too much work for me so what I do in a vegetable garden is I'm ultra straw I just put this down yesterday I get several bales of straw loosen it up spread it around push it around the plants once the straw covers the soil you'll get almost no weeds and where there are weeds growing they're very easy to pull out because the straw keeps the moisture in the ground so in my opinion straws an absolute necessity in a vegetable garden controls the weeds and it reduces the amount of water and you have to do that's important for tomato plants a lot of people are concerned about their tomatoes getting blossom end rot so they go on the internet to find solutions and there's thousands of solutions out there epsom salts Tom's all kinds of calcium formulas the problem is blossom end rot has nothing to do with calcium blossom end rot is caused by irregular watering as long as moisture is kept in the ground at a steady amount you won't get blossom end rot that's why straw is so important it keeps the moisture in the ground regular now I like to grow my root crops in rows I've tried wide beds where you just spread the seed around and that does work but I find weeding that is so much more difficult because you have to figure out where all the weeds are and you miss a lot of them for me the rows work very well but I combine several gardening ideas I like the idea of Square Foot Gardening because it encourages people to plant things closer together I don't like the rules of Square Foot Gardening because you have so many plants in each square foot and that doesn't make any sense but the idea from Square Foot Gardening is that plants can grow closer together than the seed package says and so I planned in rows but I put them pretty close together they're about a foot apart that gives the plants enough root room to grow it gives me enough space so I can actually walk between the rows for weeding and it reduces the amount of surface area for weed so there's less weeding to be done and I find this system works quite well over here I have some lettuce and carrots planted in the same row carrots are a slow grower so the lettuce will be harvested long before the carrots need to space over here I have radishes and beets both in the same row again radishes grow very quick you harvest those the beets are much slower growers so you harvest them later but you can plant the seeds at the same time that's a good idea with things I care is that germinate slowly because the lettuce comes up right away from seed and shows you where the row is and the carrots come up much later I do succession planting and I start them as early as possible so whatever people recommend start a couple weeks earlier just do one row if the weather gets really bad and kills that row you haven't lost anything but if you wait around till the weather's perfect you've already lost a month and in cold climates that's a lot of vegetables so put them in early plant a couple rows come back three weeks later plant another couple rows three weeks later plant another couple rows that gives you a continual harvest and you don't have to worry if the weather gets really bad this is my row cucumbers a lot of people say that cucumbers don't like to be transplanted and that you should start with seeds in the garden well that's simply not true now they may not like to be transplanted but it works just fine so I start my cucumbers about a month early inside get them conditions for outside weather and then plant them and I do it kind of carefully so I don't disturb the roots as I'm doing that but I find that system works fine and it gives me a head start on the season the other myth about cucumbers is that you have to plant them in a hill I've written about that in my book garden myths book two the word hill used to mean a community it didn't mean a mound of soil so there's very little to grow on a mound of soil unless your garden is really wet and you want to dry those seedlings up so I grow cucumbers in a row there's a plant here two feet over there's another plant and so on that gives each plant more room to grow they do better I just grow them on flat ground you don't need a hill the cucumber's have been in the ground here for our about a week I've mulch them with straw to keep them good and moist and they're starting to grow really well I put them along here because I'm going to grow those cucumbers up this fence and again cucumbers take a lot of space in the garden and if I let them sprawl it would just take a huge area you got to go vertical with cucumbers now for plants might not look like very much but there's only two of us living in the house now and this provides more cucumbers than we ever want by auguste I can't stand cucumbers I got too many of them this is my second set of trellis I do this one a little different than the others on the back side I grow peas again but what I usually do is the Far trellis gets peas that are planted really early and this gets peas that are planted a few weeks later that way I can harvest peas over a longer period of time and by the way I only grow sugar snaps other types of peas produce a lot of green pods that you throw away or they don't produce the peas sugar snaps you eat the whole thing and you get the most productivity out of your given space on this side of the trellis I grow beans peas are cool crop beans are warm crop so the peas will be a foot tall before I even plant my bean and the peas will be harvested before my beans start making pods so it's great to grow these two crops together and they can use the same trellis system saving me a lot of space now what I find here is that when I plant beans they germinate quite well but then something comes and eats them and you'll see the little first leaf come out and something nibbles on it and then it makes another little leaf and something nibbles on it and it seems to take forever for those beans to really grow into a decent sized plant now once they're a couple inches tall whatever is eating them doesn't do enough image to bother them so a few years ago I started a different system I now plant my beans and cover them with a row cover I leave this on until the beans are a good size and they can take a bit of nibbling so let's have a look and see what we ended up with here I have a couple loops in here just to keep the real cover off the plants probably not necessary and the plants are looking really good the leaves aren't perfect there are some chew marks in them but there's lots of leaves they're growing nice they're about eight inches tall they're ready to start finding and these plants will be great today's kind of cloudy so it's a good day to take off the row cover and get them exposed to a little more light these beans will be fine by the time I'm harvesting them I'll be reaching over my head I only grow pull beans because they produce over a long period of time push beans are great if you're going to can them but all those beans are ready at once then you pick them and then you're done with these I get beans about midsummer and I'll have beans coming out of this garden until Frost so I harvest over a long period of time there's about eight feet of trellis here for the beans I plant the beans about two or three inches apart and this row gives me more beans than I ever want at least half the beans I give away this amount of beans is enough to feed a family of four every second night I'm also going to mulch the beans with straw and what I do with this is I actually push it up against the plants sources divine closer to the trellis and I find their own way up I hope you can use some of the ideas I presented in this video if you want to know more information about growing any of those vegetables I have a set of ten videos that describes how to grow each of the most popular vegetables for beginners you might wonder why I'm standing here and not in my vegetable garden but I thought you'd enjoy seeing my abhi Leah French lilacs have just finished flowering the Korean line locks are just starting but right now the star of my garden is this abhi Leah covered with flowers it's extremely fragrant and as such a beautiful bush and very few people grow it has no bugs no caterpillars no diseases I don't do anything to this shrub been sitting here for ten years all I did this year was cut some of it back as it was getting too big anyways back to vegetable gardening I've given you some ideas and I hope you'll be able to use those but we haven't really discussed a big secret of vegetable gardening and that's the soil if you don't have good soil you're going to struggle with vegetable so what's the secret to good soil well there's several things I do when I start at my vegetable garden I dug up the garden put in a lot of horse manure mixed it all up and that was the first season since then I don't do anything to the soil I don't dig in it except where I actually have to plant when I'm planting a cucumber tomato plant I only dig a small hole big enough for that plant I don't dig up the whole garden when I'm planting seeds I rake the top a little bit to level it out and then I make a small ferrule just big enough for the seeds you want to dig in the soil as little as possible just leave it alone the second part of creating good soil is to keep adding organic matter once in a while I do put in some compost but my main organic source are the weeds that I pick up and leave in the garden all the vegetable refuge at the end of the season just gets dropped in that garden I don't take it away and compost it I just leave it there that's organic matter that the soil needs but the most important part is that straw that straw last about a year and a half and then it's decomposed so I'm constantly adding organic matter to that soil and I let nature take it into the soil I just leave the straw on top the bottom layer slowly decomposes and rots worms and beetles and all kinds of insects take it into the soil the bacteria turn it into good soil you can't buy good soil you have to make it and it takes time good soil is created when the bacteria and the organic matter get together and have a party and they create something called soil aggregation and when you have good aggregation you end up with good soil and you can grow lots of vegetables now if you want to learn more about soil a look at my book soil science for gardeners you'll explain everything you need to know about soil they'll help you analyze your current soil situation and they'll help you develop a personalized soil development plan so that over a period of time you will improve the soil in your garden have fun growing those vegetables

Channel: Garden Fundamentals

Views: 1,623

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: vegetables, grow vegetables, keep deer out, keep rabbits out of the garden, peas, beans, tomatoes, mulch with straw, how to build good soil, how to build health soil, high yields, more cucumbers, cucumbers on a trellis, tomatoes on a trellis, staking tomatoes

Id: ZFy6aZrdRiw

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020