There's A LOT Growing Already!! Homestead Garden & Greenhouse Tour | Week 1

and as you can see we're have lots to eat snap it off at the base got R coming in and I don't want them to be [Music] stunted good morning welcome back to sent Stone Homestead my name is Heather if you are new here I like to do garden tours every week during our growing season so we are growing in Southwestern Kentucky it's Zone 7A for years I kept saying we were in 7B I know they recently changed the zoning this is not part of that this is just me not realizing where I am on the map apparently but we are in zone 7A technically and I believe we have had our last frost if you've been following our Channel we have a goat named Breezy who gave birth the morning that she gave birth was our last frost out on the 10day and even the monthly forecast we have nothing even close so it's Garden season at the front of our raised bed garden we have these two u-shaped beds that my husband made he put them in in 201 20 they are starting to fall apart these are untreated wooden beds and I'm not sad that we did this I don't want to grow in treated wood but truthfully it does not last very long so we're making plans to cover these beds with cedar and so they're going to get a little bit bigger but those other beds I believe they're Pine boards they're just going to break down and become part of the soil within the cedar that we put around them I don't know if that is going to be a this year project or not probably not but you can see I have quite the lettuce assortment going on in here leafy greens are some of my most favorite things to grow and you can see I have the lettuces packed in quite densely actually what I did for some of this was just sprinkle down seed on the top of the soil rough it in a little bit and keep it watered and we have some pretty densely packed uh lettuce plants here but that is fine when we used to buy lettuce or Salad mix at the grocery store we'd get those clamshells filled with like baby greens and basically that's what these are going to be some of these plants are getting big enough to where I could start harvesting from them but I think I'm going to wait what I do when I come out to harvest a salad is I'll actually just bring the whole salad spinner out here and I'll pick into the salad spinner go in and give it a good whirl and then we've got a salad straight from our farm I had actually started some Lett uses in like a micro greens tray and I just transplanted hunks of little lettuce plants from that tray into this bed to fill in some of the gaps that were here and these are several different lettuce plants planted close together I believe this is the Rocky Top mix so these are not going to form aead these are going to stay small but some plants I did plant one of you can see there's a lettuce down here these will form a head and as you can see here I have three broccoli plants these are the only broccoli plants that lived through transplanting we have a decent bird population here and if I put plant starts out out too young they eat them up and that's what happened these ones were a little bit bigger and as you can see we're starting to form heads so it won't be long before we're harvesting at least a little bit of broccoli out of the raised bed garden over in this Wing there's nothing actually planted over here but on this side of the board I did plant quite a lot of kma bush beans and they're underneath the mulch here it was just a couple days ago and so we don't have any germination yet um but I'm eagerly awaiting those I planted I think it's every 4 in there's a plant in this little space and we'll have tons of green beans I don't have a lot of the garden mulch right now this is actually refuse hay from my goats and it's working really well as a mulch the thing about hay versus something like straw in the garden both are really good um hay does have more of a nutrient content than straw does and so as it breaks down it adds more than just organic matter to the bed and I like that I put a green stock in the garden and I think we're going to fill this today since we are past our estimated last frost State you can tell that I don't trust the winds that we have around here to not knock this over now these tear I mean when they're filled with soil especially when the soil is moist they are quite heavy but still I sleep better at night having these toost in here and the strap around it this thing is going nowhere so these beds that are down here these were here when we bought the farm and I've really enjoyed growing in them I have more of the lettuce mix over here these are actually volunteer garlics if you are not familiar with the term volunteer a volunteer plant is a a food plant basically I guess it depends on if it's something you want or not but it's a plant that is growing where maybe it grew last year where maybe some seed fell or probably in this case where I left a couple cloves in the ground and so they're not hurting anything there and so I'm going to let them grow over on this side this is our elephant garlic bed I have been growing elephant garlic for a couple years and we haven't honestly eaten a lot of it because it's hard to find I found two bulbs at our local Amish store and with elephant garlic you get maybe four four to six cloves per bulb so I started with very little and I wanted to just multiply those bulbs and we are at the point now where we can actually plant like an entire bed's worth I'll have some to save back to plant another bed next year and we'll have lot to eat this is going to be a little while before it's harvestable I did have some that I left in the ground from last year so those plants are a lot bigger I do have a spinach plant that I planted at the end of last season this might actually be more than one plant I am not excellent at growing spinach so I decided to leave this here amongst the garlic and we can pinch off leaves here and there for our salads as we'd like over in here I transplanted a lot of Dinosaur Kale it didn't really love being transplanted you can see we've got some yellowing leav leaves I had sewn this kale quite thickly in a micro greens tray and when I when I separated it out each little kale plant when it was really tightly um sewn like that had sort of shaded each other out so even though I did acclimate the entire tray to the sun separating them out expose the leaves to even more sun so they are shocked a little bit but we have had some cloudy days the last couple days and we're still going to have we're going to continue to have some cloudy days coming up so they should bounce back fine I really would like to have enough kale to actually preserve some in the freezer we love adding kale to all kinds of dishes soups casserole it's just a great way to add in Greens and nutrition so I have some kale plants that I did put in start pots later in the winter and transplanted out here these are the ones that the birds didn't get I have started harvesting off of these I can't remember the name of this variety if I can remember I'll put it in the words down here I think this is a a blue something kale but this particular decale variety I recognize it as one that one of my Amish friends grew last year and it was doing really well for her and staying sweet well into June and that's what I want I want something that's going to last that's going to be delicious so I can preserve it so when it comes to harvesting kale we do a cutand come again method so we can get as much out of the plant as possible and when you do cut and come again what you'll do is actually Harvest some of the lower and outer leaves and you leave some of the more Young tender leaves in the center and those are going to grow and the plant is going to continue to producing leaves out of the center so in doing that it keeps the plant alive and producing we don't just cut the whole thing off at once and we get more out of it I have some smaller kale plants here some of these are ones that were transplanted as well some of the Dinosaur Kale but this red Russian was kale that I sprinkle sewed in here and it's coming up quite nicely here's another variety of kale right here and on this side of the trellis here I planted some lettuce these are IND idual plants so these guys should form a small head for me and this is actually a blackberry plant we've got the Blackberry over here this Blackberry was put in here a few years ago it's the Triple Crown thornless Blackberry I don't see any flowers yet but it's really started to put on lots of foliage so what we did is actually stick the there's I think six blackberry plants over in this side of the bed and we've allowed it to kind of cascade and travel that way so this is the Blackberry situation I'm not mad about it we are seeing little blackberry plants pop up we don't necessarily want them but it's fine it's really not hard to hit those with a mower or a weed whacker and just keep things manageable so moving on to the center beds here um over here I did put in some dill I scattered sewed a little bit of dill and I can see Tiny bits of it coming up there's one there there's one back there there's not as many plants coming up in here as I would have expected expected and I did run out of seed so I think what I'm going to do is just go to my local nursery and pick up some larger Dill plants and put them in here what I aim to do is have the dill ready and usable like big enough to use by the time I have cucumbers to pickle and so it's a little bit of a it's a little bit of a balancing act this next bed I actually have dedicated we have two Carlos muscadine grapes that we put in at the end of winter there's one here you can see we're starting to get a little bit of full on that and there is actually another one over there but these guys are going to be living on these cattle penel trellises here and they're going to be one of those perennial permanent fixtures in this Garden so we're starting to hit the real perennial part of this Garden one of the perennial things that I put in the garden not long ago are these Egyptian walking onions I bought these off of etsy and I'll link the shop where I bought them in the description box below I'm not affiliated with them but they sent some beautiful walking onion bulbs that all did really well they're starting to put on their greens and Egyptian walking onions are essentially like a perennial onion we are huge fans of green onions and also shallots and these onions are perfect for both of those applications so I'm very excited to have them as part of a perennial landscape over here funny I thought that there were some mushrooms coming up but it's not it's actually it's beans last year I grew beans on this trellis and some of them fell when they dried and these will probably germinate I'll throw some over there that's how volunteers happen in the center of this area I have established a very Lush bed of oregano this has been growing here since 2019 I love it it is starting to encroach a little bit over here oregano in the mint family mints do this they tend to kind of overtake everywhere anywhere that you put them there's some little gaps and things where it was able to weasle through underneath the soil and get over here it's not really a big deal to me looks like we're only a couple weeks away from our first harvest of oregano which is good cuz I've run out in the kitchen there's some more Egyptian walking onions over here as well as some weeds and I do have our second muscadine grape which also is putting on some green things so this bed I would really like to dedicate to chamomile flour so I put a chamomile flower in here that I have not grown before the chamomile that I have grown before I believe is like a German chamomile the really common little white flower with the yellow Center these particular plants were advertised as perennial and they are yellow flowers I don't know if they are awesome for tea or not the white variety the little German Chom meals those are they're not exactly perennial they will recede quite readily I actually expected to see some volunteers of that in my garden by now and I haven't so I'm not sad that I planted these but that one we've grown that a lot in the past the German chamomile is very good for tea if I don't end up getting any volunteers of that I will probably try and Seed some of that in this bed as well and we'll have like a dual chimile bed over here hopefully for a really long time I'm assuming that what makes this particular plant perennial is that the root system survives winter I'm not sure though I got quite a few little plants that have come up though can you guys tell what these are bonus points if you know what plant this is that's a tomato there are a million little volunteer tomato plants in this bed and the Tomato that that is is a yellow current tomato that really likes to self seed on my farm I have not planted it in several years like intentionally because every single year I just find it I find it and I'm able to transplant it and grow it so there it is I have some in the greenhouse as well I will not be letting all of these become mature plants but some of them I'm not going to grow them on here though I'll move them so back here I have several different strawberries this is actually the most full selection of strawberries that I think we've had many of these are the Ozark beauty strawberry and they've started to put on their flowers but I also put in a variety of strawberry that has a white Berry and I don't know what's what I just sort of plugged the crowns in the ground and so we'll have to wait till they fruit to figure out which plants are are the white ones I need to go ahead and mulch in here pretty soon to help hold in moisture and to keep the weeds down speaking of weeds though I sometimes will receive criticism about how messy my garden looks and it at this point it just rolls off of my back because I know how productive this Garden is despite the weeds and really what is considered a weed is relative so we live in the middle of agricultural Farmland it's big monocultures almost on all four sides behind us there's a military in installation and very recently they came and sprayed they sprayed Roundup and a fertilizer and so these fields over here used to be full of things like purple dead nettle and different varieties of like wild mustard lots of flowering things for the pollinators and now for Miles there's none of that there are little pockets of it here and there in yards and I have noticed they're not out today because it's sort of cold and cloudy but the pollinators are really enjoying the weeds that I have in my garden and truthfully a lot of these weeds are edible for us as well so this here this is a plant called chickweed and this is edible I'm not super awesome at remembering what everything is for I just know that it's good and if I wanted I can look it up in my Peterson Field Guide this is plantain down here these are the purple dead nettle that I was talking about this is edible for humans and the pollinators really love it so yeah I mean I guess I could we whack around here to clean things up and just make it look better but why when it's beneficial so there's my there's my thoughts on that that's good for the pollinators it's edible and good for us and it's not in my way so I don't care about it next to the strawberries I have some more elephant garlic this is sort of a volunteer as well I haven't planted this in a couple years this little plot here is actually where I put my first bulbs of elephant garlic that I bought at the store and when elephant garlic comes to maturity it has these little mini bulbs on the bottom of the big bulb they're they're called garlic corns they're really little and they fall off of the bulb very easily and the corns likely have fallen in this bed so if you can get your hands on even just a couple bulbs of elephant garlic you will be overrun with it which is a good thing in no time flat another volunteer that we have in our garden quite plentifully is cilantro um I have planted cilantro one time and let it flower one time and now it comes back every year the strawberry beds actually had a ton of it in there and I did transplant that over and we'll go over there in just a second but there's more here back behind the raised bed garden this is one of our newest beds where we stuck our Legacy blueberry plants and we have some flowers and even a little bit of fruit can you see these little blueberries here they still have some maturing and growing to do but that's fun this is the asparagus bed I have a few different types I believe the green is Washington and I forget the name of this but it's a purple variety you can see there's a plant there and there's one there we established these beds in I think it was 2021 and when we put the crowns in they were 2 years old asparagus crowns can live and produce for decades and so we get to harvest pretty heavily at this point and I'm so excited I miss the asparagus season when we don't have it we get asparagus from usually about the end of March well into June and by the time June comes I am a little bit sick of it but when we don't have it for many months I look forward to March a lot this one is probably decently harvestable in size I wait till they're about a foot tall before I harvest and to harvest asparagus all I do is just snap it off at the base like that if you have never had homegrown asparagus it is nothing like the store-bought stuff that stuff tends to be pretty Woody especially as the stocks get a lot larger that is not the case for homegrown asparagus the stocks can be huge and fat and super super tender and an amazing buttery type texture it's just lovely this this one is really really sweet I love it I look forward to this so much so at about June time I will start to leave the stocks that the plant is putting up in order to let them do what they do they get really tall they open up and they become these beautiful wispy fronds they put on flowers which eventually get pollinated and create little red berries and those little red berries fall and Reed themselves so these are all little firste plants you don't Harvest them like this obviously aren't those cute I do have some winec cap mushroom spawn that I put in these beds before I amended and added more mulch over the winter it's just been a little bit cold for those for that mushroom melium to push up any of the fruiting bodies but I'm very excited and looking forward to that I put more of the mushroom melium over in this bed and this is where I transplanted some of the cilantro now the cilantro didn't exactly love the transplanting process we had a little bit of transplant shock but these guys will recover fine and be nice and full and they're going to help shade this bed which is going to be good for the mushrooms melium mushrooms do not like a lot of light at all and they don't like a lot of wind and these plants are going to live in symbiosis so can you see the like white fuzzy stuff down in here all that that's the melium so mushrooms are happy they're just not Fring yet behind this bed is another plant that's going to help shade the mushrooms this going to be a good relationship this is my Elderberry I cannot remember what type of Elderberry these are uh these have only been in here a few years and it's huge and they are starting to push out little baby Elderberry plants along the ground these are a little bit in the way but a lot like the blackberries I can just mow these down which is kind of sad but I don't necessarily want them shading out this side of the garden so over here on this side is a space that my kids have grown a garden in for a couple of years we have since given them their own raised beds that are smaller and each child is able to manage that a lot easier this giv it's wild and out of hand and I have reclaimed it for this year I haven't cleaned it up yet but I am going to be growing over here this year we are going to take down the fence so that it's easier for me to manage we do have our entire property fenced in and so neighborhood dogs and things they can't really get in here anyway I have planted a few things in here these are the Romeo and Juliet um dwarf cherry trees that I stuck over here there are quite a lot of strawberry plants that I am going to move and over here is the Tomato tralis we've grown tomatoes here for a couple years I do plan to grow tomatoes here again but the little tiny tomato starts that are going in here they are Itty Bitty right now so it's not time it gives me time to clean this space up those plants are in the greenhouse so let's go check that out hi sweet girl do you guys need a bottle I think so winning don't you dare [Music] so if this greenhouse doesn't look like it's ready for planting this spring is because it's not ready for planting this spring not really usually by now the greenhouse is well cleaned out and amended and prepared to grow in but we're changing things up this year we've been growing in this greenhouse this will be the third summer we have decided that I don't exactly love growing in ground in here over the winter which is the whole point of having a greenhouse is to grow over the winter the grass that is on our property is dead and because of that it's not soaking up a lot of moisture and just a lot of that deeps in in the ground here and it's quite muddy and very wet and it's just not a good growing environment so we have a plan that we're going to execute very very soon of converting this greenhouse into a raised bed Greenhouse here's a sneak peek preview of what the layout is going to look like we are going to be using Bird's raised beds from epic gardening but for now this is what it looks like they're actually are quite a few things growing in here our parsnips have really exploded in the last couple of weeks I was peeking down at the soil level the other day to see what I could see Got Roots coming in down there pretty white Roots it's still going to be a little bit before we can Harvest but this is exciting I have had success with parsnips in the past but they can be a little bit hard to get to germinate they did really well in this bed and they've continue to do well in this bed I have been keeping track of the moisture levels in the bed with this moisture meter in order to get good long roots I want them to sort of reach for water so down real low we do still have some moisture it's moist down low but as you come higher up it gets less so see it's not super moist up you know 3 in down but down where we want the roots to go it is so they'll be reaching for it over here I have a broccoli row that you know it's getting quite overgrown with weeds and things even though I have weed fabric down down here but we have harvested a lot off of these broccoli plants we have our initial Harvest of that Center head but then we have all of these little side shoots and these are delicious I don't remember what variety this is this may be the Gypsy hybrid broccoli I really do like growing that but they put out a lot of side shoots so it looks like I need to come out here later with my basket and retrieve those they're really good in like a stir fry I have put them on faka before that might be what I do again cuz that was good this trellis right here I had grown some peas on it you can tell that they have started to grow again we are seeing some pods with little peas growing in them this is just going to be kind of a bonus crop I've sort of ignored this particular space over here I had some cauliflower plants where the center rotted so the center where we get the head just stopped growing it rotted out probably due to the saturated ground in here but I noticed that basically all of these cauliflower plants decided to put out I don't know a second plant and they're trying to head up again in there so we might actually get some cauliflower this one is a little bit past prime for Harvest but we can still eat this this is not the original plant the original plant is back here this shriveled up and died and the center rotted out and the plant decided to put a sister on and give us a harvest anyway Isn't that cool here we are again this is the dead plant or dying it's not good it's not great and this is the good side and there is a tiny cauliflower in there and I don't want to metal too hard cuz I don't want to kill it but can you see that in there see see the cauliflower that's cool these beautiful plants with their lovely flowers these are brussels sprouts we have gotten a couple Harvest off the Brussels sprouts but they are gone by at this point so I've just let them flower number one I think it's beautiful and the pollinators when it is pollination time have really been loving it actually just noticed a honeybee over here see that pretty girl taking a nap on the flower the pollinators have been loving it in here and we can collect the seed I won't be collecting all of this seed these flowers here when they're pollinated they turn into these pods which eventually swell with seed can you see it there and one plant is going to have plenty of seed for a lot of people for a lot of Russel routs for a lot of years so I don't need all of this but it sure is pretty anyway I like walking in here and seeing this see other people see a mess I just see beauty those cauliflower plants died or became looked like they weren't going to be giving us anything probably 2 months ago and I left them in and it turns out it was worth it that's cool there are a few more plants over here I do have some purple cabbage this particular one has started putting on a head which is good this one looks like it's putting on two heads there's one here and there's one here I'm pretty sure this is one plant giving two heads I had quite a few of those last year and then here's another one putting a head in the center if you squeeze the center of the plant you can feel that it's a lot more dense there's like a little ball forming so that's exciting my kids specifically requested some purple cabbage so I've got a few in here for them our green stock looks like we may be seeing some sort of ant SL fungus Bloom but it really hasn't been a problem the plants are doing well these are peruviana zenas that I had to reso we had a freeze that got into the greenhouse and did kill off just a few plants I was surprised what actually did survive but I got to replant the Zenia and it's like nothing ever happened I do have a couple different varieties of celery I believe that the one up here is a as a dwarf pink variety and then down here is like a green variety of celery it might have been a little bit late to plant celery but but it's been a while since I've tried and I figured we'd stick some in on this tier I have a dwarf variety of tomato this is the orange hat tomato and they only get to be about this tall so that's going to be fun this tier we put in a purple bok choy that looks like it's doing well I'm really enjoying the pop of color that this gives and down below there's a couple different varieties of radishes these are actually not super far away from being harvested it was a few weeks ago that we planted the seeds in here and a lot of radish varieties are ready to be harvested within about 28 to 35 days they are super fast growing which is good and you can actually eat the whole plant so obviously a lot of people know that you can eat the bulbs but we like to sauté the greens down they do have a few little hairs on them but when you cook these up those little hairs essentially melt away and you can't you can't feel them at all I don't remember the varieties but I believe the one at the bottom was like a larger Italian variety The Green stock at the other side of the greenhouse is one that I have had strawberries growing in for quite some time I did just transplant some more strawberries into here so the ones that look a little limp and sad those guys are just going through some transplant shock but I started to see some red the other day these are definitely ready oh the ants have found that one already well that's unfortunate that one too usually growing strawberries up off the ground like this means that you have less of an issue with ants but if they can figure it out how to climb up there and get them they will I can probably sprinkle di Tous Earth or something like a ring around the green stock and help solve that issue as long as they haven't like created their nest in the soil in here even then diecious Earth is the answer that has been the answer for us in the past that one looks good it might have stood to sit another day or so but I don't want the ants to get to it I want to eat it that was really sweet sometimes strawberries that aren't quite ripe can be a little bit tart but that was a good one there's another one way up here we'll leave that one I know the kids and my husband will be excited about this in these pots over here I just recently purchased these bonfire peach trees and they did flower it was gorgeous and they have put on a few little Peaches I have decided to leave some peaches on these plants this year really the first year that you have a tree you need to let their Roots develop because these are in a container I'm a little less worried about them don't ask me why I mean they have roots that need to develop clearly even in a container but I think they're going to do okay I have pulled off several little baby peaches because they were trying to grow I don't know there was probably 60 Peaches on this one little tree and that's a lot for it to manage so I've still got quite a few on there there and we'll see we'll be having some peaches this year down below I did sprinkle so some alysum these guys are actually in the brassa family so they are Frost tolerant and they've been growing nicely and just started to bloom they are so lovely I just purchased some of these key lime these dwarf key lime Bush plants they have been flowering and I think we had one little fruit there it is see that little key lime in there now Citrus especially key limes is very Frost tender so we don't plan to leave these inside this greenhouse because it does freeze in the greenhouse over winter here what I plan to do is put these in like a rolling bed to where when it needs to go undercover for freezes or over the winter I can roll them into our house or into our shed which is heated it is climate controlled and hopefully we can have a little bit of key limes cuz we love key lime pie the key lime juice would be really good and things like yogurt and kefir so we're excited about this I don't think this one has put on any any flowers but this one did see them all it's pretty cool so here are the plant starts that I was talking about and there's quite a few here basically the whole table is full of starts and then there's some over there we'll go look at those in a second these are pepper plants that we bought at a local Nursery just because they were a little bit further along than what I planted they did look better when we bought them that particular Nursery that Greenhouse has a little bit more shade than mine and so they got they got a little burn when I moved them over but they're going to be okay back here the kids have started some things for their Garden there's some tomatoes and flowers and things I have two full trays of ground cherries I don't remember the variety of ground cherry but we were sent these from so right seeds we have 64 plants now which is a lot here are my tomatoes and there's a there's an extra probably cauliflower plant that I had volunteer in the greenhouse but these tomatoes are getting really big for their start pots I can't remember how long they've been in here but they're clearly looking for a larger pot and I'm clearly not ready so this week I plan to buy some Solo cups some Red Solo Cup cups or whatever color and drilling a hole in the bottom and planting them up potting them up just to give me a little bit extra time if a plant like this is in a pot too long their constricted Roots really can kind of suffocate the plant and I don't want them to be stunted at all so these guys really need to get potted up I started a whole tray of Zenia there's all kinds of different colors and pattern varieties in here really excited about that and then these are brand new tomatoes that I've started so I actually wrote the varieties down sometimes I don't these are super sweet 100 which we always have Poe germination with these These are pelleted seeds so they have this covering on the outside and in my experience those are really hard to germinate so we got black strawberry tomato blue cream berries berries crazy it looks like I only have one of those right now Dr witches orange accordion Berkeley tied dye tomato and Alice's dream so got off quite a few little baby Tomatoes as well as some bigger ones over here are my peppers and eggplants in this tray I had about a 50% germination in here and then this is what I think we're going to plant in the green stock these are Tiny Tim tomatoes so a lot like the dwarf tomato that's over in this green stock they don't get very big the seed packet said that they'll be about a foot tall and so I think they're going to be perfect in that green stock looks like we even have a tiny little flower Bud coming on so yeah let's see do we have roots oh yeah there's just a Littest little root but it's ready we'll move that [Music] over [Music] so that's what we've got going on right now there are two other growing spaces that I didn't even get to show you today mostly because there's nothing going on in them right now but it's going to be a pretty big Garden year and this is going to Mark the first of many garden tours throughout the season I'm still a little bit undecided if I'm going to start doing weekly tours right now or if that will come you know as the season progresses but stick around you're not going to want to miss [Music] it

Channel: Sage and Stone Homestead

Views: 12,947

Keywords: homestead, homesteading, farm, farming, homesteading channel, homesteading channels, farm life, garden tour, 2024 garden, zone 7 garden, zone 7b, zone 7a, raised bed garden, growing a garden, greenhouse tour, spring garden, gardening, vegetable garden, growing vegetables

Id: uTiTpf5r1ak

Length: 35min 8sec (2108 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 12 2024