Gardens Gone WILD.

Hey there darlings, welcome back to Roots and Refuge. Sweet Mayan. Five inches. Yeah, he said this fell over. It was actually full. I think it's fallen over a couple times. And that's just since the last time that I emptied it a few days ago. I know we've gotten over ten inches of rain in the last ten days. And the garden most certainly reflects that. She's wild. Will you take these trays down? To the high tunnel? Yeah, those need to go in the high tunnel. And then these need to go out into the pavilion so I can just find a place to put everything. I gotta get all this stuff planted out. Which of those? The three? Yeah, these three. Alright y'all, so there is a before and after picture in order. Um, more or less. My garden has gotten absolutely insanely wild. Basically we had house guests in and so there was like a week period that I was like doing bare minimum maintenance. I was out maybe like 25-30 minutes in the morning doing a little harvesting and stuff like that. But no like real intense, like I'm spending four or five hours in a day. Which is normal. This time of year, at least a couple times a week I need to spend four or five hours in a day. Or I could do like two hours a day every day of the week and that would be fine. Didn't do that. Didn't do enough hours. And I was thinking, it'll be fine. I'll catch up next week. It started to rain. And it has rained. And I'm not complaining because a few weeks ago we were in the driest spring on record in over 200 years in South Carolina. Um, we're actually still in a rain deficit as far as like the reservoirs and stuff go. Like because of the amount of drought we've had the last couple years. But it has rained so much, so intensely. Now we're dealing with flooding everywhere. Not on our property but in the area people are dealing with flooding. And I didn't want to prune my tomatoes because when you prune them you leave open wounds. And I typically like to not do that when it's going to be raining. So I was like, I'll wait. Well, I can't wait anymore. We still have more rain coming on the forecast. But at this point already they've already gotten past the point where it's going to be easy to prune them. And we just got to do a little maintenance. Because with all the rain and the lack of pruning they could get sick. I still have all these pepper plants to move out. And they're fine. I mean, I typically don't rush to get my pepper plants out until like the end of May. So it's just about time to get them all planted. They're huge. But those are going in the high tunnel. And I have some more odds and ends things that are going to go in the garden. These are ground cherries. That's some celery. Um, these are all beets over here. So these are all just going to be plugged into places in the garden. And I'm going to give you just a little look around to see how crazy it is. Um, actually I came out here a few days ago because I was going to try to get something done. But it was so muddy that I was like slipping everywhere. Uh, and obviously I didn't want to fall down. But I have been harvesting. I mean, the rain has done the garden good. There was a green stalk you could see under there. Where to begin? Okay, so one of the things that's a mess that is like on the list to deal with is the fact that my mulch. I had some straw that I used for mulch. And it was full of seeds. You know, it first started to sprout. And I was just pulling it up and kind of just laying it over so it would dry. And that worked. But then it sprouted a lot more. Now when this happens, it's annoying. But it's not that huge of a deal. Because it's not rooted into the soil of the bed. It's actually just in the mulch. So it's very easy to just pull up. It's not, you're not really, you don't need any tools for it. It comes up pretty easy. And typically what I do when this happens is I just leave it on top. It's not rooted in anything. It's going to dry out. Problem is, is that when it's been raining so much, it stays kind of hydrated. So I've just, I need to just pull it out, throw it on the ground. Try to leave as much of the mulch in as possible. The thing you don't want to do is if you have, you know, mulch that seeds, you don't want to let it, that grass go to seed in the garden bed. Because then you'll end up with seeds actually in your soil. And that's way more of a problem than just having your mulch sprout. So I was walking down the mailbox the other day, down the driveway. And I came right past here. And this was the day before yesterday. And literally just out of the corner of my eye, I caught the slightest gleam of yellow. And I immediately, I almost came over the fence. I almost climbed the fence. I was like, no, go through the gate. I came in and my first tomatoes of the season were ripe. These are honey drop. And I had about five of them. So we all got to share those. And that was great. And I should have a lot more soon. I mean, usually within a couple weeks of those first ones being ripe, you're swimming in them. But first I'm going to have to kind of regain some control of this space. So another thing that I'm getting tons of right now are cucumbers. Let's see. Here we go. The silver slicers have taken off. And we just have lots and lots of these. Oh, my pads are so muddy. It is our plan to put sod down in the walkways of the garden to just, like, get some good grass established. But it was so dry. We had talked about doing it. And I was like, I don't know that we ought to do that in the middle of drought. Because all the grass on our farm was brown. And, of course, I was already watering the garden. So we thought, well, maybe it will be fine. But it's just, you know, putting sod down in the middle of the drought just didn't feel like the best thing to do. Now it's been so wet. I'm kind of glad we didn't do it because I think that going from that dry to this wet probably would have been pretty difficult. But the walkways are actually kind of dangerous to walk in right now because of how slick they are. Another thing that is producing, like, crazy that I harvested a whole big basket of the night before last is squash. We have a lot. This is the supersonic squash. This is the earlier one. Oh, look. A little bee. So cute. Oh, there's one in here, too. Oh, all of these flowers have bees in them. That's funny. Hey, that's interesting. This is basil that actually reseeded right here. And when it came up, I just let it go. But look at that. This must have mixed a little bit. So we have a variety. We've got a purple, a green, and then look at this. That's interesting. I might have to let that guy go to seed and save seeds. That's a neat-looking basil, don't you think? Obviously, a cross that just happened here. My green beans. I haven't really started picking yet, but I need to keep an eye on this because probably within a couple of days, I'm going to need to be harvesting these. Here you go, Will. Beautiful. Thank you. You're welcome. Cheers. Cheers, mate. Oh, yeah. Those are good. The rain did them good. Will and I were just discussing taming the garden. Attempting to tame. I think that we are at the point right now. I have never had my garden look like this in May. Ever. Yeah, this is nuts. I got the first ripe tomatoes already. I'm getting tons of squash, tons of cucumbers. The Nanking cherries are all done. What did you do with those? We just ate a whole bunch of them. Nice. The blackberries are coming on like crazy. Did you see that? Yeah. Down there, there's a whole bunch. I was just eating them. Yeah, you can pick some and take some if you want. I've already picked probably two gallons. Nice. But, yeah, it's May. It's really wild. I mean, I know I planted earlier. We didn't get a late frost this year. Right. It's been a good spring besides all that drought. These are cucumbers that are starting. Yeah. I bet there are quite a few mushrooms. There's mushrooms growing everywhere. Like, they're all in the pasture and everything. But, I haven't checked the woods. It's a little baby. These are like little green pickling cucumbers. I haven't even finished planting yet. I mean, I have open space because I was like, I've got time. It's still early and I do. But, I'm going to put some more green beans in. I am going to plant some more flowers. I'm going to plant another planting of squash. This is my little mini watermelon. Some of these did not make it. I had a few planted here and this looks like the only one on this side. There's one on this side. And, these are bitter melons that are trying to come back. I've been pulling them out because I don't really want bitter melons here again. They just take over and I don't end up using them that much. Oh, gosh. I keep almost slipping. Here's more zucchinis. Oh, my gosh. I'm already. I can't believe. It's May and this is happening. I can't get it out. This is a two-handed job. Look at that. I'm going to share this one with the chickens. I've already probably got about eight pounds in the house still left. We cooked some for dinner, but I've got another basket full to harvest out here. I am pretty dumbfounded over the current state of the garden. I just, this happened fast. Every day that I come out here, there's just something beautiful to marvel at. It's truly a marvel. Hello, chickens. Hello. The garden grew something for you. Don't be so suspicious. It's good for you. I am actually just a little thrown off by it being such an early season. Usually, blackberries are coming on around Father's Day. Now, we've been picking them for over a week and a half. The Nanking cherries, which we picked between. I still have some on here. Look. They're really ripe. See. Nanking cherries are actually. They're not really cherries. They're actually in the plum family. I've got four bushes here. There's two bushes mixed in with these blackberries. I really need to relocate them this fall when they go dormant. I'm going to dig those out and move them because they're just too choked out. They didn't produce very much. Black, it's May. That's crazy. We missed a couple of blueberry bushes whenever we moved all of this up to the berry beds. I'm just going to leave them now. I don't want to move them this time of year. That's not best for them. It's best to move berry bushes when they're dormant. I'll leave these. I am going to replant these spaces with more trees and get all the berries out of here. This is my pomegranate tree. It looks really good. Look at this. I actually got another pomegranate tree. I'm going to put in one of these spaces. I have a few fig trees. I may get a couple more. Look at that. Isn't this beautiful? I didn't get any pomegranates last year, but it looks like this year I might. Figs loaded down. Then the raspberries. There's still a lot of raspberries in here. Again, I don't think I'm going to move them until the fall. They'll just be here for now. What I might still do though is plant a tree here because it'll be so small it won't matter. Then we can move the raspberries afterwards. That gives the tree a chance to get established. I was going to go to the high tunnel, but we'll do that in a second. I need to give Jeremiah a crash course in pruning tomatoes. Sweet Maya. We've got a lot of empty space here. Yep. Maya made me another garden bed. As one does when they're trying to woo their lady. Actually, maybe two. We just have to get more soil for that one. I think I'm going to put some hydrangeas in here. That's jessamine, so it'll cover this. It'll grow along the fence. There's another jessamine up by the front. Then this. I want to say thank you to Rachel for sending me the Peggy Martin rose. It actually got a little delayed in the mail. When it came, the leaves were a little on the crispy side. I was not concerned about it. Maya just built this bed. We put it in. I've got the tag still on, so I can show you guys. This is what it looks like. If you're unfamiliar with the Peggy Martin rose, the story of this rose is that a lady that lived down in New Orleans named Peggy Martin. Her plants survived 20 feet of saltwater flooding that was toxic and all that stuff from Hurricane Katrina. The plants still thrived. This one plant will likely go up and over pretty fully. I may end up putting another one on the other side, or I might put something else down there. It was a little dry from being mailed, but we planted it. Obviously, all of these little spark things are new growth. All the leaves fell off. I pruned off all the dead ends. This thing is going to be really lush and beautiful very soon. Big beautiful rose. The jessamine. I'm thinking I want to do some hydrangeas here in front. I think that would just be really pretty. Something big and loud and bossy. That's what I want. Don't say anything. I like it. Speaking of which, do you want some instruction on learning to prune tomatoes? Sure. Jeremiah is becoming a gardener this year. He's killing it. You planted the Peggy Martin. There's not a lot of stuff dying yet. You mean killing it. I'm killing it. I guess in gardening that's not something we want to say. You usually don't say that. Alright. Tomato pruning. If you want a cohesive lesson of pruning tomatoes from me to you, I do have videos about this. This plant is untouched. I haven't pruned these at all. Those over there I have pruned. The ones that were planted sooner. If you look here, you have your main stem right here. That's what we call our main leader. The way tomato plants grow is they have these, which are their branches. Branches grow fruit. Then they have suckers, which come out of the armpits. What suckers do is they grow more branches. When you take a sucker off, which this one is really big. Ideally, you want to do this small. See this sucker? It has all these branches. Every branch has the potential for another sucker. Every branch has the potential to grow fruit. You can see little blossoms coming off of the branch. Because we have so much nitrogen, it's been so rainy. Our plants are huge. You typically want to see your first set of tomatoes about 12 inches off the ground. If you have a ton of nitrogen, a lot of times your plants will grow really fast. Your fruit will be much higher. It's not that big of a deal. Ideally, you want your fruit set to be happening here. Anyway, that's a fun fact for free. We want to take all of the branches that are below that first fruit off. You have to pay attention to make sure you're not cutting the main one. Here, this one split with an armpit. Just during the rain. So low. It's pretty ruthless to do it. I go ahead and take it off. I would rather have healthy plants than sick ones. Sometimes you are giving up some fruit. You don't want to have any shortage of fruit. You have to weigh out whether you want... What's better? Is it better to have more fruit on a potentially sick plant that dies and you get nothing? You have to weigh that out. We want the bottom 10-12 inches or anything under the first fruit set to be bare. Because that gives us good airflow here. Then we're going to go up. Here, you can see... Ideally, I would have pruned this to one main leader. Sometimes... This one has two. I don't know if our friends are going to be able to see this. This one has two main leaders. I more or less will leave the two. If I've got space, cut that off. If you've got the two main that you can clip up... Because we're establishing these on cattle panels, you can only push so much on here. That's why I plant them close together. Last year, my tomatoes lasted a long time. In years past, they've been dead by the end of July. I was still harvesting tomatoes out of the big garden late August last year. They looked bad. But the fruit was good. I have a lot in the high tunnel this year. I'm fine with pruning these pretty aggressively. The ones in the high tunnel are not going to get sick by July. Because they're not getting rained on. Each one of these, you've just got to look at it. Establish where the main leader is. Then start taking that excess off. Then decide with how much you think you can actually secure to the cattle panel with airflow. How much you want to keep. You can keep two. You can keep three. You don't have to pull every sucker off of these. I think at this point, that's unrealistic. If we had ten tomato plants and you stayed on top of them, it would be easy to prune every single sucker. We have a couple hundred tomato plants. I didn't count exactly. I think I'm somewhere in the range of 130. It's a lot. Another thing. Because I have so many tomato plants. Look here. This is the onset of disease. I know some people are going to gasp at this. Murder? That's extreme. This needs to not go in the compost. That needs to go on the burn. Vikings funeral for that plant. With them being so close together. With the fact that we have more rain. There's just absolutely no reason to keep a sick plant. If you had a few tomato plants. That would be a grievous thing for you to do. Then you could cut off all the sick. And spray it with a very diluted hydrogen peroxide. Really try to baby it. Copper fungicide would be okay. That is part of this. Oh, it ran this way. Trying to get it back on this side is not a good idea? No, you can just attach it from the other side. It doesn't matter. I would say that's probably one of the mains right there. Clip that up and just start cutting. Hopefully I don't make any mistakes. We'll see. It's okay to make mistakes. It really is okay to make mistakes. I feel like I'm in first grade. Coloring outside the lines. It's okay. It's fine. You'll get better. I'm all for you becoming a gardener. I'm all for it too. Is there a nap? Do we take a nap at a certain time? Do we get snacks? Yes, actually. The problem is you don't like to eat the things that the garden grows. I just need a little kitchen out here and I'll make something delicious. A little salsa or sun-dried tomato sauce with some pasta. Wow, Will, that's a lot. Will knows what's up. Let's see Will's prune pile. Prune pile. Where are you going with all this? With all of that? I might pull the green tomatoes off since they had already established. Are you pulling some? Because I can make chow chow. That's the prune tomato pile. I made chow chow yesterday. What's wild is how much is still here. It's hard to want to prune off that much. I just cut the ones that were leaning over. That's good. That's going to help these stay healthy. I'm not really sure if they'll be able to pull back up. It probably could clip up. Will! Oh, man. Yes. It's not that red. What do you think? Smile. It's going to be good. It's really tart. It's a little tart. Here's a garden treat, Eli. You've got to have garden snacks while you work. It's part of the goodness of it. That's a good one. Juicy. I'm going to go show them the high tunnels. I'll be back to help. I forgot I was drinking my morning coffee. Make sure there's no bugs in it. There are some things I want to show y'all. Then I'm going to wrap this video up and get to work whipping this garden back to shape. This is my favorite of my cantalillies. That's so pretty. I have quite a few cantalillies in this garden. I moved some of them out this year. I probably need to take some more out because they just get so big. I've got them all down by the pond. Actually, a lot of this garden is stuff that people shared just a little bit of a plant with. Oh, man. This was probably one of my favorite things in the garden this year. It's pretty well passed. I did take a picture. I'll show you guys when it was peaking. These irises, I showed you a couple times when they were growing. Man, this was just completely gorgeous. Here's my little dwarf pear tree. Oh, okay. We've got a couple. Look at that. Little pears on there. I got maybe three or four off of this last year. I was hoping for more of a harvest this year. The shade cloth is up and glorious. This is really lovely. Here's two rows of tomatoes that really have to be heavily whipped back into shape. Then I've got this whole space that I still haven't even planted yet. Come down here. All of the weather has delayed this, but we'll have a chicken coop in here before too long. Right here are the more blackberries. This is a different variety. Unfortunately, I don't know what this is. Somebody just gave me some cuttings for these. This is where these came from. They are huge and so sweet. Maybe primark. I know I have primark somewhere. This may be what they are, but I'm not sure. Honestly, primark may be one of those ones that is I guess copyrighted. What is it? It's not trademarked or copyrighted. What's the right word? There are patented berry plants you're not supposed to propagate. I think it's that you're not supposed to propagate them to sell. But gardeners be gardening, you know. That's what we do. We give each other bits and bobs of our plants so that other people can multiply them. That's how all those thornless blackberries came to be. People just gave me cuttings. Here are the potatoes. They're all blooming. Actually, I read an article which I found very, very interesting. Potatoes will bloom. They don't always set fruit, but when they do set fruit, the fruit will have seeds in it. You don't eat the fruit, but you can save the seeds and you can grow potatoes from seed. I read this article the other day and this person was basically talking about how growing potatoes from seed and having potato seeds was really a sustainable move because obviously you store them a lot longer and then you have the food security of being able to grow potatoes en masse if you need to by having seeds. I thought that is so smart. My potatoes are blooming and I'm watching and if any of them grow fruit, I'm going to leave it alone and harvest it once it's ripe and dry the seeds and save them. I've never grown potatoes from seed, but I know you can. I like the idea of having those on hand. Again, wild overgrown tomatoes. There's no excuse for this. I could have totally done this during the rain, but I didn't. Here we are. It's a mess. It's fine. Your garden can get a mess sometimes. The problem is if it gets to this point, you get overwhelmed, you throw your hands up, then you really are going to suffer from it, but you can pull your garden back from being a week or two overgrown. That's not something. This happens and if you just are a human living a life like you have to go out of town for a week or you have to get dental work or somebody gets sick or whatever, you have guests in town, whatever the thing is, the weather is not permitting, your garden may get a little out of hand. This may look like such a mess and so overwhelming. I'm not proud to show this to you, but I'm honest. I'm going to show you I'm a good gardener. I grow thousands of pounds of food every year and sometimes my garden looks like this. We pull it back from the edge. All of those pepper plants are going into these beds. I do have a little bit of ginger in the back. I'm actually going to get some more and plant some more. I also want to plant shampoo ginger. I'm thinking of doing that in the high tunnel because it really likes shade and I don't really have a lot of shade to offer it otherwise. My garden has so much sun. Look at that. This is celery. It's pretty nice. I'm going to let it get a little bit bigger but I bet that tastes wonderful. I need to get some of those clips. These guys are not wanting to stay up. I have laid in my hammock. I didn't prune my tomatoes. But, you know, priorities, right? I laid out here while it rained for a little while one day. I didn't mean to get caught out here. I was piddling and yeah. It's pretty great. We're mostly done with strawberries. At this point it's like I get maybe like a quart every third day or something like that. I'm still getting some but not a lot. And it's about time to harvest the onions. They're all falling over. Some of them didn't get real big this year but it's okay. And really like red cabbages I don't think these are going to get just a whole lot bigger. I'm going to make a lot of sauerkraut. It's so good. Alright. I do have to set the camera down so I can get some work done. I just wanted to show you all these places so you can see the status of the wild garden before we whip her into shape. Probably, I am thinking Will's here today. He's here like one day a week now and like I'm very appreciative of the time that I have with him because he helps get a lot done. But with me, Will, and Jeremiah working on this all these tomatoes all of the grass that needs to be pulled weeds that are coming up, thistles and stuff like that this is probably if one person would do it, this would probably be something around the range of like 20 hours work or something like that. With all of us working on it. Will's is faster than me. I think I'm probably a little bit more meticulous so that's just the trade off. Honestly, I like when we're both working because he actually gets more done and I can like be real thorough. At the end of the day, we still got a lot done which is good. Maya's learning but he's a very fast study on anything that he does so I expect he's going to be a lot of help. I think we can probably get everything back where I want it just in one working day. So, I will catch you guys up later and show you my garden gone wild. Hopefully I can bring it back to a place of somewhat tame. Either way, we're getting a lot of food so it's working. Thank you for hanging out with me today. God bless you. Until next time.