What Happened to our Food Garden After 5 Weeks Away on Vacation?!

when we left the garden looked like this lush cool winter growing season with ample water we get back five weeks later to this hot dry winds and a food garden looking more like drought ridden outback Australia rather than mild springtime in southeast Queensland which is what it's supposed to be g'day i'm mark from self-sufficient meaning in this video we're gonna see what happened to our food garden after being away for five weeks on our listening looking and eating tour of France Italy Croatia and Munich let's get into it let me assure you that this isn't a show you my awesome holiday video and I will not be showing any gruesome holiday footage of yours truly having a good time swimming eating drinking or joking around I don't have any time for that and I'm sure you guys don't want to see it anyway and since Australia is so far away from the rest of the world I'm still getting over jetlag but as usual I will be including any relevant media that I took whilst a while on vacation in future videos if necessary you know to show information about growing food or whatever I think that you guys might find interesting so when we left we handed our property animals and kids over to my mother and I remember distinctly telling her mum don't worry about the garden it'll look after itself we've had plenty of winter rain you shouldn't even have to water whilst we're away well how wrong was I we get back five weeks later and the weather conditions couldn't be more different I was shocked we went from green and lush to as dry as my sense of humor the veggies and fruit trees were wilting the grass had gone from green to brown and even the clover had gone to sticky seed that annoyingly sticks on my boots making them impossible to remove easily luckily I have a special inbuilt cleaning system that gets the seed off quick smart and at the same time saves on chicken feed so what has happened to our valuable food garden well before we get into the bad news I should say mum did her best to water once or twice but honestly we didn't want her busting her guts outside because her main goal was to look after the boys and house it for us yes the boys had chores to do like look after the chickens and animals but I didn't specifically detail any watering that was my fault naturally the first thing I did when we got back was put our watering system on in a desperate attempt to rehydrate our suffering vegetable garden in hindsight I should have briefed my mother on just how easy it was to put our main sprinkler on to water at least the whole veggie patch but I didn't and that was my fault and my lesson learnt again after watering the garden I then went around to see what we had lost there was nothing left at all of the cucumbers they were completely frazzled to be fair though already on the way out and they never do too well throughout cooler winters anyway but nevertheless this hot dry spring certainly knocked the remainder of those plants over the Everglades tomatoes they died back a lot of the fruit is ripened though so we can still salvage that also to be fair they were a pretty early crop as ever glaze usually are so I expected those plants to beyond the way out by now the rocket had gone completely deceide which isn't a bad thing just that if it wasn't for this warmer weather I'm sure it wouldn't have gone to seed so early they need regular water if you don't regular water sell the crops like rocket I'm afraid they get heat stressed and as soon as they get heat stressed they'll go to seed on you garlic well this was a big concern garlic also does like a bit of water of course it doesn't like to be waterlogged being a bulb crop but it still does need regular water and the other thing that happened while we were away I think due to the stress was the rust got out of control rust is always a bit of a problem for garlic here in the subtropics rust really got hold of our smaller garlic bulbs the elephant garlic seems to be doing a lot better as expected anyway I'm going to do my best to try to salvage that crop and we'll see how we go the collards have been absolutely punished by this unexpected heat wave throughout supposedly cooler spring coming out of winter if we get another cool spell I'm sure the colors will bounce back a bit through the spring and we'll still get a feed out of them but the lack of water especially again being one of those leafy green crops just like salad crops if they're water stressed well then it really does make them suffer and it can make the leaves bitter to eat and speaking of heat you might be able to hear the pump in the background that's my neighbor he's pumping water out of his dam which he doesn't do very often but due to this hot dry winds I'm sure he wants to water his grass for his horses and that's what he's doing now so if you can hear that in the background that's that one of our round potato beds that was going really well we've got a few areas that were growing potatoes this season it has died off now I'm not sure if that was a natural die back or if it's died back due to water stress and heat I'm suspecting it's due to water stress and heat although those potatoes were fairly early I still think they had a lot more time in them yet and a lot more growth so I'll be interested to see what type of harvest we get out of that round bed now that they're died off I gave them a fair bit of water like I said hopefully they can come good and maybe grow a little bit longer to get a few extra tubers and for some reason our large container of oregano is completely black and died off if it was like growing so well and now it's looks like it's the end of our igano I'm afraid I've tried to sprinkle some of maybe the dried seed in and hopefully can re sprout I don't know if I'll get that lucky thankfully that was the worst of it and surprisingly there are a lot of plants that did really well considering they'd been neglected for over a month the tomatoes are looking pretty good yes there's a lot of maintenance that needs to be done on the fellas but still I can't complain with getting a lot of great fruit mom and the kids have been eating quite a bit I even gave mum some to take home and luckily they weren't all overripe either they're sort of just ripening at the right time I just need to tie them back up and do some extra maintenance and giving them that extra water that they need the leeks are developing nicely in the front garden bed along with the mustard I planted those leeks fairly close together and that mustard plant is kind of pushing its way into the side of the leeks but both plants are doing very well and I was surprised that they were doing so well scenes that the soil in those beds aren't as full of organic matter as say the tomatoes the reason why I think they've done so well is because I threw in so much organic matter into these tomato beds and also the mulch on top and that has kept the moisture in the soil and has prevented it from drying out so much it's good to see the American purple suede hey those Americans aren't they fantastic those purple Suede's must be fairly Hardy again that bed doesn't have a lot of organic matter in it but I did mulch well around them when I sowed the seed although our pumpkin vines have all died back there are several pumpkins sitting around the vegetable garden ready for harvesting which is another nice thing these are Queensland blues it's a little bit of dry wind dried the vines are cured those outer skins on those pumpkins and now we can harvest them easy enough and eat them or store them away the shallots and walking onion bed are doing well I think that they'll continue to grow nicely it just proves the point again that those walking onions are very Hardy I'm going to continue to divide and grow them because they are such a handy type of onion plant to grow when you can't grow other onions but the shallot in the middle are doing well or so and I expect they'll continue to grow into about midsummer and then they'll be right to harvest and probably one of the biggest surprises I found was how well the lettuce is growing wherever we've scattered the lettuce seed around those lettuces have come up nicely I don't taste like they've been heat stressed so now that we're back we'll keep the water up to them we should have good lettuce for the next couple of months despite the hot weather the mulberry trees are doing well I like those mole berries that are full of foliage and the branch is touching the ground as long as they don't break off but Mobley branches are fairly flexible so I I'm pretty confident they won't break and if they're touching the ground like that well they certainly won't but I think we're gonna get a heap of mole berries this season if I can get them before the birds do and being spring of course the mangos are starting to flower last season wasn't great for mangoes this season we'll see it tends to be a bit of a problem if we have a wet spring so now that we're having a dry spring this could be actual positive for mangoes when you have a wet spring in the subtropics it can get too much black spot and anthracnose on the flowers and you don't get as much fruit set but if you have a dry spring you tend to get more mangoes well that's my theory anyway and across from the mangoes we've got our bed of blueberries and I'm happy to see a whole lot of blueberries forming we saw that they were flowering before we left and it's nice to see that most of those flowers are obviously getting pollinated by the insects and I reckon in a couple of seasons that bird will be full of flourishing blueberry plants with plenty or a ton of blueberries let's hope so anyway and finally being spring also the citrus are flowering and you can't smell it but believe me the smell and the perfume in the air around our yard is magnificent spring is the time when I'll give them that extra feet of fertilizer will finish harvesting the rest of the fruit off over the next month or so and that is why I grow a lot of citrus on our property because our property is perfect for it we've just come back from Europe Europeans do this perfectly say in Croatia for example they grow a lot of figs they do in Italy as well in other parts of Europe but Croatia we saw figs galore and they exploited the figs and they have figs all different ways because they grow like a weed over there so two olives and that is the key to exploit what grows naturally well and if you find that particular crop in your garden that grows so well you hardly even have to think about it like citrus grows here for us well then grow more of it and exploit it overall I'm quite happy with the garden after being away for five weeks it could have been a lot worse but I have a lot of work to do maintenance wise to prepare this garden now for summer and to make the most out of the crops that we have been growing through our winter into spring but once summer hits if it hasn't hit already it's a lot harder to get things started and growing so preparation through spring into summer is the key if you want a flourishing summer garden in a hot climate like ours say holidays are over for me and it's time for me to get into it remember if you want to work out the best way of growing something look and see the earth through her eyes and that'll help and you don't have to be self-sufficient in everything just be self-sufficient in something thanks a lot for watching bye for now on just one thing for my patreon supporters thank you very much for supporting me on patreon I'm gonna get back into my podcasting I know I've been a bit spasmodic over the last 12 months with my podcasts but I do very much enjoy the night you guys like it as well so I'm gonna try to get more regular on that especially leading up to Christmas now they'll have a little bit more time and I just want a knuckle down and do more podcasting because like I said I enjoy as well as making videos catches [Music] 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Channel: Self Sufficient Me

Views: 201,918

Keywords: Vegetable garden on vacation, food garden vacation, vegetable garden holiday, vegetable garden tour, food garden, vegatable garden, self-sufficiency, self sufficient, grow your own, self sufficient me

Id: 6YRd1usVjhI

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 14 2019