July 2023 Garden Tour - Growing Hundreds Of Pounds Of Food In My Backyard! Kansas Gardening

Good morning, guys, and welcome back to the garden. If you're new here, hi, I'm Brie. I live in Kansas Zone 6B, and today I'm gonna give you a tour of my garden here in the month of July. This is a series I do every single month to show you how different the garden looks every four weeks and also throughout the years. I've done this for a few years now, and it's really crazy to see how much this space has really evolved and how much I have changed as a gardener. So it's been really cool to do this series, and today I'm gonna give you a little bit more in-depth on what's been going on in the garden. So you can clearly see this garden is booming with life. July is honestly one of my favorite months in the garden. There is a lot to do. There's a lot to harvest. There's a lot to sow. As far as new seeds, I need to start getting ready for fall here in a week. July is just sometimes overwhelming, but you have to stop and take a moment and just appreciate how beautiful the garden space truly is. So that's what we're going to do today. So let's go ahead and just jump right in. All right, so first and foremost, we have our beautiful goldie honey bear sunflower. As you can see, it is already starting to die back, which I don't know how I feel about. This is my earliest year with blooms because this was a volunteer. This guy started showing up at the end of winter, I believe. I did have to cover it once because we did get cold. I covered it with a terracotta pot when it was really small. But as you can see, it is gorgeous. So even though these heads are dying back, one reason I love this sunflower is I will cut these heads off here pretty soon. I'm just waiting for them to die back. I'm going to try to save this sunflower head as long as the squirrels and birds don't take it because since this was a volunteer and it produced this beautiful sunflower, I really want to take seeds from it. I also just give these seeds to my chickens, but regardless, I got on a tangent here. So this will continue to bloom for about six to eight weeks, as long as you continue to deadhead it, just like any type of zinnia or anything else would in your garden. These don't last as long, but they still last long for a sunflower because typically most big sunflowers have one big head and then they die back. And it always made me really sad. I do have a few of them planted over here though. I have Mongolian, not Mongolians. I have Russian mammoths, a few planted over there. They're not as big as some of the ones I've planted in years past, but this beauty is just so gorgeous. We actually have another sunflower blooming, but this is a variety called Paintbox Bouquet and it's beautiful. It kind of branches. So as you can see right there, we'll get closer to that one in a little bit. It kind of branches just like the Goldie does. So I'm really curious to see how this variety plays out because if it acts like this one, where I get continuous blooms for a while, I'll be really happy. I also have another Goldie right here. So in the front here, I really like to do a lot of balanced symmetry. Unfortunately, this Zinnia does not look as gorgeous as this one, but it's starting to fill out. I had Chamomile right here that died back and that's why this spot here looks a little bare, but I have a Goldie and a Goldie. Obviously they're not timed at the same time because this was a volunteer and I planted this one like probably six to eight weeks behind it. But I think I might really like it because once this one's really dying back and dead, I might have to cut it back and then I might still have this one blooming, which will make me happy. One thing I've been doing this year is just sowing some flowers throughout the space. So hopefully I get blooms throughout fall. These are called Drumstick Flowers. Really cool. They have a really thick stem, really pretty to add to bouquets. This is the Queenie Lime Orange series. So one thing I love about this Zinnia here is this one here, this one here, and also these two here, they are all the Queenie Orange Lime Zinnia series. And they all look so different from the next. I have to say this one right here in the front is probably my absolute favorite with how beautiful and pretty these colors are, but I love how different they all look, but yet they all coordinate. So right here on this little trellis here, aw, I haven't had a squirrel mess with anything. And then yesterday I caught a squirrel with my tomato plant yesterday, but I'm starting to get some really beautiful, gorgeous tomatoes off of this. So this is the Pink Bumblebee variety. This is a variety I have now grown for three years. I love this variety. It has, here, I can pick one because there are some really ripe ones I can go ahead and get. Let me get this one here. So it doesn't look super red, obviously, but as you can see, it has this really pretty marbling to it. It's just red, orangey, yellow. But the moment you cut inside this tomato, it is so deep red and so flavorful. It's so good. I actually just shared my summer pasta recipe on Shoreform. It's one of my favorite things to make this time of year. And it's one of the reasons I literally grow cherry tomatoes. But I love this arch for cherry tomatoes. This is really going to fill out really over the next month. I'm sure by the time I see you guys next month for the garden tour, this is probably going to be touching. These tomatoes are really starting to take off, but I've already got a lot of tomatoes off of here. But as we continue to move on, I just have all of my peppers here. So I have paprika and bell peppers, and then I have cayenne, serranos, and jalapenos over here. I must say my peppers this year are doing amazing. So I've had some weird years with peppers the last few years. For bell peppers, I have not done well the last few years. I had some serious beginner luck the first few years of doing bell peppers. And ever since, I don't know what's been going on, but I have not had good luck with bell peppers. But this year, they are beautiful. So I'm really hoping I'm lucking out. One thing I'm really impressed with the peppers is I grow a paprika variety called the Hungarian Magar. A lot of people ask me where I get these seeds. They're from Renee's garden. I really went searching for a paprika pepper variety. So paprika powder is just bell pepper varieties ground up, but I wanted a certain pepper to dry. And this Hungarian Magar dries very, very fast. I've done it in my dehydrator. And then this last week, I just did it in my freeze dryer. And I really, really like both outcomes of them. It obviously gets a little bit more powdery in the freeze dryer, but this year, third year growing them, they are beautiful. They're big, they're plump. The plants look gorgeous. I'm starting to get so much abundance. So even though this year didn't start out the best with peppers, I will admit, I actually had less peppers go out in the garden than I originally planned. I actually have three more pepper plants right here that are little babies that don't have anything on them quite yet. But even then, I have sowed peppers like three or four times and I had terrible germinations with jalapenos. I had multiple of my paprika plants end up dying on me. So I wanted to plant out close to 12 paprikas. And I believe I have close to, close to nine, one, two. I ended up planting out three more. I got three more paprikas planted. So we'll see if I, one, two, three, four, five. So I only have nine, no, I have 10. I have 10 paprika plants, but I currently only have seven that are actually producing anything. I really wanted 12 in the ground. Because this last year, I got really close to a year's worth of paprika powder. And paprika powder, I literally use twice a day, minimum, most of the time. Breakfast, dinner, paprika powder is going on something. So I was really happy that I got all the way to May. I really wanna get a whole year's worth of paprika powder. And I don't know if that's gonna happen or not, but this whole tangent was about how the peppers are bigger and they're producing better this year. So maybe having less plants will work in my favor. So as we move along, we have various things that have really changed over the last few weeks that I will pull you guys closer for. So strawberries are actually starting to produce again, which I do need to check this because I have gotten out of habit of checking my strawberries. And last week I finally pruned up this strawberry bed, which needed to happen for weeks. And I noticed I had strawberries starting to ripen. So I have everbearing strawberries. I can't remember the one variety I planted, but the one is called Ozark Beauty. Really beautiful strawberries. So let's see here. Oh, it's looking like we might, oh, wow. Okay, so I think this second wave might be better than the first wave. I'm not gonna pick, oh wait, actually I said, here I am jinxing myself saying, I'm not gonna pick any others, but I see one in the corner of my eye. Actually, I'm gonna leave that for later. I might be making some more strawberry scones here. Look at this beautiful, beautiful berry. So I'm starting to get more berries and I'm very excited about it. So as we continue to move on here, we have all of my carrots, which are doing really well. I have two secessions as we are talking here and I actually started to pull out some of these. So let's find a carrot that we want. Ooh, this one looks pretty. Ooh, she is beautiful. So I need to go ahead and pull this round of carrots and get it preserved up. I don't know exactly what I wanna do yet. I'm gonna try to leave a lot of them just probably in the fridge. Carrots also do really, really well just staying in the ground during fall and winter. The ground acts as like a little insulation. So I love growing carrots in the fall and winter cause they also taste so much better. They get a little bit sweeter with the cold. You'll notice that with a lot of any of your cool weather crops, but this year my carrots are beautiful. So this was the first year I tried a pelleted seed. And as you can see, they're spaced out really nicely. My next round of carrots, I couldn't get my hands on any more pelleted seed, but I had older seed from last year that wasn't pelleted, but I'm probably just gonna have to do a lot more thinning out. But overall really impressed. I can't remember the name of this. If I can find where I originally set it, I'll put the name on the screen. Cause I believe this is a hybrid variety. So as we move on, you can see all of this somewhat empty space. I did get it replanted. I have little seedlings popping up here. Those are some more Goldies. I told you guys I was planting more Goldies. Oh, there's another Goldie. I also planted another round of Queenie lime orange zinnias as well in this bed. So as I mentioned in the other trellis, I really like to have symmetry. So on this side here, on both sides, I have San Marzano tomatoes. As you can see, they're really starting to loop over as well. I need to tie these up a little bit better, but I was having a slight issue with the tomatoes. I was having a little bit of blossom end rot issues. And then I got it under control. I actually ended up feeding most of my tomatoes with garden lime, just because my soil is definitely just needing more than it has needed in previous years. And doing that soil testing and amending really helped, but I was just getting a lot of blossom end rot out of nowhere. And then I treated it with garden lime. And as you can see, and then right here, I have another bed of green beans. So I have green beans here and here, and there's a few tomato plants right there and also some more tomato plants. So that's my second succession of my Roma varieties. And that's the last of my tomatoes I planted. They're starting to fruit up. I'll show you guys, but another round of green beans. So if you want a lot of green beans, you have to plant a lot of green beans. And I actually think I might pull my cucumber here pretty soon. We'll get on that in a minute. But here I have some drumstick flowers, more Goldie honey bears, and then zinnias right in the middle. I just keep going off on other things, but that's the symmetry of the trellis. Then I have all of my Echinacea. My yarrow is starting to die back and fully going to seed at this point. I did cut back a good amount of my yarrow, and you can see I'm getting another round of second blooms. These are perennials for me. I also have some onion chives right here that I cut back as well, but this little space has really helped out. So this has been established. This is year two, and it's just a really nice space to dedicate to all the bees and the butterflies. They love, love, love Echinacea. I actually need to go through, and when this starts doing another round of blooms, I'm actually gonna start harvesting some of it for tea. I really love Echinacea tea. Over here though, I also have a bunch of other stuff that I feel like I never show you guys. So I have some oregano here that I really need to harvest up. So this is a straw flower, really, really pretty. I also have a straw flower right here. This is probably one of my favorite planters. I don't know if I've ever shown this on a garden tour, but it's a little Volkswagen bus planter, and I've never known what to plant in it, but this is a dwarf variety of straw flower that I kind of have throughout. I actually have two more in between those little tomatoes that I didn't mention up there, but I've been really, really liking it. It's the first year I've ever grown straw flower, and they're really fun. But yeah, that's probably one of my favorite things in my garden. Then we have some polar bear zinnias, which speaking of the polar bear zinnias, look at these. So these are all from the same seed packet. I've had this seed packet for years now, and I have never, never had a polar bear zinnia give me this crazy of a bloom before. Do you see the difference in the size of the heads of the zinnias? These things are absolutely massive this year, and I don't know what's different, honestly. I have another red zinnia here, and then I need to plant out a few more newer plants. I had some calendula there, and all of my calendula ended up dying, but I am gonna plant another round, I think, of calendula, because it is a little bit frost resistant, so you can get away with planting it more toward fall, and not just die it back when all of this dies. So before we get into the trellis, I have to show you guys this. This is my compost pile, and this is either a pumpkin or a melon or something. I have no idea, but it's something in the lines of something that vines. But you can see how crazy that is just sprouting. So as you guys can see, the trellis is going so crazy. If you go back to June's garden tour, this was barely touching. I think it just started to touch. And as you can see, all of the plants are going crazy. I have full-on watermelons. I have cantaloupes. I have some crazy luffas. Do you see how big this luffa is? This is insane. I can't wait to see when my first luffas will dry. I was looking back last year, and it was around the end of August, beginning of September, when I started to get luffas to dry. But I have luffas. I have a honey nut squash variety over here. This is a butternut squash hybrid that is actually vine borer resistant, and it's so good. It's smaller. It has a little bit more dense of a flavor. I love to throw it in with potatoes. Just added a really nice little element to your potato. Beautiful. I really like this, because one of them goes perfect with one potato or two potatoes, and yum. But yeah, I have full-on watermelons. These cucumbers are insane. My cantaloupes are cantaloupin'. Cantaloupe grows so fast. Out of nowhere, I had a few cantaloupe on the vine, and then they're like, boom, cantaloupe. But yeah, the little trellis is just, oh, this is honestly one of my favorites when you walk through and you can just kind of see everything. So one reason I love growing vertically is you can obviously see underneath the leaves a lot easier. So I have already found a few squash bug clusters that I have taken off, but growing any type of vining crop like this obviously allows you to see pests a lot easier than having to lift up a bunch of stuff. Oh, well, that's a honey nut squash that didn't get pollinated. I need to cut that off. That's happened a few times. They really don't get any bigger than about the size of your hand. So it gives you a little bit better size perspective. You can see here's a few little babies. It's just, this plant's going crazy. It's actually starting to loop in the front. Look at this. It's a loofah flower with three, four bees in it all at once. But yeah, this whole trellis always has so many bees around it. But here's a watermelon. So this is a sugar baby watermelon. This is my first year growing watermelon, guys. I'm really excited about it. So those are the only ones I have at the moment. I believe, though, we are starting to get another round starting to form. Here's some of my cantaloupe. It's definitely not as big as last year yet, but these really just started to come on. Okay, so with the cucumbers, they've done really well. You might be able to tell, though, they are starting to lose a little bit of coloring in their leaves. So this was a hybrid variety. I can't remember if it's any type of disease-resistant or pest-resistant. I can't remember. It's still producing really beautiful cucumbers, but it is starting to not look as hot. And honestly, I don't know if I need any more cucumbers. I've already canned a good amount. I have fermented. I'm on like my, what, fifth fermented jar? And I don't eat pickles, okay? This is all my husband. So he has a lot of pickles to go through. And honestly, dealing with cucumbers is probably one of my least favorite things in the garden. You really have to be on top of your cucumbers. You have to check them daily, kind of like okra. You can't see this okra at the moment, but I'm sure I need to go through. Yeah, I have like four or five okra I need to pick. Okra is one of those that you have to look at multiple times a day. There's a few crops. Zucchini's another one where if you do not keep your eyes on it, they'll get too big too fast. And then they're not the ideal size, especially when you are doing any type of pickling with cucumbers. I'll probably let this give me another round or two. I might let it go another week. I would like to plant the end of this trellis with some pole beans. And if I want to do that, I need to get them in the ground here pretty soon. Another round of green beans. Like I mentioned, you had to plant a lot of beans to get a lot of beans. And I would like to plant this end. So you can see everything's going to start climbing this way as far as the trellis goes. My loofah plant already comes to right here, halfway. The loofah will come all the way down toward the end of the year. As much as I don't want to take all of this off because I love having privacy. And that's one reason I love growing vertically. I might be able to get away with it here in a few weeks because everything else is going to be filling out that much more. I don't know. Maybe I'll leave one side and plant one side beans. That way I'm not just overwhelmed with cucumbers. And I make these one cucumber sandwiches. So take note, if you are a sandwich person, these are delicious. It's cream cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, onion sprouts, oil, vinegar, oregano and pepper. Oh, and garlic powder. So, so good. Am I missing a vegetable? It's such a good little sandwich. So I don't think I have any to pick today. I was like, what's in my pocket? It's that tomato. But I don't think I have anything to pick today. This one's kind of funky. I really haven't gotten many funky looking cucumbers out of this batch, but I'm gonna go throw this to the chickens. Guess while I throw this over to the girls, I can talk about this space. So this was my area where I had all my broccoli and my cabbage, my wildflowers. It has officially died back. And last night, actually, I rearranged this fence to where they would have access to that whole area and to give their old space a break. I've been giving this one area a break now for a little over a week. I was just trying to figure out a way where I could position their fence, where I could scoop it around. I finally figured it out last night. But the area where I've already given a break, it is sprouting like crazy. So my whole game plan going into fall and winter is to push them in an area and then move them to another area and give them breaks to where they have access to grass like every other week or every few weeks. They are going to have so much fun. They were so excited this morning and I love seeing my girls so happy. So here is some of the okra. You can see it's just now starting to really take off now that we're getting into some of this hotter, hotter weather. We've been having a really cool summer so far. Yeah, I have some little babies going on. So I also have my two elderberry plants over here. They were getting bombarded by sun. And with them being in these little pots and not being planted out yet, they need a lot more TLC. I don't want their stuff to start drying out too much because they do like to have moist soil. And I was starting to get a little bit of dieback and I was like, I'm not letting these die before they get planted. So this elderberry here is called Instant Karma. It has this beautiful variegated leaves. So I'm really hyped about this beautiful plant. Then this one here is a black lace. You can actually see there are some berries left on it from when I bought it at the nursery. All right, so now we have my in-ground tomato space. So I have a few different varieties here. On my A-frame trellis, I have some more San Morzano's. Over here, I believe these ones are my Plum Regals. Let's find out. Yep, so these ones here are my Plum Regals, which I actually haven't gotten a single ripe one from yet. Wait, I take that back. There's one right now that looks like I could probably pick it later on today or here in a few days, depending on when I wanna pick it. But the most of my tomatoes I've recently been getting are from my other variety called Supremo. So the Supremo and the Plum Regal, I believe, are both hybrid paste Roma varieties. And what's interesting about the Supremo is, I don't know if it's gonna get much bigger than what it currently is. It's kind of just stopped, which I've had determinate varieties before. But the one thing that I feel like that's different with this determinate variety, I mean, maybe we're just in a little stretch. I don't know. But they haven't really grown much, or it really seems like those are like a true determinate variety. So a determinate variety will put on most of its fruit all at once and ripen pretty closely all at the same time. Then an indeterminate will continue to put on fruit and continue to ripen and continue to grow. So I'll be really interested to see how those play out. I have some beautiful tomatoes coming off these plants. I really wanted these two varieties for production, and I believe a little bit of disease ability, because I believe the one, if not both, are late blight resistant, and they've been really great. So really liking it so far. I'm really hoping I get my tomato redemption year. Last year, with how hot it was, we really didn't get that great of tomatoes. Last year was honestly the worst year I've ever had out of my entirety of gardening with tomatoes. I recently just started to pick a few. I think I've probably picked like 20 or 30 like paste variety tomatoes. So one thing I like to do with my tomatoes is as they're starting to trickle through, I will throw them in freezer bags. Once I get enough of them or more toward winter when life starts to slow down a little bit, is I will do a huge batch of tomato sauce. So I realized I mentioned onions, and then I really didn't talk about onions. So I harvested my onions like two weeks ago now. I have a video. Harvest day was a mess, but I had a good problem, not necessarily a bad problem. My harvest was better than I anticipated, and I just didn't have room for as many onions as I ended up growing or producing. So this is my third year growing onions from seed, and honestly, I couldn't be more ecstatic with how this year turned out. I did a handful of things differently. I mentioned it in that video. I will tag that video up above in the description box below if you're interested in hearing all of my rant about onions, but I got onions that were the size of softballs, and I grew them from seed. So I was really happy about that. But as we continue on, I mentioned all of the green beans, and then we have all of my potatoes. So these two beds here are Kennebec potatoes. So Kennebec potatoes are a blight-resistant potato. This was something I really wanted to seek because last year, my potatoes got hit with blight, and I had to pull them quite a bit early, and I really didn't get much out of my potato harvest. Very small potatoes. So these roughly take 100 to 120 days to full maturity, and we are currently sitting into the mid to late 90-day range on as far as these go and being in the ground. They're doing good. I'm hoping this is the year I finally get good potatoes, just like the onions. I feel like this year, I've really started to hone in on some of those crops that I've just never been good at growing. I should probably knock on wood right now, so I'm probably jinxing myself with these potatoes. But yeah, here's a little bit closer of a look on all of the dieback that's been going on. You can clearly see this bed did not fill out as much as this bed did. So the differences between these beds, these were ones I cut up. So these were cut-up seed potatoes, and these were whole seed potatoes. So I'll be really interested to see what the difference is between the beds. So the last bed I have not talked about here is my sunflower bed, which I have a variety of goldies, this paintbox bouquet variety, which there's a little bee. I really like this paintbox bouquet. You get these beautiful pinks, and then you also get more of a yellowy orange. This one was full yellow, and it's fully dying back. Let's see if we got any seeds. Starting to get some seeds here. But yeah, I have some goldies here. I got these beauties, and then I also have some bigger, taller sunflowers, the Russian mammoths, which they don't look terribly too big compared to some of the ones I've grown in the past, but they'll still add like a little height difference. I planted them, I don't know what this one is. I'll be curious, because I thought I did paintbox, and I thought it was paintbox, goldie, and then the big ones, but lookie here. We have some ladybug larva. A few other light mentions. We got some thyme, a strawberry plant that I'm trying to save from when I pruned up my strawberries. This is calendula. I obviously need to toss, that does not look hot. Some dill, that is finishing going to seed. Peppermint, regular culinary sage, and then I also actually have some white sage. I'm gonna make my own little white sage bundles from. Smells so good. I am a lover of white sage, and my blueberry plant. I honestly feel like this garden is probably one of the best gardens I've ever had in the month of July. It is so beautiful, it's thriving, and you can just tell how happy it is. I really feel like doing a soil test this year was the game changer. I've said this so, so much, but I feel like getting my soil tested has been just the overall game changer on how this garden has been looking, producing, the health of it. I've been having a lot less disease, but I also have to contribute the disease factor into choosing a few different hybrids this year because I really wanted to find disease resistibility. I didn't want to spray my garden, so last year was another thing. So beneficial insects. Last year, I completely stopped spraying any type of neem or organic pesticide other than maybe a plant every here or there. This year, I haven't sprayed anything on my garden, and the beneficial bugs are just thriving. I really have been really hands off, minus just making sure everything is pruned up, getting good airflow, and again, just keeping my soil in check. So doing the soil test has just been a game changer, and the only thing I have done outside of soil testing and amending my soil was add some worm castings. I've added worm castings throughout the space twice since, what, March? And honestly, I'm really, really happy with how this garden has looked. But either way, guys, I hope you enjoyed getting a little bit closer look into the garden in the month of July. August is another favorite month around here, so I can't wait to show you guys the garden then. Thanks for watching today. We'll see you in the next one. Bye.