This Crop Took Over My Garden - Here's What I'm Planting Next

G'day, I'm Mark from Self Sufficient Me, and over the next few hours, I'm going to cut through this pumpkin vine. We're going to see how many pumpkins we can get along the front of our veggie garden, and I'm going to open up those four raised garden beds that you can't see because it's been taken over by pumpkins, so that we can plant some seedlings in them and grow something more in those So let's get into it. I think I'll just start at this end, and as I go along and find pumpkins, because there'll be plenty of them, like this little fella here, I'll put the pumpkins on this table, and we'll see how many pumpkins we can find in just these four raised garden beds, and this strip along here. I've got a heap of seedlings here that are getting a bit long in the tooth, and I don't want to leave them any longer. It's just that I don't have the space at the moment to plant them out, so that's what I've got to make now. You know what, I think I'll just use my trusty army entrenching tool. There might be a few greener pumpkins, that's just going to be bad luck. If they're not formed by now, I'm not going to care too much. There are three already, they're smaller, but they're still good solid pumpkins. Here's a shovel, I wondered where that went. All I'm looking for here is pumpkins, making sure that, you know, I don't run over it in the lawnmower. There's another one hanging off the bed. Well that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven pumpkins so far. They're not biggies, but they're still good sized pumpkins. It is winter time, and that's what I mean. This next month, all this pumpkin vine will die off, so it's time to start cutting it back anyway. Two more. Okay, let's mow this strip. Well, at least I can see the beds now. We can walk along here. Perfect. Yes, it's a little bit sort of composted underneath the feet. Now I've just got to pull this pumpkin out. I should put some gloves on really, because they've got little prickles, you know, little, not thorns, but little tiny little prickles that can irritate the skin. I'll use my trusty Timu gloves. Really good buy, these were. Nice long suede up the, they're nice and comfortable, good and wide for my forearms, nice big hands, leather gloves. They're really good. Not everything I get off Timu has lasted, but these have, and they're good. Another pumpkin. That one's ripe as well. Yeah, this might be more than two hours, this job. Boy, pumpkin vine is thick. Beautiful. It's amazing how well they keep just out in the open. They cure beautifully. Look at this one. This is beautifully ripened. Oh, it feels so good. Lovely. And so that's three big, nice pumpkins here. This one, very good. Of course, pumpkin loves growing in compost, but this bed is rich and full of nutrition and no wonder the pumpkin's doing well in it. When you could use this as rope, it's that blooming strong. Throw that Rosella back in there. Just let that die. You might get lucky and that Rosella might come up next season. Oh, wow. I'm going to show you something soon that you're going to think is really interesting. Now look at this here. So get rid of this pumpkin. You look at where this vine is coming from. It's a big vine. We just cut it down, tidy it up and it'll become more clearer. It's huge. I can see it's stemming everywhere. Look how thick it is here. Massive pumpkin vines coming out of the little garden composter. So I've probably put some pumpkin seed in here and that's where it's stemmed through from, out of here. I got this little thing off Timu, filled it full of... Yeah. Okay. So there you go there. There's nothing left in it. It's just turned to dirt, but the seed that was in there would have been some pumpkin seed and it's grown directly out of the composting tube. This is meant to let worms get through and eat up all the stuff, which they did. And then these pumpkin seeds grew and look how thick that vine is. And that has fed most of the pumpkins in this front row here. And from that vine formed other vines that kept seeding down and kept growing out and then eventually falling over the bed and going out into the grass and populating all the lawn. If you've got that little scraps, you're better off just burying that, burying the scraps separately, just in a hole. This does nothing. That's just gimmicky. But I tried it from Timu, I thought it was a lot bigger, but it wasn't. I might as well grab these pumpkins while I'm here. A couple of small ones, that one a little green. This one is ripe, but you know, fairly small. And then we've got two more green one and a ripe one over there, medium size. And now we've got the last garden bed for this side anyway. Look at that root for that pumpkin, look how deep it goes. It's amazing how well they get preserved, just staying out in the garden. Okay, it's the next day and I'm pretty happy with the progress that I made yesterday. Looking fairly well cleaned up. I just need to do that other side because when I'm refurbishing these beds, obviously I can't reach right through. So yeah, it makes sense to clear that other side as well. And then I can start planting in some crops and bit by bit, I'll refurbish the rest of the veggie garden over this next few weeks. There we go. First one. Yes, hopefully I won't step on a snake, but it's very unlikely. It's now just into winter. So most of the snakes will be hibernating somewhere else, not in my veggie patch. And especially with me trudgling through, they're probably long gone. Something smells nice. What's that smell? Is that ginger? I know I've got ginger growing here. It's something else. It's not the beetle leaf. It might be the mint. There's some mint. Yeah, yeah. That mint might be. Yeah, it's the mint. Very strong, very strong smell. It's beautiful. Not as many pumpkins as I thought would be behind here. Nearly to the end. Let's see how this electric mower tackles all this long stuff. Can it get through this thick pumpkin vine? Let's take it down to three. That's pretty low. See if it can handle it. Well, I had to have a little bit more fun with that electric mower. We don't get on it a lot. I use it for these types of jobs where the bigger mowers can't get through here and I can't be bothered using a push mower for these types of situations. But most of the time we'll use the electric to tow things around, tow carts around. It's nice and quiet. You don't have to have a motor rumbling in the background as you're pulling around dirt and stuff. So it's really good for that. It's five years old now. The battery doesn't last as long. It'll probably go for half an hour and that's about it. That was the first electric Toro lawn mower they brought out. I'm sure they've improved a lot since then, but it'd take me quite a bit to buy another one. But for a situation like this, getting in between garden beds, it's really good. And small spaces, it's fine. Small jobs still works good. And as you can see, it's cleaned that up nicely. Here we go. That's just underfoot. I don't care. That'll just mulch into the ground. It'll suppress the grass a bit and it'll feed the grass in good time. The good thing about this pumpkin vine is if I'm not using these other garden beds, they're at least suppressing weeds and other things, grasses and stuff. So I might as well let the pumpkin vines grow elsewhere while I'm not using them. They can smother the weeds and grow pumpkins. In the meantime, I'm planting just in time as I clear out each garden bed. All right, let's do one garden bed at a time. And the reason why I've got this fork is because I'm going to clear out this sweet potato vine because it's winter. Sweet potato slows down in winter, typically. And I'm going to see if we can get any tubers out of this bed. I'll leave some in there and it'll just regrow back. But in the meantime, I'll be able to plant other things in here and that sweet potato can just keep coming back and grow around all the new crops that are so in here. Now, if I wanted to repropagate some sweet potato, I could just use this vine and we could plant it in other places and it'll just keep growing. But I'm just going to put it into the compost heap at the moment. This here is some turmeric. I'll dig that up as well, but that'll die back now that winter's arrived. Wonderful fresh turmeric. Look at it. Smells wonderful. It's just beautiful. We'll stick that in the other bed for now. I'll probably miss some. You'll get some more turmeric coming up in this one location next season. You usually miss a few fingers, which is the great thing about growing turmeric. It's just so plentiful, so forgiving. Even this little plant here could be replanted in a container and grow on to make a ton of it just from that. And these lush stalks, plenty of nutrition, fantastic for fertilizer and composting. Often once you have turmeric growing in our climate subtropics, once you start it, it's, I wouldn't say the terminology should be it's very difficult to get rid of because you don't want to get rid of it. It's just, it's a fantastic plant for regrowing because it just adapts so well to our climate and garden. Well, that's the turmeric done. Let's see if we can find any sweet potato. No, none there. Oh, here's one. It's cracked through there though. Not very nice specimen. There's a little one. It's a nice looking chiba. So good for replanting. I'll plant that one around about there next to the other one and then we'll have it grow up. And another decent chiba. It's a quality chiba. Only little, but you know, again, you could eat that, but I think we'll just bury it and let it grow back stronger next season. And these here, you can bury these roots and they will, they will come back again too. So I'll probably do that over the other side. It might've been just out competed by the pumpkin. That's quite possible. Now I've got to top this bed up a bit. This is just some secondhand soil that we had leftover from some concreting we got done out the front. Yeah, of course you don't let this stuff go to waste because it's been sitting there in a big pile for several months. And now I can use it to top up this garden bed here. You're always topping up garden beds in these raised bed gardens. So when you've got leftover soil like that, you might as well use it. It's free. And here's another load. It's probably going to take this and maybe another one yet to fill this bed up. We'll see. Well, that's three wheelbarrow loads. So let's smooth it out now. That should be enough, I think. Now I'll do the old smooth it over with the fingers because I can do a better job and I'll get to play in the dirt. And that's not, not many adults can can get and say they can do this without looking childish. But I get to play in the dirt almost every every day and there's nothing better than doing that. This is just an organic fertilizer I'm throwing down because I think this bed does need a little bit of a pep up. It's been a bit neglected this here is rock minerals and that's just going to add a little bit of extra trace elements and minerals to the bed just in case it's lacking in anything and whatever it can't hurt that's for sure. So you can't really use too much rock minerals but just a good sprinkling will work a treat because plants are just like us. They don't just live off like calories like they need they need food yes but they also need good nutrients and they also need vitamins and minerals to be able to absorb those nutrients properly and so that they can grow healthy and be immune to diseases and strong. Now I'm going to give this a bit of a water in and the reason for that is it just helps dissolve that fertilizer a bit it dissolves the rock minerals and then when you plant the seedlings in here well then they're not going to get burnt there's less chance of them getting burnt by direct contact with raw fertilizer and and raw rock minerals type stuff. I mean I could even probably dig that fertilizer in a bit to be honest probably should have but you know just dig it in the first couple of inches but that'll be right that'll be okay. And now I'm going to hit it with some sugarcane mulch you can use old wood chip use anything for mulch really grass clippings as long as it doesn't have too much seed in it or any seed in it and now I'm going to plant some bok choy some cabbage and some peas. These are all getting a little bit old but they're still salvageable and I'll plant the peas along here they can climb up the trellis and when the peas are done because they're annual they'll die off and we can harvest them and finish them off and then summer will hit and sweet potato will be taking over the trellis so it's a dual crop and the cabbage and everything like that can be grown in here maybe we'll fit something else in here as well we'll just see how much space we've got. I'm going to separate these because they're root bound and they're two to a packet and I think we can separate them safely and then I'll lay them out before I go planting just to see how many we've got and see how I can space them maybe 10 centimeters apart see if we've got enough for that should do just got to be careful you don't break the stem you can you can sort of break the the roots but not the stem. Now we just plant them in cut the moss dig down plop them in couldn't be easier and then we'll train them up. Now these have come in several several to a cell which makes it a little bit tricky because you've got to break them apart again just like the peas and then they don't have much of a root ball so you've got to be up with the water on them so that they don't die of water shock and you also got to be a bit careful separating them don't break them off at the stem you just keep a little bit of roots there so I think I'll just break these up first and then I'll start transplanting them in. So here goes the bok choy I've just parted the moss back behind these peas here not too far because the peas will go up that way and I just parted the moss so that I can easily push these into the ground about 25 centimeters apart six inches or so doesn't really matter and we've got a few left over so I might just you know plant them in a bit closer I'm not just going to make another row just for five or six and we'll see how they go maybe just step back some of the bigger gaps and you know we'll just pick them young pick them whole and allow space for the rest of them to grow and now we'll make another row for the cabbage probably allow you know half a foot or so back give it some space between the other crop again I'm just going to pull the moss back so I can plant easier and cabbages are bigger so got to allow space for those cabbages to grow we'll do the same thing part the soil we'll plant them a little further apart now these might go to another row yet we'll see and I'm going to have enough space for maybe a couple of rows of something else maybe some celery whatever seedlings I've got left over there it's important to give them a and settle those roots down just helps with the transplant shock and gives them a an easy drink because the roots are disturbed they don't they don't take up water as good because they're missing parts of their root system and all that so it's a good idea to give them let them sit in a bit of water and so they can absorb some water especially overnight and that just gets them off to a good start the next day when the sun comes up well what we'll do is we'll finish the back of this garden bed off tomorrow morning I think we've done enough for today starting to get a little bit dark and I'm really happy with how this first garden bed's come along then we'll get stuck into the second one I'll talk about the third one there's something special happening with that and then we'll finish off with the fourth one and yeah yeah we'll keep going well it's the next day and like I said at the end of yesterday we'll finish off this bed by planting in some more seedlings here and I've got some broccoli and I want to talk about that in a second because there's a really important tip that I want to give you but before we do that this morning I got up nice and early and I did the same thing that we did to this bed to the second bed here so that's all been refurbished lots of backbreaking work I can tell you and also the fourth bed the last bed there the third bed I'll tell you more about what I'm going to do with that soon but let's finish off this bed now let me give you a really good tip you'll often get seedlings that are crowded in instead of one per cell you'll get two or three or maybe four and that's good because that means you're paying for a punnet of six cells and six plants you're actually getting sometimes 12 or 18 or more the tricky thing though is sometimes you don't have the space at that particular time so maybe you can't use all those seedlings and depending on your situation and how hot the weather is if you transplant seedlings from their small little cell and you've had to divide that root ball up you're often left with four seedlings with a very small root ball and if you plant that out into the main garden straight away especially in warm weather those seedlings can quickly perish and suffer you've got to really keep the water up to them or they will just shrivel on you within a matter of hours of not being able to take up enough moisture the other thing you can do get some extra potting mix and instead of planting them out you divide them up from their little cell and you nurture them in a slightly bigger container it's called potting up and then you let them grow on somewhere in a seed raising area where you can look after them easily and once they've gotten a bit bigger like these ones then you can transplant them out into the garden lovely look at that beautiful root development throughout that cell see that wonderful that's going to give it such a good start and now i'll give it a good space because broccoli is pretty big plant unless you get small broccoli but these are standard size so i'll get two more here so i might even mark that out because i've got 12 plants so i've got two there two there that's six two more there eight ten and twelve couldn't be easier especially with these cells i got these from epic gardening you can get a five percent discount from epic gardening if you follow my links in the description below doing it this way gives them such a better chance nice big spider scared the heck out of me must have been nesting in the crack here that's enough to give you the heebie-jeebies when they crawl across your hand you probably got the biggest as big a shock as me all right that's the first bed done we've got peas bok choy cabbage and broccoli and now in this second bed it's again a bit of a mix match of seedlings that i've had sitting out there that need to be planted out celery leeks wombox the chinese cabbage eight marigolds these are french marigolds bring in some beneficial insects and just look pretty you know get a bit of color in the garden get them right up the front celery does like a bit of space that's for sure it'll grow better if you give it some extra space it'll get less disease less rust it's like most plants they're looking very healthy they weren't looking that healthy when i first potted them up but look at them now i would say we're going to get another row of celery you know what i was going to plant these asian greens in the middle behind the celery we've just done the second row of that celery it looks good but i'm thinking why not put a marigold strip down the middle and divide that up and then put the asian greens behind that and whatever else at the back here i think that's the go so let's do that let's put these marigolds in pretty much in line the eight of them in line with the celery but just a little bit back from them another 25 centimeters or so that'll look nice a little strip of flowers in amongst the veggies and now let's do our motley crew of asian stuff that's the five one box now let's divide this small cell of three bok choys up they're pretty hardy bok choys so we'll divide them carefully without breaking the stems keeping a bit of root ball for each and we'll just keep going on another couple of rows they won't grow as big as the wombok but uh there's still a nice very nice asian green i've got four of these leeks so um well how can we do that we might as well just put the four in here and then i've got this little corner for something else there's three good ones this last one is it's been snipped off the top so maybe i just throw it in as a hail mary let's put it just here and if it grows well it grows well and then i've got all that space about a foot square on the other side to be able to sow some seed or plant something else in this area here i've got a couple of capsicum that probably won't grow too well at this time of year but maybe the sun's still getting them pretty well on this side bit of shade that side maybe they might do good here on there i'm on there let's give it a go and if they're not growing that well what i can do is put a mini greenhouse over the top of it so here's what i'm talking about this banana capsicum i got them deliberately because i know that in the past we've been able to grow banana capsicum through the winter here so you can't really grow any other capsicum or chilies or anything like that through our winter unless you've got a hothouse so let's stick them in and let's start the experiment and like i said cover them over with some plastic little mini hothouse experiment if i find that they're just not going too well if it can grow well through the winter the good thing is the fruit fly won't be able to sting it because they're not out in winter and that is a big threat to any type of capsicum when you grow it in southeast queensland is the fruit fly the fruit fly love capsicum not so much chilies but but any thick walled type of fruit like capsicum big tomatoes not many tomatoes but large tomatoes if you grow them through spring summer they just get decimated by fruit fly larvae i've just about used up all the spare seedlings i had which is exactly what i wanted to do i didn't want to keep them for any longer i wanted them to grow on and grow big in the garden and i just want to remind you while i'm watering these plants in that these raised garden beds here i've had them for a long time now gee but they'll be eight or so years old these front ones and the other ones down the back they're almost 20 years old and they're not rusting or anything they're still growing really well and lasting and these raised garden beds are made by birdies on the gold coast here in australia here in queensland and they export them to the usa and all around the world new zealand south africa uk so if you want go to my website under the support me banner go to that menu and you'll see the codes and everything that you need to get these raised garden beds if you're considering buying some the other thing is you can look below in the description of my youtube videos and you'll find all the people that i work with and any discounts that you can get through those businesses as well and the products that i like to use okay now we've got the third bed have a look and see how low this is check it out the reason why this is so low is because i've set myself a challenge i took all the soil out of it the challenge was to rebuild this bed with just organic matter the only exception i had which i thought was reasonable was reused potting mix and the idea was to see how long it would take me to fill it under normal circumstances not forced the point i want to make in this video is that you won't see the final product in this video this last bed here well at least this last half i've got these potatoes here that should have been planted out pretty much six weeks ago but they haven't been because of just things happen sometimes so they're not looking the best however they still will grow most of them still will grow well and i've got high hopes for them and this is the right time for potato planting so i'm going to sow these potatoes in this bed here and hopefully we can get a good crop of potatoes out of this sort of rugged rotly motley crew bunch of misfits these are an avanti and a delaware mostly avanti and delaware good for well i believe roasting and boiling and just good all-rounders and they're there are determinate potatoes they're not indeterminate meaning that i can just plant them down sort of a fist down they'll come up and they'll grow in like a bush and then they won't they won't grow upwards like a indeterminate tomato for heaps and heaps so i don't have to kind of dig a trench and backfill as they grow up and then get a bunch of tubers these will only produce one sort of set of tubers underneath the main plant in around about the same area so nice and simple determinate potatoes all right let me lay them out i'm going to put three in a row a lot of these are fairly small i'm not going to divide them up they're already probably weakened as it is again about 25 centimeters apart and like this one here i don't even know if this one's going to make it it's starting to rot but it's got an eye coming up here and it's a green sheet so maybe it might so i'll give it a chance nice loose soil dig them down about you know half a palm drop it in throw it over you don't want to get too deep especially these little ones and they're already a bit weak because they might not be able to get through and we'll see fingers crossed they'll do okay if they're nice and fresh i might have buried them a little deeper but i just sort of threw them under a few inches underneath the ground and then i've still got this mulch on top and it's a fairly heavy mulch as well so i didn't want to go too deep otherwise they won't have the energy to come through we'll see how this turns out i'm not going to water them in because the soil is damp enough as it is and i want to give those potatoes a chance to use its own energy and moisture and start sprouting through well this project overall took about seven hours maybe eight hours to complete yeah and i'm happy with it it's a really good transformation i think and i've finally got these beds propagated and ready to grow and i've still got plenty of time for them to give us a great crop through one of the better times of the year for growing those kind of supermarket greens when the weather's not so hot we ended up with about 24 pumpkins given that a lot of them are fairly small some of them are green they might not ripen that well maybe five or six of them might not be the best but there are also some fantastic big ones in there too that are just perfectly ripened and we'll be giving them away and we'll be preserving them eating them we're not getting sick of pumpkin so uh yeah they'll come to good use they won't go to waste that's for sure and i'll be sure to save some seed and keep these going year after year as much as i can well i hope you enjoyed this sort of makeover video if you did make sure you give it a big dirty pumpkin makeover rejuvenate garden beds thumbs up and subscribe if you haven't already and i'll see you in the next one thanks a lot for watching bye for now cheers