I'm Sick Of My Garden...

Yeah, guys, it's Friday. It's that time of year, mid-August. Brutal. It's hot. The garden doesn't look that good. Let's be honest with ourselves here. I know mine doesn't. I know mine doesn't either. So what we're going to do today, we're going to crack ourselves a little seltzer. Might be hard, might not be. Don't worry about it. Choice is up to you. We're going to take you around the garden and do a season assessment. What went well, what didn't go well. So hopefully you guys can learn from us and some of our successes as well as our failures. Let's give it a shot. Ooh, that hits good. Yeah. Let's go check it out. Let's hit the front. Here we are in the front yard where we have experienced many successes and many failures. Jacques, I think the first thing that has done weirdly well despite how bad it looks is this determinate tomato bed that we planted really at the beginning of the summer. Yeah. And you got a whole lot of tomatoes out of this. Now here's the lesson that I'm taking out of this one. It's that, yes, it got hit with probably a little septoria. Definitely has some harlequin bugs in there. I did see my very first hornworm. I saw my first hornworm today. No way. Hey, cheers. Cheers. To the worst pest in the world. Now they're actually not that bad, but sometimes it's okay that a plant doesn't look healthy. This is still throwing out an insane amount of tomatoes. It's, it's honestly more than I need. Do I really need to go in, hack this plant to death, spray with this, spray with that so I can get 20% more than 200 tomatoes? The answer is no. I mean, it doesn't look pretty. Nothing in the garden is always supposed to. So weirdly a success in our garden. Let me ask though. Yeah. Would you support determinate tomatoes next time or just let them go like this? You know, I probably would. I probably would. We decided not to because we were like, you know what? It's a determinate. It's probably going to do okay. So I think you could take like a decent bamboo and, and it would be okay there. It would need to be a relatively thick bamboo at this scale. Or you could throw in like some kind of structure. Cause this is four tomatoes. I was going to say, this is, determinate tomatoes are the only time I would use a cage. So here's one that we really did sort of fail at. So the watermelon here looks incredible. It does look really good. Now this was crazy. We planted this a long time ago. Something about either our watering habits or maybe just the climate. It only now started to take off. I'm talking the last two weeks or so. And what didn't do well is underneath. It's hiding the shame. And that would be these peanut plants. They started to come back, but. Just not enough. Not enough. Just not enough. I mean, we're going to let them ride and I'm sure we'll get a peanut or two, but it might be like my sad peanut harvest from many years ago. I might get one good harvest of peanuts this year. I honestly just think in our climate, peanuts just aren't a great thing to try personally. But it doesn't mean that the watermelons didn't do well. And then, you know, what happened in these couple of beds was mostly sunflowers and corn this year. So we had these little dwarf sweet corn. They performed really well, I would say, given that it's sort of an unusual corn. We hadn't grown it before. And then the sunflowers this year were a real showstopper. So we've planted them yet again. They're over here. We had some over here. So I would say those ones did pretty well. Not a whole lot of lessons or learnings there. You planted the corn really tight and it did fine. And this bed we've now just recently put in some yardlong beans, some luffa, very late, but still looking healthy. It looks really good. And I have a feeling in here in San Diego, you get this, this sort of hot August, hot September, unlike many different climates out there. So I think we have some time to potentially get at least a few out. We basically have two more months of summer. We just don't have the light, but we still have enough. We'll be losing the light, but we will definitely. This also looks really good over here. Yes. Yes. This bed is probably my most proud bed I've grown in a while just because of the way that it's sort of ornamented itself. It looks really nice. The zinnias are that tall elegans variety that comes up sort of through things. And then this melon, weirdly, it almost feels like the zinnias spaced the leaves of the melon out a little bit more and forced more airflow through. Cause I haven't seen a lot of disease on this. Whereas we totally have seen PM issues over here and over here. And speaking of, why don't we hit this center cut squash up? I got quite a few center cut squash. So many that I actually let a little of them go overripe, unfortunately. But here's what's crazy. You can see this, this middle area. Perfect. This is the perfect one to harvest. So this is why you grow center cut. You don't really grow it to get it to that true butternut stage. It's this. And how are you preparing this? I personally like to chop it up into little cubes and saute with butter. It becomes like creamy beyond any creamy texture I could describe for a squash. Yeah. Wonderful. Yeah. So I'll maybe try that tonight. But what's been really interesting here, guys, is this got hit with powdery mildew after harvesting maybe five to seven center cut. And I was like, okay, it's done for the season. It's put out a lot of squash. And as you can see, it's come back with a vengeance. Look, there's a couple more right in there, Jacques. Yeah, there's one right here too. And what's weird is even the PM infected leaves don't really seem to be getting damaged that much. And all these new leaves have no PM. I would call that some sort of resurrection story. I don't really know what else to say. Now they're hanking out again. Let's talk now about this. This is just a bean bed. This makes me mad. Yeah, Jacques, Jacques, Jacques had a bean problem. I think you're about to release that video, the great bean experiment. He didn't have a good time with beans. I've never had a problem with beans personally. Anyways, this was a second sowing. Worked really well for us. Dragon's tongue beans primarily, my absolute favorite bean. And as you can see, great looking bean, very productive and very, very delicious. When you cook it, the flavor is great, but the color does sort of go away a bit. But Hey, it looks good on the vine. It's all good. Yeah. So let's take a look at a big success this year, which was our strawberry patch. So for sure the most lush and vibrant strawberry patch, if you remember guys from last year. Yeah. How's that, how's that guy taste? Let me see if I can find one. They're so vigorous. Yeah, we ripped out a ton if you remember in a recent episode. But I think like what's the, what's the takeaway here? The takeaway is grow a variety that works really well in your area. Do throw a little sacrifice down and do some early pruning of, of damaged foliage and flowers and then do a runner clean out. But for the most part, just let it rip. I mean, if we wanted to, we could have enough strawberries to grow for the rest of our lives, just off of runner propagation. Also this bed compared to where it was over there, had strawberries before. This is a carpet of strawberries. They never hit that before. So the irrigation, probably one of the biggest successes this year. I think, I think it was. And I just found my, my little treat. So let's give this a taste. It's so good. Okay. Some big successes here. Let's go ahead and check out the backyard. Another big success here was just getting this arch in place and having these roses grow. It's not the season for them to be throwing flowers out, but we have reached the pinnacle point of having them cross each other. The canes have sort of overlapped. So next year should be explosive. Next year should be explosive. And speaking of the Dragon Alley, as I've said, I think before, it's for sure the most productive year we've had. And I attribute that number one, to better watering. We've actually moved this into a more suitable climate, a little bit more sun than before. We had them kind of back there just a little bit. But, but honestly, it's just the fact that the vegetative growth of these stems has gotten to the point where they can actually throw out a lot of buds and support a lot of buds on that energy. So we have an incredible amount of first flowers coming out over here. If you take a look right here, you can see the very first fruit on this variety right here. But what I'm very excited about is look at this. We have Ecuador pelora, the yellow dragon fruit. You've got a little bud here. You've got a little bud there and a little bud there. Now this is the dragon fruit that is known to be the absolute sweetest dragon fruit. Flavor complexity is not very high. Sometimes you just want that hit of sweetness. It's a beautiful dragon fruit. There's another six buds on this side. I know it's wild what's happening right now. I think if I'm remembering correctly, you get a nice amount of flowers and fruit as you move from September to October. My very first dragon that I grew, some of you have seen that, that video, that fateful steminal video. That was October that we got those dragon fruit. And so there's probably about seven to 10 ripening fruit on this sugar dragon. Richard's custom variety from Grafting Dragon Fruit, my mentor in dragon fruit. This is Sour Patch Kid. There's tons of flowers on this one. It's my first year of that, as well as Trisha and Red Jaina. Just take a look at this. I mean, this is absolutely bonkers, guys. We have a fruit that's days away from being ripe. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. If you take a look, you give it a squeeze, it's softening just slightly. It's still green. You want to see a little like 50% blush, but then you let it get to legitimately ripe, chill it in the fridge cause it won't ripen off the vine. But take a look, you're seeing one, two, three, four, five. This is actually a good argument to remove some of these buds, but we'll see if it can handle it. Is that for size? It's for size and it's for the fact that it'll try to abort them anyways. And so you might as well pull off a couple. So good dragon fruit year. Let's talk about the backyard where we have had some significant problems. So as we come into the backyard, we've shown you the pond. The pond's actually gone really well. That pond clean out. Water's clear. Algae's good. Fish are happy. But if you remember, the corn maize boys, well, it looks like we got a little lost in the sauce ourselves. Yeah. We didn't create the best maize here. If you remember, what we're supposed to have is a row of corn here, all the way around, all the way around the back. And on this side, we could not get germination to go correctly. And Jacques, I mean what do you think the problem was? It seems like maybe we mixed in like too much wood and locked out some nutrients, not enough compost. The soil is still a lot harder than we thought. This is hard. It's hard soil. And it dried out really fast. Obviously that isn't an end all be all because we do have some good corn right here. And honestly, it'll be a fun little mini maize, but it's certainly not the epic maize that we were trying to do. So just wanted to show you guys, look, like we're learning right along with you here at Epic Homesteading, Epic Gardening. We make mistakes much like you guys do. We just make them on a bigger scale. So I don't honestly know if you'd rather be us or you'd rather be yourselves. But what else, what else has gone wrong here or gone right? I think one thing I want to point to is the asparagus patch. It looks good. I think it looks pretty solid. Yeah. It's one of those plants that, I mean, you've obviously grown some successful spears of your own and it just looks kind of boring and doesn't really do much for that first year, year and a half, two years, three years. But at this point this looks good right now for its age, its growth. Next year they're going to be big plants. I think they're going to be in a really good shape. Now here's what's kind of interesting though. This is where the gardener's eye is really important. Take a look at the fern leaf level over here versus on this side. Yeah. To me that that's an indication that something's up with the watering on this side. Weirdly, this is one bed that isn't on irrigation yet. So we're still relying on manual watering and we might just not be hitting that enough. So it's, it's one of those things where you really got to keep an eye on it, watch it and see if you can figure out what the heck is going wrong. It is promising though. So as we go over here, this is the area of the garden that I think we've had the most highest highs and the lowest lows. We have this beautiful coat of mulch in here. We've spread this, we went three or four inches deeper. So hopefully that'll help keep weeds down, build soil. But for example, you see this empty bed here, see a couple of empty beds back there and then you see these lush and vibrant beds. I mean, I've pulled, no joke, 250 to 350 shishitos off of a row of four plants. I believe it. Right? And the sugar rush peach here is absolutely exploding with growth. It looks really good. Jacques, your Bulgarian peppers have done really well. So heavy, it knocked the plant over. It did. And I've grown five to six bell peppers on a single plant. So incredible. And then these eggplants, take a look guys. I mean, these are pristine, pristine eggplant. Dramatically, Jacques, the best eggplants I've grown in my life. They look really good. I've never grown an eggplant even close to this level. I've been getting an okay amount of eggplant, but this has really made me assess the placement of mine and I need it to be in full sun. Cause these grew twice the size of mine. We know that eggplant, pepper, tomato are all related. And we do know that if left to their own devices, eggplant want the most blasting sun. As long as it's not consistently over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, they're going to be very happy at that 85 range. Which they're at, you know, and they're loving it. Absolutely loving it. Now, some fails here. This bed actually didn't fail. This is just, we cleared it out. We just put in some cucumbers and pumpkins here. But these two beds back here really had a hard time. We were watering into them with nothing planted, which means no roots were soaking up water, which means that anything we put in there was kind of getting a little drowned out and probably going a little bit anoxic or anaerobic. Whatever you want to call that. Basically just like no oxygen, everything dies. Here's what I did to solve it. I broad forked it. I worked in a little bit of organic matter. I also threw some straw on. But what we did is I said, you know what, it's August. Like you said, Jacques, we get a couple more months of summer here. My tomatoes back there, which I'll show you in a moment, guys, they're pumping, but they're coming to the end of their life. So I threw four more sun golds in. Oh, I threw four sun golds in. Why? Still, it's one of our favorite fruits. Favorite tomato, fast producing cherry, great genetics on it. And it's got enough time to actually throw out, probably not its full crop as September, October comes in. But cherries don't need as much light. It doesn't matter, right? And they're going to get ripe faster. So this is to me one of those situations in the garden, guys, where if you, if you have that intuition, you'll actually make this play and you'll get a lot more out of this than throwing, let's say, early kale in that accidentally bolts because the heat wave's too big or whatever the case may be. I agree. So that's a, it's going to be a great bed. That's a great bed. Watermelon went in this bed. This was another one of those sort of failed beds. Um, but as we get back here, I mean, again, back to success. Zinnias, peppers, sunflowers, and we're getting incredible results on all of them. They look really good. And in your pepper bed, Jacques, you've had incredible success. I've never grown so many large peppers before. Like I've had decent success with small peppers, but now I'm getting like the 12 inch like Escamillo peppers and I have like a dozen. Like a nice stuffing, roasting pepper. I actually have enough that I could cook and use them. And I've just like eat one off every once in a while. So I'm very pleased with that. So what do you think Jacques about my tomatoes? Cause you have, you've got a great tomato crop this year. I have a different approach to mine, but I think it's my best year as far as success across variety. They actually cleaned up pretty nice. Like a lot of that, you know, as the tomato gets old, the leaves will wilt back and die. That's totally natural and it looks like you cleaned it up really well. I'll tell you this. And the top looks really healthy. The top. And that's the weird lesson that I've learned this year. Every year you pick up like two or three major takeaways from the garden. You know, last year I think one of my big pickups was brassicas just simply needs to be planted earlier in my climate, as do garlic and alliums and such. And I actually got incredible results, the best results I've ever had in my life. And with tomatoes, I think the level of patience this year and coming in, getting meticulous, took the shirt off, got a little vitamin D, had some music going, had a podcast going and spent two hours coming down this line and cutting out everything that was foliage below the lowest fruit cluster. Anything that was damaged, diseased or dying, which in this case was a lot of the plant. And so that's why you see this sort of stripped bare look down here and then beautiful clean foliage above. Because I've done the best that I can at least of removing all that septoria, that powdery mildew, that wilt. And I'm eyeing these plum tomatoes and they look good. Those of you who've watched this channel since its inception, remember early on, back when Jacques was a wee garden hand in the Epic Gardening universe, helping out while working on his PhD, we planted this orchard here. And it really started out as this citrus orchard with only 10 plants. And of course it's now morphed into this, honestly, a little monstrosity of a peach, which we had a crazy amount of fruit from this year, as well as an apple. And right now the showstopper are these pomegranates. I'm actually extremely excited and proud that I have these to show off for you guys. Quite a few. Especially this one here, Jacques. I mean, I'll tell you this. There is something going on with the formation at the bottom that's unnatural looking compared to most palms, but the structure is good. And I'm very excited about it. Eight fruit? Yeah, it's about eight fruit on a small bush. The other one's going to flower out next year. But I think for us, what I've noticed is if you know a plant is not going to make it, it's really better to reset that plant. And instead of praying year after year, your peach is going to come back. Look, you've spent 40, 50 bucks on the plant. That's not a small amount of money, but it is a huge amount of time to gamble that two more years it's going to be better. Yeah. You could get nothing. You can get absolutely nothing. So I would say you're not going to have a perfect take rate on all your transplants in your orchard. You may irrigate the wrong and the soil might be wrong. You might've made a mistake. In my opinion, it makes a lot of sense to say, Hey, look, I made a mistake and go and buy the highest quality plant you can at the largest size you can afford to do and plant it correctly. We actually did that in a recent episode a while back. Our avocados. We did it with our citrus. We had to replant a lemon as well as we replanted a peach that died on us or nectarine. Sometimes you just got to make that call. So that's probably the biggest learning I have in the orchard. Other than that, Jacques, I'm actually surprised at how well the orchard's doing. Honestly, it looks great. You're getting a ton of citrus too. Insane amount of citrus, insane amount of limes. I would attribute a lot of the success of this back half to the fact that the graywater basins are here. Yeah. And I now have the outdoor shower working, which is plumbing straight to here. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Exactly. And so something you're going to see pretty soon here on the channel, so I encourage you to subscribe if you haven't, is we're going to be extending those basins all the way to the end because there's too much water to output in this area. It's going to be fun. So it's going to be a fun, maybe not so fun digging project. Maybe it's a fall project when it cools off a little bit. But Jacques and I, this is our way to deal with garden burnout. Walk through the garden, analyze it, see what you did wrong, what you did right. Don't, don't beat yourself up. Yeah. Learn from the mistakes and enjoy the success. Exactly. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.