Favorite Garden Tips and Tricks

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hey guys and welcome back to Teal House Farm i am out here in the garden tonight i’m getting ready to do my night garden tours and I thought I’d take a minute to share some of my favorite tips and tricks that I’ve learned over the years just about gardening in general i do not consider myself a gardening expert i consider somebody who has learned by doing um who has tested a lot of theories that I’ve seen online and some of them work and a lot of them don’t so I’m going to just share what’s worked really well for us first though I want to show you because this looks super cute is the kids little fairy garden now that the garden has grown up around it is looking really good look how cute that is with the sunflowers that they planted towering over it and then the green beans are growing up the sides and the cucumbers off the back another couple weeks that thing is going to be totally enveloped in greenery and uh it glows in the dark too those lights turn on and the kids just love it in there it’s worked out really well super proud of that little project that’s an old hay storage thing that we made out of an old movable chicken coupe and it is stood the test of time this is its fourth repurposing and it’s also been a greenhouse so that looks really cute though my first tip is to diversify your garden types so we have three raised beds and I also have no till beds behind me that are made with a cardboard layer and then we use stall material from our livestock on top but you could also use um straw glass c grass clippings as long as your grass hasn’t gone to seed uh those that also works well um and then when you need to plant you plant through the cardboard into the ground but the cardboard is going to keep weeds from popping up it is basically July it’s the very end of June and I have not weeded my garden at all i’ve mowed around it trimmed around it but actually inside the garden where the plants are I have done zero weeding and it’s still in really good shape so it is 100% worth the effort if you’re physically able to to set up a no- till bed and then I keep the raised beds because I feel like there’s certain plants like root vegetables potatoes carrots radishes that for me just do better in a raised bed because our ground is really clayy and even though the no tail bed will improve the quality of our ground it’s not going to build that much good dirt in a couple years that’s a really long process so getting some things up out of the ground is going to help them do better when it comes to squash plants there’s lots of things you can do to help with squash bugs you can do some companion planting with like maragolds mint other really potent smelling spices tend to ward off squash bugs a little bit you can try neem oil that sometimes works but really honestly the best way to to beat the bugs is to come out twice a day pick them off your plant and drown them in some soapy water if they don’t have time to lay eggs on your plant um they don’t have time to damage the plant now that being said I’ve also found that waiting a while to plant planting later in the season makes a big difference because the squash bucks have already made their home in my neighbor’s garden and they’re not as interested as coming over here so for us I could plant squash starting midappril but I don’t i wait until June and that makes a big difference yes you do get a you do end up with less over time since you’re not growing your squash as long but I’d rather do that and not have as big of a battle than plant earlier next as I’ve said before I feel like root vegetables do better in raised beds for me um I also don’t heal up my potatoes so talking about root vegetables while they’re in the raised bed you could heal them up by adding more material on top of them i keep an eye on them make sure there aren’t any potatoes poking through the ground but typically if you plant them deep enough in here it’s not going to happen i haven’t found that actually hilling them up really increases my yield that much that’s just my personal experience it may have to do with the types of potatoes I’m growing i’m growing potatoes from store-bought russet potatoes um but the amount of effort I’ve put in over the years into growing potatoes and hilling them up really well versus just plopping them in a raised bed I actually get more this way than all that work I was doing before i don’t spend money on fancy tomato cages or cattle panels or anything like that for my tomatoes i just use what I can find these tomatoes are held up you can kind of see here it’s just by sticks that fell off the tree i just make sure they’re long enough I can get them in the ground nice and deep and then I tie them with whatever is handy usually that’s bailing twine this time it’s some yarn the kids left laying around downstairs so I grabbed it there’s really no reason to spend a lot of money on extras if you have things like sticks laying around it works just as well and it’s free it’s also compostable and next year if I want to plant tomatoes somewhere else I can just put new sticks in somewhere else instead of having to move a whole row of cattle panel or any other kind of wire or cages that you might set up for your tomato plants i plant my green beans in a messy pod i do not do rows anymore i find that this is more effective and yes they are really tight together see if I can get a better angle here but the pod has a walking path before it and then it goes into right up against the grass on the other side i can reach it from this side leaning in that side leaning in so try not to make it more than 4 feet 4 and 1/2 ft wide and then I just kind of dig around the plants and get what I need it’s less less opportunity for weeds to pop up in between your plants it’s less work when you plant it because we literally just I bring the little kids out and they get each get a little bowl of seeds and they just broadcast them in a little square that I draw on the ground and it makes the planting really fast and I feel like I get more green beans this way i also diversify my green beans so we have some bush beans and we have some pole beans i just to find depending on the season certain ones do better than others and we really like green beans so I want to make sure I’ve somewhat protected my harvest from whatever pest or natural issues Mother Nature’s is going to send my way i also don’t plant a huge garden i said we have those three raised beds we have this no till area this side where I’m standing now and another side that’s pretty similar these are not huge gardens i’m not growing a half acre even a quarter acre of anything this is a pretty small garden but it can still grow a lot of food and I can maintain this well because a garden that you can maintain without a lot of stress is going to be a garden you enjoy being in i would much rather get lots of green beans and tomatoes from my garden that I enjoyed doing then get more from a larger garden where I felt overwhelmed and didn’t look forward to coming outside and working and lastly I don’t try too many things at one time it’s really easy to spend all winter getting really excited about things and then getting overwhelmed with all your new projects in the spring i’ve definitely been there as well so I always try to pick one maybe two new things to try and then everything else I do what what I know will work that way no matter what happens with the new things I want to try I kind of have my old standards where I know that this is going to produce for me and I’m going to have food for my family and if the new things fail I feel a little disappointed but it’s not crushing soul crushing because I have so many other things that are going to go well so for this year the new things that we tried were this archway which used to be a greenhouse i turned it into the fairy garden with an archway and this seems to be working really well obviously this is not new plants but kind of a new practical theory so I expected it to work there weren’t too many surprises and I’ve also tried growing my squash my zuz zucchini squash inside a raised bed and I hadn’t done that before i was worried about them being too compacted and not having enough space so far they seem to be doing really well and I definitely will agree with the people who say that it is easier to take care of them because you can easily see under the leaves when they’re up high off the ground and so that’s working out well we’ll see how the end of the season goes see whether or not they kind of smush each other in too much and make it too difficult to get in there and look for squash bugs but so far so good but those are just the two new things I tried didn’t go crazy didn’t get overwhelmed picked simple things maybe next year I’ll try growing a new vegetable I’ve never grown before i’ve always kind of wanted to try artichokes um but I’ve never done it and so maybe next year something like that will be my new thing but we’ll keep it to one or two so that we don’t get overwhelmed that’s all I have for you today pretty short and sweet i just thought maybe I’d share a couple things I’ve learned i’m sure you all have your own tips and tricks and some things are going to depend a lot on where you live and what the climate’s like but this is what’s working real well for us and I wanted to share so I hope all your gardens are growing well and we will see you all again very soon