SUMMER GARDEN TOUR // July Gardening in Zone 9b (Sacramento, CA)

Hey guys, welcome back to our Liberty House. My name is Beth and it's time for the July garden tour here at my property in Sacramento, California. If you're new here, I know there's a lot of new faces I've seen on our channel recently. I just want to real quick introduce who I am, who my husband is and what we're doing here. So Lucas, my husband and I run this channel and we garden, I think our lot size is around like 8,500 square feet. We're in the heart of Sacramento County, which is growing zone 9b and we dedicated a good chunk of our backyard to putting in about six raised beds and a few other containers to just grow vegetables for us to eat in our household. We share a lot with friends and family and then we intermix flowers in with our vegetables to really attract pollinators and do as best as we can. I don't want to call it organic gardening, but being very sustainable, eco-friendly, trying to not use any pesticides or anything like that here in our garden space. It is July 11th today, so nearing the middle of July. We're really into the time of year where we're harvesting everything. All of the hard work we've put in for our summer garden over the past three months is really paying off and we get to harvest so much. Actually just did a big harvest yesterday. Vegetables and things on the vines might be a little bare, but you'll see everything that we have growing. So let's get going and I'll show you what we have going on. Those of you who've been watching our channel for a while, welcome back. Thank you so much for staying with us. I like to start here on this side of the garden and kind of work my way this way and I'll kind of just go bed by bed and show you what we have going on. Here's Liberty just taking a sun bath. She's crazy. She's a black dog and just likes the sun apparently. So let's start here. We have our perennial flowers which are thriving. It's their second year they've been in this bed. I think I may be harvesting the echinacea here this year, which is really exciting. I've never harvested echinacea root, so I'm excited to do that, make a little tincture and see what happens. But the bees on both this echinacea here and this one just across from it are going crazy. Like there are always dozens of bees on these two plants at all times, like night and day it seems like. So it's really cool, really attracting the pollinators with this. I'm really happy with it. Let's see, kind of hiding behind some of these flowers. We have, and I'm sorry if the lighting's a little wonky, just the time of day is not the best, but we do have some hot peppers growing back here. So we have our jalapenos. So you can see, I think we have three plants here. We do have some jalapenos we've already started to harvest, which is great. We've put them in some tomatillo salsa just to make it a little spicier. You can see we also have some weeds in here I have not picked. It's from our straw mulch that we use. So we put down straw mulch every year. It's a really great way to kind of keep the moisture in the garden, especially here in Sacramento where it just gets super hot. But it does have some seeds in there, but thankfully all the seeds are just wheat seeds and they're super easy to pull out. We've just been so busy doing other things I haven't gone in here and kind of like weeded some of this. So ignore that. But yeah, we have these three jalapenos doing really, really well. They're loving this heat. This one behind the rudbeckia is like so tall. I don't know if you can tell. This is still the same plant. But yeah, super fun jalapenos there. This rudbeckia, black-eyed susan, is like my favorite flower right now. Well, second favorite. I'm going to show you my favorite favorite in a bit. But just a really, really pretty happy color on this. Not as many bees on this compared to the echinacea. I think they prefer the echinacea over the black-eyed susan. But there are a few. Let me see if I can show you in here. These little smaller bees maybe? I'm not really sure what they're specifically called, but I'm sure they're a form of a pollinator too. You can kind of see them buzzing around there. But that's mostly what we're seeing here. And then moving along here in the front is just our thyme plant, another perennial herb. I think I'm going to transplant this fall, kind of August-September timeline when it cools down a bit. But it has already gone to flower and is kind of just past that stage. So we're just letting it do its thing. And then let me move around to the back side and show you what we have growing on the trellis. So if you're familiar, let me zoom out a little bit, with our garden, we have two of these tall eight-foot trellises that Lucas built over the past couple years. And I didn't mention this earlier, but we've been here at this property for just over three years now. That first year was kind of our planning stage. This actually used to be all concrete pad that we ripped out and put in these raised beds. So we've been growing for about just over two years in these beds. So over the last two years, we built two of these trellises. We actually have a how-to on how to build it with cattle panel on the YouTube channel. So go check that out if you haven't. But on this back side, we have growing two tomatillos. You need two because they pollinate, you need them to like pollinate each other. They're not self-pollinating. We have two beefsteak tomatoes and a couple butternut squash growing on this trellis here. And then I have a rogue zinnia that's self-seeded here from last year. But the tomatillos have been great. They've already reached the top of the trellis. They are like these little husked tomatoes. Here's one right here I can show you. So it's kind of the tomatillos inside this husk. See if I can do this one-handed. And basically you boil that and blend it up and you have tomatillo salsa. You can do green enchilada salsa, a whole lot of good things. We had a whole bunch of them. So we actually made up some tomatillo salsa and canned it the other day. So we've never canned tomatillo salsa. So I'm excited to see how that holds up from the pressure canner. But these have been a really prolific tomatillo variety. We started from seed and it's the second year we've grown them. And I think we'll just continue to grow them because we really enjoy the salsa. Moving on over. So our beefsteak tomatoes are just kind of a like a hodgepodge brand. I don't know. It was literally a seed pack I picked up at Lowe's. It was like a Lowe's branded seed. So I don't even know what kind of seed it technically is, but here's the beefsteak. They're actually relatively small for what I would imagine as being a beefsteak, but it's been a prolific bloomer. We've just harvested a whole bunch of them, but you can see there's a ton of fruit set in here and like the leaves have been healthy, no pests or diseases or anything like that that we've really seen on this. I'm really happy with it. The tomato itself, Lucas just did like a taste test review of all of our tomatoes and filmed it. So that's also on the channel. And so he tasted this and I mean I've had them too, but they're not bad. I wouldn't necessarily like write home about them in terms of flavor or anything like that. But we've, the ones we haven't gotten to eating, we have simply been freezing with all of our San Marzano tomatoes and we'll just blend it up into our pasta sauce at the end of the season. Let me talk to you too about our butternut squash. So last year we grew the same variety of butternut on the arch trellis and we like to do kind of a crop rotation method with our plants just to promote soil health and everything like that. We planted the butternut here this year and it doesn't seem to be doing nearly as well as it did on the arch trellis. I don't know if that's due to the sunlight or or what exactly. We do have a couple butternuts growing. We have this one here. Let me put this tomatillo down. We have this one here and you can see it's not huge but it's healthy, looking good. We have another baby one growing right up here. I don't know if you can see with this light. And you can tell too like the leaves are just a little yellow. So we're actually due for a fertilize. I think we're going to fertilize. We were going to fertilize last night but we got a little lazy so we didn't come out here and fertilize. But we might fertilize tonight or sometime this week and maybe that'll help. But honestly everything else in this bed is looking super well so I don't know if it's really the soil or what is going on with it but it is what it is. We might not have a great butternut harvest this year but yeah we might get a few which will be great. Moving back to these little planter boxes. Look this bit with some scrap wood. We have growing some calendula back here. We had some other flowers in here but they are kind of at the end of their season. Even this calendula is not looking super healthy. I've kind of just left it in just to let it be. It's still blooming. I've been deadheading these kind of spent flowers there and I just haven't had anything to replant in there. It's really hot this time of year so it's not a great time to be planting new things. But probably in the next over the next month you know I might throw something in if we get a cooler snap of weather. This bed here has some more hot peppers. We have let's see what do we have here I forget. So this one here is a Thai chili. No oh there is there is right up here you can see we have a few Thai chilies. Hi Liberty. What are you sniffing? Growing so peppers are notoriously a little bit more of a late bloomer and late producer. But now that it's getting hotter these hot peppers are going to do really well I think. Back here we have I have to check a scotch bonnet right here. Gotten really really tall no peppers yet for this guy. And then up front what is this a serrano which these serranos have quite a few peppers. We've harvested a few of these. They're kind of just hot hot pepper there. And then we have two zucchinis. We planted these as starts. We picked up some eight ball zucchini from the nursery and we haven't gotten a single eight ball. We've gotten just regular zucchinis. I think they might have been mismarked but we've been harvesting so much zucchini lately. It slowed down a little bit with the heat but we'll see. It's still putting off some flowers in there and I've trellised it up so we'll just see what happens. And then really just some more flowers over on this side. Lots of bees buzzing around this echinacea still. And before I move into the tunnel I'll show you what we have growing on this side. So on the arch itself we've planted 14 plants. Four different varieties between those 14 plants. But before I move over I just wanted to show you we've gotten such a bumper crop of tomatoes so far. But you can see right here I just wanted to show you what a sunburn looks like on a tomato. This poor guy. Because on this side of the arch it gets really hot afternoon sun. So it might be time we need to put up a shade cloth just to protect this. This is a black crim tomato. It's honestly probably ready to pull and we'll just kind of cut off that sunburnt part. But kind of unfortunate but it is what it is. There's not a lot of shade from the sun leaves or anything like that. Whereas you know this one over here is a little bit more protected from the leaves. So it's there's no sunburn on that. But we have these red cherry tomatoes. Large red cherries. We just harvested a whole bunch of these so there's not a ton that are ripe. But you can see all of the fruit set. It's insane. A super prolific bloomer on this red cherry. It's honestly not the best tasting cherry tomato. And they're a little bit larger. Let me pull one for you guys. A little bit larger than I prefer to just like pop in your mouth. But they're not terrible. I just don't think we're going to grow them again. I would prefer maybe a sun gold or something a little bit smaller that has a little bit more sweetness to it. These are very like tomatoey with high acid. But overall it's been a prolific producer of tomatoes. Just look at all that fruit set. So it's been a good tomato plant. We just don't prefer it compared to some other varieties. Then like I showed you we have the black crim. We also have green zebra tomatoes which are these heirloom variety. This is one of our favorite tomatoes. It turns. You can tell they're ripe when they turn a little bit more yellow. These are still pretty white in color. But these are super delicious. Higher sweetness to them and very meaty. Not so like pulpy. And then we planted six total San Marzano tomatoes which is another heirloom variety which you can see has a little bit of blossom end drop. Not a ton. But I think that's just because of the variety honestly. And San Marzano tomatoes tend to have more of the blossom end rot. None of our other tomatoes have that. So it's not a soil issue or a watering issue or anything like that. But we looked it up and it just seems to be something that happens with San Marzano's more than others. And that's probably the reason why we next year are going to try a new variety. Maybe go back to more of a Roma tomato. But these have been really good for us. This is the second year we've grown them. They make delicious pasta sauce. We're just not a big fan of the blossom end rot. So I don't know if you guys have a really good paste tomato you want to recommend for us. We would love to hear what you guys like. But overall this has been a really prolific producer of tomatoes. It has a ton of fruit set. We've already been freezing a few batches of them. So if you're wondering why we're freezing tomatoes right now, that's just what we like to do. We are so busy this time of year harvesting everything else. We tend to just batch freeze our paste tomatoes and things like that that we know we'll use it for sauce later. Freezing tomatoes isn't great if you want to just eat tomatoes later. But by freezing, the skin literally just peels off those tomatoes when you defrost them. So we batch freeze as we go when we have a huge harvest that we can't eat all of it. And then at the end of the season when we have a little bit more time in the kitchen, what we'll do is we'll defrost them, peel the skins off, and batch make some tomato sauce and can it. So it's kind of all at one time rather than doing it multiple times throughout the season. So that's just what we tend to do with our tomato harvest. But yeah, back in the tunnel here you can see here's another view of that black crim tomato. This has been such a good tomato for us this year. It's our first year growing black crim. It's another heirloom variety. So you can actually see, let me see if I can do this carefully, that bottom. So if you see a bottom like this, that's just because it's cat-faced, which means heirloom tomatoes when they flower. I don't think I have any flowers to show you. It's been so hot we've had a lot of flower drop recently. So this is like a standard flower, but with heirloom varieties what you sometimes see is like, I forget the the term for it, but multiple flowers will fuse like into one and basically that cat facing on the tomato itself is just a natural byproduct of that because it's basically multiple tomatoes forming into one tomato. But these black crims have been super delicious. They're a great slicer tomato. Very, very sweet and meaty. There's not a whole lot of like pulpiness to it. So it's been great on sandwiches. That's been like our favorite little sandwich tomato, but they've been really, really good. So I'm excited to continue to grow those in the future years. On both sides of the trellis we pretty much just mimicked what was on the other side. So we have more another large red cherry, another black crim, another green zebra tomato, and then three more San Marzano tomatoes. And you can see somebody asked last time what these gutters are in the arch. So when we installed this arch trellis, we also picked up a couple gutters from the hardware store and planted in them. And quite honestly, I don't know if I would do it again just because these tend to dry out so quickly, especially in our climate. We put a drip line in it, but we water every three days. So between those three days they dry out just because the roots aren't very deep. But we've planted strawberries in them and they honestly just die back and then they kind of come back to life. We also have some trailing rosemary in here. So it's okay. It's kind of cool, but I don't think I would do it again. We have strawberries that we planted up here in a pot that do way better. I think there's actually a few strawberries in here ready to pick. So I think these will produce way better than anything I'm going to grow in those gutters, unfortunately. And you can see here, this is our sad oregano plant. Just an update because you guys have been following it. It used to be right over there and I transplanted it just because it was taking over this bed and really pushing the jalapenos and things. But we transplanted it into this pot and it's alive. It's not thriving by any means, but I think come cooler season it'll rebound really nicely and do great. I'm gonna eat this strawberry real quick. Moving on over to our third bed. Right here in front we have just some flowers that I planted. This is a mum. I actually overwintered here and it's blooming right now. So doing really, really well. I also started some celosia from seed that you can see is starting to flower. Hasn't gotten its beautiful color yet, but I'm pretty excited about that. And this is a new to me flower. It's the only one that survived. It's direct so, but it's called a drumstick flower. And it has these like little lollipop yellow, like bright yellow looking flowers that come from it. So I'm really excited. I hope this does well. Oh, there's a little ladybug hanging out in there. So I'm not sure if it's just the time of year. It's been so slow to grow, but maybe it's just been so hot. But since it's the first year I'm growing it, I don't know a whole lot about it, but I'll keep you guys in the loop. Liberty is thirsty. I just realized my little pollinator station was dry. So let me fill it up really quick. Of course, Liberty being a water dog, she just wants to get wet. Yeah. If you have a lab, you know. So I picked up this cute little, it's technically a bird feeder from like a local vendor. Lucas accidentally broke it right away, but we glued it back together. But I've been using it just as like a little pollinator watering station because it's so hot here and we don't have any other water sources right now in the garden. So it's just a little spot where, you know, bugs can kind of perch on those rocks and take a drink such as bees and things like that. So in this bed, you can see too, right here, we have some dill that is pretty much gone to seed. And it's currently like covered in aphids. Can you guys see that? I've left it so far just as like a trap plant to kind of mitigate any aphids elsewhere. In our garden, we often only see aphids kind of at the beginning and ends of seasons. They tend to just really go after plants that are kind of at the end of their life cycle, such as this dill or even this, these lettuces below that I've kind of let gone to flower. But we just kind of let it happen. It feeds other beneficial insects, such as ladybugs and things like that. I obviously keep an eye on it just so it doesn't jump around to plants that I don't want, but don't want them on, but just part of, part of the garden life here at our house. This bed is honestly so empty right now. We were growing some lettuces, which you can see right here. I've just been letting bolt. I figured the flowers will be great for the bees. And we just didn't have anything else in here we wanted to plant. And we're just leaving it empty until we're ready to plant for the fall. Last year, we kind of missed the primetime fall planting. So we're trying to be more cognizant of it this year. In Sacramento, we're actually going to be starting quite a few of our fall seeds here in the next few weeks, like mid-July. I think we're going to be starting them to transplant out into the garden come August to September, depending on the variety. We've never really started seeds for fall. We've always just bought transplants, but this year we want to try a few different varieties that we can't find at the nursery. So we've decided to put together our seed starting setup and start seeds for fall. So we have left this bed relatively empty in preparation for that. Our plan, either this bed or the bed next to it. I actually think it might be this bed we talked about, will be all of our garlic and onions, which don't really get put into the ground until November. But we do have a lot of root veggies we want to grow, which it's still too hot right now, but maybe in the next, by August or so, we will start planting some of those in here, like beets and radishes. We also want to try root abega. I always want to call it because I'm so used to my black-eyed Susans, but root abega and parsnips or turnips in here. So that'll be new to us. So you'll come along that journey. I actually put our soil thermometer in here just to see what the soil temp is. And you can see it's right about, is that an 80? Can't quite see it. I think, yeah, that's 80 degrees in the soil. We were curious if this bed was cooler than the other bed because this gets all of, it gets morning sun and afternoon shade because of the arch. So that's kind of our mini plan here. You can see this one pumpkin I planted is doing nothing. I have no idea why. I'll show you in a minute. Our other pumpkins are doing really, really well. But over on this side, we just have more pollinator flowers. I planted some zinnias, which if you're in Sacramento and not growing zinnias, you're missing out. These are so prolific. They love the heat. They thrive this time of year. I especially love these purple ones this year. And then back here, I just have some agertum floss flower. It actually self-seeded right here from last year. So I'm just letting it, letting it do its thing. So moving along, we have our this year pumpkin bed, which is super exciting. Last year, I'm totally missed the boat on pumpkins and this year I really didn't want to. So we'll see what happens, but you can see these guys have easily taken over this bed. There are four plants in here. We purchased them as starts. The seeds, actually, I think these two up here might be from the seeds I started. Most of the seeds I started did not do well. They died. They dried out. But we did plant a couple starts, which are these two plants here, which is why this, this back potato to me, oh my gosh, pumpkin plant is so large and doing really, really well. You can see it's kind of trailing in both directions. We have mostly male flowers in the core. You can tell it's a male flower because it's basically the flower has no pumpkin attached to it. So this is a male flower. They open up beautifully in the morning. But let me see if I can find it. It would think it was on this run that's like hiding in the back. I did see a female flower. Where did it go? Oh, there it is. See if I can zoom in. I'm getting all in there. So that is the female flower right there because you can see the little pumpkin attached to it. That's about the extent of any of the pumpkins I've seen yet. So hopefully it's just pumping along and will produce more female flowers. I haven't been hand pollinating. I know I've talked to you guys in the past about not wanting or needing to hand pollinate, but I might hand pollinate these pumpkins just because I want to make sure we get pumpkins. These little pots right here I have. We have another Black-Eyed Susan, Rebecca, growing in this pot here. I have some French lavender that's already had its bloom. I deadheaded most of them already. We have a rosemary plant, the one I transplanted from one of our other beds. And you can see there's just weeds in here. And then we have our fig tree that's doing really well. I'm hoping to get this transplanted this fall, but you can see it's set some figs in there, which is exciting. But you can see our potting bench is a mess. We have our compost is going well. We have almost finished compost. We just need to keep turning it and keeping it wet. We have something growing in here, but yeah, this is our dumping side. We could turn this. You can see there's a few flies, but nothing too crazy. And then over here we have some empty spots. We have our Lisa, the lemon tree, which is dead, I think, as you guys have been watching. I don't think she's making a comeback, so I think it's time we could just probably put her into the compost. We have a couple squash plants in these boxes. These boxes are perfect for squash because they just get so wide and take up a lot of space. This squash is a regular zucchini, and I put him in a tomato cage just to help trellis him up. You can see there's three zucchini plants in here, probably about the right size to harvest, so they're nice and soft and delicious. Empty spot, TBD. And then this is a yellow cricknet squash, which you can see we trellis just with a post here, but yeah, we're still getting all the squash. You can see that there. Lots of flowers too. And then this big behemoth is our Jerusalem artichokes that we're growing. It looks like a jungle in there. And then back here at our u-shaped bed, we have a lot going on. Here is my favorite flower right now. It's the purple zinnia, which I showed you earlier. It just pops so well back here against the green giants we have behind them. But let me show you what we got going on. We have just some marigolds still alive in here, and then we have our cantaloupe, which is taking off. We've never been successful with cantaloupe, but this year has been a good year. We're trying it out on our newest vertical trellis that Lucas made using the router. It's a little bit different construction on this mini trellis than what he built with our large trellises, but since then he picked up a router and has been having fun with it. We have the how-to on this trellis on our YouTube page as well, but it's a great way to just maximize space because we don't have, I mean, we've let this cantaloupe trail quite a bit, but cantaloupes and other melons require a ton of space. So by training it vertically, we can just harvest more. And you can see back here, we have some cantaloupes. We have a younger cantaloupe right here hanging out. And down here we have two really good size cantaloupes. I might show you from the back side here. Here's the view from the other side of the fence, but you can see these guys are looking so good. So excited. So I think we might be able to harvest these probably in another few weeks. You can really tell when they're ready. Supposedly our in-laws grow cantaloupes way better than we do. So we've been asking them, but pretty much you want it to practically fall off the vine and then, you know, it's ready to harvest. But you can see it's still a little bit of a triangle here. And I guess when it's ready, it's going to envelop that stem. And that's another kind of sign that it's ready. And I have a feeling since these are literally suspended, also don't mind all of the weeds back here, suspended, that they'll literally just kind of fall off. So these taller ones, here's that one from earlier. I think as it gets a little bit bigger, we might trellis it using, I think we're just going to use some of our old COVID masks and kind of give it a little hammock just so if it does ripen and we don't realize it, it's not going to descend a few feet and potentially harm the fruit. But that cantaloupe has just been growing wild through this fence and kind of out on this side. We have such bad Bermuda grass. I don't know if you guys struggle with Bermuda grass, but it's literally growing in between this bed and the fence. So it's very difficult to get rid of, but you just keep pulling at it. But yeah. Okay. Let me walk back inside and I'll show you everything else. Okay. So back in this corner, you can see a little, another rudbeckia peeping out. And then on, let me take it, take a step back. So on this trellis, we've planted six different plants. We planted two Armenian cucumbers over here. Well, maybe, maybe seven. I think we had three center cut squash and then a couple green bean climbing, climbing beans. The center cut squash has literally taken over since last month, I think. Let me, I'm going to see if I can find a picture of what this bed looked like just a month ago or even two months ago. It was nothing like this. These center cut squash have been blowing up. You can see here's like a little baby one. And then we're experimenting because we have been harvesting so much squash lately. We just didn't want another behemoth, but look how big this one is back here. I don't know if you can see like how big my hand is compared or how big the trombocino is compared to my hand, but it's so big. And we're honestly just going to let that one grow and see what happens because there are so many other trombocinos or center cut squash, whatever you want to call them, growing in here. It's taken over. We've been pruning it back because I've been wanting to get some cucumbers. But you can see it's like that's trombocino, a trombocino leaf, like it's just peeking out everywhere. But we're starting to get some Armenian cucumbers, which is so exciting. It's our first year growing this variety, but it is supposed to hold up to the Sacramento heat a little bit better. Some of the other more traditional cucumbers, here's another one, tend to get pretty bitter. But we've heard good things about the Armenian cucumber, so I'm excited to give it a try. I think there's a few in here, I'm not sure where they all went, that are pretty close to harvesting. We haven't harvested any of them yet, but I think when they get to about 12 inches long are when you want to harvest them. So this one's probably about five inches, so a little bit ways, but I think this one right over there is getting pretty close to harvest time, which is really exciting. Okay, so the beans, you honestly can't even see them. You can kind of see them poking out on the top because they're just so intertwined with the rest. I honestly don't even know how we're gonna find the beans to harvest when they're ready. But I haven't really seen a whole lot of them, but it's also just very challenging to find them in this chaos. Like look at this corner, how am I gonna get back there? And just to give you some perspective, like look how big this leaf is. That's the trombocino. In front here we have what I've dubbed our bean forest. So I planted a whole bunch of different drying beans that I'm excited about. I also planted a few yellow wax beans, which are my favorite to pickle. We actually didn't pickle them last night, but we harvested a bunch and sauteed them up similar to a green bean and they were delicious. So just something a little bit different, but they're really, really good pickled. We call them dilly beans and they're delicious. So I'm hoping to get another decent harvest either quick pickle or pickle and can. But we have yellow wax beans in here, we have kidney beans, we have calypso beans, we have great northern, there's another one I forget what it's called, but we've have quite a few beans in here. It's our first time really growing a lot of these beans, so I'm not 100% sure when you harvest them, but I think from what I've read is you just wait until, that leaf is in the way, you pretty much just wait until they're dried up and that's when they're ready to to go. But if you know better than I, let me know. See there's a whole bunch of whichever one this is, I have no idea, but they've kind of been dying out underneath. You can see all of the dropped leaves and they've just leaned forward out of the bed which makes it even more challenging to harvest, but I'm not exactly sure why we're getting this. I know in last year at the end of the season we had some issues with this bed with, we suspected root knot nematode, but we've grown in it since and I mean look at this bed, like it doesn't look unhealthy. We did treat the potential nematodes with beneficial nematodes and we fertilized the heck out of this bed, so I don't know if that has anything to do with this or not. It could just be the lifespan of a bean, but it seems odd and it it seems to me like there might be an issue with the root structure, but I'm not 100% sure. So if you've seen that before, comment below and let me know. But yeah, kind of odd I think. Also in this bed you can kind of see some swiss chard that is like a behemoth of a swiss chard plant. We've harvested some of this, not a lot of it, but it's doing really well here. It literally just, it's crazy what's growing, what's growing in this bed. You can see my zinnias that I planted are doing really really well. I had borage here just like up until a few days ago that we pulled out because it was kind of in the way and it was making, I think I might be allergic to it, I'm not sure, but every time I touch it I just get so itchy. But here's kind of an inside view of some of these squash plants. You can see there is a center cut squash that's growing, but yeah just wild in there. And you can see this is that trombocino that we planted in the middle of this bed that has vining all the way through here, all the way down, and is just continuing to go. So we're just letting it go. I'm curious to see how far it gets, but yeah kind of crazy. And then I'll mention really quick in these two pots right up here I have some catnip that has gone to flower. I've seen quite a few bees in there which is awesome. Confrena is one of my favorites. It takes a little while to grow. It literally just now started blooming and I planted it out with literally everything else this spring. So just have some patience if you're growing it yourself, but it's so worth it. These little flowers are so vibrant. It comes in a variety of colors. I keep wanting to buy more, but I still have seeds. So if you know the struggle, you know. But aren't they so cute? So that's really it for this side of the yard. I want to show you some more things though, so stay with me. One of the favorite things we planted early on when we moved into this house are my roses. You know, if you know me, you know I'm obsessed with these. It's honestly so due for a deadheading, but I want to be real with you guys and show you what it looks like when it's not picture perfect, because that is life. But you can see it really could use a good deadheading. So that is probably on my agenda sometime this week, because deadheading is just going to promote this to continue to grow big and beautiful and give off way more blooms. This variety of rose is called the Sweet Mademoiselle Hybrid Tea. And I have a ton of YouTube videos on how to prune and how to deadhead and everything like that. So check those out if you are growing roses too or want to learn. But the Sweet Mademoiselle has such a pretty color, really beautiful big blooms. And then the hybrid variety honestly is just so disease resistant. I never have had much issue with any fungal diseases or any pests or anything like that. The biggest thing we struggle with, and it's honestly everywhere in our garden, are just like these little tiny garden spiders that tend to web all over the place. They are literally everywhere in our garden, and we've learned to co-exist with them. They're not harmful. We just have made the perfect environment for them because we've invited so many both beneficial insects and also other insects that these spiders like to eat. So it's just the full circle. When you grow quote unquote organically like we do, you're just going to have both good bugs and bad bugs. So learning to live with them is just what it is. Sometimes when they get, you know, really bad or I'm trying to get in there, you know, I might deadhead appropriately to kind of get rid of some of these. Or I'll grab our little spider duster thing. I don't really know exactly what it's called, but I'll kind of get in there and remove some of the webs just to help out my plants a little bit. And then of course on all of my pruning videos you know I talk a lot about leaving the base of your rows nice and open and airy. You can kind of see this one is. I just put in some compost down into this area of the garden, and so you can see we have a lot of volunteers because we apparently did not get that compost hot enough to kill all the seeds. But yeah, they're really easy to pull out. It's just finding time to actually pull them. But yeah, also kind of in these beds in between some of the roses we recently planted a couple artichoke plants that I'm really excited about. This one actually went to flower this season, which I really didn't think they would do much this year because we planted them kind of late. But it's going to be flowering sometime soon and I'm really excited because the flowers on the artichokes are absolutely gorgeous. And we're just going to let it do its thing and help feed the bees and do that. So hi Libby. You can see our arch here with our climbing roses is still doing really well. It could also use a dead heading up there, but I have to get the ladder out for that so it's not an easy chore. But let me duck underneath our badminton net and yeah you can see it's just totally thriving. All of these offshoots that aren't even attached to anything are just doing its thing and we're just kind of letting it, but it's well above our house line. But yeah, fun stuff there. I have another artichoke here. This one didn't throw off any flowers or anything like that and we're just kind of letting it do whatever it needs. And then we have one more sweet mademoiselle hybrid tea. This one's about six months younger than that one or at least since we we planted it about six months after that one. But same thing, it's just really pretty. Highly recommend this variety of rose if you're looking for one. And this spot on the yard gets really great sun. It gets all morning sun and afternoon shade, so these roses love it. And then, oh my gosh, right next to it we have our lemon balm, which this is another herb that I want to dig out this fall and transplant into a pot or a container because it's literally so much just taking over this spot. And then let me move over to what is our last raised bed right over here. So this has our passion fruit vine that is growing bananas. We planted this two seasons ago, so it's really on its like second big growing season. Last season we didn't get anything, got a couple flowers that didn't produce any fruits. This year we've gotten even more flowers, but so far I've only found this one passion fruit, so I'm not really sure why it's not giving off more flowers. Maybe I should have hand pollinated, I don't know, but I did not. But really this thing is just growing wild. We've been kind of pruning it back a bit. It was like trying to attach itself to this lilac bush, so we trimmed all of that and then we put up this really janky hillbilly looking trellis to just give it some more room to grow. But I think come this fall winter when we have some more time on our hands, we are going to maybe create some sort of different pergola or trellis structure. I'm not exactly sure what it's going to look like yet, but it will need to be addressed and we'll probably heavily print it back too. Also in this bed we have all of our sweet peppers, so all of the non-hot peppers. Over here are some snacking peppers. We have a few little peppers growing. They're still pretty small, but looking really good. Oh, here's one that's a little bit bigger. It's looking good. We have one beet that survived. It's probably about ready to harvest here. And then so we have these like snacking bell peppers. We have four shishitos. I've been harvesting a few of these. We really probably could do a better job trellising here. I just put up some makeshift trellises using some palm tree branches. And then up here we have our habanandas, which are those heatless habaneros we always talk about. We haven't seen any fruits yet on those. And over here we have our Hungarian wax peppers and we've been harvesting a few of these too. These have a little bit of heat, but I think they're pretty mild and I really like them cut up on salads or you can pickle them. Kind of like the Papa John's little pepper, peppercini type pepper, which I think is delicious. We attempted to plant some sunflowers in this bed, which was a total fail. They all look relatively miserable. And maybe it's just the heat of the day right now, but they're looking especially sad right now. They're usually a little bit more perky, but yeah, those were just a total fail this year, but that's okay. And then we have some calendula back here. I just kind of tossed some seeds in to see what happens. Same with the marigolds. I also threw in just some marigold seeds to just kind of fill in the spaces in between the peppers. But yeah, that's kind of this bed in a nutshell. Nothing too crazy going on except this passion fruit vine. That's absolutely wild. Lastly, I'd just like to show you guys our trees. We have one avocado tree here. Not much of an update, but it's just growing and doing its thing. It takes quite a few years for avocados to produce anything. And this one still is not after a couple of years in the ground, but it's grown substantially since we planted it. So we will see how long it takes and you guys will just follow along. But yeah, it's looking relatively healthy. Nothing really to report with this guy. And then our lime tree over here, which is doing really, really well. It is nice, big, and showing off a lot of little baby limes. So we'll probably be inundated with some limes this winter, but overall looking really good, nice and healthy, and lots of good branching going on here. Well, now that I'm officially sweaty, it is now midday here in Sacramento, probably nearing 100 degrees today. But just big thank you for watching this week's video. That is pretty much it for the July garden tour here at our Liberty House. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you guys next week.