Full Backyard Vegetable Garden Tour | Zone 8a - July 2025

Hello everyone, welcome back to my gross plants. If you're new here, I'm Meg and I'm gardening here in Charlotte, North Carolina zone 8a and today I'm going to be giving you guys a full July garden tour. July in a North Carolina garden can be a pretty brutal one. Honestly, things are growing so quickly and things are happening. I'm so overwhelmed. The sun, intense. The humidity at an all-time high because it's pretty much afternoon storming like every day. The bugs, everywhere you can imagine. They're literally taking over. So it can be a very overwhelming time in the garden and that is exactly what I'm feeling as I'm walking around out here. It's like so hard to breathe because the air is so thick. It's hot, it's buggy. I literally ordered a full body mosquito suit from Amazon earlier today because I am so sick of the mosquitoes. So honestly, although the garden is very beautiful right now and things are growing, it's kind of miserable to even be out here. There is just so much happening. Things are so overgrown. There's so much pruning and work that I actually need to do in July. There's pruning, there's ripping things out that are pretty much done with their first round and then replanting another round and as we walk around they'll show you what I'm which ones I'm going to be ripping out and replanting. There's you know starting to think about the fall garden in July which I know seems so counterintuitive but we got to start you know thinking about the fall garden and seeding our brassicas because they can take a long time. So like there's just a lot of like chores to do in July when you really don't want to be out here doing them. So July is a very very challenging month especially for me. I have MS and Hashimoto's and so my body has a really hard time regulating temperature and I'm very very heat intolerant. So being out here like I gotta take breaks. I gotta go inside getting some air conditioning every like 20 minutes or so. Today is not like too too bad. We've got some cloud cover. I think it is about to do its daily afternoon storm here in about an hour or so. So let's go let's start the tour. Let's go around the garden and see what's going on. So just for those of you that are new here I'm going to give you guys kind of an overview of my garden first and just kind of tell you a little bit about my garden. And I'm going to tell you guys right now it is very very weedy. I have not weeded in like a month just because like I said it's so hot and I'm just kind of letting the weeds take over and I'll do another heavy weeding in the fall. So yeah don't judge all the weeds that are in my pathways. So here's like just one of the entry points of the garden. I have this back patio back here. Everything is super wet super dirty because it's been raining so much but got a little umbrella. This thing is a lifesaver in the heat. But starting over here on my patio I have this little raised bed here. These are two blueberry bushes. As you can see they are still producing a little bit. I have been harvesting these blueberries out here every single day. They are almost done producing or they should be because it's getting very very hot for the blueberries. But I'm about to eat these as a little snack. I love just coming out here and like grabbing a handful of blueberries popping them in my mouth. So good. Moving over here this big mama fig. This fig tree is in a 20 gallon pot. You can't even see the pot because it's just so big but it is here in a 20 gallon pot 20 gallon container. And most of this growth is new this year. It just really really really exploded. I don't know what happened. I don't see any figs on it yet because like I said this is just its second year. So I really don't know if there will be any figs. They might come in the fall. I don't know but this thing is just definitely gonna have to heavily prune this in the fall. Walking over here. Ignore that. That's just some trash that I need to throw out. But pizza oven here. Got a little hibiscus plant here. Looks like the flowers have closed up for the evening but this is really beautiful when all the flowers are open. Behind the pizza oven I have this blackberry bush that is growing in a container. This thing is like four years old. I heavily pruned this back just because it was growing so so crazy. And I think because I pruned it so heavily it's not really fruiting much this year. There are a couple of fruits over here but it's just on one stem. Moving over to this bed. This is a six by three cedar bed and I've got a lot of things going on in here. I've got a little patio eggplant. There's some peppers. I forget the variety. I think this is a Japanese santaka pepper variety. I need to prune these cucumbers because they're kind of encroaching on this pepper plant. This one is called couliage and it's just these little purple peppers and it's got some variegation to it. I really love these variegated leaves. Look it's got like purple in it. There's some tomatoes here behind it. This one is just going crazy. This is a patio. I think it's the glacier variety from Botanical Interest. This one's actually supposed to be a dwarf variety but it's not looking quite so dwarf to me. It is getting very very tall. Here is the cucumber trellis and as you can see my cucumbers have seen better days and that's totally normal for July here. Usually I do two rounds of cucumbers in the summer. I do one round early spring and these have already given me so many cucumbers. Probably at least 50 or something so far. Like a crazy amount of cucumbers. So these are probably on their way out for the season and I'll probably be ripping these out and starting over. They're also experiencing a lot of pest pressure so all of this defoliation that you see is from bean slash squash beetles. They are little ladybug imposters. They look like lady bugs but they're not. They're orange. I actually just found one that I can show you. It's kind of hanging out right here on this little tendril. So see how this looks like a ladybug? It's not. Ladybugs usually have black heads. This one has an orange head. Here is what their larvae look like. So it looks very different from a ladybug larva. These are yellow spiky and they're very very tiny. Here's an adult and a baby together on the sleeve. So I have a bit of an infestation going on here. I swear I went on vacation for four days and while I was gone they just multiplied like crazy. I don't know if I'm going to be able to even get it under control so yeah. Squash beetles are more detrimental to young plants when they are on established plants. It's kind of more like it just makes the plant look really bad. Obviously if it gets out of hand and it's defoliating like the entire plant that plant's not going to survive but I find that established plants can handle quite a bit of pest pressure. It's kind of why I'm not freaking out about it. I'm not like oh my gosh I you know have to rip these out right now. What I'm going to do my game plan is to go in I'm going to cut off the most affected leaves. I'm going to see if the plants are still even producing. If they're not, if they're tired because it's like too hot then I'll just rip them out and start all over because they tend to do better in the fall and I get a second round out of them. I've already gotten an incredible first round out of them so I'm not too sad. I've been harvesting like 10 cucumbers per day and I'm so cucumbered out. I don't even know why I'm doing a second round really. I think I've decided in my second round I'm going to plant only pickling cucumbers because my first round I kind of messed up and I planted all slicers and I don't know why I did that because I don't really pickle my slicing cucumbers so I just had so many cucumbers on my counter I was giving them out to neighbors like it was just it was a lot of cucumbers. I came around to the back of it because this is where a lot of the cucumbers hide out. This variety is called Sweet Success and I love this cucumber variety so much. I swear I'm going to grow it every year for the rest of my life. It's a parthenocarpic variety. Parthenocarpic varieties don't require any pollination and they only set female flowers which are the flowers that bear the fruit, bear the cucumber. So every single flower is a female flower and is a cucumber so it produces so many cucumbers and the fact that it doesn't require pollination is amazing. You can grow these in greenhouses. You can grow these on balconies. Maybe you don't have a lot of pollinators visiting your balcony and overall I feel like they just create straighter more uniform cucumbers because sometimes you get really wonky cucumbers because of wonky pollination. My favorite part about them is they don't get bitter because they don't make seeds. They don't form seeds. So they're less seedy. They're less bittle. They're less bitter and they're extremely sweet cucumbers. They're so so good. My absolute favorite variety. So here kind of poking out of the side is another tomato and I didn't trellis this or anything. I'm just letting it kind of like grow on the ground, crawl on the ground and it's got a lot of yummy tomatoes on here that are growing and I'm just kind of letting this one be wild and free. Here's a little container. I've got some native flowers. There's a little bee on there. I've got a little light in here and I planted a potapeno which is a mini jalapeno plant. The plant only gets about this tall but it produces full-size jalapenos and this is definitely one of my favorite jalapeno plants. I think that they they're just so like compact and small and you guys know me. You know I love anything dwarf. This thing is so tiny but it's already loaded full of peppers. Over here in this like border is just such a jungle of things. There's like a rose bush that's stopped flowering. There's this cat mint. There's a jasmine that's growing up I love jasmine. It smells so great. Another smelly bush here is my gardenia. This was so beautiful like a month ago. It was just full of white flowers. They've all kind of stopped setting now. There's a few that are still blooming but this is a different variety of gardenia and I can't remember the variety. I think it's called I think it's called daisy variety or daisy gardenia. Gardenia is definitely one of my favorite flowers though. It smells incredible. So walking into the rest of the garden I told you guys how weedy my pathways are. I have mulched pretty much my entire backyard so here's just kind of like an overview of my backyard. My backyard is about 9,000 square feet and I have made use of every single space in my backyard. The entire yard is a garden. In some way shape or form. A little walk through before I kind of go into more specifics of the bed. Like I said it is so jungly in here. I feel like I can't even walk through my garden. There's a lot of like pruning and things that I need to do especially this salvia bush right here. I guess I'll go ahead and tell you about this. This is my salad box. I always plant lettuce in here. Everything is flowering now because it is way too hot so the chickens will get a great treat out of this. Like I said this is a salvia bush that is just out of control. It is so so large. It needs to be pruned because it has stopped flowering. All of these flowers have already come and gone. It is a blue variety so what I'll do is I need to do a hard prune and then kind of try to spark it to re-flower again. Over here which is kind of like being encroached on by the salvia is my little mini pond. I love this little mini pond so much. I've got some plants in here. I have a full video on me setting this up last year if you're interested. There are some I don't know if you can see one of the goldfish back there but there's two goldfish in here and I think like three or four minnows, rosy minnows. The plants that I have in here are water hyacinth, water lettuce, and then I have a pitcher plant tucked back there and this is like kind of encroaching but there's a little pitcher plant back there if you can see it. As you can see there are some bigger rocks that I kind of just placed in there to give the fish some hiding spots. There's some smaller rocks down there. I do have a filter in here as well and usually this is like shooting up water kind of like a waterfall situation but it is solar powered and since we have some cloud cover right now it's like not really operating at full force. So yeah that's the little pond. I love this water feature in my garden. It like keeps all the pollinators hydrated. I love coming out here and like seeing the fish. I've had frogs lay eggs in here. I think that a water feature in your garden ecosystem is just really important. So moving on from the pond I guess we'll take a little walk through here and I'll kind of start over here. This eucalyptus is called baby blue. I think it is taking over the sidewalk. I really need to prune it or stake it up and to kind of like move it out of the way but right now it's just kind of growing very wild but I love it. It's so it smells amazing. I love pruning some of this off and just sticking it in a glass vase and just having it as a table centerpiece. It's so beautiful. I have a ton of volunteer sunflowers. I did not plant any of the sunflowers that you see in my garden as we go on with the tour. I did not plant these. The birds planted them. They're from last year. I just let the sunflowers from last year seed themselves, fall to the ground and then the squirrels and the birds help me plant them but I think that they're very beautiful variety. I don't even really know the variety. It's just this branching variety so these are all in ground. Like this one is literally just in the middle of my walkway but I don't even care. So walk through here. Here's more volunteer sunflowers. These are a bit taller. I just think that they're so beautiful. They make me so happy. Look over here first. This is kind of like the first bed you see when you walk out of my house. This is where I planted all the potatoes and as you can see they're all dead which is a good sign. I really need to get in here and harvest these potatoes. They are ready to be harvested but I'm going to save that for another video. Over here I have a mess. All of the calendula that you see in this tour, it looked beautiful like a month ago but now as you can see like everything is pretty much going to seed and it's pretty much done for its round like its season. The summer is really hot for calendula because it's more of a cool weather flower. So I'm letting all of these go to seed and then I'll collect the seeds and I'll just replant them for another fall round. Behind it there's some lemon balm that is going to flower which is a huge no-no. Do not let your lemon balm go to flower like this. I need to get in here and do a hard prune of all of this. Let it regrow for the fall. Moving down in this area, oh my god look at all the weeds in this pathway. Yes this is supposed to be a pathway but it's just weeds. But over here this is just kind of like a flower garden. I've got chives as well. There's some native flowers down there. There's a dahlia but this bed right here might look familiar to some of you. I planted these dwarf paste tomatoes this year and I love how tiny they are. They are so small but look at these paste tomatoes. They look so good. I need to actually harvest these because we have so much rain. I don't want them to crack but they're all very very short and very very manageable. And then of course I've got the marigolds that are kind of like surrounding the tomato border. Lastly at the end I've got two tomatillo plants and they're just kind of starting to get going. I'm going to take you guys like out of this corner and just kind of like go back around here. In this bed that is attached to the cattle panel chalice I've got some dwarf tomatoes, some calendula. I've got some bell peppers here up front that are producing some peppers. The tomatoes are starting to ripen. So I've got these two dwarf tomatoes here. I just use a plain steak for these and I prune them and I tie them to the steak with twine. This one is dwarf Russian swirl so that is what that one looks like. This one over here I think is called Amish gold. I've got one that's ripening right here so it's like a smaller variety of tomato. Kind of hard to see but it looks like it's going to be a good one. Coming around to the cattle panel chalice, this is usually where I would plant my squash, my winter squash. But something happened to my winter squash this year and they just they germinated and then they got eaten and it just it wasn't great. So I planted, I replanted them over on that chalice over there so we'll get to that. But this chalice I let noodle beans that were volunteers just grow. I planted noodle beans here last year that grew alongside the squash and I just let some of them rot and so they just came right back and I just got back from vacation and there were no noodle beans before I left. Four days later I come back to this. There's like so many, so many of these noodle beans and I guess you can see why they're called noodle beans. They're also called yard long beans. I think some cultures, some places they also call them like bori or bodi or they have like a bunch of different names. These beans are really good for like stir fries. At least that's my favorite way to eat them is in a stir fry. I think my neighbor Minchi, I think I'm gonna ask her to teach me how to make Filipino adobo and I know in Tagalog they're called sitaw as well. So like I said they have so many different names. I just think that they're so cool. It's like this curtain of beans. My mom was actually watching the garden and the chickens and stuff for me while I was away and she just messaged me a photo of these and just put WTF in all caps. I don't think she'd ever seen them before and I think that that's like most people's reaction to these beans when they've never seen them before is just like what the is that. These are best harvested when they're pretty young and immature and they're skinny and they're not super long. When they get really thick and chunky like this they're not really good for eating so I feel bad because I was away and couldn't harvest a lot of these so a lot of these are gonna get just composted or I'll just let them dry out to collect seeds but they get very like spongy and weird when they're this large so you can't really eat them when they get this big. But this right here is like a perfect time to harvest them. They're young, they're tender, they're easy to chop up and just put in a stir fry. You can also just eat them fresh or you can bake them like regular green beans. I've pickled these before. They're pretty good pickled. You can freeze them to preserve them which is probably what I'll do with a lot of these is just like chuck them in the freezer just because there are so many. So moving on to the other side of the trellis there's all these marigolds that are volunteers. These all popped up from last year. They're not even in the bed right here they're just in the ground. Coming to the other side of this bed so I can show you guys I've got a volunteer eggplant here. I had an eggplant planted here last year and it just popped up so I need to harvest that one. Chive plant is just like a mess. It's a mess. I need to put it over here because it's just like encroaching on all the other plants here. I need to cut back some of these chives. There are some beets in here that I need to grab. I don't know if you can see them but there's a few beets in here. These are megatron pepper plants. They create these huge jalapenos. These are like massive jalapenos. There is some carrots in here that I kind of just chaos sowed. I mean there's like a ton of things in here. There's basil right here. Back up this way so that we can talk about this bed here. So I didn't like plant too much in this bed this year. I didn't pack it as full as I usually do because I've had some issues with this bed. Last year I had some bacterial wilt with all the tomatoes that I planted in here so this year I went with peppers. The peppers are doing okay. They're a little bit like more lime green than I'd like them to be so I think that they need some nutrition. But they're not like doing as well as peppers usually do. This sugar rush peach is doing pretty good but like this one it's got some blossom end rot so I think I really need to add some nutrients to this soil. Here's some other ones that look great. I love sugar rush peach. Here's another pepper plant. This is the Hungarian paprika pepper. This one's doing okay. I've got this Russian sage that's kind of poking out of the corner here. Behind these peppers there are the midnight moon eggplants that I've planted. Like three of those they're just now starting to produce. On the other side I've got this Mexican sunflower that was a volunteer. I had one growing in here last year and it just dropped its seeds and popped right back up. I love these Mexican sunflowers so so much. They attract pollinators and hummingbirds like crazy. Like seriously if you want to see a ton of swallowtail butterflies, monarchs, like other species of butterflies that you've never even seen before in your garden, hummingbirds, plant a Mexican sunflower. I think that they're just attracted to the bright velvety orange color that the flowers are. Then here's another volunteer sunflower that popped up in the ground and it's just now kind of started to get going but it should be blooming soon. So we kind of went over this whole portion with the trellis and everything. So now I'm going to move over to this side. In this bed I have more dwarf tomatoes and I'm really excited because they're ripening and I cannot wait to pick this and make a tomato sandwich out of this. It's gonna be so so good. Here's some more ripening. This first one is dwarf beauty king and the one behind it is dwarf firebird sweet. They kind of look the same to be honest. This one here is purple rain. It's got a bunch of tomatoes on it. These are honestly like they put out their first flush of fruit and now they're kind of taking a break because it's so hot. So I'm assuming that these will pick back up in the fall when it starts to cool down a bit. You can just see like how compact these plants are. I mean this one's like probably two and a half feet tall. These ones in the back are a little bit taller but just to compare a dwarf indeterminate to a regular indeterminate, I'll go down here for a second and then we'll come back. But like this is the cherry tomato that I have and it's an indeterminate and like look at how tall this is. It is literally reaching for the stars. This is probably seven feet going on eight feet tall. Same with this tomato back here. This one is also indeterminate. This one's a volunteer actually. I don't know. I think it's indeterminate by the way that it's growing but it's just so very tall already. Back over here because we need to talk about this trellis that is attached to this bed. So this trellis here is my grape trellis but I also let my passion fruit kind of grow alongside the grapes. So you see the passion fruit hanging here. There are a ton of grapes growing on this trellis. Let me actually show you from the other way. I think you can see them better. There's so many grape clusters growing here and I'm so excited for the grapes this year. These are Concord grapes or I think they're actually pronounced like Concord. Okay so coming back out here I know my garden is kind of like a maze. It's kind of like hard to navigate but there is another trellis that is attached over here and this is where all my passion fruit are growing and there are so many passion fruits this year. It's absolutely taking over this arch and so passion fruit if you didn't know which I don't mind this but passion fruit they put off runners under the soil so they're like constantly popping up in the soil around it. So like this bed here there's so many like passion fruits that pop up and I just have to pull them out. So that's how the passion fruit got over there with the grapes because a runner just popped up but I just kind of let it live and grow with the grapes because I figured why not. But like yeah if you're gonna plant passion fruit in your garden just make sure that you're prepared for the commitment of constantly keeping them in check because they do spread quite aggressively. The variety that I planted is Passiflora incarnata which is the native variety here in North Carolina. So they're also called a maypop and the flowers I don't know if I can find a flower let me see if there was a flower over here. Ah there is. So this is what the flower looks like actually this is not like a great flower but look at the little native bees doing their job to pollinate it so it turns into a passion fruit. But they're so cool they're such funky little flowers so once they're pollinated they turn into passion fruit and like I said this is a native fruit here in North Carolina so it's it's amazing to grow it's just you've really got to like keep it under control. All right so moving on to this bed that's connected as you can see there's some problems over here. This was the squash that I got to harvest a ton of summer squash from but I think it got hit by the squash vine borer so there were three plants here and as you can see here this is definitely squash vine borer damage there's also a ton of squash bugs on this plant they've just kind of like taken over. Look at the party that is happening over here I must have left this when I went on vacation. Look at this party of squash bugs and bean beetles. The freaking audacity oh my god hold on look it continues over here they are just feasting. At this point in the garden the garden is pretty much fending for itself and I don't let the pests stress me out that much like obviously that plant's already dead and there's nothing I can do at this point so I'm not freaking out about all the squash bugs. I do try to come out here early in the morning and in the evening with a bowl of soapy water and I do try to pick off any pests that I see physically and just drop them in but like I said like it's miserable to be out here and so at this point like the garden is just fending for itself and I harvested a ton of summer squash off of these plants so I'm not mad about it and summer squash here in North Carolina is like one of those plants that we have multiple rounds of so these are going to be ripped out I'm going to redo it plant another round and what I'll do since there is so much pest pressure now is I'll put some row cover over the plants until they get nice and established and they start flowering so that way when they're more established they'll be able to handle a little bit more pest pressure and then I can go back to just like picking them off but like I said these are the passion flower vines that are just popping up everywhere and I just have to come in and like pluck them out they're really easy to like just pluck out and so this is like a daily thing I just come out and pluck them out um so yeah some other random things in this bed like there's some zinnias that are popping up there's some snap dragons here um I think I planted like two random little pepper plants in here that aren't like doing super hot I don't know this one actually looks fine this is a shishito pepper there's another Mexican sunflower that was popping up here but the wind knocked it over so I think I'm just gonna cut it and rip it out this bed I'll just save for the fall stuff because there's a lot of empty space here so um this will be where I plant like my broccoli my brassicas so over here this little bed here um I got a lot of volunteers going on this tomato that just popped up right in the middle is a volunteer I don't even know what variety of tomato it is but it's starting to set fruit so I guess I'll find out soon enough I've got some volunteer potatoes that popped up here from last year you can see a little purple one poking out right here but it's a purple variety of potato so I'll harvest those when I harvest the other potatoes some little onions that didn't really size up that I need to pick and this is hot banana and then I think sweet banana back there and this bed here it's another round bed um another like smorgasbord of things happening over here there's two eggplants here that are volunteers they just popped up I didn't have to plant a lot of my garden this year as you can see these are some carrots that I chaos gardened I think these are ready to be pulled out and then we have the indeterminate cherry I think this is like super sweet 100 I think is the variety this thing is just going crazy there's so many tomatoes on it though it is going wild so I do love this plant it's just like I hate indeterminates and how they just get so tall now we'll kind of come back over here and start making our way through here there's a dwarf butterfly bush here and then this is kind of just a flower like wall that I made there's a birdie's bed here with different there's native flowers in here there's a Mexican sunflower volunteer there's snapdragon there's a video of me planting this out with the native flowers I think this one was the cup plant it looks like it's about to start blooming I think this one's the lance leaf sunflower or something this was the aster that's starting to bloom and these little blooms are super pretty this is another native plant and there's another butterfly bush at the end and this is like a really big one really tall one I need to get in here and prune that one as well so turning around to this trellis that's connected by two beds starting here first this is my jellybean blueberry plant that's in a container it's done producing for the season this is a pomegranate bush here I don't know if I'm going to get any pomegranates this year it's only on its second year so probably not so in this bed I planted out my winter squash a little late and they're all just now popping up I need to actually go in here and thin these because there's a lot of plants here I planted extra because I was scared of what happened before happening again but there's tromboncino squash freaking bean beetle seminal pumpkin and then there was another variety that I kind of forgot look at all of these bean beetles I really need to come out here and go bug hunting then in the front here I planted corn and I'm planting I think it's a uh it's a violet sweet corn variety from burpee so I'm excited to see that in this grow bag I've got my lemongrass I'm gonna try to speed up this tour because the way that I'm being eaten alive by mosquitoes right now is insane I cannot wait for that mosquito suit to come in tomorrow so here on the other side there's a lot going on so I have some cucumbers growing on this side and it is miniature varieties so here's one um this is called miniature white I love this variety then this is a persian type of variety I think it's a like mini persian cucumber so these are growing up here here is a black-eyed susan flower that I can't wait for it to start flowering it's actually in a pot and I need to plant it in ground and over here this is an anise hyssop plant that's flowering this is a pollinator haven like all the pollinators flock to this plant and here's another one it's the baby of that one it just spread over here um so I kind of think I might just line the whole chicken fence with anise hyssop um just because it'll kind of create a barrier for the chicken fence but we'll kind of like cut through here and just come around to the back of this here I've got a sage plant in a grow bag it's in a 20 gallon this is like a huge sage plant and then my rose my huge rosemary bush this rosemary bush is five years old now I really need to give it a hard prune um so that it can grow some new growth because it's looking a little dingy and that's typically what I do for this is I'll give it a really really nice hard hard prune cut back like a third to two-thirds of the entire plant and then just let it regrow before I talk about the chickens and the bees there's one more part of the garden um so we've got the greenhouse which I'm not gonna go in there because it's basically like a storage shed at this point um but there's some volunteer dill and basil and like mint and stuff over here let's talk about the green stalk it didn't go as planned I if you guys saw me uh plant this out with strawberries um they didn't really do well I think it's just too hot here um and I think I'm gonna have to figure out another solution for my strawberries I think I need just like a dedicated strawberry raised bed instead of a green stalk but moving over here we've got more sunflowers look at how many volunteer sunflowers are over here let's talk about them first because they're just so pretty they're so beautiful I did not plant these I love this part of the garden I'm gonna be so sad when the sunflowers go away but there's all of these branching ones and then I think this one back here is a mammoth here is another mammoth that is now going to seed I'll probably give this one to the chickens because they love sunflower seeds and I'll probably just like sprinkle some of the seeds around the garden maybe they'll pop out pop up for the fall and now this absolute jungle part of the garden I feel like this part is just crazy these are volunteer zinnias that popped up from last year here I've got my hardy hibiscus plant this is a native variety of hibiscus here in North Carolina and it's cold hardy um so it comes back every year it's a perennial and so you don't have to replant and it's so beautiful it's got like this dinner plate sized hibiscus flowers and they're just like absolutely stunning I'm so glad that these are blooming now these didn't bloom for me last year because it was their first year and they were just really getting established but like look at all the blooms that are about to come out I'm like I'm so stoked about these over here is the milkweed there's a ton of milkweed here and no monarchs I haven't seen monarchs here since 2022 that was the last time I saw monarchs so I'm hoping that they come back this year but I'm not like holding my breath I know that there's a huge population issue with the monarchs but they have plenty of milkweed I think this is like two plants and then I've got a little bit of an issue back here I have a ground cherry that is a volunteer and it's like so hard to get to these ground cherries that'll like traverse through this jungle just to get the ground cherries if you've never grown ground cherries before you must because they are like candy I call them my garden candy they're so so yummy you just like peel back the little husk and then you eat the little fruit they're so good they're so sweet it's like it's like a tomato and a pineapple had a baby so yummy so then behind like the sunflowers and everything I've got this six by three cedar bed and it's full of bush beans there are so many bush beans in here I have already pressure canned 10 quarts 10 quarts of beans and they are still producing they're kind of near the end of their cycle there's a ton of pest damage from the bean beetles and they're kind of like falling over now so I think I'm gonna get like one more harvest out of these and then they'll kind of be done and I'll just like rip these out and replant but I really like what I did this year with this like just planting this full of beans because I just have literally so many beans inside so many canned beans and I really like canning beans I think it's really fun reminds me of being a kid me my aunt we would like sit and snap beans to can I think I missed these potted fruit trees and plants when I was over here with the other cucumbers this is my potted nectarine I've already harvested all the here's my potted mulberry tree it has grown so much this year and I've already harvested all the mulberries from that that is all of the actual garden part so now I'll show you guys the chickens and the bees so we'll walk back over here and I have it separated by this fence from omelette if you guys have chickens and you're looking for a fence this fence from omelette I swear is like amazing it's it's too tall for them to jump over and it stands tall like it's lasted through all the hurricanes and everything so they have all of this kind of like free range space all the way through here this is my compost bins here I put my compost bins in the chicken yard because they love to just kind of forage through the compost post and they actually help me like turn the compost because they're just constantly like in there digging continues to go on down here and there is the beehive the chickens love it down here at the beehive and I decided to kind of put the chicken fence around the beehive to let them forage around it because chickens love to search for bugs in the soil they love to search for little beetles and one of the main pests of a beehive is the small hive beetle if you let your chickens forage around a beehive they'll eat all of the small hive beetle larvae in the soil and then you won't have small hive beetle last year small hive beetle was a huge problem for me because I didn't have like I didn't give my chickens access around the beehive because I didn't have this fence in place I had like a totally different fence but once I opened up this area for the chickens and I allowed them to forage around it I don't have I haven't seen a single small hive beetle this year it's incredible so that's just a really good perk of letting your chickens forage around your beehives like I was saying the chickens they have this whole space and here's their coop if you guys want to know more about the coop I do have a full video on putting this coop together I still love this coop it's from Tractor Supply I think it's called the Chateau something something but it's been almost two years now with this coop and everything is great I still love my chickens and just like with the bees I think I'll never not be a chicken keeper I love keeping chickens I think it is so cool and I just love all my chickens they're like they're like my children well guys that is everything that is going on in my garden right now um I hope you enjoyed the tour thank you for coming along with me if you like this video and you want to see more like it make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe be sure to follow me on instagram tiktok facebook and substack and also make sure to follow the garden girls podcast we post a new episode every Wednesday at 6 p.m and I will see you guys in the next one bye I've got to get my butt inside because I'm getting eaten alive by mosquitoes I am so itchy and I'm so over being out here right now