The Spring Garden is EXPLODING! 🏡🤯

I'm back my friends without Jacques, but today we don't need him because why? I have my Irish sweater on. I'm rocking my Irish fisherman era vibe today because I want to take you around the garden. It's spring. We're very, very close to the official first day of spring. I'm going to take you around and show you some of the things I'm doing right now, but also some of the improvements that I want to make in the coming three months, because this really is the time. This is the time to buckle down, get your plan going and make sure you know how you're going to maximize your garden. So let's start out in the backyard, but first a little more love for this fit. This is from the Aran Islands in Ireland, Aran Island. Look at this. It's, you know, I got my own pattern. So here in the back bed, right next to the mural, we have the peas. These have finally come up. I tried this last year and it didn't work out that well, mostly because the epic thickies over there ate all of them. But what I like about it is this mesh right here. What the trellis system we built out last year allows us to do is modify for different growing conditions. So for peas, obviously with tendrils, they're going to want to come up something like a net. So we're able to do that with just a couple eye hooks. But once tomato season comes on, we have eye hooks up there that will just drop down and we'll do single or double liter tomatoes in this exact same area. The next thing I have going on is this chard. We plant a little chard every fall, maybe late winter, just because it provides a little color in the garden and we plant it on the backside of the garden. So looking at the wall over here because it's, it's a backdrop. It sort of backstops the garden with a little bit of color. I don't eat a ton of it. It's almost like an edible ornamental for me, but I still recommend you give it a shot because it grows easy and it's very long lasting in the garden. It can tolerate a lot of cold. So I might eat maybe ahead of this per, per season, per few months, but that's fine because I still like the look. It's a huge potato and onion year in the garden this season. So what I have is this triangle section is all potatoes. There's Charlotte, there's Norland, and there is Sarpomera in here. All planted about 18 inches apart or so. So that's potato bed number one. And then here's garlic bed number one. So there's like so much garlic in this garden right now. It's crazy guys. So I have a few varieties here. These are all the smaller cloves that I reserved for just seeing what would happen. I also interplanted some leeks in here. You can tell the leeks are the ones with the tiny bit thicker leaves going on there. And then the sturgeons are coming up all around the garden. This right here is onion bed number two that you saw me plant out a couple of months ago. We replanted some of it because as you can tell, we're getting decimated by our friendly skunks. So they come through especially after rains and they dig out a bunch of pockets here. So we have to fill that up. And it's mostly because they're going for those grubs, but especially with alliums they'll just uproot it and it's a bummer. As you know, I was on a few trips lately and that means that unfortunately I almost missed most of my asparagus this season. There's still a few coming up. Take a look at this guy right here. Very happy. We'll be eating him for sure. But this is the third year for asparagus. So this is the year I'm supposed to get a crazy amount. And I have, I just accidentally let it go to fern. So I'll harvest as much as I can, but it's proof that about three years in on asparagus is when you get most of your production. Now these backyard fruit trees I am very pleased with. This is the double planted European pear. So we have the hood European pear here and the Florida home pear here. I did quite a bit of active pruning here. Pear seems to want to throw vertical branches just straight up. So you really have to cut that height down. And then I have my quad grafted Asian pear right here. All of these have been painted with the Ivy Organics tree paint, which is of course a natural paint, but we're getting budding out on all of these, which is fantastic. So that should be coming soon. But I'm also excited. I mean, look at this cherry. Didn't really think I'd be able to pull cherries off in my climate, but year one growth was great. Didn't get any cherries, of course. Did a bunch more strategic pruning, which I can talk about. And we're getting some good leaf out here. This is the double persimmon. Then I got two persimmon off this last year, hoping for a big bounty this year. And then the new addition is the Glen mango. We put this in about a month ago and this came from our video on planting a huge hole. It's called the multi-year hole. So you'll have to check that video out on the main channel, but we're seeing almost no transplant shock and great, great growth out of this mango using that planting method. So believe it or not, this banana is actually the daughter of the banana that I harvested earlier this year. So it was right there. So you've got a bunch of pups coming up, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to get another stand of bananas this year. Cause this guy's almost as tall as its own mother was just a few months ago. And then over here, I've got a little bit of a variegated sunflower leaf that looks like damaged, but no, if you take a look at the actual coloration there, you can see it's, it's true variegation. You got one, two, three, four different shades of green there. And it's showing up on other leaves, especially new leaves. So I'm actually quite excited to see what comes of this. This is going to be a non-hybrid variety. This is just sort of whatever was left by the birds. That's going to be very interesting. And then we're running another garlic experiment over here. So you can tell, like I wasn't joking when I said we had a ton of garlic. There's probably a couple hundred right here and then we're running a spacing garlic experiment right here. This is just more extra. Then this is the one I'm actually the most excited about guys. This is the grand potato experiment. There are eight different potato growing methods going on here. I thought I lost these because a few months ago we had one day of frost that whipped through the ground at about 28 degrees and it roasted off all the tops of most of these. Thankfully they've come back. So we have our under frost cover one, which I don't even really know what it looks like, but it certainly seems like it's growing like crazy. We have our Ruth stout, which we keep adding straw to. And then we have different trench and hilling up methods as well as a bucket method and growing from seed. We're doing the potato experiment better this time around. We've been having so much fun doing these, these gardening experiments. But sometimes when you spend a couple of months, get one bad day, the experiment gets thrown off. So we're trying to improve our methodology for the season. So here we are at the pond. It's going to be a big project this year because there's a few things going on with it. Number one, you can tell that the passion fruit has been reset. We wanted to remove one. We accidentally removed both. So we're resetting the passion fruit by planting one in the middle because last year it snaked around honestly too much. You can even see a lot of the material down here, all this debris is just tons of old passion fruit that's been slowly breaking down almost in a leaf mulch type fashion. But what we're going to do up here is we need to fix the biofalls here. So we have some of the biofalls. We've got to fix up this setup, replant this area, weed this section out and then revisit some of the plantings we made a year or two ago because some of these are just looking a little bit unruly. The pond itself though, looks amazing. I mean, the lilies have propagated themselves for many years now. The koi, look how big the koi are. Can't see them too well, but they're not as shy as they used to be, which is great. So you can see, got some pretty beefy guys in there. And then all the mosquito fish, you can probably see a few of them have been keeping down most of the bug population, not only mosquitoes, but other things as well. There's my little feeding ring. So as we ran out the backyard, I really want to go for a little bit more cleanliness in the garden. There's a lot of kind of broken lines. I like cleaner lines in my designs. I also like a little bit less weed pressure, but we just had thankfully some crazy rains, which were great that accidentally flooded my new sunroom. So imagine my surprise when I came in here a couple of days ago and it was raining and this was leaking right here. Really a nightmare because it came through. You can still see some water there and got all the way over to here. Got actually all the way over to here and started touching this corner right here, which is not ideal. Fortunately, we were able to seal it up and fix it, but it's kind of a bummer to happen to your very first week, having the remodel complete. We're in the front yard now. The artichoke patches continue to develop over the last couple of years. I did something interesting this year and I planted some extra potatoes right around there. I told you it's a potatoes and onions year. It's a staples year for me. I really want to grow stuff that I love to eat. I love to eat potatoes. You can transform them in so many ways. So I used the power planter auger and just drilled potatoes in all over this area that I didn't know what else to plant there. There's a mix of some ornamentals. There's obviously some weeds. There's looks like we spilled some lettuce seed. So there's a bunch of lettuce seed in there, but then the artichoke and the sturgeons are going strong as well. So this is three to five artichoke that have propagated themselves for the last three to four years. And look how beautiful it looks. I always get depressed when it dies off for the season because this just looks so prehistoric and amazing and lush. And then the bougainvillea, that orange guy has made it all the way up the roof. I probably got to prune that off a little bit cause it's looking a little haggard. This bed right here really showcases the power of a border planting or a corner planting. This is of course sweet alyssum. This is a white variety. And you can see how it just kind of spills over the corner of the bed. Look at that. I think that looks pretty cool. I don't know about you guys, but to me that's a nice look. Of course our Epic Metal Raise beds, they are quite geometric in their structure. So if you want to break the border, you got to do something with the planting. The sturgeon also a good trailer. But what's in this bed right now is saffron. So I have saffron corns. I'll dig one up for you. I'm actually waiting for the cormlets to form so I can really not have to deal with buying saffron again. But this is what ends up happening. There's a main one and it'll produce these offshoots. I think this one must have gotten dug up. I'll dig another one up for you. See what we got going on. Let's dig one up that actually has some connections still to the soil. There we go. So you can see, it'll put out these little cormlets right here and eventually these get hardy enough that you can store them. Of course, what I'm most excited about in spring is our fruit tree action. This is the fig that I've been pruning for a few years now. It always looks weird at the beginning because it has just one leaf coming out of the top and then all the buds start to break a little bit lower on the stem. So it just looks very kind of erratic for a while, but eventually you'll start to see these guys coming out, which is exactly what we want. So what you can see is I've pruned this in a kind of horizontal structure. So the tree really should be this way. So I've taken all the branches that are coming downwards into the ground and de-emphasize them unless they're looping up like this, like that one right there. But the rest of them I've let run upwards, but I've cut that height down considerably. And I've also tried to control this growth that's coming up this way considerably. So it's growing almost as a weird horizontal side tree. The only reason I did that is because I decided to plant this tree at this crazy angle because I wanted to cram it in here underneath this monster loquat, which I really should have pruned by now. Those of you who are early on in the channel, remember this is one of the first fruit trees and the few fruit trees that was here on the property. I've pruned it two or three times. You can't prune it in spring because it sets its flowers in fall. So if you prune it, you got to prune it before fall so it can grow and set those new buds and flowers. And then it can produce its fruit in basically now, March, April or so. So I didn't do it last year cause I felt that I had done it too many years in a row. That may have been a mistake guys because this thing is absolutely massive and it is laden with fruit. Over here in the front yard orchard, I made yet another mistake. I forgot to spray my peach for leaf curl before the buds came out. So as you might imagine, I've got leaf curl on my peach. Can't really do much about it now. That's fine. I'll still get a good amount of peaches. I did quite a lot of pruning to this peach tree in general. And I also did a lot of pruning to the citrus hedge. It looks like the strategy I employed last summer, last fall has tended to work out. And that's basically one where I take the highest tree, let's say that guy right there, and I bring it down to the height of the lowest tree. So I clearly haven't pruned it in a while cause this guy's quite tall, but I did that and it really has let this satsuma go crazy. The satsuma is this little area right here. They're kind of blending together, which is the whole goal. But it also brought the yuzu over here to life. This guy, if you remember, this was really struggling for quite some time. Not only is it in an unfavorable sun position, but it was getting blocked by the light from this gold nugget mandarin, right? So I brought this one down twice over the course of last year, which let this one get the light resources it needed to come up. And you can see the hedge is starting to really take shape. That being said, there's still a bit of ugliness in this area of the garden. I've of course got my tarp for solarizing, which is working, which just doesn't look that good. And then the first three or four citrus that aren't on my shower graywater system are just looking haggard. So much so that I think what I'm going to do this year is remove them, replace them with the same varieties and dig out my graywater trench so that they're actually getting irrigated to the amount that they need. Cause these ones, I feel like if I force them to try to catch up, it's just not going to work out that well. So I'm going to do a full replace, but I like to show you guys the ugly too. It is not all bad though, because I have to say this angle right here is one of my favorites right now in the spring garden. I hope you guys are having an exciting spring. If you're not planting yet, you're getting ready to plant. I'd love to hear what you're excited to grow down in the comments. And if you're curious how to get your garden started, check our planning tool out. It's GardenPlanner.EpicGardening.com. I did a whole video on how I planned the actual Epic Homestead in our Garden Planner. So if I can do it with this crazy smorgasbord of designs, then you can definitely do it in your garden. I will catch you on the next one guys. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.