Tools that will TRANSFORM your Garden Experience

having the right tools for your garden can make all the difference in how much you enjoy working in your garden and also how well you can keep up with your garden so starting with something just as simple as this watering wand it took us a really long time to get ourselves a good watering wand for a really long time I just like used my thumb on the end of a hose it was really difficult to water things like tender young shoots or lettuce or anything that gets matted down easily this one here you can control the flow of the water it can be gentle or it can be all out it's very light we've got a garden up by the house and we've got the one down there that Michelle was just watering in and I've seen Michelle drag hoses all over the place she comes to me complaining that they're so tight together she can't get them apart and I wanted to come up with a solution for her so something that I got this year was these Quick Connect things I had tried some different ones last year that did not work very well at all but these things are amazing this makes it a lot easier for Michelle with a bunch of different hoses to the different Gardens we've got trees out by the road that have to be watered and the children can even use these things the ones I got before were really hard to push together I think they were easier than unscrewing the hoses but nothing compared to this I'm still not quite satisfied with our watering system though this right here drives me nuts and often it's just out in the middle of the yard and the way especially when you need to mow like this here dragging this hose around and bringing it back up here there's nowhere for it to go except on the ground so I got something to take care of that that I'm really excited about it's a little nerdy but I'm excited to be clear this has nothing to do with a sponsorship or anything nobody gave this to me I've just gotten playing sick and tired of these hoses laying around and I wanted to do something about it so I finally went and got us a hose reel foreign there is pretty snazzy barely even use this thing and I'm already in love with it I love things like that so to be honest gardening is not really my favorite thing in our home state I really love the animals and I helped Michelle in the garden but it's not my favorite thing but I love making it more efficient and making it easier to keep on top of stuff we had somebody come into our comments recently and say stuff about how all of our stuff just looks brand new and we must have tons of money and faking it and whatever and I assure you that is not the case we've been homesteading for nine years now and that is the very first hose reel that I've ever bought we have actually not had very much money at all for our entire marriage and each year we just kind of keep on building we're very careful about how we spend our money but especially me when I see something that I know can make a big difference in making this homesteading life possible I'm willing to invest in that to make so we can keep going and keep getting better and better at this last year I only had two raised beds and so I just made do with like a long-handled hoe so this year I have 10 and so I really wanted a tool that I could use in my raised beds that was a little more practical than a long-handled hoe I got a Korean hand hoe it's perfect for making furrows like the point you can use to make furrows and then this side right here you can use for weeding and really anything it took me a minute to kind of get the feel for this tool but once I did I really really enjoy it this is the bed that my cucumbers were in and they have officially died so as you guys can see my cucumbers died so I am going to plant some fall carrots in here this is the beginning of August and if they don't quite you know get huge like my other carrots will that's okay we'll eat them fresh it'll just make our others stretch a little bit further foreign [Music] carrots are very delicate and so they just need like the right conditions to come up and putting these boards on top will help keep it cool and hold the moisture in that'll really help them germinate a lot better I'm up here by the house right now and I'm cleaning out this raised bed that I use for my greens it's not been being used all summer while it's really hot I just really don't put a lot of effort into growing greens when it's hot because we don't like bitter lettuce so now that it is the beginning of August I'm going to plant some lettuce in here the really cool thing about this raised bed is that it gets the morning sunlight but then in the afternoon it's shaded and it's really perfect for lettuce we will move on to the next tool as soon as I am done with this raised bed [Music] this here is cilantro that I let go to seed so here you can see all the coriander seed on here I am just going to pull these out and shake them over the raised bed I'll throw compost over top of this and we'll have a nice crop of cilantro for this fall [Music] this is a 10 Cube wheelbarrow it gets pretty heavy but it's got two wheels the thing is though is they're like 500 new but I did not buy it new I found this in a dumpster I got it out of the dumpster and it was like all broken and stuff I put new handles on it and fixed all up and this is compost for the raised beds over here composting is one thing that can tend to intimidate me a little bit and I'm guessing it intimidates a lot of you as well and the thing is it's one of those things that can just it can be really simple there's a really good way to do it where you figure it all out and you make sure you kill all the weed seeds and you get it really nice and you know a couple of months or something like that there's another way to do it you put things all on a pile and you let it sit for about two years and it'll turn into compost not perfect but it works and our garden gets better and better every year let me put this stuff on [Music] I must have misplaced my seeds when I planted this spring I thought I was just sure I had lettuce seeds left and I guess I didn't we usually get our seeds from Berlin seed but I didn't want to wait to get them in the mail so I got these at Tractor Supply and thankfully I got three packs because I thought I was being like very over prepared they barely have anything in them and they were three dollars each so pathetic [Music] these are the great plants that we planted early this spring and it took them a little while to get established but they just all of a sudden started going nuts they should have definitely been like pruned and taken care of before now but today better late than never I guess basically what we're going for here is we want a single trunk going up and then we'll also train it out onto these wires and then that's where the grapes will eventually grow from before anybody goes down to the comments and tells me how I'm doing it all wrong and I should do it another way let me just tell you I looked a lot of places to try to figure out how to do this I watched videos I read articles from single people and from universities looked everywhere and it was really hard to find like one good solid answer and so I'm going to kind of combine a lot of the things that I read and watched and try to use some common sense because often in gardening farming homesteading a little Common Sense can go a long way and it might not end up being perfectly right but usually it turns out okay in the end here's another tool that we wanted to show off this is another simple thing a scissors but it's a really Hefty scissors and we use it for so many things in the garden and it'll work great for something like this just cut right through that stuff that felt painful but what you're really wanting to do is you're wanting to grow a really solid trunk and a really good root system and if it's growing all of these other branches a lot of your energy is going to those other branches so we want is the energy being going into this one single trunk another thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to leave some of the leaves on actually probably a lot of the leaves so that it can keep doing its photosynthesis thing and that'll bring in a lot of energy from the Sun to help this thing grow so this guy has really grown this thing is like already about up to the top stuff like this is always a little bit of an adventure and you just learn as you go and that's okay and I do appreciate help and advice from people that are qualified to give it and give it nicely so if you want to you can go ahead [Music] the tool I'm going to use next is one that is going to be a little controversial and I'm okay with that we do use a tiller in our garden and especially for something like this right here is what was our strawberry patch and we planted a new one because if you want good berries you have to replant the strawberries every two years or so so we planted a new patch and this needs to be tilled in and then we're going to plant a cover crop here and then we'll use this as Garden space next year I really don't know how we would manage this like we do without using a tiller and I know there's a lot of advantages to doing a no-till method but I think there's a lot of drawbacks as well and I'm not going to get into that right now but I mean honestly I see our soil getting better and better every year and I feel like if it's used right and not used excessively it can be okay and it can be a good thing for your garden to use a tiller this is not just terribly ideal to be tilling this right now because we've gotten rain fairly recently but there's a chance of rain tonight and tomorrow so we for sure want to get it done and get a pepper crop in before that happens I'm going to till this one more time going the other way because when you go just one way it'll kind of leave some strips sometimes and stuff and sometimes that's okay but this had some really thick grass and stuff but before I do that I want to try out my favorite garden tool I actually bought it one time very early on when we were pretty broke and it was one of those things wasn't sure if we should do but I went ahead and did it and I'm so glad that we did I don't really have any other place in our garden right now that needs to be weeded with this thing that's usually more in the spring but right now this is about how it would be that is cutting right through the roots of that grass right underneath the top of the soil and just cutting it right off and that's one of the things that we do to minimize the tilling that we do because while I do feel like tilling is okay and can be a good thing I also think that doing it excessively is not good for your soil and a couple things that we do to minimize that tilling is using things like a wheel hoe to get the weeds down and also using lots and lots of mulch what's on here right now is the weeding sweeps and those do work really really well to cut down those weeds but this can do so much more than that there's also a plow set so you can put these things on here and they would make a big Furrow so you can use that to like plant potatoes that works awesome and then there's these cultivator teeth if you just want to rip up the ground honestly I don't use these very often they could be used like just one of them to make a small Furrow but usually we want our furrows a little bigger than that and we actually have another wheel hoe it's a different style it's got a big wheel on it that's got a really nice thing on the back of it to make the furrows that we do for planting our seeds those are the attachments that we've been using on our wheel hoe for the past number of years and they work great but I am really really excited about something else that I just got this was not sent to me I bought this myself I've been wanting to buy it for a long time kept putting it off but decided for this video I wanted to compare this with what's on the wheel hoe right now and see which works better so I can give you a better idea of what you might want for your garden I honestly wasn't sure which I was more excited about that hose reel over there or this thing here like a kid in a candy shop when it comes to getting a new tool to use wow so the idea with a stirrupo is that you can cut through the dirt this way and then when you pull back this thing pivots and moves back and forth and you just cut those weeds off so I'm really really curious to see how this does compared to the weeding sweeps that are on the wheel hoe it's not going to be the greatest test right now since this isn't actually the normal conditions that you would be using it in this is like tilled up and all chunky with those grass clumps in there and stuff but I think it'll be a pretty good test and we'll definitely be testing this in the future when we do have actual places we need to weed and we'll tell you how it works out the one reason that I'm pretty excited about using the stirapo is because you can see right here there's kind of a gap in between these two sweeps and that'll Miss some weeds sometimes and that stirrupo will go all the way across so it's not going to miss anything you can get this stirapo in different sizes I got the 12 inch one because I figured that'd be about the most useful for me one of the advantages of the oscillating hose supposed to be that you can go back and forth and when you cut the weeds off then when you go back it'll cut again but it'll also like flip those weeds over I can't wait to try this out in the spring when we're dealing with you know getting the garden started and weeding in between the rows and everything if I was to go out and buy one or the other right now I'm honestly not quite sure what I would get I know this one's a little more expensive I I really like how it feels and I think I would get the oscillating hoe but I know that either one of them would work really well for most things so as you guys probably here in the background is out there tilling we are running out of daylight it's really cloudy today and so I am going to dig potatoes while he finishes tilling out there the tool that I would like to tell you guys about is a potato Fork this may not seem like a crazy transformational tool or anything but for us it was a huge like light bulb moment when we got a potato Fork instead of using a pitch fork to dig potatoes it makes the world of a difference in how easy it is to get the potatoes out of the ground the other day we dug all of our Yukon Gold potatoes and tonight we need to dig our red Pontiac potatoes they're looking really super nice [Music] now this is all tilled up it's really not too bad cover cropping is something that used to really intimidate me thinking that you always had to have just the right perfect mix and you had to do it just right in everything but really the two main objectives when you're cover cropping is a green manure for your soil and also protection for your soil and really pretty much anything can do those two things weeds can be a good cover crop the main thing is is that you just wouldn't want to let certain plants go to seed but as long as you've got a green cover on the ground and then you till it into the soil that's a cover crop now saying that there are definitely different kinds of cover crops that will do different things for your soil so if you've done a soil test and you know exactly what you need you can plant certain things to get certain results we're hoping to get a soil test done this fall and then we'll be able to do a little more like that figure out what exactly we need and what the best thing we can do for it but this is definitely going to be better than nothing it's still going to really help our soil and it's going to protect the soil from just being bare to the heavy rain in the hot sun I'm going to rake over the top of these seeds a little bit so they get in good contact with the soil but before I do that I just want to give a quick shout out to our channel members thank you so much for the support you give to our Channel and also for the input that you give us we give them several options as to which video we were going to do next and this is one of the most popular ones so that's why we did it now and this video has been a lot of fun so thanks for that now that that is all raked we're ready to put a sprinkler on it because we really needs to be watered in so that it can get a really a good start we started out using the sprinklers that go around and around and if you'll notice our garden is square this is an oscillating sprinkler it goes back and forth I mean just kind of like people used to use a long time ago but this one's pretty sweet because it's adjustable you can adjust how wide it goes and you can adjust how far back and forth it goes so it's super versatile and it makes we can get the exact spot that we want to get in our garden it used to be a nice pretty blue but it is definitely very well used ah you could have turned the water off first it is sprinkling a little bit right now but it's not going to be enough to make this cover crop as wet as I would like it to be so we are going to set up the sprinkler anyways [Music] here's another one of my very favorite garden tools I use this thing every single week in the summer and spring and fall today I'm going to be spraying surround which is kaolin Clay this coats the plants and makes so that they're not as tasty for the bugs this is a fall planting of green beans that I did and you can see here they look really beautiful on the top but underneath you can see that the bugs were eating some of the leaves I think it was cucumber beetles and you can see they still have a bit of a white film on them but the bugs moved on now and there's beautiful new growth coming on so I'm just going to go ahead and spray these again this morning coat them again with another round of the kale and clay I've been noticing that my sweet potatoes have some lacing happening on the top of the leaves this is not anything I'm worried about I'm going to just go ahead and empty out my sprayer on these sweet potatoes kale and Clay is literally just that it's a kind of clay completely non-toxic Cody came up with this idea a couple years ago to get a DeWalt sweeper to help with the bug problem especially squash bugs and it has really been a blessing so if I'm honest I have pretty much given up this year on the squash bugs I'd been picking eggs and doing all the things but I wanted to show you guys how this thing works and like this is absolutely disgusting I can hardly even look at it but I just want to show you the power of this tool this sweeper obviously is really awesome when you actually have the really bad bug problem but next year I came up with this idea that I want some kind of lid that is an insect netting over our raised beds and so Cody instantly had some really good ideas so next year we are going to be netting all of our cucumbers and squash and everything like that and hopefully that will take care of our massive problem with squash bugs quick they're running away thanks gardening is such a big broad topic and it's so hard to fit a lot of the good stuff into one video so we're putting together a playlist of some of our best gardening videos and we'll put it right here for you to watch next this thing is just so cool [Music] because we're more than farmers foreign

Channel: More Than Farmers

Views: 180,054

Keywords: homestead, organic farm, simple living, how to grow food, homesteading, homesteading family

Id: SkXtDbr7Dlg

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023