10 Vegetable Crops I'm Growing In October

G'day, I'm Mark from Salsa Fishermen and in this video I'm going to give you 10 crops that I'm growing right now here in our veggie garden in October. Let's get into it. Now just quickly before we do get into it, sorry about the hiatus over the last two or three weeks. I've been crook with the flu, not covid. I don't know how because I've had so many needles over the past 12 months, I feel like I'm getting pickled from the inside out. I guess I'm just not eating enough oranges. Speaking of pickling, number one is cucumber and this whole long raised garden bed are cucumbers. Check out this whopper. Look, I like whoppers but when it comes to cucumbers, too many whoppers isn't a great thing because I like pickling them and I really need to get pickling but unfortunately our kitchen is still not quite ready. We've got the longest renovations in history. There's still a few minor things to go and we haven't unpacked fully yet, meaning all my jars are in storage in the shed but I've vowed to be able to pick at least four or five jars of this crop. At the moment we're just consuming them in lovely wonderful salads and Nina also does do the juicing thing as well. Number two is spring onions. I don't know if you remember but earlier on in the year I did a video showing succession sowing of spring onions. Well here's the results. We've been eating them like crazy and now with all this rain they're starting to die back a bit, a few diseases creeping in. I succession sowed from the left or your right through to the left here. The ones on the right here are going to seed and the ones on the left here are still fine to eat and will eventually catch up and go to seed as well but that's the succession sowing and going to seed is exactly what I want because it does two things. It attracts the pollinators and it gives us seed for next season. Blow them off and have a look at that. There's all probably about 20 spring onion seeds just sitting in the palm of my hand. I can just throw back in the garden bed, come up by themselves, self-seed when the timing's right for them or I can store them and plant them elsewhere in the garden. Such a versatile crop and speaking of seed saving, number three is mixed salad. I just made that up because there was a whole lot of mixed salads growing in here. Everything from coz to loose leaf to bok choy to coriander. Look at the seeds on this sucker. You can eat them green they're so different to the spice coriander when the seeds get hard and you grind them up but these aren't really thriving are they? A lot of them in fact are dead like this here was a mabuna and again I'm keeping them for the seeds. All of these crops are true to type and you can just let them grow again or collect the seeds and store them so I can plant them elsewhere or I'll just dig up the little seedlings gently when the seedlings come up and replant them around the garden. Mixed salad forever. Speaking of salads, have you ever heard of tree lettuce? Well that's number four and I'll be doing a full video on tree lettuce coming up but for now you can eat the leaves especially when it's young and the reason it's called tree lettuce or Celtus its main name is because it grows like a tree. Look at this tree trunk and you can eat the stems like celery. That's pretty bitter but they tell me you can cook it up and it's really nice. It's not too bad I suppose I could get used to it but anyway we'll talk more about that later. Number five is tomatoes. It's literally raining tomatoes here especially under this berry cherry tomato. The reason why they've all fallen on the ground is because we've had a whole heap of wind and heavy rain over the last few days and they've knocked these beautiful ripe berry cherry tomatoes off. Oh they still taste beautiful really sweet. Bee tried to get me. The problem with the extra rain it brings leaf diseases. The other side of the coin is that this last few weeks has been extra cool and even though we're coming into summer when tomatoes don't particularly like to grow and they won't germinate when it gets too hot we've had some extra tomatoes come up on their own around the place. So that just means more tomatoes for us such as this beautiful Tommy Toe gives us these lovely big cherry tomatoes. Great stuff. These grape berries another good cherry variety and here growing through our tunnel trellis are these Gladiator Roma tomatoes that are planted late but as you can see are producing a beautiful Roma type tom that is great for pastas and sauces. On the other side of these tomatoes is number six. I'll hit you with the reverse angle pumpkins. Look at these here aren't they growing fantastic. These are a golden nugget variety or bush pumpkin because they grow like a bush and not like a creeping vine like most pumpkins do. Straight upright leaves and the fruit grows from the middle of the plant. They're a small baseball sized pumpkin and I'm looking forward to testing them out and seeing what they're like. I'm hoping the skin isn't too thin otherwise the fruit fly here coming into fruit fly season will start stinging them and they'll fill up full of maggots unless I cover them somehow which would be a bit difficult. On the other hand this side have a guess what I'm growing here. Yes you probably guessed it if you watched my videos it's the dreaded Jap or Kent pumpkin. I really shouldn't say dreaded because this pumpkin here is amazing. It's a perpetual pumpkin meaning it just keeps on growing. It dies back a little bit through winter or quite a lot and then it just punches into life again in spring. It grows all the way through summer and into winter again when I generally finish harvesting them. We've practically got so many pumpkins we just don't know what to do. Happy Halloween. Number seven is sugar cane. Now I'm not going to talk too much about this because I'm doing a full video on it later down the track but I thought you know what I'll give you a little bit of a sweetener. I'm growing this for the main reason of sweetening things. You know instead of refined sugar I thought wouldn't sugar juice be better and I think it would be. I got this idea around 40 years ago when I was at school. Some of the kids because we lived in Queensland and it's a sugar cane growing kind of area some of the kids would come to school with a little piece of sugar cane and they would chew on it and that would be their sweets for morning tea or afternoon tea or even lunch. Anyway I've got a bit of testing to go yet before I release the full video but that's why I'm growing it. Number eight is blueberries. Growing wild down the back here because of all this rain there's this really interesting twist and that is this tape here. Old bird tape. It's a glittery thing. It had worn off. I'd wrapped it around. I thought it was going to be a gimmick. I really didn't expect this thing to make any difference at all. When I wrapped it around it stopped the birds from attacking the crops. It did deteriorate in about 12 months but the strangest thing the birds haven't come back. All the more for us of course but all I can think of is that the birds have formed a habit of not going there because they think it's dangerous. They haven't come back. I'm not saying they won't come back but I am now thinking that this scare tape in this case has worked. Pardon me if I have a break in filming. These are just too good. Number nine is these fabulous herbs called dill. Well you shouldn't grow cucumbers if you don't grow dill. They go hand in hand as you know. It'd be a bit of a dill otherwise. Oh what a wonderful herb. Goes great with potatoes and roasted veggies as well and you know sauces dips whatever chives as well mixed in with some sour cream. I could go on and on but I've got a confession to make. I actually didn't plant them. They came up by themselves from last season and I simply slotted in the cucumbers around them. So that's why they're way ahead and I will just keep that going. Let them grow nice and beautiful. Let them go to seed like they are feeding again the insects but then creating that spice if you like. The dill seed that you can grind up as well and use later when dill isn't in season. Yeah I think dill is probably one of my favorite herbs and I dill urgently grow it every year. And number 10 is carrot in the front there but this is a real secret experiment that I'm going to give you a little bit of an insight into. I did some filming with Hoselink. If you don't know I work quite a bit with Hoselink. I love their products. This video isn't sponsored by the way. If you can notice that the bed is divided in half there's a wooden plank here. It's a bit of a competition between myself and someone else. I'll elaborate more on it later but the actual main video is going to come out on Hoselink's channel so have a look out for that in the coming months. I'm not sure when that'll happen and carrots is one of the things that we're growing. They should grow well at this time of year maturing into summer when we'll have to harvest them otherwise it will start to get too hot. These are a larger type of carrot should be a good strong root so fingers crossed it works out. Well those were 10 of the crops that I'm growing here in October and to put it into perspective October is our second month of spring in a subtropical climate similar to Florida and we're running into summer although it's been a pretty cool lead up. Beautiful sun today though which is nice. I hope you enjoyed this video if you did make sure you give it a big thumbs up and subscribe to my channel but thumbs up I want to talk about that a little bit. I'm going to have a look and see if you like these type of videos because there's other crops that I could mention in October but what about I do every month and then we can cover all the months and I can show you exactly per month what I'm growing. If you do like that idea the thumbs up helps me determine and gives me more ideas. If you have other ideas whack them down in the comment section below. Go to my website selfsufficientme.com and share the video around because that helps my channel out heaps. Thanks a lot for watching bye for now. Cheers