What's Wrong With My Summer Garden?

Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden. It is July. We are well into summer, and today I want to give you a tour of the garden to show you all the things going well, what's going wrong, and what I am planning on working on for the rest of the upcoming season. Now one of the interesting things about last month is that for the first time, I think, since I've started gardening, I was gone from my home more in June than I was at my home. So the garden definitely took a couple losses in that time period, but honestly, I am extremely impressed by the resilience of a garden, even if you are not here to watch it. So let's kick it off with a quick little tour of the patio because some of my containers, including these flowers here, have been doing quite well. So the patio hangout zone is fully activated and pretty much ready to go for all the summer parties. Now I've got the Mediterranean herb bed here that's mostly just like thyme, sages, oregano. Then I've got a lot of flowers and citrus over here. So these are my only dahlias. I think I got two varieties. Can't remember either name. Most of them are in containers. So here's one of them that's been blooming for quite some time now. This is actually in a terracotta pot that I believe is way too small and dries out way too quickly for it. So this has been getting water every single day in order to bloom and look like this. Now the roses are doing really well. I have one here in this big blue container. This was refreshed recently and I gave it a really good prune this year. So it's nice to see developing structure. And I love the look of the leaves on this rose. A lot of roses to me just look kind of ratty, but this one looks really good, even without any blooms on it. So I'm very happy with that guy. I wish I could tell you the variety name, but I could tell you it is a white rose and that's it. And now over here, I've got four citrus trees. They're all in containers. I've got two bears lime, one that I just potted up yesterday. I put some rocks in there because I put fertilizer and something keeps digging up my pots when there's fertilizer in them. Here's the more mature bears lime that's been growing for a couple of years now. And then back here, I've got one of those sumo citrus, those giant like mandarins are nice and puffy and delicious. And I've got a Eureka lemon in here back in the corner. Now, one of the interesting things about the containers this year is that I potted up my two big blueberry bushes earlier this year after they finished fruiting. So they went into giant whiskey barrel containers, they got a lot of fertilizer and new soil. And this is what happened. They started growing again, as if it was a second spring, like they actually developed fruit to have a ton of new growth developing. But really, the fact that I'm really tripping out about is all of these berries. I've never had a blueberry fruit twice in the same year. So we'll see if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Hopefully the plant can handle it. But I guess with all this new soil, it should be able to at least handle the fertility requirements. The other weird thing is that this right here is a ground cherry. Now, I have not grown a ground cherry in my garden for I'd say three years. So when I potted up this blueberry, I guess I reactivated some dormant ground cherry seeds, and they are now growing. Now, I don't like these. To me, they taste like a tomato that you just ruined. I don't know how else to describe it. But other people in the household like it, so I'm allowing it to live. But even here, you can see just how much growth this blueberry has had. Now, the fruit trees have been doing really well in containers, specifically the guavas. So over here, I have a lemon guava. You can see just how much fruit is all over it. And if I come around here, actually, first, I'll show you this plumeria, which looks super wonderful, smells amazing, very fragrant, and also this mint container. If you are growing mint in a shallow container like this one, then don't keep it in full sun like I have it here. It's basically impossible to keep all watered. I've been trying to stay up on my watering, and you can see the top growth has been much healthier. So the real solution here is that I want to move this into a partial shade area because there's just way too much sun. But the other fruit that I was talking about is my second lemon guava tree. You can see some of the fruit on there. You can see some of them up here. Some of them are even ripening. But it is such a prolific fruiting tree. It is one of my favorites. Now, behind me, as we go into the garden, you'll see all these sunflowers. These have been blooming for quite some time now. They're all multi-branching types. I am a huge fan of multi-branching sunflowers. I think they are the best type. Basically, instead of just one big sunflower head that looks great for like three days, these will continue to bloom for weeks. So these guys here are starting to fade already, but they've been in full bloom for I think two weeks now. So we've been enjoying their beauty for two weeks, and they are still going. And way up there, there it is, that sunflower I measured at 15 feet. It just opened fully, the top sunflower. So that's going to start a cascade of blooms coming all the way down that 15-foot tower. Very excited about it. Let me bring you up closer, and I'll show you what I did to get it that big. I've got the younger progeny on the way here. These two will be taking over the reigns, but they will not get as big as these guys. That's because these were planted in the spring as the sunlight hours were increasing and bloomed near the peak of sunlight hours, which is when summer begins. Whereas these were planted before the summer solstice, so now they're going into waning sun. But the other thing that makes a sunflower big besides getting that timing just right, is giving it an absurd amount of water. Every time I water my patio containers, I come by and I flood these guys as well, even though they're on irrigation. And of course, in order for it to bloom and get as big as possible, you do need to fertilize. In this case, I am using the fruit and flower fertilizer, which has that P number, the middle number, really high. And that is what encourages blooming. So that is what I am doing, to juice these guys up and try to get as many of these multi-branch blooms as possible. And I mean, you can see it. This plant right here is just covered in other side shoot branches, and it's going to be blooming like crazy. So now, let's dive into this garden tour. I'll show you what's working, what hasn't worked, and what's changed. All right, so here is the quick pan of the garden itself. This is the first garden, the south garden as I call it. One of the major areas that I really want to work on this year is this whole back wall. It's basically useless. The only thing I get out of it is essentially this lemon verbena, which is just way too big. I can never use that much lemon verbena in my life, even if I tried. And the whole garden itself, I kind of want to do a redesign, rebuild this fall or winter perhaps, so more on that later. But up front and center, what we have here is the summer squash bed. I want it as close to the back kitchen door as possible, because we all know summer zucchini grows crazy fast in the summer and can get way bigger than your head before you realize it. So I have one, two, three younger plants that have just gone into the ground. Very excited. They're all starting to produce now. And I've got this one that's way more mature. It's been growing vertically. Now, while I was gone, I wasn't tying it up, obviously. And what happened was it got up to this point and started to flop over. So I had to add a second stake and rewrite it. And this is what it looks like now. So it is totally fine, but now it's growing on two separate stakes. You can see how vigorous it is at this point. It has fruit all over it, because it has been growing for such a long time, and it has a good root system. Now, coming up to this raised bed, I've got a lot of cucumbers going in here. The only problem is that my cucumbers can never get taller than about here before the root-knot nematodes take over their roots, and I have to rip the plant out because it looks like it's sad and dying. So maybe this round will do better. Maybe not. But so far, they are looking very healthy for the moment. So I'll take it. Over here, we have a mostly pepper bed that's been kind of stagnating as we've been approaching summer. I don't think this bed has been getting enough sunlight. It just hasn't been warm enough. But now what I did is I removed two of the gigantic, you can see one there and one there. There was two more right here of these collards, which were starting to crowd and shade this bed too much. So I removed those. This bed was double dug earlier this season as well, so it's been re-amended, re-sort of invigorated, and I've been growing multiple crops of lettuce in between these peppers all season long. So this is now the third round of lettuce that's gone in here. It is looking pretty dang good, especially these guys here have been really well performing for me. The little gem has been a little bit lacking this year, but the butter crunch lettuce has been doing quite well. And all these peppers are now starting to look really green and healthy, and I think they were going to start pumping out peppers in no time. Now when I removed those two collard greens here, what I did is I planted two new tomatoes. So I have one on this side, one on this side, and I've also planted marigolds around them, and also a flower. I believe this is the scabiosa. This is the first time I've grown scabiosa, so I'm not entirely sure, but I'm 99% sure it's a scabiosa. Now in the middle is the perennial green sorrel that's just been here for a few years now. I just trim it back heavily. It looks really sad when I do that, but then it always bounces back. So if we come through here, you'll see that these lacinato kales have just been doing incredible. So they've been in the ground now since early spring. I want to say maybe even February. You can see just how tall they are, how much we've picked off of them. This is the Black Magic lacinato kale that I believe I got from Johnny's. Very fragrant, very tasty, grows really well all year round here in my climate, so no complaints from me. These four plants provide more than enough kale for pretty much any size family unless you're eating kale every single day. So if we come around this corner, this was my oldest tomato bed. So that plant right there, and actually the middle one, I'll tell you about that in a second. These have been in the ground since maybe March, I want to say, so quite some time now. They've clearly reached the top of the trellis and started to droop back over because there's not enough height. Now on the right side, this plant was just defeated with powdery mildew. Whatever the variety was that was there was not a very resistant one, and it got basically destroyed. I got plenty of harvest off it in the early season. What I've done now though is I've replanted it, so I'm looking forward to that. This plant is one that I started from seed, I want to say, oh, about six weeks ago, maybe less. So it's looking really good right now. Just went into the ground about two days ago, got some marigolds on it. Now this one was also covered in powdery mildew. You can see some of it over here on this leaf, but overall the plant itself seemed to be outgrowing it. So what I did is I allowed this sucker down here to become the new primary lead on this plant, and then over here this stump is where the old plant was that actually stretched up and over this trellis. So all I did is I decapitated it right there and allowed this new shoot to take over as the dominant one. So since it has a big root system already, it's been growing since, like I said, basically March, it should be able to support this new growth. And honestly it looks really good right now, so there's no reason for me to deal with it. The sun gold, I do need to harvest and remove it. It's too spindly at this point, there's really nothing worth saving. Now this bed here I will probably be doing a full reset of this week. I do have one summer squash in here that actually is definitely ready to harvest. It looks really perfect and beautiful. And I also have this melon here, this is Sugar Cube I believe was the name. And off this one patch, I am not exaggerating guys, I've pulled off 9 to 12 individual-sized melons. They've been extremely fragrant, sweet, and delicious, so that's been really great. But yeah, the rest of this bed I do need to just reset. I'm thinking of putting in my last round of tomatoes in here, and maybe some like bush beans or something else to sprawl into this kind open area. Now the last bed I want to talk about before we get to the grapes is my big 4x8 cedar bed. This has been planted with these peppers for quite some time, and again the peppers in sort of this May to June period sort of slowed down because March is oddly one of our hottest months, and then it starts to cool down right before summertime. So now that we're in July, it is the appropriate conditions for peppers and they are starting to look much better. So these should take over now and start to really crank out a lot of production. And same story here, basically I've been gone so long, these cherry tomatoes have been so prolific that when you let the fruit sit on the plant for so long, it starts to sap the energy out of the plant because it thinks it's basically reached its ultimate goal, which is to produce a seed and fruit, and they start to kind of get weak and die. So what you see here is a plant so covered in powdery mildew that the leaves are just not able to photosynthesize. There's literally like zero or almost zero green left on this, and on some parts like over there it's even worse. So what I need to do is come through, remove all these, and figure out what I want to plant here. I'm not sure yet, I wish I had more cherry tomato varieties ready, but who knows, maybe I'll take some cuttings and propagate it that way. Now I do want to do a quick update on these trees. I've got the pomegranates here which are doing quite well, got some fruit over here, got some really nice fruit setting right back there in the distance, and then my apple trees are doing really well. So these are the pink lady and the fuji apple, both apples that shouldn't do well here. Last year I harvested a couple, they were really sweet, crispy, and delicious, so that's a good sign, but that was still the first year after as a bare root, so they might have had some chill hours left over from wherever they grew it. So it's encouraging to see that it's fruiting again this year considering how warm this winter was. So we'll see if they actually taste good, if they're worth it, but for now the trees actually look good so I'm optimistic about it. So let us now turn our attention to this grape, the flame seedless grape. So here's the thing about flame seedless, I love it, I think it's crispy, it's sweet, it's tart, it's delicious, but in our climate, it does not work. The problem is powdery mildew. Now I did some research and basically powdery mildew, if you have a May that does not get over 90 degrees, which in San Diego it's rare for it to get over even close to 90 degrees in May, I can't lie, what happens is the powdery mildew does not die, it thrives. So that thriving period is coinciding with the fruiting window of this plant and what you get is decimation of your crop. So take a look at this cluster here, this is a grape, supposed to be green at this stage, but it looks white because it's absolutely covered in powdery mildew. Now you'll see up here some of these are wilting before they even had a chance to fully form, but what really happens from the powdery mildew is it cracks the skins of your grapes and then they dry out and rot. So now they're cracked, they're full of mildew, and they're starting to dry out into raisins before they've even had a chance. So there's a cluster over here that looks like a little healthier, like it could have made it, but you could see a perfect example of what I mean. See all those cracks? That's from the mildew, these are actually all covered in it, it might not look very apparent, but I could promise you this is absolutely dusted in powdery mildew. Some of the leaves look a little rough, but nothing too bad, but the fruit itself just gets destroyed. Now there is a solution to this, I could, if I wanted to, spray them like every single day in May with some sort of copper fungicide or like once a week to try to kill any of the mildew that might live on the plant, but it doesn't actually like prevent it in the future, you just have to continuously spray it. And that's just something I don't want to do, not just because I don't want to like use those sprays in the garden, they're not like the worst things in the world, they're mostly just copper based, but I just don't want to have to rely on spraying something all the time in order to get fruit. I'd rather find a variety that fits my climate better. I've done a little bit of research, I haven't narrowed down my options yet, but blueberry is a good one. I think Faith and Jupiter are the other three varieties, or other two varieties that I've looked up that have powdery mildew resistance, and usually the case is that they're American European hybrids. Now if it's only one or the other, they don't have all the disease resistance, but the hybrids of those two varieties of grapes tends to do really well for powdery mildew. So at some point, I'm not going to turn it out now because I want to actually process all these leaves and turn them into salted leaves to make stuffed grape leaves. And maybe I'll make a video on that if you guys are curious, but for now it lives, but it's going to be gone at the end of this year, that's a promise. Just behind the grape plant is my driveway where I've been growing tomatoes in containers. So this is a test to see if I could grow healthy tomatoes with new soil, disease and pest free, no nematode issues, I don't need access to soil, this is straight on concrete in the driveway. So let me tell you how it's been working and what I've changed in the past month. So again overall, all these tomatoes are looking pretty good right now, they all have plenty of fruit on them. And just as a quick update, this was in my container video, but these are all tomatoes without resistances, mostly heirlooms. So I have four over here in 15 gallon bags, this one's in a 20. Now the main issue that I've been running into is that climate that I mentioned earlier has been very conducive to powdery mildew, which you'll see the bareness of these lower trusses and also on some of these leaves. And also, turns out the shadows here are pretty decent. So I'm actually not getting nearly as much sunlight as I expected, another good reason to remove that grape. But needless to say, right now it's 11, they're in full sun, they'll probably be in full sun for only about four hours or so before they start getting spotty shade. So how's it been going? Pretty well, except for the fact that they've been hand watered up until this week. So that was fine early on while the tomatoes were young, but once they reached about like this height, they started to grow too fast and inconsistent hand watering, especially with me out of town, has kind of stunted them a little bit. So yesterday I went through, and actually not yesterday, like five days ago, I added this irrigation. These are a quarter inch, I put 10 of the emitters in each grow bag, this is all running off my main garden irrigation line, all I did is I pulled a supply line in from the garden and brought it over here. And the nice thing about our grow bags is that they have this little sleeve built in. So that means that the irrigation tubing can go up through the sleeve and up and over and into the actual grow bag itself. So it keeps things a little bit more trip free. This is all on drip here, but you can't even see all the lines. So the goal here is that with this many emitters, when this system waters, I want the soil to be fully flooded and saturated with water every single time it waters, allowing it to dry off between waterings. But whenever you water a container, the goal is full saturation of every bit of soil, and then allow it to dry a little bit between watering. But if you don't do that, you end up with like dry pockets, inconsistent water issues, and your plants will not be happy. So fully flooding the container is ideal when you do water, you just don't want to do that like every day unless the plants need it. So ever since I've added the irrigation, I could already tell that the green on this plant is much more intense. Now it's only been like five or seven days since I've put the irrigation, but even in that short period of time, the plants just look better. So that's how they're looking right now. And that is the update on my driveway tomatoes. The last thing I'll mention is this trellis system. If you guys want to see more about it, it's been working quite well. This is freestanding on a concrete driveway, allowing you to trellis like whatever you have, the whole system comes apart, it's collapsible, none of this is permanent. So let me know if you guys are curious about that as well. So earlier we saw my sort of ornamental to fruit tree containers. Now let's take a look at some of my vegetable grow bags because a lot of these have done really well and provided me continuous harvest through the season. Alright, so here we are. Now what I've mostly harvested at this point is multiple grow bags full of potatoes, really quite good yields, and also peppers. I've gotten quite a few really huge, delicious bell peppers out of these plants. This one is almost ready. God, it feels so thick and heavy. I can't wait to harvest that one. But basically I have a couple peppers in five-gallon pots that have been doing quite well. These ones I just planted recently, they're just starting to fruit. And I've also had a lot of tomatoes, both determinate and indeterminate. Now also you'll notice this one here. This is a five-gallon pot holding a sun gold, which is woefully undersized. But this was a leftover plant that I just didn't have the heart to throw away, so I shoved it in a five-gallon pot and I've been getting some decent fruit off of it. Now over here is a Bulgarian variety somebody, a family member gifted to me. They got seeds from a friend and they started them themselves. And I'm now trying to grow it at home. I have one in a container here and one in the garden. And honestly, it's looking extremely healthy. Very promising. I've grown other Bulgarian varieties before and they seem to be not too strong against powdery mildew. But this one so far, it's really holding its own. Now in the back corner here, I've got more peppers, more tomatoes. I've got a Space Master cucumber, which has been reliably cranking out a cucumber like every week for me. And they've been really good. And the plant is not that big, which I really appreciate. Some big beef, Italian heirloom, and all sorts of other things. Now back here, see some of these tiny onions left over from the harvest. But this is a Chef's Medley, I think, salad blend. These are two or three different types of lettuce from botanical interest. I sowed right into my grow bag and now this is all ready to harvest as young, delicious, wonderful lettuce. Even in the middle of summer, I could keep this in part shade and it's doing wonderful. Now let's pop into the greenhouse and show you some of my seedlings. You can see right now the seedlings are mostly those tomatoes. This was basically my round of tomatoes that I started in preparation of having to remove plants as they die due to nematodes or powdery mildew overload. So now I have all these ready to go. I put some of them in the garden, which you'll see in a moment. But I will need to sort out where the rest of these go this week and then get rid of the rest or give them to a friend because they're starting to get a little bit too tall. I've got a couple green shards that I needed to grow in the ground. And a new plant that many of you probably haven't seen before is a pigeon pea. This is a northern adapted pigeon pea, which is designed to grow in cooler climates. I got it from Adaptive Seed. This is also known as gondules in Puerto Rican cuisine. Very delicious. It's a perennial. It fixes nitrogen and it makes a really tasty pea or bean, whatever you want to call it. Now if we pop into the greenhouse, I will admit this has been underutilized and that's because this winter was just so warm. I just never really felt a need to get much out of it. It's been mostly a seed starting place, a propagation station. I have a lot of like fruit trees and dragon fruit cuttings in here. The things that have been thriving the most are the tropicals like this ginger. I have three different ginger pots. They're all starting to grow really, really nicely even for the fact that it's early summer. I also have my mango. Look how absolutely ginormous this is. It is so thick and wonderful. I think this is about ready to harvest. I harvested one last year and it was incredibly delicious. This was the mango tree Kevin gifted me alongside the greenhouse. I also have some guavas in here. I think pink Hawaiian pinks and then in the back there I have Malaysian pink. And I also have just a lot of different peppers that were planted earlier in the season that are just going nuts with production. But it's warm in here so let's step back out and I'll show you the bigger side of the garden, the north garden. So it sounds like my neighbors are doing some tree work back there but I think we'll be able to get through this. It doesn't sound too loud. Now this garden in my opinion looks better than the other one especially this back corner here is so lush and full of life. So let me walk you through the thought process of it, why things are the way they are, and what's growing in here. So right off the entrance here I used to have this trellis covered in the orange clock vine. It was creeping up over the top, casting a lot of shadows, so I decided to remove it earlier this week. And now what I've done is I've replaced the base here with a dahlia that was planted about two or three weeks ago. And then I've got a icebox or sugar cube, no the sugar cube is a melon. This is a watermelon, one of the smaller varieties that is capable of going on a trellis without breaking. And then on this side I have the honey nut butternut squash. Those are the ones that are like this big so those should be totally fine to support on a trellis as well. So the plan is to have both them climb up and over and just load up with fruit in this area up here where it should be easy to support from above. Now if I turn around what you'll see on this side, a little sneak peek, is my pepper alley. So these are the youngest ones that were just planted not too long ago. These are the ones that were planted a decent time ago underneath my tomato plants here. And these are my grafted tomatoes which I do have thoughts on. One thing that's interesting is that the grafting only affects the roots below so any soil-borne diseases it should help with that. But above ground it's still fair game. So we still have plenty of powdery mildew on some of these heirloom varieties that don't have good powdery mildew resistance. You could see this one in particular, I can't recall the variety name right now, might be an Italian heirloom on this side and a Cherokee on this side are definitely sensitive to the PM. As well over here the sun gold has taken some losses on leaf matter due to all the powdery mildew. But the thing that the rootstock does is it provides extremely vigorous growth. So all my tomatoes have already topped my Florida weave like two months before I expected them to. Now this is good because it outgrew the powdery mildew so I'll take that. It's bad because now my tomatoes are way up there and I don't have anything left to support them with. So either I improvise something or I let them just kind of hang down and break and just deal with the harvest that comes. Now in terms of the actual yields, I mean you saw the other side there's a decent amount of fruit. On this side there's also a decent amount of fruit. Quite a lot of it across the board here. So as long as I get all these to ripen I will be a very happy camper. On this side I have the Brandywine which is a not heavy producer. So I do have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven decent sized fruit already and hopefully I'll get some more. But yeah the rootstock the main question I have now is basically will the roots have root knot nematode pressure on them. If they do it doesn't seem to have affected the top growth of the plant. So might be promising but next time I'll have to devise a much taller trellis because I did not expect it to top out so quickly. So coming back through you'll see I have a lot of zinnias over here, a lot of these peppers that are starting to be producing right now. I've already harvested off them quite a few times and if we wrap our way around to this big patch the 10 by 10 area before that is the sort of blanket flower patch. This I will want to curb this year. I want to cut all this section off. There's a new stand that began on that side and this side I'm going to be putting in with native plants. Quick note on native plants in the actual garden. In San Diego a lot of our native plants go drought deciduous which means that they will actually go brown and drop their leaves in the summertime to protect themselves from a lack of water because we get zero rain in the summertime. So what you need to do is find a variety that could handle irrigation. Usually they're labeled as like garden friendly or irrigation capable or something like that. So there are quite a few native plants out there that will actually grow and flower and thrive all year round on irrigation. Just make sure you get those kind because you don't want your random patch of native flowers to just die in the middle of summer and then you drown it because that's the adaptation it has. So this will get replanted, I just need to find the right varieties. So now moving past the native patch we're over into the big bed and what you'll see here is a tomatillo doing exactly what a tomatillo wants to do which is sprawl, creep, and spread. Now I have trellises before. A florida weave works okay but this time I just decided to let them rip and just do their own thing and they are producing like crazy. I think I could get my first harvest out of there just about now. This is only three plants from there to here so they've all equally sprawled and taken over to the best of their ability and they are very happy for it. Now in the back here this is my tiered tomato strategy in action. You saw the oldest ones in that big raised bed at the beginning where they were mostly dead or dying. So what happened was I planted this bed after those so these are in between age, they are just about to start ripening. There's a bed behind that we'll see in a second that was planted even before that that I've been harvesting out for a couple months now and now this bed is going to be the future generation of tomato harvest. So I will probably get my first harvest in about a month. I have one, two, three, four, five plants back here. They are all on the florida weave, they're all roughly around the same age and the idea is that I will be getting harvest out of these guys in like august into september and definitely through october while like by that point all of these will be gone because they will just be too old, too tall, and unsupportable. This will be the tomato patch that takes over. So I need one more round of tomatoes to get me through into the winter time but these are going to get me pretty close. Now over on this side I got the big old peach tree which in theory has been doing great. It did harvest or it did fruit really heavily. I just didn't get a chance to eat a lot of them because I was traveling basically every time the ripe window opened I was gone and the rats and the birds found most of them. So I think it produced like 30-40 really good size looking peaches and I only got about 12 of those. So not the worst but hopefully next year I'll catch them in time. What's crazy is that this has been summer pruned, it's been winter pruned, and it's still this ginormous tree. So I think I just need to do a much more severe pruning which I thought I already did because I removed 70% of the tree this year. So I guess this year I'll remove 80%. Now over here I have the patch of the hugelkultur bed and what you'll see is that it's almost all French marigold but what it's hiding is it's actually full with eggplant. So there are I believe eight different eggplant plants in here. They're all kind of spread inside there so you could see let me see if I could find one of these. Oh that's a spiky one just found the spiky calyx but look at that guys that is a nice really good looking eggplant. Actually this one might be going into dinner tonight. If I look over on this side my favorite variety the anea has these nice stripy eggplants also looking good. Also looks like I need to support this plant with a stake because these eggplants are too heavy but this hugelkultur bed has impressed me. Everything in it looks really happy and healthy looks really vigorous especially these marigolds. I've never had marigolds pop off this hard before but it looks incredible it smells great and also the eggplant still looks fantastic at the same time. There's a couple zinnias hiding in there but the marigolds definitely outvigored them. Now over here this shishito bed absurd. Shishitos apparently can produce even in cool weather months without a lot of sun. We've pulled hundreds I'm literally saying hundreds of shishito plant or peppers off these plants. I think it's only five pepper plants got hundreds they keep going red because we cannot eat them fast enough that they keep ripening and it's fine to eat them when they're ripe and red they're actually a slightly different flavor which I don't mind but if you let them sit too long they start to get leathery and dry and they're not enjoyable anymore. So what the plan is here is to remove these shishito peppers I think everyone in the home is getting shishito peppers for now. I have three new plants that I already put in the ground that are younger this should start producing in about a month so I think nobody will mind having a little break of shishito peppers for a bit. Now these beds have been a little neglected since they're the furthest from the house. I have a sauce tomato bed here that I just haven't been keeping up on supporting and making sure the tomato actually gets onto the trellis but nevertheless it's still producing. I've got all these leeks that I need to actually eat and harvest maybe give away because there's just so many leeks that I never got to. If I turn around over here this is an entirely single cultivar of one pepper. These are the kurtovoscu kapia. It's a Bulgarian pepper. So interestingly enough in Bulgarian cuisine peppers and tomatoes are like the two most important vegetables followed by eggplant. The solanaceous family is basically king and of course none of these are native to Bulgaria. They were all introduced in the past like hundreds of years but they've quickly become our favorite and these peppers in particular are way up there in our cultural zeitgeist of food because they're thick-walled, sweet, elongated peppers. They're perfect for stuffing, they're perfect for roasting, they're perfect for eating raw. It's basically like a bell pepper but just better in every single way and there's just a truth to that. I cannot deny that truth. Bell peppers are way more mid compared to these longer style European peppers. They're sweeter, they're thick-walled, they're more versatile in my opinion. If you haven't tried growing any of them there's Italian versions. I highly recommend it like the Corona di Toro peppers like bullhorn peppers. All of them are great. If you haven't tried them before I highly encourage you do. Now let's check this bed over here because this one has had some problems. So when we go up to this bed we see some sad pepper plants. Now a couple things happened here. First this irrigation was broken for a bit. Something over there on the connector side broke and it just was not getting water so the plants were starting to settle this fruit and they started to get powdery mildew and they just basically had no resources to defend themselves. So this is what you end up with a plant that has a lot of drooping sad that leaves. Now that it's fixed there is some regrowth but I will be harvesting all these peppers just to free up some energy on this plant but I just wanted to show you guys what it looks like on this side. I think I had a pepper basically kill itself with production so I only threw this shade cloth on about a week ago and I should have done it like three weeks ago because if you look inside here this is all one pepper plant and it did this. So I've never seen a pepper produce this many peppers unless they're tiny. So the fact that it was able or sorry these are two plants I lied. The fact that I was able to produce this many I think was just more than it could support and it was starting to get a lot of sun scalding. You could see that where the discoloration happens so I threw the shade cloth on but since I had the irrigation problem the pepper just basically started to die back because it didn't have enough energy to support all this fruit. Now since it's been shaded and getting watered you could see these new leaves here look way healthier look like they're actually alive and capable of supporting health and growth. So maybe this will be okay but I just want to see if I could get some of these to ripen because they were really tasty and there's so many of them. Now the pepper or the tomato that I was talking about earlier is this guy here. This one's been growing really really well I can't remember probably when I planted it maybe May. So I have tomatoes planted in like March, April, May, June and now we'll be planting in July. By planting in each one of these months I can guarantee that I get ahead of any disease or pest pressure and also make sure I get tomatoes harvestable essentially for at least eight months out of the year. So this has been doing really well these were mostly early varieties there's a Lemon Boy Plus there, Moscovich, Nepal and I want to say New Girl on this far end here. I've been getting some really delicious large size fruit. The Lemon Boy is easily one of my favorite, the Lemon Boy Plus specifically. It just produces these wonderful tomatoes that are quite a nice size and they also have a good mix of fruit and acidity and savory flavors. They're very all-purpose. This front section here that just got mulched has been all planted with bush beans so we'll see if we get some good production in the middle of summer. I haven't tried planting bush beans directly in the ground like in July so hopefully it works out because I have three rows of them. Now back here is a carrot bed. They're starting to bolt so I do need to clean that bed out. We just didn't need as much carrots as I thought we would so that's why it looks like this. But this whole back section has been one of my failings in the garden. I just haven't found a good use for this space. Putting all these fruit trees here has really crowded out this section so this gets so much shade. I think at best I could use that as a summer sort of greens bed. This bed I've planted in a few times. I just haven't had great success out of it. I think my irrigation is just not well set up in there. I need to fix it. So this section neglected, problematic, not great. But the actual trellis itself has been rounded with this kale, the same variety that was up front in the other garden. And what I've been doing here is planting climbing beans like these scarlet runners. I have this rumpicante squash which is like those really long like foot-long squash that you could eat as a summer squash. Coming around the corner here the other thing I have planted is all cucumbers. So a bunch of young cucumbers that are about to take over. A couple flowers like a dahlia and a sunflower. And this whole big patch here I'm planning on ripping this all out and basically doing a big three sisters patch here because I don't have anything else I want to grow. I already have tons of tomatoes, tons of peppers, so I figured let's get some winter squash in the ground. It's been a while since I've properly grown them and maybe get some corn at the same time. So there's a quick overview of my garden, what it's looking like, what I'm working towards, and basically what the deal is. Now like I said I've been traveling a lot. My travel plans have slimmed down now as I've gotten into summer. So I have more time able to lock in and focus on the garden here. But overall a lot of it looks great. It's taught me that the garden can survive, will survive, even if you don't touch it and you leave it for a long period of time. But it's not going to look incredible. It'll just look fine, which is fine. It's okay for your garden to look fine as long as you're getting production out of it. You're getting good harvest out of it. You're enjoying your time spent in it. It's not about perfection. It's about growing and continuously getting out there and just working towards a better version of your garden. So thank you guys for watching. Let me know if you have any questions, if there's something you want to see more of, put it down in the comments. I'll see you guys next time!