Revealing My Fall Garden Plans!

Well, we are officially in the aftermath of the summer garden. It is November now. The crows are in the air. Take a look at those two guys over there. Crow B1 and Crow B2. I still have this feeding platform I'm going to put some treats on. We'll see if they come munch next to the hens. These are just black soldier fly larvae. So I'll give some to the hennies. Hey girls. There you go. You love it. And then this is just an aqua block. So it's the bottom of one of the things that we use to fill the epic pond. I like to put it just like that. The crows will land anywhere around here and sometimes they'll even leave gifts right here. But while we're waiting for that, I thought I would walk you around the garden. A lot of things have changed over the years, of course, but over the seasons and we're transitioning into the San Diego fall. So many of you watching, hopefully this doesn't make you too sad, but maybe it'll help you out planning your future fall garden or even your upcoming spring garden. Cause fall and spring gardening are very similar in their approach. In fact, fall is my personal favorite season. I'm curious what yours is. Drop me a comment. Let me know. I suspect more spring and fall lovers than I thought. Summer of course is your classic tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, which I love. But something about the crisp air, maybe it's just cause I don't get it much here in San Diego. But anyways, I digress. Let's show you some of the stuff going on in the backyard of the homestead. So this is the furthest bed from my office over there and my home. And what that means is you don't want to put stuff that you have to come to frequently out here. So there used to be tomatoes here. They got root-knot nematode like crazy. We did some peas here. I'm going to do a winter wheat row. So this is about three foot bed. We're going to weed it out. We're going to amend it and I'm going to throw about three by 30 feet of wheat here. We'll see if we can get some good bread going. The bed right next to it typically has stuff like eggplants, peppers, or tomatoes. Obviously we've gone a little buck wild this season with eggplants. Look at this one. This one is massive. Look at that booty. It's huge. I mean, look at my hand. Look at my hand and look at the eggplant. I mean, it's very reflective too, honestly. But a lot of different varieties in here. Too many eggplant. Good rule of thumb when you're planting. This is something that Jacques and I have talked about. I talked to Paul who helps out around here. If you don't have something good to replace in a bed, let whatever's there keep going. Cause there's really no downside to that. But of course, as you start to plan and maybe do some succession planning or seasonal planning, it's a really good idea to think about what's going to go next. So right here is where we're going to sow our garlic for the season. We had garlic in the test garden over there. We've had it in the front yard raised beds. We've had some garlic rust. This area has yet to be afflicted. I'm going to give it a shot. Huge row that I can put garlic in. I may actually decide to go garlic on the exterior of the row and then right down the center, I might do some pretty large onions. They'd be the yellow granite style onions. Man, I'll tell you a beautiful light in the garden right now. Once it gets below the greenhouse or below that palm tree, it's going to be even better. But this is the asparagus patch. Looks pretty bad right now. What we did is we just threw it through the chipper shredder. So we chopped down all the ferns and we let them really go. You can see them sort of chopped right here. And we threw it down on the chipper shredder and then just laid that on top as mulch. It should be a very productive year. That's because about three, four years into your asparagus patch, of which we're at about that mark here, the crowns or the underground sort of stems, rhizomes, et cetera, have really developed. So you should be able to cut off or harvest some of those that would otherwise develop into ferns. So the first couple of years, you're letting those stalks develop into ferns, grow up and send energy back down, strengthen that whole system. And then now I would not be surprised if I got like over a hundred spears of asparagus next spring. As you guys know, we're no strangers to showing you the garden as it is, not as we wish it to be. So this is the test garden patch, a boatload of weeds going on right here. So we're going to clear all this out. Got a couple bits of junk there, but this is our test garden. So we can technically grow about 16 different experiments at any point in time. The only one currently running is this sweet potato experiment. We've been doing for about five months now. This looks like one plant, but there's a container sweet potato. There's a Ruth Stout sweet potato where we mulch some straw over. And then over here there's just classic sweet potatoes. We should be coming close to a harvest here. I would say maybe end of November. Honestly, you could harvest it now, but if I start seeing the leaves die back, that's a better sign because they're still producing energy and throwing it down and developing those sweet potatoes. So I want to give the experiment its best chance, but we really have to clear this area out. We've got kind of like an accessory greenhouse going on here. I want to reveal the edges, make it look a little bit prettier. And also maybe plant some of our alternative lawn mixes. We've got a spot back here. I really want to do that. And we have three of them launched now in our shaker format. I'm not a big lawn guy, guys. You know this. I'm not a big lawn guy. So we came out with three of these and I think they're really cool, but I want to grow them out and show you how cool they are. Over here in my cosplaying tropical climate, I've got my bananas. The bananas are looking really good. We're starting to see some yellowing up there, which is a good sign. I would say another week or two I can take these down. But if you walk around the plant, you'll see what bananas want to do. So there's next year's banana, hopefully. And then here are the banana army spawning from the ground. I do not need all these. I only need about one of these. So I'm going to try to cut these out. There's a technique where you plant them upside down and they start sprouting like crazy so you can propagate these. We'll see if we can get it done. Regardless, we need to remove these. Another huge win this season was the grape trellis. I got seven bunches of grapes and I'm talking bunches of grapes, like real proper bunches of this flame seedless grape. So the grape vines are actually pretty developed at this point. You can see we have some pretty sturdy stalks and stems here. We're going to do a full grape pruning video because it's kind of confusing. You have all these different terminologies that people will use for the different parts of the plant. And it is a bit particular. First couple of years you get grapes in the ground, you need to really be particular about how you get this strung up. After that you can kind of let it rip with pretty minimal maintenance. So I got to get to that. I'm kind of just waiting for these leaves to fully die off though. Before we continue, say hello to the beautiful koi. Remember how small they were back in the day? The first pond video where we introduced them? Put that up because I want to show you their transformation. Look how beautiful they are. And they're huge too. And they're a lot more friendly. The greenhouse is looking shockingly bare right now. That's why we're doing a fall prep and planting video because we need to start a bunch of seeds. I've got one tray started here or will be started pretty soon here, but the rest of it, not much. I mean, we do have some stuff planted out. I'll show you. But what I'm focusing on right now, like you've seen on some of my recent videos, is trying to reconnect to the enjoyment of the garden for its own sake. The whole reason I got into Epic Gardening in the first place. So I'll show you. I've gotten back to some of my houseplant roots. A good friend of mine sent me a ton of cuttings and I've successfully grown them out. I mean, here you have a Thai constellation. This is sort of a sub-irrigated planter here. Same things, bigger model here with this Philodendron Pink Princess. And you still do see a bit of the pink on there. It's very, very pretty, but I've got some propagations going of some of my other favorites here. Philodendron Espiritu Sancti. We've got the Cebu Blue Pothos, my Filipino roots. We've got the Philodendron Micans and we have the Philodendron Brazil. What I do, and I probably should put like a, you know, a dome on top of these, but I just hit the cuttings with a little bit of shower water. And I hit that with a little bit every day just to keep the local humidity higher in this area. That brings us to the backyard in-ground garden, which is a bit of a mess right now. Not a mess in the sense of, I don't like the look of it. It's just things have grown. It's late summer, early fall right now, or even mid-fall for a lot of you. And it's just a little bit crazy. I want to show you this potato patch though. So this is where we planted potatoes this spring. None of the ones that you see here though, were planted by us. They're all stuff that we just forgot in the ground. So I'm going to dig one up and see what we've got. So this is classic SoCal gardener fashion with sandals. But what I'm going to do is just chop off the top here so I can get a nice clean pull here. We'll go in with the banana shovel. Kind of come down low. Filipino style. Okay. That's actually not bad for free potatoes. Okay. Now that the potatoes are out of the ground, what am I going to do right here? Well, over there, I already got brassicas, so your cabbage, your cauliflower, your kales. So right here, I don't think I have enough broccoli in the garden. So I'm probably going to put some broccoli right here. I learned a hard lesson last year by growing like 20 cabbages. I don't need that many cabbages. We did some for an experiment, so that's fine. But over here, we also have to tackle, you can see the distortions are going crazy. So two years ago, Jacques and I kind of redid this garden here from those eight squares that we used to have to this more naturalistic kind of triangular central point view. And we did a big flower patch right here. We called it the smile. It's kind of like this little curved structure, which is nice when you're thinking about the way this garden works. Because look, here's my border. Here's a lot of my edibles. And I really want to attract stuff on the margins. When I say by stuff, I mean birds. So I've got my bird feeder right over here. I've got all sorts of stuff that attracts beneficial insects and then they make their way into the garden, to the peppers, to the eggplants, to all the things that might need some extra love, some pest control and some pollination. But this area has gotten really out of control. So I think what I'm going to do is clear out all of the actual debris, which I know you're thinking, okay, don't, you're not supposed to do that. It's fall. There's a lot of stuff that's still, we're going to be replanting. Remember we have a mild winter, so we can replant, we can still leave forage and shelter for a ton of stuff that would be in this garden, birds, insects, and et cetera. So it's not that big of a deal. If you are in a colder climate though, I do think it's a smart idea to kind of let your stuff die, let it be sticks, and then come out and clear it in the late winter and you can work it under the ground at that point in time. We basically have a whole nother season here. So we're going to clear this out. We'll plant some more seasonal stuff. We'll thin it back. And then this area here, I think I'm going to go crazy on my bok choys, my Asian greens. I'm probably going to do some garlic up here as well. I'm probably gonna do a little bit of the root crop stuff. So your turnips, your parsnips, your radishes, your beets, definitely golden beets, probably the golden boy variety. As we go out to the front yard though guys, look at this ice cream bean tree. Inga edulis, huge, absolutely massive. It's still flowering. So this is what the flowers look like. They're quite beautiful, honestly, in their own weird sort of way. But the actual pods are still ripening. I know a couple of episodes ago I showed you what this looks like, so I won't do it again. But if you can grow this in your climate, I highly recommend it. Out here in the laundry gray water section, we're going to have to do some pruning back of this bougainvillea. The only other thought I had is maybe putting some more anchors on the house and having it wrap around. Let me know what you guys think of that idea. As you can tell right now, it is just simply too crazy. But if I could train it around, would that be a good or bad idea? I saw some people saying for fire, maybe not the best idea. I'm not in that fiery of an area. I'm in a pretty suburban area here. So we'll see. But I do love the orange on it. I mean, I think it was the right call to get one with the orange bracts. A bougainvillea, as my grandma says. But up here in the main garden, I would say the fall garden is pretty much in swing. You can tell most of these beds are fully planted out, fully growing. Some beautiful sweet potatoes hanging over the edge here. I like this in a raised bed. You can put the actual sweet potato slip in the ground relatively close to the corner. If you're trying to cram space, maybe you only have a couple beds, and it'll spill over. It'll get all of the growth potential out of that and send it right into that corner where the sweet potatoes are. I have to say, Paul and the team put together a beautiful bed right here. This is a four by four Epic Garden bed, but look what's in it. I mean, have you ever seen a choy this beautiful in your entire life? Like look at the size of that choy. Absolutely massive. Over here you can see a good example of our succession sowing methodologies. So this is a half bed of radish. We just took this half out. We re-sowed this half. We're harvesting out this half. So some pretty nice size radishes here. I'll pull one out just for you to get a sense of. Look at that. I mean, slice that baby up, throw a little salt on it, maybe pickle it. So honestly, front yard, I would say is in full swing in fall. I do want to show you one more bed. It's the eight by four massive honker over there. Uh, but this is just a rotational kind of greens, maybe some peas, maybe some root crops type bed system for the, the fall. Not, not keeping it too fancy. Here's another really solid planting idea. If you do have a larger bed. So you've got, we call it the stadium seeding methods. You've got your low growing greens here. You have your sort of mid tier greens. This would be like your heading romaine style lettuce, maybe your chards. Then you've got your larger greens like your dino kale or your curly kale in the back. And so if you look very closely, you can see it does have a bit of a stadium seeding kind of vibe to it. Now, why I like that is, I mean, come on, look at the aesthetic of this. You can work in it easier. Imagine if you had the tall guys up front and the short guys in the back, it would be kind of annoying to come over here and have to like reach over the tall stuff to work over here. Especially if you didn't have access around the back of the bed. By the way, I do want to say we are having our Black Friday sale. So it's kind of like more than Black Friday. Obviously these days, you run your sales for a little bit longer. Don't ask me why. You kind of just have to do it because everyone's doing it. And if you don't do it, then you don't get sales. Um, it's just, it's annoying guys. It's annoying. Trust me. I, I understand it but we do have pretty good deals going on right now. So it's 25% off seeds. I'll put it up on the screen. It's like seeds, live goods and raised beds and a bunch of other stuff. So good deals if you want to stock up. And we have a very cool thing coming in January along with all the 2026 seeds for botanical interest. So a lot of cool stuff. I do want to show you the hens and get a couple of pieces of advice from you. And then we're going to see if we can feed a worm to gunch the Pac-Man frog. So it is fall. Temps are getting colder. Light is coming down, but the hens really haven't laid much in a while. I've got calcium. I've got oyster shells. I've got proper food, got good enough water. The only thing I've got in here and it looks like there's eggs. These are just the fake eggs. So they don't peck on their own. I have five of them. So there's two, four, five. And then when you come around here, I'm probably gonna have to do a coop clean out, but I do see a couple over here. So it looks like they may have found a new egg hutch, which probably means I need to give this coop a decent clean. I don't want them pooping where they're laying all their eggs. Oh, they buried a few. Look at these little sneaky girls. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm understanding. I'm understanding what's going on now. Okay. So a coop clean out will be coming, but I'm curious if you are a chicken keeper, are you getting a ton of eggs right now or not? I know I pretty much get close to none when it comes to full winter, but um, some people seem to not have that problem. So let me know. If you're squeamish, just watch the next vlog because we are going to go into frog feeding time. It's just a worm though. If you're not squeamish, let's figure out how to do this. So if you missed the last episode, I have a little frog now named Gunsh. He's a blue mutant Pac-Man frog. And he's just chilling right there. The only thing is he hasn't eaten in a while. So what I'm trying to do is just get this guy to bite literally anything at this point. I know this is probably, dropped it right on him. This is probably a little bit too big. But he'll try to chomp and then he'll just miss. And then he just won't try again or he'll try like 10 times and he'll miss. And it's been a few days since he's eaten and they can go a little bit without eating. But man, I do want my boy to eat. Come on, man. He could be a girl honestly. But see, look at him. He's just so nonchalant. He's like nah. And their motion triggered. They also have a reflex on their hand. If you hit their hand it'll sort of trigger a chomping reflex. But look at him. He just does not care at all. So I'm going to let him get a little more comfortable. I got so frustrated. I even did a little painting. I'm going to censor some of it, but that was me trying to feed him a black soldier fly larva and he just wasn't having it. And so this is how, what I felt he was emotionally saying to me, by the way, I did get a new place. So your boy is moving out of the homestead. This will become our company office for the San Diego headquarters. Bittersweet moment, but I'm very excited to have some space from living and breathing all the time with team members here who I love in my home. Right? So updates coming soon on that. You won't see much of the new place, but you will see hopefully the spirits lift in my face. Also I've been doing some skincare. So we'll see how it goes. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.