August is here and the garden continues to produce a variety of veggies. Come along with me on a tour of our small 100 square foot kitchen garden and harvest some vegetables.
* July Small Vegetable Garden Tour https://youtu.be/ew7xy-U3uLE?si=I0awfqaiFoETbTkj
* Small Container Garden Summer Tour & To Dos | Setting Up Tomato Trellis Set-Uphttps://youtu.be/gZkPEc621Ts?si=tQ2oC8C8jhSI1Jdg
* DIY Custom Vegetable Trellis & Plant Cage https://youtu.be/0HSM8EaVzaw?si=bD1u6zkRqq7o4Sbd
* How to Grow Bitter Melon at Home in Containers | Easy to Set Up Trellis https://youtu.be/ecBp3tOVJNk
* Protect Veggies Humanely from Critters in the Garden | Step by Step How to Make Protective Cages | Cover Fruit with Ziplock Bags https://youtu.be/jkg-GnnlnI0
* DIY String Trellis … Easy & Strong! https://youtu.be/1PfnWNF9eXQ
* Tomato String Trellis Update https://youtu.be/ip92UAO4ZEs?si=SI2TggH8wgoJptNA
* Custom Container Tomato Trellis https://youtu.be/g1UcE0hdcx0?si=zBQQ1NUEnEM7nGlC
* Starting & Planting Sweet Potato Slips in Grow Bags https://youtu.be/fSTFWB3-AoE
* Growing Sweet Potatoes Slips https://youtube.com/shorts/teJPd-yS_4Q?feature=share
* Harvesting Sweet Potatoes https://youtu.be/tgt1myZXN1o
* Harvesting Sweet Potatoes from Grow Bag https://youtu.be/v08XLb41cG4shorts/hCsS4-zDIfs?feature=share
* Growing Green Onions from Cuttings https://youtu.be/3M9Pz_b5X7s?si=6PMGheyAaV8-HzdU
* Shishito Tempura | Secrets Revealed https://youtu.be/3IabkLUQyoo?si=Gl56HTJQjDkShSFf
* Grilled Shishito Peppers | The KEY to easy grilling https://youtube.com/shorts/eVtkBWhxc3g?si=C0K7HTKf39jgxhFN
[Music] [Music] [Music] Hi everyone. It’s late August here in Southern California. I’m in zone 10B. Let me take you on a tour of our small 100 ft kitchen garden, show you what’s growing, and harvest some vegetables. Please stay tuned. All right, Jinger’s joined me in the garden and she’s going to help to harvest these potatoes. So, let’s uh get started. What are you going to do here, Jinger? I’m going to pull off this um this cage. Okay. And it really helped to keep the foliage in check. Get kind of crazy, right? Without the cage, the um foliage would just flop to the ground and so it cage really does help to manage um all this foliage. Okay. And I think I’m going to cut back the um these stems. It has basically died back. There’s some one. So this is the indicator that these potatoes are ready to be harvested when all that foliage dies back. All right, let’s give this a go. Okay. So, we’re down to the mulch level. So, we have a good 8 to 10 inches of mulch that Jinger will start removing. Can we take a look at that label? Yeah. So, these were planted back in November. So, they’re about 9 months in these grow bags. These are yellow potatoes and the seed potatoes came from Trader Joe’s. Okay. Now, we’ve got this thick layer of mulch. I’m going to stick it back into this bag here. We’re going to reuse that. There’s the potatoes right on top. Wow. Nice. Let’s see. Oh, there’s another one there. with another one. All right. Good start, little guy. Okay. Oh, another little guy. Oh, I see some pill bugs in here. Okay. So, we’re coming down to like seeing some potatoes already. More. So, here’s these. All right. Good. Okay, it’s a good start. Oh, okay. Some more. All right. Wow. A lot of small ones in there, huh? Yeah. I wonder if that newer growth is coming from Maybe. Huh. Yeah. From those smaller ones. Okay. It’s a little bigger one. All right. Okay. So these are a little bit more green. So maybe they’re new newer. Yeah. So back in November, I placed the seed potatoes on top of the soil, which is about 6 to 8 in 8 in from the bottom of the grow bag. And then I placed I think this is soil now. Soil. Yeah. And then I placed this mulch on top of those seed potatoes. Oh, there’s a nice one. And as those seed potatoes leafed out and the foliage started to grow, I added the mulch on top of the seed potatoes. And um and that’s where we are right now. How many potatoes did you put on the bottom? I believe I put three in. I guess that’s about right. Okay. Well, I think this is all down to the soil level. Oh, there’s more. There’s some more. Yeah. Keep digging. Oh, right. Yeah, this is all Let’s take a look at what we harvested today. Pretty nice harvest of potatoes. These are yellow potatoes. Um, we like cooking these with rosemary and thyme and and onions and roast them in the oven. So, this will definitely make about what maybe two or three maybe two meals. Two, I think. So, all right. Or one big one. In this pot, I planted kabocha squash. This variety is called sweet mama. I sewed the seeds for this plant back in March. So, these are about almost five months old. Let me just show you what the packet looks like. So, this is from Kitazawa Seed Company. It’s labeled Japanese squash sweet mama hybrid. Uh, according to the uh seed packet, it takes 90 days. So, that would be, you know, about 3 months. So, this is on going on five months now. So, this is looking good. And we just have the one fruit on there. Um, we’re going to harvest it. So, Ginger is going to cut through that stem. All right, let’s take a look at that. All right, looks good. And Ginger just noticed uh down here there is actually two female flowers down there. So, we’ll just keep this going. I mean, I was planning on taking the plant out, but um there’s potential for some more fruit here. Let’s take a look at our Japanese eggplant. You can see that this fruit is covered, and that’s to protect it from rats. However, I noticed like right down here um on the lower level of this plant, there was a eggplant that was eaten by a rat and basically the rat caught up in its hind legs and ate from the bottom up. So, they’re pretty crafty. I don’t know if this is just damage. I think it may be just Not sure. Not sure. I think we can still eat that though. Yeah, I’ll cut around it. But, all right. These plants are starting to get to the end of their life cycle, I believe. Um, there’s some new foliage, there’s some small fruit, um, but, uh, it’s really slowed down over the past several weeks. And here’s a nice one here. All right, that’s nice. Beautiful. Let’s check out these moment tomatoes. There’s Ginger back behind the plant. You can see again like with the eggplant, we have the fruit protected with these Ziploc bags. So, Ginger is going to harvest uh these tomatoes. We like to harvest them before they turn completely red, um the breaker stage. So, that’s just about perfect. We’ll place the uh tomatoes on the counter in the kitchen and it’ll take, you know, a couple of days to maybe a week or so for them to fully ripen. And so after Ginger uh harvested that one tomato, she zipped it back up here to protect this tomato. Okay. So, that one can just come straight off. There’s another nice one. Beautiful. There’s another nice one. Great. Maybe we should put a a big Ziploc bagger on that one. All right. [Applause] All right. All right, so we still have several tomatoes on the vines and the plants are still doing well. As they get to the top of this trellis, I’m going to let out some string to let them continue growing. You can see that I have them attached to the twine with these clips. So, as I let the twine out, and I given myself a lot of extra twine to work with, then they’ll just bow off to the side and continue to grow, send out flowers, and develop more fruit. This is our Japanese cucumber. This variety is called suiat. And you can see there there are some nice fruit ready to be picked. And there are some smaller ones as well. Uh as the plant got uh to the top of the trellis, I pinched the tips to stop the um the growth from the ends. So that apical uh growing end is cut off. So that should have forced the laterals to develop. So we have some lateral shoots that are um growing every which way. So hopefully those laterals will continue producing fruit. So honey, which one you going to do first? Okay, go ahead. This one’s a little bit big, but Yeah, it’s big. Nice. Then there’s one up there. Uh-huh. Other side. Can you get it? Well, I can’t reach the other side. I got it from here. You show me there. All right. Beautiful. And I think there’s one more there at the bottom. Well, there’s one. Oh, I didn’t even see that one. This is a good one. Yeah, it’s a nice one. Okay. All right. Okay. Okay, let’s swing over to the bittermelon plants. I have three plants uh in these three containers and they’re being trained up this plant cage. Bittermelon is also known as bitter gourd. In Japanese, they’re called niari or goya. Uh they’re grown and eaten in tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Uh we’re not in one of those regions. We’re in a a Mediterranean climate, but they still do well because we get plenty of uh sun and warmth in the summertime. So, that one I think is ready to be picked. So, let’s uh let’s harvest that one, honey. All right. Uh this is, as the name would suggest, uh very bitter, so it is an acquired taste, but it purportedly has a lot of health benefits, and that’s what we like to believe. And I’ll later harvest all these leaves and make them into a tea leaves. I think that one still has got a ways to go. I think we’ve got about seven or eight fruit on this plant. There’s some down over here and some on the other side. So, we still got a lot more coming. In these four pots, I have shishito peppers. Now, the two in the center I grew from seed and there are a lot to be harvested. You’ll notice that on the left and the right side of those pots are two additional pots with these smaller plants. And ironically, those were larger when I started them. They were bigger than the ones in the middle. But the uh ones from seed that I started, they overtook the ones from the uh from the garden center. And those plants aren’t looking very good at all. I’ll be pulling those out. So, Ginger is going to cut and harvest some of these beautiful shishito peppers. The plants are just loaded with fruit. These will make really nice shishito tempura. Nice. That’s a We’re back here in the herb area and we have this Thai bird’s eye pepper. You can see that these peppers have turned from green to red. So, Ginger’s going to harvest these. Yeah, I am not going to be able to use them um fresh uh immediately. So, I am going to string them and then dry them. Nice. Okay. Last year before we went on vacation, we had a pot like this that was loaded with peppers just like this one and they were turning red and when we came back they were all gone. We don’t know what ate them. I’m assuming they were rats. It’s kind of hard to believe that any critter would want to eat these because they’re so hot. We got an ulcer. Yeah. Let’s take a look at what we harvested today. So, honey, what’s in the basket? So, we have our kabocha and we have our yellow potatoes that we just harvested. We have our nigi or bitter melon. We have um Japanese cucumbers, Japanese eggplant. We have some tomatoes, Momot tomatoes. This is shishito peppers. And some of these hot um Thai bird eye peppers. All right. Pretty good for a small garden. Yeah, it’s a pretty good harvest. Nice job, Ginger. Thank you. So, there you have it. This was a late August tour of our 100q ft kitchen garden. I hope you enjoyed the video. 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]
1 Comment
Our garden may be small, but it has been producing enough veggies for our needs! Summer is such a fun time for veggie gardening!