Come join me for a walk through my September garden! 🌿🍂 The season is shifting, but there’s still life and a little harvest to enjoy. In this video, I’ll share what’s still growing, what’s starting to fade, and pick a few things along the way. I’ll also talk about my fall garden plans and some of my thoughts as I look ahead to next year’s garden.
Even though the harvests are smaller now, the garden is still full of lessons and little joys. Thanks for walking with me today, and I hope you’ll subscribe if you’d like to follow along with more garden updates, seasonal harvests, and planning for the year ahead.
#SeptemberGarden #GardenTour #FallGarden
Good morning, guys. It is September. Happy September. And happy fall. It’s not really fall yet. We have another 3 weeks till fall officially starts, but it definitely feels like fall. It is in the low 50s this morning. It is chilly. The days so far have been qu getting cooler, and it doesn’t feel like summer anymore. So, and the garden it I can see it in the garden that the season is starting to come to an end. So, in today’s garden tour, I’m not going to give you a full garden tour. We’re going to show you some highlights and some things that are doing good for this time of year or the things that are still producing. So, as you can see over back here, this is my lof arch. Now, this has not produced some not even one lofah for me, but it does bring me joy because I’ll show you the other like from the other angle what it looks like. And it’s just beautiful. It’s everything that I envisioned for my archways when I got when I had the idea to create these arches. So that’s win number one. Even if it didn’t produce any actual lofah for me, just the greenery and the way that it filled it up, that’s a win for me. So we’re going to start over there and I’m going to take you around the garden and show you some things that I’m really happy about what’s going on around here. Okay, so this will be kind of hard to show you in just a single shot because let me put my baskets down. But you can see lofah is just the greenery is taking over everything over here. And if you’re coming to the front of it, to the face of it, like this is coming halfway through the opening of the archway. like you have to wiggle your way through to be able to get to the other side. So, this archway is basically basically can be used. I mean, I still use it, but it’s like you have to like get your way through. But I love the feel of it. I love the look of it. And like I said, not a single lofah has grown over here. Okay, next up I have behind the lofah bed, we have our chickpeas. This is a chickpeas. Now, I have no clue if this has started growing too late in the season, if it’ll be ready. I have I don’t even know what to look out for, but I think this is what we’re going to look out for. For it to dry out. Focus on here. No, that one’s too soft. Actually, that one went bad. But I guess I have to do some quick research and find out what’s going on over here. Ooh, I wonder if this will grow anything. This is a watermelon. It definitely looks like it was pollinated. The question is if our season is still long enough that this should grow to size. I guess we’ll find out. This was an exciting find this morning. Okay. Um, so yeah, our watermelon was planted over here. That’s a coffee filter that’s just decomposing over there. Um, a watermelon was planted over there and it just vined out everywhere. Um, I’m guessing because it was slow to start, very slow to start, and by the time it did start, it just created multiple vines. I’m thinking that’s why. But generally, I don’t think it should have so many vines. But yeah, we have our chickpeas. This doesn’t look very good. We’ll have to some research about this. Hopefully, that’s okay. But yeah, I’m looking forward to be able to harvest this. And I’m debating if I should I will probably make hummus with it. That’s what I’ll probably do with it. Over in the next bed is our brassacas. And over here we have one more cabbage in here because this was not Now it’s tight. Yeah. So this is ready to be harvested. But I had removed the three over here. One of them wasn’t good. Um, it had I had I saw that it was ready. I told myself I’ll come out tomorrow and harvested that. Come came out the next day and I had split. So, I don’t I don’t think I mentioned it to you guys, but we got baby chickens. We’re going to have laying chicks chicks for eggs that will lay eggs for us. So, I gave them the cabbage. They loved it. Then we have our kale, which is still doing very good, which not surprising because it is a cool loving crop. So, we’re still enjoying this. And we’re still enjoying our broccoli as well. And I see I got to come out and do a harvest. I guess maybe the end of this video I’ll do a quick harvest with you guys. We can harvest the cabbage, can harvest some kale, we can harvest some broccoli. Let’s see what else we can get out here. And next to our brassica bed, we have our um celery here, which is still doing very good. What I did this year differently than last year is uh last year I har I just cut it at the base and I harvested the entire celery. What I did this year was I went through and I picked out the thicker celery stalks and those are the ones that I cut and I sliced up and put in my freezer. So, those are what we will enjoy over the winter for soups. Our tomatoes have loads of tomatoes on them and they’re slowly ripening. We’re getting our first big flush of tomatoes. I’ve already made one and a half recipes of pizza sauce with our cherry tomatoes actually. But these, the slicing ones, I have to actually freeze because they’re not going to last too much longer on the counter. Um, we got another pepper plant over here. There’s nothing blushing for you guys right now, but these the sweet pea tomatoes, they produce a ton. But these tomatoes, they are so tiny. Let me show you the right ones. Can you see compared to my hand? Let me see. Can you see how tiny it is? It is such a pain to harvest that I was my husband was like, I hope you don’t plant this next year. I was like, I think I won’t. Not I think, I know I won’t because it’s just very hard. And because we’re not the type of people that just munch on it while we’re in the garden, not tomatoes at least, then it is not really something that I would grow again. And I would rather grow bigger tomatoes, which I’ll show you in the next bed because those are easy to pick. Those are what I use for roast for my pizza sauce, and they’re delicious. And over here, we’ve got some more um celery. And yeah, definitely I got to come out and do another harvest on these. In front of that bed, we have more tomatoes. So over here we had our onions and carrots which I have long harvested. Has it been a long time? I’m not sure. But over here, these tomatoes over here are a good size. These are a good cherry tomato. So these I got to come through and also do a harvest. I see lots of red ones. I take off even the orange ones because I’ll let it I I don’t like coming out here every single day. I want to, but I don’t get to come out here every day. So, instead of coming out every day and harvesting whatever is red, I harvest anything that is starting to blush and it can ripen inside. It does not have to stay on the plant to ripen. So, that’s with all the tomatoes over here. Our basil Oh, it has gone to flour. Definitely gone to flour. Um, I didn’t feel like making more pesto or dehydrating more. Oh, I see a ripe tomato over there. A slicing one. Yeah, I just let this go. I have more basil plants, but all of them I just let them go. And then this one is very slow to blush and put on fruit. It’s loaded with fruit, but it’s taking a very long time to blush. Those are our Samaranos. I think next year I would not plant this variety. I would probably get a different sauce variety, maybe even a bush variety because let me show you something. the end of our season, our plants are really nice and tall. And over there, you can see even like our last one over there is going outwards and all of it is pulling the top support down. And I the the concept of this type of trellis is that if you have the string going up, you have one stem of the tomato plant, the center one, and you can clip it up with the clips, which I’ve showed you guys in the past, and it’ll hold the plant up. But these plants, not a single one of my tomato plants have just a main stem. They have so many. They got so big and this just can’t work for us. But what we will do is we’ll see if we can repurpose our frames that we built. But instead of going having string going up, we’re going to buy a roll of string and we’re going to make them go across the entire bed. You put it one side of the wood, wrap it around, bring it back. You do it like twice around. And then you do it like every, let’s say, six inches. you do one of those and that will help keep the plant a lot better and it’ll hopefully be better for harvesting. So, that’s the goal for next year. But if you’ve seen my garden last year, the way the tomatoes were, this is 100% better than that. So, we’re still getting lots of tomatoes. We’re still getting to make some delicious things with it, but it’s not the way that I envisioned. Okay, over in the next bed we have this is where we had garlic and I have planted some drying beans. And over here after we harvested our garlic, I did plant a bunch of zenise seeds down the the center. And I see the bee is starting to he’s just sleeping here. And they just started flowering. I was out here 2 days ago, 3 days ago, and it it they were all like looking like this, budding, but they didn’t flower yet. So, this is exciting. Back there is cilantro, which I didn’t get to harvest a lot. I did harvest one little bit and I dehydrated it because it went to flower so fast because you’ll see a couple videos from now. Um, we had gone on a road trip and that’s when we were away for 9 days and that’s when these were ready to be harvested. Had I cut them down then then I probably could have gotten another succession like another harvest off of it. But because we were away, it just went to flower. It wasn’t harvested. It went to flower. So I figured the pollinators like this. I’m going to leave it here. That’s okay. And when we planted our zenyas, I also put in a bunch of dill over here, which looks like I can start harvesting on these already as well. I was not going to show you this, but this one here is just way too exciting. Wow. It feels kind of shrinking already. Um, so this here is our green bean green bean arch, which is pretty much done. We’re still putting on a few green beans, I see, but not the abundance that we got. I got to put away probably eight or 10 one lb bags of green beans to be able to enjoy over the winter. Okay. So, in our first row over here, we have more basil, which again I have let flower. Yeah. So, these are flowering already as well. We have quite a few plants right over here. We have our super tall sunflowers over here that I don’t think the flower is actually open yet. These I had planted to roast the seeds in the head, but I wonder if we’ll even still be able to do that because it’s kind of late in the season and they didn’t really flower yet. Now, we’re in our sunflower pepper bed. So, we do have a couple of ghost peppers over here waiting for them to ripen. And I’m going to go through all of our pepper plants and show you what is going on, which ones are producing or still producing. In this bed, we also have eggplant. And this is the only one that has actually produced fruit so far. And this is our second eggplant. So, not a successful eggplant year this year, but I’m happy to get whatever we get. Now, let’s go back to the peppers. So, this plant over here is yellow pepper, and it has a pepper right there. I wonder if any of these will still come to size and ripen, but it has quite a bit of flowers, but I think this right here is our only fruit. This one also a bunch of flowers and flower. Here we got another one. This one should be a red pepper which has two fruits on it. Can you see the one right here down here? Um, so peppers so far they did better than last year, but again not the bounty that I had wished for. Over here we got a habanero pepper waiting to ripen. We have red cayenne which has quite a bit of fruit on it. We got another ghost pepper over here. And over here we got another one back there. Oh, we got a bunch over here. These are some jalapenos which also has a bunch of fruit on it. And I am letting them turn red on the plant. And I’m thinking I don’t know if I’ll have enough to make a hot sauce, but I’ll definitely try to make some hot sauce. And here we got another habanero pepper right there. And this one, nothing on it. And this is what I mean that my garden is telling me that it’s ready fall cuz this is all starting to die out. But we still have quite a few cucumbers. Oh, that one back there is big. We got another one up here. So, we still got cucumbers coming to size on here. But the plant is pretty much done. Like anything that is still baby like. I don’t know if you can see, but a bunch of them up there. I wonder if they’ll even grow to size because it really is getting kind of cold for the cucumbers. There’s another one right over here. So, now we’re in our old pepper bed. So, all of this is peppers. And this was just an experiment. I had gone to the nursery and my plants that I started from home from seed are doing a lot better than these. So, I’m not buying peppers from the garden from the nursery next year because the only one that’s doing good is this is this one right here. This is yellow cayenne and it has a ton of fruit on it. Can you see this? so much. We’re just waiting for it to ripen. And my joy when I look out of my kitchen and see this bed, cuz my kitchen window is right there. When I see this bed, oh, I love this. So, this is our flower bed. Our baby’s breath. It’s doing a lot better than I expected, and we’re getting quite a bit off of it. I’m loving it. A great filler. We got our zenyas over here that are beautiful. They keep on producing more and more and more and just taking over the entire bed. And in fact, it choked out our aers right here. And our cosmos are finally finally putting on some beautiful buds. Now, these I I thought it was going to be red, like red red, but I love this color, too. It is so beautiful. So, we’re slowly starting to get some I don’t know if you can see, but like over there, they’re slowly starting to form buds and flowers. Very late in the season. Still giving me lots of joy. And the other today is Tuesday. On Friday, I came out here. I think on Friday, I came out here. I made a bouquet of flowers. I took out the eucalyptus that was right here because it wasn’t really doing much. our snap dragons. It is producing beautiful flowers. It is not what I envisioned. I’m gonna try again next year. I thought that it was going to get massive like this. Tons of foliage, tons of flowers, but it’s doing pretty okay, but we’re going to try again next year. And our dalas. Oh my goodness. I love this. Love this. The style, the the flower itself is so dainty and beautiful. And all the colors that we’re getting, it is so beyond gorgeous. Like this yellow one. I love it. It looks way It looks very pale to you guys, but it’s a beautiful bright yellow, like a neon yellow. So gorgeous. Look at this one. See the cosmos I thought were going to be like such a color. Um, and it’s just putting on flower after flower after flower cuz these the more we cut or like this one which is done if you pull it off which is called deadheading it’ll produce more flowers and it just keeps on going. And then we have our sunflowers right here. These are not for the seeds, but as you can see, the bees are loving it. They’re still sleepy, but all day long, you see bees over here. They really do enjoy it. So, now we’re going to get to harvesting. So, I’m going to start off with our cucumbers. and just getting my basket, going through the foliage. Now that things are starting to dry out, it’s a lot easier to spot them because when everything was full, like a month ago, it was hide and seek. And I would go in there, I would look for some, and then my husband would come behind me and he would still find a handful more. But now it was kind of easy to spot. And I’m just going through pulling them off. And they do have some I don’t know what the correct term for it is, but like prickly stuff on the outside. So you can see as I’m harvesting them, I’m like rubbing my hands up and down the cucumber to get rid of that. If not all of it comes off as I’m doing this when I am cleaning them, washing them off, and wiping them dry, they the rest of them usually come off. And this was quite a surprise. I got way more than I expected. I thought that I’ll get four or five pieces and you can see I got so many more. And there’s still quite a few on there on the plant that are baby size. Um, and I guess I’ll just leave the plant here over the next few weeks and see if those come to size or if the plant just dries out, then I’ll remove the entire plant. And you’ll see in a moment that I bring my ladder over. Actually, first you’ll see I go around from the other side as well because there will be more cucumbers on the back side of it as well. And I’m going to go to the second side of the arch and get some from there. I think there was three on the other side. And then I’ll get my Sorry about that. I have my baby chicks in here with me. Um, and they’re getting kind of loud. I actually gave them one of the cucumbers and they’re really enjoying it. Um, so one of the cucumbers I saw kind of high up. So I’m going to bring over my ladder and I’m going to harvest that. And my ladder has become like a permanent piece of furniture in the garden. It goes between this arch and the green bean arch. And it makes the harvesting so much easier. Next, we’re going to be harvesting the brasacas. So, I’m getting a little basket because our cabbage is not that big. And I actually decided not to harvest the kale right now. I’d rather come out and harvest it when I’m ready to use it. I don’t like for it to sit in my fridge. Um, I’d rather just have it on the plant and it can grow bigger like that. I don’t have to storage it and it’ll it’ll always be fresh. So, the cabbage, my other five heads that I’ve already harvested, one, two, three, four, five. Yeah, this is my sixth one. I was able to just twist. I just actually what I did was that I took the outer leaves, the ones that are out and open and I pushed down on them and then I took the head and I was able to twist it to break it off of the stem. For some reason, this one it didn’t want to work. So, I had to get my snippers out because the root the whole root system was pulling out as I was twisting it. So, I just cut it off at the base and I just let the outer leaves I just leave them all on the bed as you can see up here in the front and I’m letting them just decompose over there. So, I’m going to come out here and to the front and I’m going to harvest the broccoli. And this is also super easy. I don’t actually need my snippers for this. All I do is I just snap the stem wherever I want to break off the broccoli from the plant. And I’ll just go through and do that to all of my broccoli on both sides of it. And as I was harvesting this, I was thinking, you know, I have some more broccoli in the fridge from a harvest last week. I think I’ll make a broccoli cheddar soup. It’s one of my favorite soups. My family doesn’t like it. Um, some will eat it, some won’t, but I love it. And we also have carrots from the garden. So, the main vegetables in here is onions, carrots, and broccoli. And I have all three from the garden. I think this will be a delicious lunch for me in the next few days. Now, I’m going to start harvesting the tomatoes. So, our first plant over here is quite easy to harvest from the side over here because I can access a lot more of it from this side. Once I’m done with this, I will head to the back of the tomatoes and I’ll harvest whatever I can from this side and then I’ll finish off in the front of it reaching. The reason why I started off in the back is because it’s a lot easier to reach everything. But whatever I can’t reach from the front side of the plant, like reaching through from the back to the front, I will do from the front. And it just I have to reach in a lot further. So, it’s not the easiest, but this is what I do to be able to harvest whatever I can. Now, I started saying before that for the sauce tomatoes, I would maybe plant some bush varieties next year. The reason for that being is because I want to be able to preserve um I want to can up some tomato sauce and some crushed tomatoes and a bunch of different tomato products. Sed tomatoes are the best for that. You can do it with slicing tomatoes, which I might have to end up doing this year because I don’t have that many sauce tomatoes. But the reason why I would consider doing bush varieties next year is because they all ripen at the same time versus like what I showed you earlier with my sauce tomatoes that it has a bunch of fruit, but they’re all blushing and ripening at different points at different times. If I would do a bush variety, they would all blush at the same time. So, I can do one big harvest, maybe get two flushes of tomatoes. There is a potential for that. And like that, I can do one big harvest, one big big preservation day. I don’t have to freeze the tomatoes as they come out of the garden and then later down the road have a preservation day. Instead, I can just all do it all all at once. So, it’s something for me to consider. Um, I’ve got some ideas for next year’s garden already, which is very important if you’re a gardener to as things are growing or as things are dying down, finishing off like now is to start thinking about what you want to do the same next year. What do you want to do different? What do you want to change? What repairs? What change structural changes do you want to do? because the end of the garden season, like now in the fall or early spring or a nice winter day, you want to be able to do those projects. So, when it comes springtime and it’s time to plant the stuff, you have everything ready. So, for me, it’ll be a first come this spring that my garden is basically set and I don’t have to wait for structural things like now the beginning of this garden season. I didn’t have all my beds ready. So, like the peppers, they were planted quite late in the season. Our very tall sunflowers. The reason why they’re not flowering yet is because they were planted very late in the season because the beds weren’t fully ready for me when it was time to plant things out. So, my next year’s garden will hopefully be quite a bit different than this year because things will be able to be planted out in the right time so I can potentially get bigger harvests and more harvests out of my garden beds. And I know that I have to add more nutrients to my soil. So, my plan for that is because if you don’t know yet, my my new bed. So, the tomato bed that I’m harvesting right now and the one next to it where you can see the zenas and the um cilantro that went to flower. So, those three beds along that row are my beds from last year. The other beds, the beds in front of it and the beds behind it, which you can’t see any of those, those are new beds. Those are beds that I added this for this garden year. The soil that I put in there, I was told that it’s a mix of top soil and compost, but I don’t think it had any any compost in there. So, my plan for that is to be able to improve the nutrients in the soil. Is that in the fall, now the next few weeks, I hope to get some compost or manure top of the beds because it has settled. So, it’ll do two things. It’ll fill up that gap. Plus, it’ll over the winter it’ll add nutrients back into the soil. So, I’ll put that compost or manure down. And I’m debating growing a cover crop. So, I just have to order the seeds for those when I order my garlic as well. Um, I want to try different garlic varieties next year. Not next year. It’s now in the fall. So, I have to start thinking about that. Um, I lost my train of thought. Yeah. So, if I do a cover crop, I want to do that. I would do it on all my beds except for the ones that I’m putting garlic in. And then in the spring, I would add some more compost manure on top of the ones that I’m putting down in the full so that we have a fresh um layer on top of everything. And I’m hoping that that will help my garden out a ton and it’ll help with the plant health. It’ll help with its plant nutrients and the plant growth. So yeah, that is my goal now for the fall, winter, early spring, and I am looking forward to that. So I am going, like I said, I’m going through the tomatoes here. I’m harvesting whatever I can, anything that even is slightly blushing. I’m even picking up some tomatoes that had fallen on the ground. Tomatoes usually when they’re ripe, it could detach from the plant. They don’t always, but they do. It does happen. So, if I see any good looking tomatoes on the ground, I pick those up as well. And I’m not harvesting any of the sweet pea tomatoes. I just don’t have the patience for that, honestly. So, guys, this is it for today’s video. Thank you so much for joining me for this September garden tour and harvest. Even though the harvests are slowing down, it’s always exciting to see what’s still growing out here. If you enjoyed this little tour, make sure to subscribe so you can join me for more garden updates and harvests coming up along with some cooking that I do, some preserving and some future videos. Coming up is some full inspired cooking along with a harvest and preservation video. I hope to see you in the next one.
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