Small Garden Tour & To Dos | Big Changes |Container Vegetable Gardening

In this video, I’ll give a tour of our container garden and harvest some veggies. I’ll also be doing the following chores …
1) I’ll remove cool season plants and amend the soil in the containers with leaf mold, compost and an organic fertilizer
2) I’ll plant out Momotaro tomatoes
3) I’ll rearrange the containers
4) I’ll show you a big change we made in the veggie garden that will improve sun exposure and critter mitigation

[Music] [Music] hi everyone it’s late spring here in zone 10b with summer right around the corner during this time of year in Southern California we experience what locals call May gray then June bloom this phenomena is a persistent marine layer resulting in overcast skies the warming days and evenings is a reminder of this time of transition as we finish up and remove cool season veggies and plant out warm season plants in this video I’ll take you on a tour of our container garden and harvest some veggies i’ll also be doing some chores i’ll remove some cool season plants and amend the soil in those containers with leaf mold compost and an organic fertilizer i’ll plant out Momot tomatoes i’ll show how and explain why I rearrange the containers and I’ll show you a big change we made in the veggie garden that will improve sun exposure and critter mitigation we would love to hear from you in the comments about any connections you have as you watch this video if you get anything out of the video please consider liking sharing and subscribing to our channel we would really appreciate it okay let’s go ahead and get started we made a big change by deciding to remove the three Italian cypress trees along this wall as much as I love those trees it became necessary for several reasons first the trees were a haven for rats that either use the trees as shelter and/or a pathway to my neighbor’s yard the rats have been a constant source of frustration as they have eaten or damaged our veggies second the trees blocked the morning sun along this west facing wall third the branches became difficult to manage as they required support with wire as they spled outward and fourth the debris from sap and dead foliage littered the shelves and plants below with the Italian cypresses removed the veggie garden will receive more morning sunlight and as the days were getting longer and the sun takes a higher path in the sky I moved the containers from their winter location to take advantage of the summer sunlight [Music] [Music] okay it’s time to take out this mustard green which is bolted and the kale behind it then amend the soil for the past couple of years we’ve been trying to grow new plants in the garden like this one this is a curly kale the leaves on this curly kale are more delicate than say a lassionado or a dinosaur kale and we really enjoyed it we will definitely grow this again we could keep this in the pot for another couple of weeks but we need to get our tomatoes in so we’re going to take it out right now when amending the soil in containers I use three things the first is this homemade leaf mold it’s an awesome soil conditioner and my leaf mold has a lot of worms in it as well if you’d like to see how I made this check the link in the description the second thing I add to my containers is a good quality organic compost and the third thing I add is an organic fertilizer after all the ingredients are in I take a cultivator and gently till it in i don’t want to go too deep and affect the structure of the soil where those worms reside i’m going to plant this matado tomato into this container i started this from seed first thing I’ll do is cut off the two lower leaves and the reason for that is because I want to plant this deep take my T and pull the soil out to make a nice deep hole now before I drop that into the hole let me show you what the root system looks like and there you see a really nice root system okay let’s go ahead and carefully drop this into the hole so you can see how deep that hole is and then I’ll just push the soil in around it and press it in then what I’m going to do is add this mulch to the top because we want to keep that soil nice and moist we don’t want it to dry out and the mulch will help to minimize the spread of disease on the plant the last thing I’ll do is I’ll give it a good drink of water okay mumat tomato is planted let’s go over to the Roma lettuce i have two pods with three plants in each one of them and we’ve been harvesting Roma for the past several weeks you can see the lower leaves have been picked off we’re going to go ahead and harvest some leaves off of the plants in this pot conventional wisdom is that you should plant romaine lettuce anywhere from 6 to 12 in apart as you can see here I have these about 4 in apart and it has not affected its performance in fact it’s thriving in these pots so conventional wisdom doesn’t always apply the main thing is that gardeners get into the garden and grow these plants themselves in order to see what works for them okay that’s a pretty good harvest of romaine lettuce let’s move over to the container of carrots you’ll see that I have a wire mesh around the outside to train those carrot greens upward so I’ll just remove the wire mesh okay let’s see what we have first one about medium size not too bad kind of small what’s fun about picking carrots is that you kind of never know what you’re going to get so I got a couple small ones there there’s a oddly shaped one with two roots see what we got here okay that’s a little bigger it’s nice okay there we go it’s pretty nice harvest of carrots let’s move over to the turnipss this is a Japanese variety of turnup in Japanese they’re called kaboo we’ve harvested a few already okay let’s harvest some [Music] turnipss all right those are looking good let’s move over to this dinosaur kale and look how tall that plant has gotten we’ve been harvesting leaves off of this for several months and it’s really uh produced like a champ we couldn’t be happier about this kale okay this is the last of the dinosaur kale this is our first time harvesting garlic so I’m kind of excited here wow hey let’s see what we got here oh not huge oh that work for that spool a little bowl healthy healthy roof yeah no kidding all right let’s see what else we [Music] got all [Music] right well not a great harvest but it’s our first time that’s fun these are uh garlic cloves from the the market that we use so maybe next time we’ll order from this a seed company and see if there’s any difference certified um garlic bulbs so I guess these will dry out and cure and Yeah okay maybe we’ll throw it in a dish all right okay thanks chop it up you can’t tell so in these grow bags I’m growing potatoes in the Ruth Stout method there you see some yellow potatoes peeking through the mulch and in this other bag I’m growing red potatoes in this method I place the seed potatoes on top of the soil which is about 6 in below the surface of that mulch and as the foliage uh grows I just continue to add mulch like in this grow bag here until it gets to the top now these are getting to the end of their life cycle and the foliage is starting to die off so these should be ready to harvest in the coming weeks in these four pots I have Japanese eggplant this variety is called Ichiban it’s a slender long deep and purple eggplant and it’s known for its sweet mild flavor and thin skin these plants are looking really healthy and there are some flowers developing on the plants [Applause] in these two containers I’m growing Satsuma sweet potatoes these are 20-gallon pots i have three slips in each of the pots and since these pots are so big and deep it’ll give the sweet potatoes plenty of room to grow they should be ready later this fall this is a Japanese kabotaa squash variety called Sweet Mama it’s known for its sweet dry and nutty flesh and it stores really well in the space around the kabucha I’ll be interplanting bush beans in our herb area I have Thai peppers and next to it are pill leaves here we have green onions and two pots of Italian parsley on the top shelf we have mint and thyme and down here at the bottom we have another perilla leaf plant so there you have it this is our late spring garden update i hope you enjoyed the tour let’s take a look at what we harvested today we have garlic and carrots curly kale Japanese turnipss the last of our dinosaur kale and mustard greens and romaine lettuce please consider liking and sharing this video with people you know please consider subscribing to our channel we would really appreciate your support and as always thank you so much for watching [Music] [Music]