FIRST FULL GARDEN TOUR!- ORGANIC VEGETABLES AND FLOWERS-SUBURBAN GARDENING

Full June 2024 garden tour. This is the longest garden tour we’ve ever done and it includes EVERYTHING. Growing kale, lettuce, swiss chard. Tasking broccoli, basil, sweet peas. Harvesting broccoli and kale. Hot peppers, and sweet peppers. Tomatoes, mint, herbs for the kitchen. Sweet potatoes and potatoes. How we grown pumpkins. Growing loofah sponge on trellises. Growing tomatoes on strings. What we are growing in the greenhouse. AND SO MUCH MORE!!!

hi this is Bri welcome to my garden I’m really excited to take you guys on a tour today my garden is doing amazing I have loved gardening this year and I almost didn’t do it and I’m so happy that I decided to just go ahead and plant a garden even though I wasn’t sure if I was going to be gardening here or at our farm this Garden brings me so much joy and I hope that this walkthrough today will bring you Joy too and I also hope that you are growing something that brings you Joy Garden in 7A and our first Frost is usually mid to late October it’s honestly though it varies every year when that first Frost comes but we expect it to come about mid to late October here and then our last frost is miday we always say after Mother’s Day I prefer a noil system to gardening and so this is a raised what I call I think it is actually a name but I call it a raised row system and basically we killed once we created beds not raised beds but just beds that kind of come up above the ground a little bit and that way all we have to do is kind of clean them up and add compost every year and then we don’t actually rill them every year my beds are around 3ft wide with a 1ft path that can vary from bed to bed depending on like just how much we’ve cleaned it up or how wide the bed spread throughout the year or how narrow we made it this year but that’s about the idea is 3ft wide one foot wide or 3ft wide 2ft wide and I find that that works great um I like a little bit wider path than one foot but some of them are about a foot having wider paths allows my children and especially my toddlers to help and having really distinct looking paths allows my children to help especially my toddlers because then they can see very clearly this is the garden bed this is the path and it’s so cute because they come to me all the time they’ll be out in the garden and they’ll want to like run to me and they’ll say is this a path and I’ll say yeah and they’ll run down the path it’s really sweet I have 23 25t beds I pack them full of vegetables but I also pack them full of flowers cuz flowers in the garden bring me the most Joy I know it’s fun to go pick some fresh tomatoes go pick some fresh cucumbers but for me I’m all about the flowers so one thing you’ll notice is that the the ends of every single row of my garden have flowers or will have flowers and there’s a lot of reasons for that the number one being Joy it just makes me happy it makes my garden beautiful but it also attracts pollinators to my garden and it can also repel pests there’s all sorts of flowers that attract and repel I mean the list is so long so you just look up your specific needs if you want specifics about that I also like to put annual herbs in my garden like basil all different kinds kind of Basil I think last year I had five different kinds this year so far I just have two but I’m working on changing that the first thing you’re going to notice is I have a beautiful Arch entrance into my garden and this year I grew long beans on this trellis it will be glorious and it really won’t take that long for the to get tall and then the beans hanging down it just feels magical to walk into the garden through a trellis and I I personally have found long be do the best job of getting the TRS covered I also have I think a melon a couple of melon plants here and some NS just to bring some variety and to see what happens the nsts of course are the flowers and they’re for beauty I actually have five trellises all the way down and when they’re covered it feels like I am in a magic secret garden and coming out here first thing in the morning just fills me with light and happiness and my kids too they love it on my second trist I have loofah I’ve never grown luah this is my first year so I have one on each side I know it will fill this in I have heard that with loofah you need a male and female plant and I guess we’ll find out if I have a male and female plant um but just in case it doesn’t fill in I did add some long beans and I may be pulling those out if the loofah is so heavy that the trellis can’t hold all that but for now I’m happy my long bean is actually outpacing the Loof or it’s at least keeping up one of the fun things about plants that grow on trellises are these little tendrils this is the part that actually makes me the most happy is you come here and you just see these beautiful little tendrils and before they grab on here they put them out and they kind of wave around till they find it and then they link on it’s really sweet here’s a little tendril looking for a place to grab on to he’ll grab on here it’ll be really cool look at the cork screw so pretty interestingly this long bean is actually growing its Vine up and around rather than putting out tendrils here on my third trus I’m trying something new this year I am growing some cantaloupe and some watermelon on the trellis we’ll see what happens um um I haven’t had a ton of success growing melons or of any kind but every year I just keep trying and I keep learning a little bit okay so on this side we have cantaloupe melons like hot weather and a lot of water so here we are and I’m still waiting to see how they pull themselves up I’ve been training them so one thing you sometimes have to do like this cantaloupe was laying like this on the ground and he’s got a tendril starting to form here so I just put him up inside the trellis hoping that he’ll reach out and grab and I might have to do this for a while until here really gets the hang of it I’ll probably weave them in right here I just found these horrid Bean beetles mating in my calypse oh there’s another one and I just like to reach down and squish bugs I know for a lot of you that’s going to be gross so you can just use a leaf and do it but I’ve been doing this so long anytime I see them I just kill them with my fingers here are the Watermelons I’m growing as you can see I’ve been train oh uhoh he tried to grab on there sorry and as they get long enough I’ll just weave them in oh he’s grabbed on right there so we’ll just let him be there’s a nice tendril on this watermelon he finally got the hang of what he was doing over here I just think watermelon leaves are so interesting like every melon is so different you saw the cantaloupe leaves are rounder but they still have kind of a jagged edge and then the water melon the leaves almost look like oak leaves it’s pretty neat the same with this trus I have long beans growing and I also have another type of melon called the greatest North melon a friend of mine sent me those seeds I had some success with that last year but not a ton so I’m trying again this year she has so much success I’m believing I can do it so this is called the greatest North melon and it’s supposed to do really well in shorter seasons and I don’t have as short a season as her but typically melons don’t don’t do great here because we need just a little bit longer of a season and I actually have them planted in a lot of different spots around the garden to see where they’re going to do the best and also just long beans again because they will do their job on the trellises no matter what my last trellis here it’s the one that comes from the bottom of the property up I have a loofah on one side and long beans on the other this is going to be gorgeous I also just have flowers planted all around the bases and around the um trellises to keep things beautiful and inspiring we’re coming to the very top of the garden again and this is the Spring Garden at least the top of the top of the garden is and because I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go gardening this year I planted my Spring Garden very late like 6 weeks late so some things aren’t doing great but I kind of knew they wouldn’t but I wanted to try anyway just to see what would happen that’s a great thing about gardening it’s fun to not go by a formula it’s fun to be like I don’t know if this is going to work but I’m going to try it I mean how much is a packet of seeds you know or a few plants it’s not that much money and it allows you to experiment and have fun and see what you can do better the next year or see what you want to do exactly the same this is a beautiful butterleaf lettuce mix it also has a little bit of oak leaf lettuce in it and the way that you make baby lettuce is you just plant the seeds really close together so I do my rows here about 3 in apart and then I just heavily put the seeds in and I don’t thin it at all and it creates baby lettuce now if I had oh that was a basil I wish I hadn’t pulled that that was a lemon basil I’m so sad I just did that each one of these seeds will create a head of lettuce but I prefer baby lettuce for a couple reasons mainly they grow so quickly and you can start harvesting lettuce within just a few weeks of planting another reason is that we just like the sweet tender flavor of it it’s easy to grow it’s fast and it’s cut and come again so you just cut it it grows back you cut it it grows back the deer eat it it grows back it’s a lovely thing to grow and I highly recommend growing this you could grow this on a porch you could grow this in a small backyard raised bed you could grow it in pots I mean it’s just lovely and it’s a way to have fresh food most of the Year this will get bitter and it will bolt once the um season gets too hot but you could put a shade cloth over it to extend the season and you can also secession plant it which means you plant some and you leave a space and then you know a few weeks later you plant some more so there’s a lot of ways to provide fresh lettuce for your salads all spring summer and fall and honestly you can do some winter gardening with lettuces you just have to cover them real good this is my new kale so I have an old kale plant down there you’ll see in a minute that we’ve been harvesting off of for 15 months and this is the new kale coming up I actually need to come in and thin it out but it’s it’s doing great and we just can come in here and eat it the leaves are more tender and literally we will keep this growing all summer all fall all winter into next year until we have kale again and this beautiful plant that is bolting is Swiss chard which is one of our family’s favorites I actually transplanted this from a different part of the garden so we’ve been eating on it this spring actually through the winter and the spring and now into the summer but it’s both now I have some new plants coming on I’ve had a hard time keeping my plants alive in this part of the bed because this is where my babies like to play or my twins I should say they’re not really babies anymore and so I need to come in and fill in the holes or at least separate some out and spread them out I think the the twins understand now not to dig here and we’ll get this nice and filled in and have a glorious bed of swits chard through the summer through the fall through the winter again and of course at the end of every bed I have flowers and these are Mammoth sunflowers they self-seed I didn’t do anything except protect them from the Twins and watch them grow here we have a comfrey plant operation it’s actually my kids Grace and Justice my oldest daughter and my oldest son this is their operation they are growing comfy to sell these are from larger Roots so that’s why they came up so fast and are already doing really well and all of these that are just starting to come up are for some just little pieces of root Roots just tiny little bits of roots comfy has so many uses not only is it a beautiful perennial the flowers are these pretty little purple flowers and the plant itself I think is very attractive not only that but it can be used around your orchard and around various other perennials to pull up minerals from deep in the ground another really cool thing is that you can use it medicinally for sabs and for healing wounds coming into my second row this is Cula that I last year it just self-seed all over the garden I even have it growing in like the strangest places and I left it here because cingula gives me so much joy obviously it needs to be deadheaded and what’s so one cool thing about cingula is that deadheading it allows it deadheading it causes it to keep producing flowers so it’ll actually Bloom until the frost and actually after the first Frost until we get like a real hard Frost Cula just keeps blooming and not only is it beautiful and not only is it easy to grow and not only does it self seed and do this it’s medicinal now I’m not an herbalist so I may talk about things being medicinal but it doesn’t mean I necessarily make a bunch of stuff with my medicinal plants however two things that are easy to make and use with cingula is tea and savs clela is super good for your skin heels Burns Su rosacea Su acne so you could make like an infused oil for your face you can make a Sab for your kids and for yourself and then of course let’s just talk about the medicine of the eye I mean just having this out here heals me in some way I don’t know how to explain it coming out here and seeing just a ton of beautiful yellow and orange and knowing that it just grew here because it loves to grow that fills me with so much joy and happiness that it’s like a healing Sab to my soul so I just I love growing it I’ve had it in my garden for many years now and just keeps coming back in whatever Garden I put it in there are different varieties of Cula that offer different levels of medicinal benefit I’m pretty sure cingula Resa resa is the one that has like the highest amount of the resin that you want to use medically and that’s actually what this is because I bought it from a girl originally I bought the plants from a girl who that was the variety she grew so it’s what I have if you remember last year my sugar snap peas grew feet above my fence and and it’s because I planted them on time so when to plant things can be extremely important not all plants care that much but peas like cold weather and they do a ton of growing during that cold weather and then they put out the flowers and they grow peas now partly it’s this low cuz my kids eat them off the top and they just love the greens but part mostly they’re this low and not doing very well because of the hot weather these are very small but they’re still delicious and obviously the kids about out here picking these already but what’s awesome is whenever you give them time to develop the Pea inside gets much bigger and the Pod gets thicker and crispier and it’s just like this crunchy delicious pea um but you can also pick them when they’re tiny and they have so much flavor you eat the whole thing the pot and all this isn’t the kind of PE where like a garden pee where you’d open and save the peas this is a pee where it’s like a snacking pee or like for stir fry it still brings me tons of joy and it still provides food for my kids cuz they come out here and they just eat these greens and I know the cameraman likes these so we’re going to give him one coming to the end of this trellis I have some more melons remember I told you I have those greatest North melons planted all over on this side I have a bunch of Dill that I transplanted from where it grew so Dill easily self-seeds and it did it self-seeded on the other side of the garden from where I grew it last year and then I just transplanted it over here it’s so hard to come in the garden and film a garden tour and also not do a little work because I don’t know about you but when I’m in my garden I just want to touch it I want to pull the weeds I want to harvest things I want to smell things oh my goodness that smells amazing I want to taste things M oh this one would be better all right third row broccoli and as you guys know broccoli is one of my favorite things to grow in the garden there’s just no comparison to fresh broccoli out of the garden and store bought uh broccoli does take a lot of space so I don’t necessarily try to grow a Year’s worth here in this Garden it’s just not big enough to do that but I do try to grow enough for us to enjoy this broccoli was planted like I said pretty late so it’s wanting to it for it did form heads which I’m really excited about I didn’t think it was going to do that considering how hot it was and it did it formed a beautiful heads but it’s already wanting to bowl and I have a feeling it’s going to be a little bit bitter which is no big deal because it won’t be too bitter probably once we roast it that’ll come right out um one way that I successfully grow broccoli is by cover it with covering it with this netting and that protects it from these little cabbage moths that lay their eggs on the leaves and then those caterpillars that come out eat the leaves and I actually do have some cabbage mouth caterpillar damage in here and the reason for that is because I tried something new this year and I put these clips on here to hold this netting down and I would come out here all the time and find these risen up like this so that gave space for those moths to get in there and lay their eggs typically if we do not cover they will completely eat the plants down and we if we even get a broccoli head they’ll be completely wormy so so I don’t want to say that this is unsuccessful I’m just going to say this wasn’t my favorite method of holding on netting usually I just use a rock or some sticks on the side but I thought this would be simpler probably a knife would be good but I’m just going to break them off it’s feaster F and around here with broccoli it comes and then it’s gone this broccoli will put off side shoots which means you can keep harvesting it for a long time however what I found is that those side shoots are so bitter they’re really not edible um so we’ll see we’ll see what happens this year so typically the way you’re going to know that your broccoli is ready is that you’re going to have these nice dark green tightly formed flowers cuz these are flowers broccoli the broccoli head this is actually a flower that hasn’t opened and that’s what we eat so you want to pull it whenever actually this one probably could have gone a little longer and a bit a little darker green but I’m afraid it’s going to bolt instead of getting darker and so um I went ahead and pulled it now this one is getting ready to open and bolt see the flowers They’re looser and they’re starting to open we can easily still eat this it’ll still be delicious but I did want to go ahead and get it harvested so you see the difference in those this is more what you’re looking for you want some broccoli you want some broccoli St you out of the garden some yeah these heads are a little smaller than the ones that I have usually grown I might have a few small ones but usually they grow pretty big but I know it’s cuz I planted them so late that airplane is so loud is that for me yeah you want me put it in my hair yeah I’m just really happy that we even got any brocc this year so I’m not going to complain about anything we’re on to another row of brastias this is cauliflower I’ve never grown it before so I’m not exactly sure what to expect time will tell and I’ll learn for next year and also in that same row we have a bunch of beautiful cabbages they’re starting to form heads and then there’s a little cingula that just popped up there this is a good shot of it forming ahead see how the leaves are folding in on each other one after the other after the other and that forms your cabbage it’s so beautiful and we keep this covered in netting as well for the same reason as the broccoli my cameraman’s back and at the end of both of these rows we have sunflowers of course diee just leave you there as a reminder to all your friends coming into the potato Zone I planted yellow butter ball um honestly I just used what we had left over from last year that had sprouted and so we just planted it I actually have some grow bags that I’m going to plant some fingerlings in but yeah we just got these in the ground real quick one day and got it done and I didn’t really want to do more than three rows of potato this year because one even if I did four rows I wouldn’t be able to grow a Year’s worth for my family and two I really want to focus on cut flowers this year so you’ll see that in a minute I’ve actually got like I’m going to have four rows of cut flowers cuz I want to learn how to grow cut flowers so I designated parts of my garden and gave up other things for cut flowers which I think was a good idea it’s good move for me um they’re doing well the plants are doing well I’m interested to see how well they produce considering I just used our sprouted potatoes from under the house now there are gaps and I think it’s cuz I had the kids helping me and spots just got missed like whole entire huge spots so in those spots I planted flowers and these are scabiosa pink cushion flower and then I have some zenas interplanted and some Cosmos oh and these are asers here so I just interplanted them and when we dig the potatoes out we’ll just be careful we might lose a flower plant or two but it won’t be a big deal honestly the thing that is bringing me the most joy in my potato garden this year are the volunteer Tonia which is Mex skin sunflower it’s everywhere I’ve had to pull tons of it out but I’ve left tons of it too here’s one I may have to pull this one out if it Shades this potato if it ends up shading it here’s a couple um anyway it’s just everywhere and I’ve killed I’ve pulled a bunch of it and I’ve transplanted a bunch of it and then I’ve left a bunch of it cuz I have a really hard time killing volunteers I’m just so proud of them for making it and and I can’t even imagine like if I had left all the ton in this area it would be this massive overgrowth of electric orange flowers and to me that sounds like a really good idea so I left as many as I could and probably actually too many I did heal my potatoes there’s a few reasons why you heal potatoes uh one is for support to the plant they get really tall and so when you he them up it supports the plant um it also keeps weeds at Bay there may be Weeds on the edges of my past but there’s very very few weeds up around the actual potatoes and that’s from healing them another thing healing does is it keeps light off of your potato tubers and as you know with potatoes if they’re exposed to Sun like they turn green and you can’t eat them because they’re actually toxic now if there’s one little green spot on there that’s not a big deal but if like half the potato is Green from half of it from half of it being exposed to sunlight it’s toxic and you’ll either have to cut off half the potato or just not eat it well this is a volunteer zucchini and it has oh like five or six little baby zucchinis growing on it and it has another one that has like a blossom end rot I’m interested why it has that so I need to read about that oh there’s another Bunch let’s see here you know what I like babies if so I’m just going to go ahead and harvest this before I forget about it and it gets way too big anyway that’ll be a delicious addition to my eggs or to some pasta obviously not enough for the whole family but the whole family doesn’t like zucchini it’s getting late it’s starting to get loud we got a weed eater starting up you we going to work all right we’re moving into the summer garden and the corn my corn is doing glorious they say KNE High by the 4th of July well it’s up to my thighs so I think we’re good to go uh it is looking so beautiful my stocks are thick and strong my leaves are nice dark green which is what you want to see corn is a heavy feeder and it needs a lot of water so it needs a lot of nitrogen so we do fertilize with a liquid fish and that seems to keep the plants really healthy I was very sad with my corn production last year mostly cuz it got really really warmy and the other thing is is that I definitely overplanted I have a tendency to do that I get greedy cuz I just I hate killing plants I hate thinning plants but I did it I made myself do it and they’re about 6 in apart and they’re going to do awesome you do want to keep your beds pretty as Weed Free as possible obviously little guys here are going to pop up and also this is a sucker you actually want to take that off and a good way to do it is to just twist it off so that you don’t pull your plant out of the ground so you just twist it right off because that thing is going to suck the life out of this corn plant you you don’t want it to do that this year I grew Silver Queen that is a corn that we’ve always loved and I couldn’t get it last year and we happened to be at this Farm Store one day on a date and they had some so I bought it up right then it’s a super sweet is it a white would you it’s a white corn and it’s super sweet and it freezes really really well and remains super sweet it tastes fresh as the day you picked it whenever you freeze it one thing making me super happy in the corn is once again we have some Sonia growing just like in the potatoes but it’s this now I have pulled out thousands of these but I’m leaving some of them because this is tulsy Tulsi basil that to me is one of the best smells on the planet it’s the best tea I love to freeze dry this and make tea with it and this year I’m going to try to do a cingula um tulsy rose petal mix I’m still trying to figure out how to freeze dry rose petals it’s not as simple as you think but freeze drying herb is very simple and I do a lot of that it’s my favorite thing to freeze dry as herbs so there are still hundreds of TTY plants all over my garden and as much as I can I mean I want to keep them away from the base of the corn plants but as much as I can I’m leaving them because I know that as they get bigger when I come out here my whole garden will smell like Tulsi basil and if you’ve never smelled Tulsi basil you are missing out you smell it and you immediately feel happiness that’s how good it smells see here’s a patch I don’t that’s another kind of Basil I’m going to keep this one I’m going to transplant that one that’s a red basil this is all Tulsi and then I’ll find that I’ll go back to that lemon basil plant from earlier tulsy tulsy tulsy tulsy I’m going to transplant that red basil and that lemon basil plant later so flowers in Cosmos we have Tulsi which will flower and I still need to plant some zenas at the end of these two beds so we mostly have hot peppers in our pepper Garden we do like sweet bell peppers but we like them fresh we don’t necessarily like them cooked so we I just have enough for us to have some fresh eating later in the summer it takes a long time for Peppers to grow and even longer for them to fruit so we’ll have them at the very end of the summer for a few weeks and it’ll be glorious you can do so much with hot peppers so we do have quite a few of those now you can dehydrate them you can ferment them you can freeze them and it all still works really really well all right so we’ve got Sano we got jalapeno we got some habanero and then these are our sweet bell peppers now the deer did take a few little nibbles off the sweet Bells but they have recovered this is this one’s recovering the most slowly but this one was bit down too and it’s recovered so we’ll see we’ll see if he makes it that one’s recovered this little guy I don’t know if he’s going to make it and then these last ones here are Carolina Reaper which are the hottest pepper in the world I’m excited to grow that for Arthur’s sake Arthur and Grace love hot peppers and the boys they like them too and this is I just stuck these pitiful little eggplants in here I mean they were beautiful when they were given to me but as you can see the flea beetle have just about destroyed this one but it’s coming back we’ll see I have never successfully grown eggplant I’ve also not tried very hard so far all I’ve done to grow eggplant is stick them in the ground and see what happens and this is what happens every year probably I need to cover them in netting this poor Plant which just I just found this plant and it was half dead and I stuck it in the ground so this is just from neglect the last bed in the garden is my favorite I have been wanting to learn how to grow cut flowers for ages and it feels daunting because there’s so many choices there’s just so many options there’s so many ways to do it plant in the fall plant in the spring plant anytime um so I decided to just commit a couple of my beds in the garden to cut flowers and yeah so let me show you what I have typically I grow zenas Cosmos Snapdragon sunflowers cingula and some other herbs and things and I have gorgeous bouquet but I wanted to expand my horizons a little so we have an entire bed this is this is my first bed I have more beds than this uh we have sunflowers then straw flowers then um pin cushion flow or scabiosa and then we have asers behind that now I could be doing this totally wrong I don’t know I could maybe plant them close together I could plant them farther apart maybe they need supports I don’t know that’s the fun thing about gardening is when you’re growing something new you really don’t know what’s going to happen I mean you can read all day long but until you do it and do it a couple of times you really don’t know what you’re getting into and what’s going to happen and what the growth looks like and what the flowers end up looking like I mean maybe if you’ve seen them in person but um you just really don’t know so I have this whole bed committed to those flowers and of course I have some flowers in the front my boy planted those almost anywhere you see sunflowers my boys um Rebel gardened me they Rebel gardened me they have they put sunflowers all over the place of course I’m not complaining uh so the boys put those there and then at the ends of both of these rows I have zenas and then coming over to the bottom row on the other side of my garden I have this is a wild flower cut flower bed and I honestly don’t even know what flowers are in there so I’ll let you know once I know this was just a random mix I bought and it didn’t say what the flowers were it just said it was a wild flower cut garden mix so this whole bed I think it’s 25 ft some are closer than others I mean I really just wanted to kind of see can I grow them super close together do they need to be far apart and this is just an experiment and it’s going to be a beautiful experiment even if half at the flowers in here die it’ll still be really pretty and it gives me a lot of Joy all of these merry Golds that are the Border came back from last year they self-seeded and I just think that makes a really pretty border to the Garden it’s also a good deer deterrent as you know I have major deer problems so if my flowers get big enough I don’t think the deer will eat them but they may nibble at them at this stage um supposedly the ones that I bought are deer resistant so we’ll see this bed is also a cut flour bed I just need to add compost to the top and then I can plant and then this is my last bed that I need to prep I’m working on it I’ve got some of it done this is actually this is either going to be flowers or it’s going to be sweet potatoes I haven’t decided yet right now it’s a way overdone cover crop that turned into e which is fun my next two rows I have my sweet potatoes planted I do think I want another row of sweet potatoes um yeah so these are just plain old bow regard guard they always look like they’re on death’s St whenever I first plant them I buy these from this small I can actually pull this one off I buy these from this guy at this greenhouse and I can get50 for $7 and they always grow well for me they always do awesome and I just don’t worry about the condition they look like whenever they arrive and what’s cool about sweet potatoes is that there’s these nodes on the plant and what you’re wanting is that you plant a few of those nodes there’s one into the ground and then it’ll root up and then it’ll grow leaves so it’ll take a while for these guys to look like they’re going to be much of anything but once they do they will explode and it’ll be really beautiful and as you know last year my sweet potatoes did amazing I’m interested to see how they do this year coming up the garden we have okra which I’ll extend that down I haven’t quite finished planting that and then as you can see I have Tulsi basil and some geneves basil behind it and they look a little pitiful cuz I left them in their little pots too long but they will recover now that they’re planted they’ll do just fine I probably need to go in there and actually pop off all these flowers yeah they had given up on growing into full plants and said well we better make some seed now before we die yes that’s exactly what happened but they’ve already picked up quite a bit since planed them yeah so coming down this bed this is the kale plant that will never die um and so because he’s turned into our grandfather kale plant he gets to stay even though he’s taking up a huge section of my cucumber space but look look at all this delicious kale and it tastes awesome this plant has been here for 15 months we’ve eaten off of it the whole time and we’re just leaving it this side did bolt but then look at all the good leaves we can still Harvest this one too so yeah when it finally actually bolts we’ll pull it out but for now this is we’re just eating off of this almost every day coming down through here the little plants aren’t up yet but I planted cucumbers all along here we’ll put a trellis in right here and then we’ll have this tuls SE on this side this is one of the sunflower bombs my boys planted and I left it I didn’t thin it because I wanted to see what would happen I’m pretty sure what this will look like is like a a bouquet of sunflowers because when you plant them that close together um it makes the flower heads be a lot smaller so I think this will look like a bouquet whenever it blooms but it’s fun whenever things like this happen in the garden I like to leave them I like to see what’s going to happen just so that I know in the future because if this turns into little sunflowers and it just looks like a bouquet think about how fun that would be to have all over your garden oh no they do that man where’d he go did you see him so this that was a bean Beetle and as you can see he is killing my bean plants um I’m actually going to let these beans produce beans and then I’m going to pull them out and replant a double row and that will be like a later harvest the cool thing about beans is that they produce so quickly that you can secession plant them throughout the summer and get tons of beans and you also might avoid like this so um say you have a really bad Harvest just keep planting and see what happens beans grow relatively quickly it probably depends on the variety there’s some varieties that maybe don’t this is tender this is what we always grow the reason we like it is because it grows quickly and it produces these beautiful long tender beans that are pretty straight those are great for sautéing great for fermenting great for pickling great for freezing um you can let them mature a little longer but they’ll get you know uh they will get firmer and be less tender the longer that they go on the plant this is my onion bed I grew about half the amount of onions that I grew last year mainly cuz like I said I was trying to make space this year for learning how to grow cut flowers but the onions I did grow are looking amazing this year I grew the variety candy since I knew I wasn’t growing a whole Year’s worth I didn’t need a whole Year’s worth of storage capability candy will will store like 3 to 6 months I think and they get massive these were planted a little late so I am interested to see how big they actually get and one thing I do need to do now that they’re nice and thick stems they’ve created all their leaves is I need to come in here they they were planted kind of deep and when you plant them deep the bulbs grow under the ground and you don’t want that the bulbs need to be growing on top of the ground otherwise they don’t grow very big so I actually need to come in here and pull the soil away and leave it to where only the roots are under the ground like that and you have to wait to do that until you have extremely sturdy stocks so that your plants won’t just fall over I’d like to point out that my Rebel gardeners planted some corn here that was not a bird that was a kid and they also planted some beans here one cool thing I want to show you is um there are some holes in my onions it’s probably where some kids came in here and ate ate them and pulled the whole plant rather than just pulling the greens which that happens I’m used to it I’m not upset about it but what I’m going to do is I’ll actually come in here and plant flowers in any of the holes and it won’t mess up anything with the onions the onions will still do great and it’ll make my garden even More Beautiful You could also like plant an herb in there one that doesn’t get too big you could plant some beans in there it’s okay to fill in the holes in your garden with something else cuz you’re going to have holes unless you’re just an extremely efficient market Gardener if you’re gardening with kids especially or just you know in a more relaxed manner you’re going to have some holes and stuff and that’s a really great way to fill in your garden especially with things that are more time sensitive like this onion I can’t plant an onion right now I can’t repl place this onion it won’t do well it’s too late in the season but I can plant flowers and I can plant beans and I can plant herbs and they’ll do awesome not only that another benefit of that is you’re going to attract different kinds of pollinators into your garden you’re going to have all of this variety it’ll deter more pest it’s just really cool it’s just a great way to Garden once again a little tulsy volunteer look at how beautiful it is look at that Tulsi compared to the ones I Almost Let Die and this is just some mulching Arthur grabbed a bunch of stuff out of the forest and just came in here and mulched the end of this bed which I’m so grateful for because weeds like to grow they grow better than the plants usually so this protects that and actually whenever I plant some flowers in here I will just pull this back and plant directly into the soil and not only that not only does it protect from weeds but this is going to break down into my soil provide organic matter improve the soil structure and improve um the availability of nutrients to the plant perfect mulch this is my herb and cingula Forest um these beds are actually empty the herbs and the cingula are kind of on the sides of the beds cuz that’s where they were planted last year and if you know me I love giving volunteers a chance I just can’t help it and all of this self-seed we’ve been eating it we’ve been enjoying the cingula and um these beds two of them are going to be carrots I could have planted carrots long time ago but I have other had other things I wanted to do so our our carrot Harvest will be kind of late it’ll be more of a fall Harvest which is fine cuz then we can do a well two experiment one experiment I want to do is keep them in the ground through the winter CU we did that accidentally last year and it was awesome and then the other thing we’re going to do is store them so we’ll have two big rows of carrots and then this will actually be another Cut Flower Garden so this is cantro and I actually have some smaller plants still growing so we can still Harvest that for eating some thing that I have learned to do in the garden is allow my cilantro to go to seed when it goes to seed it becomes coriander actually which is a lovely spice to have in your pantry and it also if you don’t pull the plants out this will self-seed itself again next year and you’ll have cilantro in your garden before anybody else and I don’t know about you but cilantro prices in the grocery store make me want to never buy cilantro again because you get these teeny tiny little bunches for like $150 when I could come out here and it’s like a weed growing in my garden and harvest it and harvest it and harvest it for free this is all free I did I’ve done nothing to any of this except enjoy it um another really cool thing is that the cilantro flowers It Bolts before almost anything else in the garden at least in my garden and so it attracts tons of pollinators there’s a honeybee but as you see there are dozens and dozens of tiny little flies tiny little bee bees and they’re honestly way more pre prevalent than the honey bees honey bees are not our only pollinator there’s a huge variety of pollinators in the garden though it’s lovely to see honeybees it always brings me a lot of joy to see them so this is cilantro that I would still Harvest to eat but I have a bunch of those around still I would not Harvest and eat this people might but to me I don’t like the flavor of that or the texture and here is a bunch of Dill that’s self seated the only thing about this Dill that I noticed that’s different than every other time I’ve ever gr Dill is usually my Dill gets like this tall and none of the dill that I transplanted and none of the dill that I left in the garden has gotten as tall as usual and I don’t know if it’s because it’s like itself seated it’s a seconde plant or just the weather’s been different this year because yes we want to eat all of this yummy Fern like leaves but these Dill heads they make dill seeds and not only are they gorgeous in flower bouquet Dill seed is delicious to too hey sweetie you can pick one ear don’t put it in your ear behind your ear hey babies you want to help I help C me I put it I think he wants help he’s sticking it in pretty girl so the other thing you can use this for once it’s developed the seeds is for your pickles so whether it’s fermented or canned pickles you just break this off and literally stick the whole head down into the jar and you’ve got your Dill seed for your dill pickles or for your Dill ferments so that finishes up my main Garden like the center of my garden where I’m growing most of everything I’m going to grow but there’s more um I have had this tarped for over a year this area and originally I wanted to extend my garden and make this my cup flower garden but I think it’s a good idea to learn how to grow cut flowers before I can um before I commit to this much space so what we decided to do was turn it into a pumpkin garden and a winter squash Garden uh the vine borers are pretty bad and Vine borers are this bug that bore into the main stock of your squash plant and kill the whole plant so I’m interested to see um I would love any advice actually on Vine bores cuz I really don’t know how to deal with them and I would love to be able to grow gorgeous pumpkins in Winter squash successfully we used to be able to do it at our farm we grew tons of pumpkins and butternut squash every year and I just haven’t really been that successful in a few years Connecticut field planted here I’ve got a variety of the Little Pumpkins planted there I’ve got green pumpkins planted there white pumpkins planted there and the bottom bed hasn’t been beds haven’t been planted cuz those are the kids and they haven’t iron done it yet and I may add more down the center actually cuz I have a feeling the kids are going to want to plant more you going to be a butterfly are you a garden butterfly we like those kind of butterflies mom now walk with me to one of my favorite areas of my garden that has begun to just turn out so beautifully and it’s my Greenhouse I still have a lot I want to do but I’m getting there step by step with my cameraman’s massive help um but first let me just show you the outside it brings me so much joy I’ve always wanted a space that looked like this you know a little garden shed or a green house and then just the outside being filled with flowers and herbs and just almost having an over grown feel but it’s on purpose so look at these daisies they’re almost as tall as me I planted these last year and they have gone crazy this year and they make me so happy we’ve got oregano about to flower th more oregano isn’t it beautiful I can’t wait to see the flowers yellow yo have you ever seen an electric yellow yo that’s hard to say so pretty I do need to stake it a little bit so it’ll it is staked around here Arthur built me Arthur built me this beautiful bamboo fence but I think I need to put something in the middle to kind of hold it up a little then coming around this Edge now this hasn’t fully filled in but it will I have Tonia Tonia Tonia remember these will get like this big and granted they’re annuals but seeing how it self seated literally all over my whole garden I have a feeling I won’t have to plant it again and then this is his up and hiss up and as his up it smells like Licorice and it will get nice and big and full kind of like mint and speaking of mint I know a lot of people say don’t plant mint in your garden but I love having mint in my garden I love that it takes over I love that it gives this feeling of wildness but it’s actually a contained wildness and mint is so easy to pull out like if you don’t want mint growing right here you just pull it out it’s super easy you can just mow it too yeah and you can just mow it down this is actually where my children that started their little comfy business are storing all their extras so they can come in and cultivate again and sell more and then back here we have a new oyster mushroom bed something we’ve never never done before and Arthur started it yesterday so it’s going to be fun to see what happens there continuing coming around we have more mint coming into the rose campon which needs to needs to be deadheaded terribly it Rose campon doesn’t last all summer but it will Bloom over and over again for a lot of the summer until the plant dies back if you deadhead it so about once a week I come out here and I hit them all because as you see a whole lot Bloom at once so then they all kind of die at once too so I’ll do that on Sunday I usually like to do that on Sundays Mom thank you you want it on again yeah okay all right byebye little butterfly I think this is our first time showing you inside the greenhouse pretty much ever as far as like since we’ve been using it so come on in we decided to grow our tomatoes in here this year and the reason for that is because one we can control the moisture so we can control where the where water touches we can control how much water they receive and where we live it rains a lot so Tomatoes tend to get Bight and die so it just takes a lot of work to care for them and grow them another reason we grew them in here is because um we may get a longer season out of them which would be cool and the reason that would be awesome is because I’m not trying trying to grow enough tomatoes to feed my family for a whole year or even for a whole month I’m just trying to grow enough to eat out of the garden through the season and this allows that and it may even extend the season another really fun thing is all the different varieties we’re growing in the past whenever I’ve grown you know 50 or 100 tomato plants I grow almost all the same variety so that I can just have consistency I can make sauce I can you know Freez diced tomatoes whatever it is and this is fun because I almost every single one is a different variety it’s really fun and the the plants are looking incredible we’re growing in these 17 galon pots and we filled them with soil that we bought so it’s non-native soil which can also help a lot with blight cuz blight lives in the soil and then the water comes down splashes all over kicks the the soil up onto the leaves and then you get the blight we also have some just regular I think this is the geneves basil growing with our Tomatoes we always grow basil with our Tomatoes not only is it a good pest detergent for tomato horn worm and other pests for tomatoes it’s beautiful and it smells good and as you know basil and tomatoes just go together I like to make a lot of brushetta and I like to make a lot of just like tomatoes and mozzarella and basil with balsamic so that’s why we do that for a couple reasons so we have Jubilee orange we have we have lucid gem which is a new one to us we were just driving down the road one day and saw um a plant stand with a bunch of tomato plants and this is the one the lady that started these recommended was this Lucid gem so we’re excited to try it and it already has some tomatoes on it I mean with a name like Luca gim doesn’t that sound like something you want to try we’ve also got it looks like crazy cherry black cherry over here we’ve got Paul Robison Mr stripey yellow pear and one San Marzano as you can see they’re thriving in here our plants look beautiful they’re growing like crazy and then we have them stringed up to the frame of the greenhouse so every single tomato in this greenhouse is an indeterminate and what that means is that it’s it it’s undetermined basically how much it can grow cuz it’s a Vine it’s not like a bush so a determinate tomato would be a bush but an indeterminate grows like a vine you got to give it space to grow up up up and we’ll prune it as we go and then the other thing about indeterminates is the fruit comes a little bit at a time so you’ll have you know a flush of tomatoes and then higher up those will ripen and then you’ll pick those and then higher up those will ripen and it goes on and on um determinats that grow more like a bush so you would see you would use tomato cages for a determinant variety you wouldn’t use tomato cages for these um those pretty much will all ripen all at the same time so there are there are benefits they’re there are pros and cons to determinate and indeterminate tomatoes and it’s really just up to you and what you feel like dealing with and you may even just want to grow a variety of both look at those Tomatoes right there I didn’t even see those yet we’ve used string before but we’re doing a homemade string system so basically I just have these little knotted loops on the support string and I’m just going to take a small string usually go under a leaf not under a Fring um Branch branch and I’m going to tie a knot that’s not tight so it’s just creating a loop I’ll use a square knot usually that’s not a square knot um and we’ll just walk that up all the way up I could tie that one up again whatever knot you use you just want to Loop that’s not tight constricting the plant it’s just supporting it I would say that concludes my garden tour but it doesn’t I wanted to show you a couple of really fun things last year I was wanting to turn this into perennial Heaven it didn’t quite happen but it’s happening so first we have this really fun Pond right here my yo came back here my oregano came back all of the time that I was using as a border came back I absolutely love the color on this yo this like blush pink and cream and I may move it because the soil here is so compacted with roots from that awful River cane back there that as you can see this year didn’t get very big but it got a lot bigger than last year so that gives me so much hope blackeyed Susans I think I just planted those at the very end of last year so we’ll see if they spread mint eona bbal moreo and look at this color and then the chy opsis has done the absolute best so this may look kind of like a mess and partly that’s cuz not everything is blooming so imagine if it was all blooming right now and it’s partly because after seeing the soil and realizing that planting in here was almost impossible I wanted to see what would do well in here before I invested any more time and money in it and honestly I am shocked at how well the daisies and the eona are doing so I have about 60 eonia plants that I’m going to start filling in and then I am going to probably this fall maybe I need to read about it separate the daisies out and then fill in with that and then I’m going to get some more coreopsis and fill in with that so since those three things are doing so amazing that is what I’m going to focus on to fill all of this bed in my goal isn’t to have this look super landscaped but I do want it growing actual plants and not just weeds and River game so I’m pleased I’m pleased with the first year there’s a lot more to do and if this was if this was rich dark soil that didn’t have River canane Roots literally making a mat underneath the soil this would be exploding in color right now but it was fun it was it’s fun to see what’s working and what isn’t this is the last thing I wanted to show you as you guys know I split green stocks in half and give them to my kids as their Gardens I find that green stocks are the best way for young children to have a garden they don’t have to weed it the care is minimal compared to like a regular garden bed and the is results are glorious so that’s justices and that’s brightens and the girls each have one but they haven’t really planted much in them yet if you’re looking for a great idea for giving your kids a small garden that they can manage easily I highly recommend getting a green stock and then just splitting it in half or in fourths if you have really little children you just want them to have a little tiny space thanks for joining me today on this garden tour it is actually getting super hot outside now even though we started very early this morning and I hope something in this Garden inspires you and encourages you and brings you Joy today see you in the next video