My Garden is EXPLODING With Growth! | Summer 2022 Garden Tour

I've been summoned. DragonDaddyK aka Kevin from Epic Gardening is here to show you a tour of the Midsummer Epic Garden. Let's get started. So here in the front yard raised bed garden, it's for sure the most productive year we've had yet. Starting out with these strawberries. These are in our Berries 8-in-1 original. So there's about 15 strawberries here, seascape variety, everbearing variety. Check our strawberry playlist out if you want to learn exactly how to grow these bad boys. But it's massively productive. I've been pulling multiple handfuls a day. We just had a little 4th of July celebration. I had a big bowl of strawberries. And so this has been one of the best ways to grow strawberries. Prune those flowers off early, up until about May or so, even through June, if it's an everbearing variety, it's kind of up to you. Then let it flower. That's how you'll get all of this nice green growth, which then fuels a lot more strawberries down the line. As I stand up here, you can see one of the tallest sunflowers I've personally ever grown. I don't know the name. It might be Russian Mammoth, but needless to say, a lot of bee activity, a lot of visual beauty here, breaking up what would otherwise be a sort of a flat raised bed section. And then also a lot of bird activity in here, which when you see those birds, you know you're getting a lot of pest pressure. So you bring those pests in, you bring the birds in to counter the pests and you're in a good spot. Now I will show you, we show you everything here at Epic. So here's one of our sort of failed beds. Now the things that are left haven't failed. This is alyssum, fantastic crop. This is dark opal basil, which is one of the more beautiful sort of purple basils you'll see. But the thing that really didn't work out here were our tomatillos. They had some kind of nutrient deficiency, maybe nitrogen, but it's weird because these didn't have that deficiency. So what was going on? I've never had a great level of success growing tomatillos. It was a queen of Malinulco variety, which was kind of a longer one. I'm thinking maybe the variety just didn't work out for the area. But we always have failures here and we have successes. Another funny little failure I'll show you really quickly is if you take a look at these Japanese pickling cucumbers, we have some great cukes here and these ones are fantastic. But we did a little test for you guys and we tried to use one of those cucumber molds and turns out cucumbers are stronger than we thought because, you know, we only thought we had to put a couple of screws in here and it turns out it almost busted this mold. So while this does work, I think we need to be a little bit stronger with what we use. So over here, this is the other section of the front yard raised beds. I'll highlight a couple of weird plantings that we have going on right now. This one is Swiss chard surrounding an overwintered fish pepper. So fish pepper is a very, very classic variegated variety, meaning you can see how these leaves have little white flecks or sometimes even the leaves are fully white. So it's kind of like a houseplant. You get a variegated houseplant. Now what's interesting is the peppers themselves are also variegated. So if I can find one here, I'll rip one off. You can see how that color kind of striates throughout the pepper. So a really unique variety. The chard was just something we had lying around. So we put it in and of course it's now exploded. I want to call your attention now though to this squash. This is the center cut squash and it is one of our favorite squash to grow here at Epic. But you'll notice that this is starting to get some powdery mildew. So something that is probably the most common problem with squash or any plant in this family is that disease, powdery mildew. How do you deal with it? We've sort of taken a prey approach where we accept that it's going to come and we actually succession sow our squash. So by the time that this starts getting taken over, we're ready with another round. We don't really have to worry about too much of these control or prevention options. But if you want to, you can use things like milk diluted in water and give that a try. We'll do a full video on it sometime. Now over here, just, just beans, nothing too crazy, just more beans. But the production of these is starting to slow down a little bit. So what we're testing out is a method in which you actually kind of mow down the tops of your beans and let them regrow instead of succession sowing. We'll see if that works. Over here, of course, as a hedge, I've also just succession sowed some smaller beans in that lower corner right there. The craziest part though, to me about this front yard, is this tomato bed. This is four different tomato plants. We have two San Marzanos and two Roma tomatoes. Both of those are determinate varieties. So they're more of a bushing style tomato. Decided not to stake them up. And as you can see, they've gone absolutely crazy. None of them are quite ripe yet, but as you can see, there is a multitude of fruit on this plant. And I'm very, very excited to have a sauce day, probably on the Epic Homesteading channel, which you should probably subscribe to if you haven't already. The final thing up in this front yard I really want to highlight for you is this dwarf corn. This is a dwarf blue jade sweet corn. You know what? I'll see if I can pull one for you just to kind of show it off. And this is live and unscripted. So you're going to see if we've grown good corn or not. And you know what? I would say that we have. But you'll see a little problem that shows up in almost every corn we grow this season. There's a tiny little worm here at the top, which fortunately we caught this one early. It's only now starting to eat this one kernel. Let that guy go. A lot of the times people will just throw their corn away if they see that cause it's gross. I agree with you that it's gross, but all you need to do is just cut that tip off and the rest of it's completely fine. So this is definitely going to make it into the kitchen. And speaking of let's move on over to the orchard where we harvested a ton of fruit this month. Over here in the Epic Orchard, we have finally completed the citrus hedge. This is my grand experiment here saying to myself, can I plant citrus absurdly close together and grow them all in such a way where when I prune these, it'll become a wall of seasonal citrus with all different varieties down the line. So far we've gotten a lot of produce out of here. Blood oranges, caracara oranges, kumquats, lemons, limes. But I do want to highlight a couple of things I just planted. We have a Eureka lemon here. And then for my Filipinos out there, we have a calamondin or a calamansi, which is a fantastic tart orange type of fruit that really is tasty and very, very productive. But the real big winner, surprisingly for my climate here in San Diego guys, is what's going on right over here. Some of you might know if you're in a colder climate, these are stone fruit trees. This is a nectarine and this is a peach. And believe me when I tell you, we had some of the sweetest, most delicious and prolific peaches this year. And we even did a video on it on the Homestead channel, which I highly encourage you to check out. We got a little crazy, we got a little drunk, so to speak on these stone fruit because we were so excited at how vigorously these have grown. So the orchard is doing really, really well. Apples, pomegranates also coming out. But it also might be our best dragon fruit season yet. So let me show you that. Over here in Dragon Alley, actually, I think I'm forgetting something really quick. That's more like it. Dragon Daddy Kay is back to show off what is for sure the most productive dragon fruit season we've had yet here at the Homestead. This particular variety is called Sugar Dragon. It has a small fruit, but very tasty, very delicious. And as you can see, we have many, many flowers coming up. I can see about four or five, maybe even 10 little buds coming out. And if you look right here, this is the first almost ripe fruit. This is just starting to blush. It's been about 30 days since it flowered and this is a self-pollinating flower. So you don't have to do anything crazy. Let it flower and let it die and it'll produce a fruit on the back end of that, which is what you're seeing right here. So pretty soon we'll be doing a dragon fruit taste test. But man, it takes time with these beautiful plants. But a couple of years in, you'll start getting this type of production, especially if you use this type of dragon fruit trellis, which we've already shown you how to build on this channel. So now let's go in the backyard and check out the Epic Pond. Here in the backyard of the property, there's actually a lot going on. Before you even get to the pond, we have this Cavendish banana here. And I actually have two jujube varieties, Li and Lang that are producing fruit for the first time ever. So it's not super prolific, but hey, anytime you get that first fruit, it is a win in my book. But let's take a look at what's going on here at the Epic Pond. Of course, we put this in with the help of the folks over at Aquascape. And I have to say it's been one of the most pleasurable parts of being here in the backyard. We have six or seven koi. We actually lost a koi, but most of the rest of them are doing perfectly fine. And as you can see, there's a ton of beautiful aquatics that are growing in here, like these lilies. I have to say, they looked better earlier this summer. Their flowering season is starting to slow down, but these were creeping everywhere and throwing up gorgeous flowers throughout the entire June month. But then this other stuff, we have dwarf papyrus right here. I grew watercress in this area. We actually just had to reset it. It was so prolific. We turned it into some soup and we're probably going to grow it again pretty soon. But this pond has been incredible for bringing in more biodiversity here at the garden. I see sometimes things I don't want to see, like raccoons, but I also see all sorts of different birds coming in, as well as our neighborhood garden cat, Bobca, likes to come in. So it brings in all sorts of interesting biodiversity that I think has really good benefits as we go into this back garden over here, which I'm going to show you right now. So over here, what am I excited about? Mostly this sweet potato wine barrel idea that we had. I think this is going to fill in and look absolutely beautiful. We just showed you guys how we planted those. But over here, this is the first season, guys, in my gardening history that I have this many secondary seedlings that we started all the way from seed, ready to go to transplant in as we start to get some of our first summer harvests going. So I've got extra tomatoes, I have extra squash, melons, cucumbers, peppers. And something I'm extremely excited about is they're all hanging out in the new Epic 1020 tray, which is the most sturdy 1020 tray you're ever going to find. That's not out on the store yet. It will be soon. Needless to say, this is one of the most important things I think about being a gardener is working with time and making sure you're continuing to succession sow as the season goes. Especially for those of you watching with a short season, you need this stuff ready to go. Otherwise you're going to miss that transplant window and you just won't have anything to grow. So I'm excited that it looks like a jungle here on the seedling table. You might be wondering what these little poles are for. Well, it's San Diego, it can get kind of hot. We're actually going to frame up a little bit of a shade cover that's removable. So if it gets hot, we can pull that over and protect all these seedlings. But as you can see, some of these I probably need to transplant pretty soon. These are some more sunflowers that are going to go in pretty soon. Another final thing I'll show you is the way we water these. If you look at how we do it, this is another one of these epic bottom trays here. You just fill the bottom with water and let this soak up. So we just water this. It'll wick up through the bottom of these trays with large holes here. And then you don't have to worry as much about damping off disease. And you can also give yourself a little breathing room on watering and not being scared that your seedlings are going to dry out. So let's see where some of these seedlings are actually going to go here in the backyard. If you remember here in the backyard, we did the unthinkable. And we actually did till these eight mini in-ground raised beds. And I have to say it was one of the smarter things we did because we finally broke up that clay, incorporated some good organic matter. And now look at the production. We're not going to be tilling again, but the squash is throwing out an insane amount, so much so that I have to feed them to the chickens, which you'll see in a second. And I'm actually having my best year of eggplant production yet. You can see the plants are nice and vigorous. Something to remember, if you struggle with things like eggplants, tomatoes, or peppers, they're actually all in the same family. They're solanaceous crops and they like heat, but not all equally. So tomatoes like the least, peppers like more heat. And then eggplant you'll find really likes a lot of heat and will explode in growth as that midsummer heat starts to come in, which is exactly what you're seeing happen. But that being said, this small pepper bed is still throwing out a ton of production. Some of my favorite peppers in here are shishitos. And then Jacques, our resident garden hermit, actually smuggled some back from his trip to Bulgaria. He's full Bulgarian. So he brought some Bulgarian seeds and I have those in the back here and they've been incredibly productive. But this is just a small taste of the peppers we have here at the homestead. I'll show you the big patch and the tomatoes, which might be again, our best crop yet. So right here is the big pepper bed here at the homestead. So it's a much longer bed that I have five lines of drip irrigation on. And you can see what I've done. I have peppers down this row, peppers down the middle and peppers down the end. And what I've done in between is actually pepper in some zinnias crossing through. So I wanted a little beauty in here. Zinnias are a really easy productive cut flower that maybe they'll bring in some interesting pollinators or interesting sort of ecological benefits. But basically just spacing these peppers out at good increments. And I just tossed all sorts of different ones in here. So we'll see how this goes. As you can see, the tomatoes are coming along a little bit faster than the peppers. Peppers are just a slower growing crop. So in the front here, these are all dwarf tomatoes, but they're dwarf indeterminate tomatoes. So all of these should have the flavors and the beauty of an heirloom, but without that crazy height that you see. In fact, the crazy height, you're going to see on this back edge here, this is all our actual indeterminate tomatoes. So all of these are being trellised up with our Florida Weave system. We actually did a review last year in this exact same spot about three different tomato trellis methods. This year, I just wanted the easiest one. And that's the Florida Weave. It's also the cheapest. So these are starting to produce. But the craziest part about this guys is behind here is the first time I've ever built a specific trellis for berries. And I'm going to show you that right now. I'm very excited about it. This is something I've been waiting to do for a very, very long time. Something about building structures to hold in plants I just find really satisfying. So what we did in this back row here, so we made a whole new bed and I planted in blackberries and raspberries. So there's about 15 or so down this row, a couple of different varieties of each. But what you see here is this trellising system that we built to contain them. Cause these are cane crops. Cane crops, as the name implies, grow these sort of cane-like structures here. It kind of looks almost like a rose setup. And what they'll do is depending on if it's a primo cane or a flora cane, the fruit is produced either on the first or second year life of that cane, respectively. So these are mostly flora canes, meaning they'll grow a cane in year one and then they'll produce on that cane in year two. And after that you cut that cane off. But in the meantime, you need a way to actually contain all of that plant matter. Cause these things can go absolutely crazy. So what we did and this build is coming up soon here on the channel. So subscribe if you want to see it, is we built a cemented in post system that has this wire that will help keep all those canes contained so they don't spread all over the place. Might have to do something a little more to prevent them from spreading through the soil. Maybe that'll be for a different video, but I'm very excited to see raspberry production here at the homestead. And the final thing I'll say is just plant stuff wherever you have space, guys. I didn't really know what to plant here. So I threw some more random corn in and I threw some more random squash in. I'm going to get something out of it and that's all that matters. And you know what, it might even be for the chickens, which I'm going to show you right now. So here in the coop, I have to say I think we're getting close to having our very first Epic egg. I don't know which hen is going to do it. I have my suspicions, but let me take you inside and show you these girls. And you're going to have to forgive the mess because I have been feeding them a little bit from the garden. I've been feeding them a little food scraps and some of it they don't like as much. So come on in. You can see the squash graveyard here on the ground. So what they tend to do is pick out the middles of the squash like this. I in fact just threw this one in a couple of minutes ago and they've already done that. They don't really want to eat the outside. But let me introduce you to the girls. I don't think we've fully named all of them for you yet. And the ones at least on the screen, we have Butter who, look at her. She gets a little nervous sometimes. That's Butter. This is Gucci right here. This one is a silver-laced wine dot, still unnamed. So please let me know in the comments what you think we should name her. Down here, this gray one is Little Lav. Then this one is Lobster. She's the Rhode Island red. And then finally, where's the one that's, where's our girl? Oh, right here. This is Rufio. So why am I so excited about chickens as a gardener? Well, as you can see, they're a great recycling mechanism for, quiet Sterling. They're a great recycling mechanism for crops that maybe have gone a little bad or you just have too much of, or even just extra plant material. They will turn into chicken poop, which then turns into fertilizer eventually when you compost it down. So as you can see, they're looking to me for their next meal. So I better get out of here before I get eaten. And until next time guys, make sure to subscribe. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing. Hey girls. You want to hang out Lav? Nope. You want to hang out? Nope. Butter? Oh, okay. Lav, you gotta be. Lav, you got it. You're the nicest one. Okay. Well, there I go.