a little taste of spring | garden season begins

Did you get in the pond? Hey there darlings, welcome back to Roots and Refuge Farm. Today is sadly one of those days where my plans went a little sideways. Does that ever happen to you? It happened to me. I was planning on starting more seeds today. I started to get some pots filled and then got sidetracked and had to do some stuff with the kids and now the sun is setting. I came out here, was feeling really discouraged because I did not check the things off my list that I intended to and I decided, you know, I only have about 30 minutes of light. I'm just going to turn the camera on and hang out with my friends for a minute. Honestly, I think wisdom is sometimes knowing when to call it when you know you're not going to be productive. And the pots that I filled will be waiting for me tomorrow and the forecast tomorrow is gorgeous and super sunny. Try again in the morning on the super productivity. I do have one exciting thing to show you. Look at this. Happy birthday little guys. I will be honest, I came out today and I was looking and I started these like just under a week ago. I intended to move them. I left them out here because it was staying fairly warm out here but it's been like not real warm and at this point I would have expected to see some germination and when I came out first thing this morning there was nothing and I was, this never fails. I just want to tell you if you feel this whenever you start seeds, there is this point like the first 48 hours or so I'm always checking like it's it's not going to happen unless there's a miracle but I'm always checking but then as the days progress there is this period of time, this tension when I'm waiting that I convince myself that I did it wrong, all the seeds are bad and I'm not going to have a garden at all. I don't know why that always gets me uh silly because obviously it's worked every time. These are just breaking through right here. That's some broccoli rob um but it's not surprising the cooler weather plants are coming up. I expect all, I bet that if were to dig down in here I assume that the tomato seeds that are in there actually have sprouted, they just haven't broken through. Um I've got some, these are going to be microgreens and actually I noticed here looking, I don't know if you're even going to be able to see this. Okay y'all see that one right there where my finger is? See the little little root sticking out of that? So that's growth. I grow basil microgreens about every February, March because I'm just desperate for basil at that point. Um I just, I need something fresh. I need just a little something so uh that's my tray of basil microgreen. I, I'm trying to decide. I need to prune my roses too. This might be a tomorrow job also. Yeah I should do that otherwise this video is not going to happen. I'll shoot, tomorrow our high is in the 70s. Actually I'll look and tell you exactly. Tomorrow is 73 degrees is our high and sunny. Um that's 22 Celsius. That is glorious. So this evening I'm going to take you around my garden and show you the signs of spring because I know some of you are still in frozen places. You are desperate for spring and I want to encourage you tonight that it is indeed coming. Um it has, it has knocked on my door. I am gladly welcoming it. We will still freeze. We will freeze in the night multiple times probably throughout this month. Um potentially into April. Sometimes we don't. It's just kind of a gamble. It's definitely feeling very springish here in South Carolina and I wanted to give you a little reprieve from whatever winter you're currently in and also golden hour. Am I right? So it is, it is really time to prune the roses. Probably ideally I would have done this a few weeks ago but it's still fine. And you can see the buds starting. So I'll come in and prune back a lot of this so that they can have nice fresh growth. I think I have, I actually don't know how many roses I have out here. It's quite a few. It's somewhere in the range of about 15 on the whole farm and I've got, I got some fertilizer in. It's up in the house. So typically what I'll do around February-ish is I go through and prune all of them and then fertilize them so I get lots of blooms. Well hello little calf. She's not actually that little of a calf. She's a yearling. Hey darling. You having a drink? So all the trees are starting to bud just a little bit. Not a lot. They're not really opening much but this is a dwarf pear tree. I have two of these. I have this one and then the other one. I can't tell if that bright light is like obnoxious on the camera. I'll be able to tell sorry if it is. Last year there were two pears on this tree. That's all it produced. We'll see what it does this year. This winter was quite a bit colder than is normal for us and I'm starting to see like irises pop back up. I'm curious to see what happens. I don't really know because like a lot of my irises that are here I don't see any growth on yet but it's not too late. Like look at that. It's starting. I actually came in to grab a shovel. There's one thing that I can work on. I'm really bad about seeing a task and being like I need to do that but I can't at that moment and then it just completely escapes me. So we're gonna go dig some chamomile volunteers out of my walkways. Maya was just out here and we're trying to decide what to do with our walkways. So I've gone on quite a journey in my years of trying to figure out the best garden pathway that's not insanely expensive. Of course you can hardscape but I mean I guess you could. Theoretically you could hardscape. I cannot hardscape because I'm not paying that much. My garden is huge and that would be crazy to put this down everywhere. Plus I imagine that would cause like drainage issues and all that stuff. I want something organic. You know I'm kind of leaning towards trying to just establish some really good grass in the walkways. I love being barefoot on grass. That is like a goal of my life to be barefoot on grass as much as possible. So that's really where we're leaning but it's kind of just figuring out the best way to go about that because as it is right now this soil is very clay. It's real wonky right now because we had weed paper down and gravel. Of course we had a lot of stuff that just broke through that and grew through it and so now we kind of need to like reset it. But right now in amongst these weeds like there is a bunch of chamomile that reseeded. This is my chamomile bed and there's some other stuff in here I'm going to take out. But I want to dig some of these up and put them up in the bed. Obviously there's some chamomile that reseeded in the bed. There's several little babies here but I want to pick some of these out of the walkways because otherwise they're just going to end up getting torn up when we do what we're going to do here. See all of that that's all chamomile. I actually have not sewn chamomile in that bed since I first sewed chamomile in that bed because it just reseeds and even when I had gravel in here I just pulled this up with a clump of roots. I'm going to throw it up here and then I'll plant them up there. Even when I had gravel down here the stuff grew on its own and I would just pluck the little seedlings out and move them back up there. Hey bear! Honestly it might be nice to dig up even some more of these. I'm gonna go grab a tray and dig some more and go put them up in that big garden bed in front of my house. I have a lot of stuff other stuff in that garden bed but chamomile typically peaks like here around June maybe like early July. I'm usually harvesting the most of it in the end of May and when it starts getting really warm it starts to struggle but I have a bunch of elephant ears up there by the house and they don't get really big until July or so. So I'm thinking if I took some of these plants up there and planted them all up in that front garden bed if nothing else the pollinators would really like it and why not you know I mean what a great cottage garden plant. Oh that's also a good idea I could move some of this over into the cottage garden. I wouldn't mind having chamomile growing everywhere. I love chamomile tea and obviously it reseeds on its own. So this variety of chamomile is Polish. Here in the states we pronounce it Złoty Lan. At least that's what I've heard people say but Polish viewers have told me that there it's Złoty is how it's pronounced. I had the hardest time with chamomile for a very long time. I tried to germinate it. I tried to get it going. I direct sowed it and what ended up working for me was to sow the seeds about January and I just directly sowed them in this bed when it finally worked. Since then I've had I've started something from seed and it's done fine. You just kind of have to start it early and the seeds are minuscule. They're so tiny and with any tiny seeds obviously the danger is that you sow them too deep and then they break through into the soil then they don't have enough energy to get up to the surface of the soil. Twice as deep as the seed is wide in the case of chamomile you can't even like you don't poke a hole you just kind of press it into the surface of the soil. Absolutely not! That is mint made its way in here. Oh y'all I have mint got in my in-ground garden and since then it has just been everywhere. I do not want that in here. I think I should be a little more aggressive in getting those roots out. I'm just going to take these little guys I got out of the ground, plant them, nothing fancy here, kind of spaced out somewhat. Y'all hear the goose drama happening over there? There's a flock of Canada geese that have stopped at my pond today and my geese that live here are just deeply offended by that. They're not feeling hospitality at all. It's been a very dramatic day for them. So that's it pretty pretty resilient stuff doesn't really need to be babied. Oh that's not mint. The soil is also really damp so it you know it'll take off pretty easily. I'm gonna go grab a tray. I had Maya when he was out here unstack all my green stalks for me. I'm actually gonna move some things around and consolidate and I'm gonna have a few with strawberries and then I'm gonna move a couple back over and put some different flowers and stuff in them. I did a video, I think it was last year, I'll find it and link it showing how I amend those every year. It's time for that also. This is really the time of year where the actual garden season like really heavily starts for me. You know I'm not planting just a ton yet. I'm starting seeds, I've got the high tunnel going, but I'm doing all the prep work which is also really fun. Y'all don't judge my mess. Maya is actually planting. Man, this camomile is everywhere. Okay I'm gonna come over here because there are a lot of smaller ones. Obviously anytime you can get like a lot of the roots around something that you're trying to move it does tend to stay happier that way. I hope that ought to be enough to get it pretty established up by the house. More on signs of spring. Look at my Nanking cherries. Quite springy. I mean it's only a few weeks to actual spring. I'll have a warm day that pops up and like you know December or January I'll be like oh it feels like spring. But now we're actually getting the early stages of it actually being so. Speaking of which, I have not checked today out here to see if there's any asparagus. Don't see anything yet. It's yet to dry out enough for me to weed this. It just comes up massive clumps so I'm leaving it. No asparagus yet. It's got to be close. Actually before my light is gone I want to come down here and check the high tunnel. Y'all it's one of my most favorite things in the evenings whenever the light just kisses the tops of the treetops. I know many of you have heard me say that before but I really do love it very much. All right let's come in here. Everything is a little sopping wet out here. This kind of floods a little when we get a lot of rain and we got a lot of rain the last couple of days. So um okay we got some babies out here. Look at this. Oh happy birthday little guys. So I've got beets coming up. The little white pellets you see on top of the beds that's a product called Sluggo and it's for I mean obviously slugs but it's for roly-polies because we're having the worst roly-polies. I had them really bad last year. I think it's a number of reasons. Roly-polies are remediators. They pull heavy metals out of soil. They break down things. I think we we had some compost had a lot of wood in it and I think that that's really when the imbalance started. It's really important whenever you're managing an organic garden to realize that the earth is really just trying to balance itself and there's really no bad guys in the garden. Like the roly- polies are not bad. They're here trying to do a job. They're trying to bring balance. Now they will absolutely destroy seedlings. The last two years I've had really really bad roly-polies, pill bugs, sliders. They're called different things and every year there are a number of people who argue with me that they do not eat seedlings and you can keep believing that but I have absolutely 100% caught them in the act. They do eat seedlings. They prefer breaking down rotten stuff but in beds with fresh seedlings they will decimate them. So my seedlings started coming up. I planted some starts and I almost immediately started seeing this. There were no other pests going on out here other than them so I sprinkled the sluggo stuff yesterday. I'll put a link to the one I'm using. I just bought it online. I used it last year. Several people recommended it and I also did last year where I put cut up oranges and potatoes. That helped some. You just had to keep bringing them out so I'm trying the sluggo to see if I can knock back the population just a little bit on the front end. These are all radishes. Of course they come quickly. Quite a lot of seeds that haven't popped up yet but we had some cool days so that's not really terribly alarming. My garlic back here it definitely came up. I'm not 100% sure how this garlic is going to do this year. I was real late getting it in but we'll see. We'll learn together. It's not even remotely alarming that I sowed all these seeds a week ago maybe 10 days ago some of them and that a lot of them aren't up yet especially considering we have a few very cold days. Totally normal. I've kept the soil moist. There's nothing that would have went wrong. Some of the seeds were on the older side. Most of them were not. They were within a year old so they'll come up but this being mostly still blank looking and my seedlings at the greenhouse was what had me having the crisis this morning of oh gosh what if it doesn't work. I don't know why I'm this way. Please tell me I'm not the only one that convinces themselves every time. I've grown thousands of seeds. I have harvested thousands of pounds of food y'all. That's my garden. It will be full. If you are watching this video three months later go watch the most recent video and laugh and laugh please on behalf of me. You're welcome to have a laugh at me. I know logically it's going to work but every single time I'm like what if this is the time it doesn't work. All right here's a new little baby. I can't remember what that is. Maybe a rutabaga. I have notes. I did take notes. I just didn't make any labels. Yeah one of the this one got decimated. When it comes to things like this oh no that one got cut off. That probably won't come back. All the rest of them are fine. Oh there's one of them right there. Tiny saboteur. Last year I seriously had like thousands and thousands of roly-polies. It was insane. For me with anything in the garden I just I never take the like kill them all approach. I got some pretty alarmed responses. I did a video in here when I was planting these onions and I found a black spider in that bunch of onions and I carried her outside. And I mean it was alarming like nothing in the garden like is out to hurt you. It's just trying to exist. And if you are paying attention you more or less won't get hurt. I mean the worst things that have happened to me I've been gardening for a really long time is you know I've been stung by wasps a few times and that does really hurt my feelings. Like obviously it hurts my body also. Nobody likes to get stung by wasps. But um I'm always trying to be so peaceful and like kumbaya with all the animals and so when something stings me I'm like don't you feel my love. Like it just really spins me. But um really the best mindset to have is balance. And so like I do have an imbalance of roly-polies in my garden. I can identify why. I think it's all the wood that we brought in. I need I need to balance them. And so it's not super common for me to like come out of the gate with any sort of pesticide. Um I do I only use organic stuff anyway. And that is something that I do have an old video on if you are interested in like organic pest management. But I'll tell you like I really prefer to use nothing if I can. And really just keep it all in balance as much as possible. But sometimes you got to do what you got to do. Especially like I really want to have good gardening year. I'm planning on doing kind of like a grocery store challenge and and really focusing on just buying bulk ingredients and making things from scratch and eating is as entirely off our farm as we possibly can through this growing season. I'm actually planning on starting in March. So that's coming up. And so you know like there is a real desire in me to make it work. And that's why I'm like okay I'm going to be preemptive more than I usually am. I'm usually a little more fly by the seat of my pants like yeah we'll see what happens. But I also probably have a chip on my shoulder because last two years like I have lost so many seedlings from this imbalance happening. We had dandelions start a couple weeks ago and I always leave the first one. So they're all like going to seed out there. I'm going to be covered up in dandelions. And I like that because I will make dandelion jelly. Um it's really good. It tastes I mean there's a lot of sugar in it. Uh dandelion jelly it's just like this really beautifully light floral sweet jelly. And I think it's really cool that you can make it over things that people call weeds and try to kill. Um but yeah I'm looking at all of those little wishes over there. I'll have to tell the boys they got lots of wishes to come make. Here you go. I'll blow it for you. You can Do you have to get them all off for it to come true? It's okay. It's the thought that counts right. Bear I think we made the right choice in scrapping productivity for this instead. To-do list tomorrow. Prune the roses. Start the seeds. Amend the green stalks. Plant the chamomile on the front beds. Had a lot of weeding to do. Oh I forgot my mug. I don't usually remember my mugs but my my late friend Haley she passed away a handful years now. She was a potter and she this was the first mug I ever got from her. It is very special to me. I even hesitate to bring it outside. I'm going to try not to be too precious with things like this even if they are special to me. I feel like it honors her the most to actually use it and bring it in my garden because that's what she intended. All right firm grip on my mug. Got my chamomile. Got my camera. My wet dog. I'm headed inside. Thank you guys for hanging out with me today. I hope you enjoyed a little bit of spring in my garden. God bless you. Until next time.