Garden Tour: Come Explore with Me!

Hi everyone. Today I'm going to do a little bit different style of video than I normally do. Usually I'll dive pretty deeply into research on a specific topic and then share that with you all but I've been getting asked a lot lately for a garden tour just because people are curious about how I have my bed set up since I have several different kinds of beds set up. I've got in-ground and I've got raised bed and I also have a little patio type garden so I thought that I would honor those requests and fight the introvert in me and try to do a garden tour and just kind of go off the cuff. Now my initial thought was this is not the right season to do a garden tour because I am in between the summer and the fall garden and if any of you have gardens of your own you know how messy it can be. I've got some of that dreaded Bermuda grass that's sprouting up all over the place that's taken advantage of the extra moisture in my irrigated beds and I've also got some summer things that are pretty ratted and tattery and those are not looking their best right now but then I've also got some beds that I've already cleared out so between all of that as well as the overgrown squash that's overtaking everything right now it's a little bit messy. But in the spirit of trying to give an honest look at what gardening is like all year round with pests and diseases and weeds and mistakes and failures as well as successes and harvests I want to take you along with me and show you how I have my garden set up and what the state of affairs is now in mid-October. So this is the state of my stock tank garden right now this is an area right behind south side of my house and so since it's south facing it does really well in the winter. I have overwintered peppers here by accident with no protection and I have grown things without covering all summer long but this area used to be just a really shabby corner that was totally unusable. There was a big oleander bush here and this was just a weedy dusty yucky patch so what we did is we took up some of the flagstone because there was this really weird flagstone path and we made the stock tank garden and these stock tanks were in my old house. I had a little tiny house right near the U of A and there was no yard basically and this is how I gardened but I emptied all of the soil out and I brought these stock tanks with me two years ago when we moved to this house. So I will show a little bit better picture of this what it looked like before and then after we built it so that you can see what the flagstones and stuff looked like because right now it's being encroached upon by this crazy squash that goes all the way out all the way back to the back of the garden. Also this Bermuda grass is going to make me lose my mind so it's supposed to look like just a flagstone path here but this Bermuda grass even though we put down some landscape fabric which was permeable by water as well as sand and the rocks this Bermuda grass is just coming up so I have to get rid of this as I empty out these beds for the fall stuff I'm going to be having to tackle this too. Let's just do a quick walk through here got this pistache tree that was here so we kept it because it provides shade for our little table here but I've got one stock tank there this fountain was also here so we kept that just because the birds actually like to come drink from that which is nice but yeah I've got I think six of these two by four oval stock tanks and then I've got two big round ones so right now they've just got some pretty tattery tomatoes that have definitely looked better but I do have a lot of ripe tomatoes in there if you can tell some beans that are kind of finishing up it's definitely messy right now and I've got these are the jalapeno peppers that I said had overwintered from last year so they had no protection at all so these are just loaded with these really yummy pumpkin spice and lemon jalapenos red and orange and yellow and I've gotten so many off of those so I've got these round stock tanks that are pretty big and I have got tomatoes in here that are doing super well I'm starting to get my second flush of tomatoes for the fall season and just around the edges I have some green beans and these are the jade green beans and they are just doing so so well so if you look underneath here you can see all of these green beans just hanging on there and these are huge green beans too let me see if I can grab one for you but really nice really long green beans so those are gonna be part of our dinner but in the middle I've got these little tomatoes um just cherry ones which are kind of getting overgrown and huge but that is okay with me because that means more tomatoes this is a view of what that round and very overgrown tomato and green bean filled stock tank looks like I cleared this out I had my tomatillos in here because I like growing them separately they just take over the space so I wanted to kind of isolate them I had planted some seeds in here for kale and lettuce and radishes and all those types of cool season things but I failed to cover it and the birds pretty much ate all of my little sprouts it's very sparse in here so I'm going to have to reseed this and then cover it like I should have to begin with but this Bermuda grass is just coming through everywhere let's move on to the in-ground beds I'm going to show you uh the one that's most overgrown at this point these beds are about 28 to 32 feet long we staggered them so the back one I've got three long beds the back one is 28 feet then followed by a 30 foot bed and then the one in front is a bit longer than that and that is 32 feet so these are supposed to be for things that are a lot bigger that aren't going to fit very well in my little four by four square foot garden beds so let's go check those out now it's probably hard to see because it is so crazy but I thought my um optimistic self in the spring thought it would be a great idea to plant just these little sweet zinnias all along the edges but these little sweet zinnias some of them are close to five feet tall um actually let's go check out how tall they are so the sun is really bright right now but I am five foot nine to put that into perspective and this zinnia is just a little bit taller than I am so definitely the idea I had of these sweet little zinnias um you know just along the edges of my garden beds is was definitely optimistic because they got so crazy but I am not complaining because they have been really beautiful and they have attracted so many different kinds of insects and pollinators so um they've actually been really lovely and I have gotten into the habit of picking myself a bouquet every Sunday and putting it on either on my husband's desk or on my desk or on our dining room table and that's been really really nice so this these are my three beds believe it or not so this is the first one and this is the second one and this is the third one so let's take a look at what those look like before and then when I first planted them and then after and you can see what amazing growth I've had this summer this first bed is the 28 foot bed and this is what I call my bean row so I've got four foot cattle paneling up here connected to t-posts along the way these are a type of bean that I actually grew from seeds that I got from Rancho Gordo um he sells those with the intention of you eating them but since they're all heirloom beans you can plant them too and these are called bio beans and they were so delicious that I saved some of the seeds and planted them and I planted them last year for the first season but then I had such a great crop that I planted them again this year from seeds that I saved and they are late bloomers so I am just now getting some of these delicate blooms off of these these vines and I thought last year no way they're going to beat the frost but they did and so I'm hoping that they will again this year as you can see all the way along it's flanked by zinnias and I had planted zinnias on purpose um season before last but all of these are from volunteer seeds that had fallen so these are bonus flowers which the butterflies and I have certainly appreciated so in this tangle of zinnias and spent amaranth here I've got my shade structure still put up um I have a video all about that that you can check out I will link it here but I will probably remove the shade structure the shade cloth at least I may leave the posts in place um maybe not next week but the week after because the temperatures are still supposed to be in the high 90s and I want to protect those tomatoes for as long as I need to but let me climb over the squash this bed is 30 feet and along the edges I planted marigolds and I also planted some jalapenos and other kinds of peppers because those are really low growing in the back I've got tomatoes the second round for us in Arizona and in the very back I have on this other edge I have got basil which is starting to flower and that's fine because the bees really like it so I want to make sure they have what they need since the zinnias are starting to fade but these jalapenos are going crazy so all the way along this is my tomato bed all the way down and this monster of a bed that you can't even tell it looks like a jungle I may have been a little too exuberant in my polyculture efforts to mix in all kinds of different things but the squash took over the corn suffered the zinnias thrived and but all in all I think that it was a really successful effort I've gotten a lot of tomatoes a lot of little miniature pumpkins out of here they're called Jack B Littles in fact here's one here they just keep putting off these little adorable little pumpkins here which is super cute so I've got a bunch of these on my table already but I've got all kinds of tomatoes you can see maybe some of them here little tomatoes so cute and I've got some beans that I now realize were a mistake to put in here because they are just taking over everything we'll see they've got blooms on them if I get any beans off of them but I definitely will not be doing that next year so that is the third bed so in this crazy bed which I'm sure you can't see is the squash this crazy squash is growing up onto my patio garden it actually originates way over here and it is growing from all the way over here all the way to the very back fence back there so let's go see what that looks like I planted the squash in the spring and then I failed to label it so I actually am not quite sure what it is so I guess I'll see once the pumpkins get ripe or the squash so I have one right here and it's a big pumpkin I know you probably can't tell the size of it but that is a big big pumpkin and I'm so excited about it and I actually found the name of it I guess I did label it after all and it's called a I'm going to butcher this I'm sure but a Yomi Saguake I think is how you say that but that could be totally wrong I'll put the text on the screen for you so that you can see but it is climbing the walls climbing the trees and going all the way to the back all right I am hiding behind this tree right here just to show you the other beds because the sun is high in the sky I got out here a little too late and it's really hard to see on camera because the light's pretty harsh but we're going to turn this around and look at my 4x4 beds these were my original garden beds I started with just four of these 4x4 beds at the very beginning before I put anything else in so these are my original beds and as most gardeners know one thing leads to another and you end up with um I don't know 12 beds instead of four which is what I ended up with so I have 12 four feet by four feet beds I use a square foot gardening method for these I have a little grid that I built out of just four foot garden stakes and some uv resistant zip ties and I can move that from bed to bed when I want to plant them and it's already measured so I only had to do it once and make one of those grids which is a lot cheaper and a lot less work so let me show you what these 4x4 beds look like so this is one of the beds I just put in while my husband and I and my son just put in these irrigation grids I did not have irrigation in these beds until a couple of weeks ago so I was watering these all by hand twice a week using flood irrigation so I will probably talk about this installation soon it's not finished we tried to get it in as quickly as we could but I'm going to bury the feeder lines I just haven't done that yet so the only thing that will be visible once I'm finished is these grids the rocks that you see were all here when I bought the house so I just gathered them up and used them as edging I dug these beds so that they're four feet wide and four feet long as I said and I dug down about six inches removed six inches of the native soil and then put in compost and mixed them together I have a video about that as well it's one of my first videos at the time I was filming under the name little mission garden which I changed quite a while ago to sow Arizona as you know but you can find that in one of my earliest videos maybe a little hard to see but let me show you this grid and so it's a square grid I took four foot garden stakes and I zip tied them together so these are uv resistant zip ties I actually did my first ones with regular zip ties and the sun completely dried them out and they broke so I have one two three four foot stakes going horizontally and then vertically I have three more so I just measured out one foot so I did one foot and I made a mark one foot and made a mark all the way down in the same going in the other direction and then zip tied them together so let me show you what they look like when you put them in the garden so I just take this grid when I'm ready to plant and I lay it down into my garden bed hopefully you all can see this the sun is really bright right now and I know it might be hard to differentiate these are the irrigation lines these brown ones but each of these green squares will give me a perfect one foot section and then I use the square foot gardening method in here which allows for a lot of things in a small space then when I'm done planting this bed I will just simply lift it up and move it to the next bed that way I have less materials and less work because I only made one of these one of the projects that I want to try doing over this fall and winter is using just one single square foot gardening bed and trying to plant kind of like a salad garden or something like that that I have greens or lettuce or radishes or things like that that anybody could use in a small space so that that way you could see how much you can actually grow in one of these beds so you don't have to have 12 if you have a tiny little yard and just enough soil to just do one in ground bed it's way cheaper than investing in the materials for an above ground bed or buying stock tanks like I did if you choose not to build one or what have you so if you're on a budget in a small space or maybe new to gardening and you want to start small this is a great solution so I'm going to share that with you in a later video let me know if that's something that you'd be interested in but I think it would be really fun to show just how much you can grow in one of these for instance one of those little one foot squares in one of those beds you can plant nine green bean plants which provides a lot of green beans if you think about it last but not least are the triangle beds that I'm using these are also in ground beds they are not the long beds like the three I showed you at first and they're definitely not the four by four beds they're a pretty weird shape but it was our effort to try to use up the last bit of space we put these in late last fall and so this was the first year that I planted in them the soil still needs a little bit of work but the cowpeas did amazing as cowpeas do they totally took over the space and I've got so many cowpeas that I have to shell and store so that was really great but let me show you what these look like it's maybe a little hard to see because I've got some sorghum some dried sorghum leaves but this is the smallest triangle bed and it is definitely a really weird shape but this is the space left over and I could just get one more tiny little bed in so I had to make it a triangle to fit it I grew a ton of zinnias and okra and a bunch of zucchini in here I've still got some okra some of the last bit of the season that's growing and it's starting to produce so hopefully I'll get a few pods off those before the frost the poor zinnias are definitely the worst for the wear but let's look over here so this is a big triangle and you all may not be able to see it on camera but trust me I will try to show you the before stages of this so that you can see what the shape was like once again I used some of these rocks that were around as you can see this Bermuda grass this is going to be a serious job for me because it has creeped into the beds I even put landscape fabric down just around the beds along with wood chips but that did not stop it so I have cleared out all of the cowpeas and the popcorn that I grew in here so the last remaining things I'm waiting on are these pumpkins these are called the Magdalena big cheese from native seeds amazing for the desert if you want to try to grow those doesn't look great right now but this was a super super productive bed I've got some more zinnias here and I've got some of these pole beans these are runner beans these are called the bumblebees the carpenter bees love the blooms on these and they don't bloom until late kind of like the other beans I showed you they have the most beautiful red blooms and the carpenter bees love them so much and they are finally starting to hit their stride I know they look a little ragged but I will get seeds off of these believe it or not they are just late to the party so just like with people and their life transitions which can be very messy the transitions between seasons in the garden can be really messy too I will do another garden tour in another season and I will also add some before pictures so that you can actually see what the garden beds look like and the layout that I'm using because I know that it's really hard to see right now it is a jungle please let me know in the comments if you like this more informal style I don't mind doing garden tours in fact it's really fun to share it with you all so if you would like to have more tours in the future and a more informal style just let me know I hope that that helps stimulate some ideas for you and what you can do in your space thank you so much for following along and letting me share my very messy garden with you and I look forward to sharing more with you very soon I'm Kara from Sow, Arizona until next time happy gardening