Shade Cloth for RAISED GARDEN BEDS // Tomato Growing Tips // Self-sufficient Living

Hi everyone, welcome back to my garden. Today we are out the front and I'm going to give you a tour of my front veggie patch which is brand new and has had heaps of new additions to it. So if you haven't already watched the first one I'll pop a link to that because that shows us setting up this new area here for Australia for my front yard veggies. These flies are driving me insane. And if you did already watch that video you'll notice that there is some new additions to this garden. We have put up, and I say we very loosely, Halim has built me shade frames and we have just about finished those because it is so hot here in Perth in summer and this front garden gets full sun all day and my paw plants will be absolutely crispy if I don't do anything. So I have got away with not using any shade cloth or anything like that. For most of the time that I've been gardening here just by moving my pallet planters under cover and planting in shady areas in summer. But this patch was just completely new, open, bare and I do have plans to plant some things that will eventually give me some summer shade. Things like deciduous fruit trees, grapevines, things like that that have lots of leaf coverage in summer when you want that protection but then they lose their leaves in winter so it lets the winter sun in. So we'll get some of that developing out here but for now I had to put something up because it was just not going to work otherwise. Everything would just get too hot and die. So we have got some recycled Jarrah hardwood poles, sticks, timber thingies and Halim has made some frame structures out of that and then we also did get some recycled shade cloth which was a little bit of a funny shape and he has done really well at cutting that and fitting that on. So we aren't going to put it on all four sides. Sun rises here and moves across the house. You can see on this one here we're only going to put the shade on this side and the back side and that should pretty much well cover it for most of that harsh sun and the rest of it won't be so bad. So we'll see how that goes. We've got a top, the morning sun here and then the afternoon, midday sun on the back side. So that should get them pretty well protected and we can get lots of food because I want this front veggie patch to be really productive. I'm gonna get a lot of things that I can preserve, that I can give, that I can trade and really boost my self-sufficiency and grow more of my own food at home. So this summer season I'm really concentrating on tomatoes. I've planted heaps of different varieties of tomatoes and I want to grow an abundance of extra tomatoes that I can preserve. I'm going to make tomato chutneys. I want to make my own tomato like sauces and preserve those tomatoes so I can use them throughout winter. Oh and I also really want to make some sun-dried tomatoes. I love sun-dried tomatoes. They're super expensive and I am hopefully going to make my own by dehydrating them and then we'll preserve them in some oil. So I'm really looking forward to doing that. But yeah, so I've got tomatoes planted in here. I'll give you a little bit of tour about everything that I've got growing. Some of them are looking a little bit sad because they haven't had any shade cover up until now. So they have been getting super hot and a lot of their leaves are struggling with that. But I have been giving them a really good drink of water to try and keep them going while they didn't have any shade. But now they should be all right and I can reduce the watering. I've got lots of mulch on them so let's take a look. All right so in this one we've got tomatoes. I've got I planted all of these from seed but then I didn't transfer the labels. So actually I'm not really sure what's growing in here. I know what varieties I planted, I just don't know which ones are which. But it'll be pretty obvious when they come through because some are yellow, some are purple, some are cherry tomatoes. So we'll just have to wait and see. We've got some strawberries here which I'm hoping will be able to cover this area here. I've planted in some marigolds which are really good for natural pest management and keep the bugs away as well as attract pollinators. And that's another reason I didn't want to fully enclose them because I do still want to attract the pollinators to the garden so they can all come in from this south facing part here. Yeah I've got some basil planted in there and that will really bush out and take up that space. And a tip for the basil is if you pick out the top here like that then it will send off two side shoots so you end up with a much bigger bushier plant and heaps more basil. So you can see here the two will start shooting off there and we'll have two main stems instead of one. And then once these tomatoes get a lot bigger we can cut off these bottom lower limbs so they don't touch the ground and give them some good airflow and that will give more space for this basil to grow. And that's another marigold. Over here we have capsicum. This one over here we haven't quite finished yet. So only two of them have the back covers on at the moment. And I did the two that have the most tomatoes in them so this one's still got some room in it. As you can see this space here is bare but I have lots of seedlings that I'm currently growing so I'm just trying to be patient and I'm going to leave that space available. And some more flowers. Basil flowers and tomatoes and a few capsicums and a lot of flies. So this one is pretty full. Lots of tomatoes, some corn and we have a melon. And I did put the label in there. That is a honeydew melon and that would have been really smart if I had put all the labels in with the plants but you know I like to just wing it. This one here is looking pretty good. I have been coming out here and keeping on top of pruning off the side shoots or the suckers. So that's where you want to pull off those little ones that grow out of the armpit because otherwise the plant will go wild and you won't be able to get a nice tall upright structure. I have missed a few obviously. This one here is a side shoot that's grown too long and I could either cut that off and and put it in a jar of water to regrow roots or I can just leave it. I don't mind them having a few side branches that's no worries. Again a bit more space in here ready for some other plants that are yet to come. Marigold, capsicum, tomato, zinnia, another zinnia. So those will grow quite big and have lots of flowers which will be really nice. And another capsicum. So my thoughts are if I were to plant here some either some deciduous trees or a grapevine but I think that might be too heavy for these structures but some sort of deciduous plant here to block a lot of that summer sun and let the light through in winter. So I also have to stake my tomatoes and those are what I'm going to use because it's been really windy and I've had to tie up some already but I need to get the rest of them tied up so that they don't blow over because they're getting really tall now and they need that extra support. Things should be able to grow well now that the weather is heating up. We are already in the 30s. I think it was mid 30s today and tomorrow is going to be 37 so it is already so hot here in Perth and our summers tend to be really high 30s, mid 30s and then we get blessing of 40s and over 40 which tends to be on Christmas day and around Christmas we get a lot of the 40 degree days. So those really hot days that are just consistent every single day really make my gardens struggle through the middle of summer and I've got a lot of tips on my website for keeping plants alive in those really hot periods so check those out if you're interested and I'll definitely make some videos as I go along with how I am watering these and how I am keeping my plants alive. Oh flies! During these really hot summer days. So I'm just going to take out this one. As you can see it's growing in like the armpit. This one and this one here and I'll just chuck them. So we've just got that one main leader that will keep growing up and then I'm going to cut off some of these lower limbs to clean that up and just tie this up because we do get a lot of wind here and my poor tomatoes have been getting blown around. So that one's nice and tidied up now. I like to trim my tomatoes everything below the first set of tomatoes. of flowers already on them as you can see and there's even some baby tomatoes. Fingers crossed we're going to get a huge abundance of tomatoes, basil, all the summer things that we can then preserve and I will definitely show you how I do that as I go through the process. So make sure you subscribe if you haven't already and I will see you back for another video.