Struggles, Harvests, Wins and Plans (My garden status tour)

Hey there darlings. Welcome to my garden. I am so excited to show you all around today where we are going to be doing a little bit of a status update. It's not necessarily a tour. I'm not going through and showing you every absolutely everything that's growing though you know I can't help but be a little tempted by pointing out all of the things I'm excited about which is all of the things. But there are a lot of things being built not necessarily grown so I'm calling this a status update. There's a lot going on in the garden. First though I wanted to let you know that today, well the day you're seeing this, April the 20th starts GreenStalk's big Mother's Day sale which is like their big one every year. I know I had my private sale with them a couple weeks ago. Several of you comments you were really bummed you missed out. Well you haven't missed out on the opportunity to get a good deal. I know that all three five and seven tier planters all of them all colors and styles are $50 off. There's free shipping on $150 plus. You can stack my coupon code ROOTS10 for an additional $10 discount and they have lots of other good deals on a lot of the accessories like the berry cups that I like so much that are over there as well as the mover base and the supports and lots of different things. On the day that this is released it is the early access to the sale so the site will be locked. You can put your email in and then you can get access to it. I know that sometimes different things will sell out during this big sale so if you are planning on getting something specific you may want to go ahead and do that on the front end. But the sale does run until May 11th. So it's great to go ahead and get your Mother's Day purchase in. GreenStalks are a really great Mother's Day gift. If you want more information about this product I've done tons over the years. I think I got my first GreenStalk in 2018. That company and I have definitely grown together and I think they're a fantastic solution for anybody who's really wanting to get into gardening. Maybe you have any sort of like physical limitation. You have a space limitation or like me you just think they're really cute and you like what they offer. I'll put a link to the sale down below in the show notes and I'm gonna come back to these. I've got my GreenStalks all set up here. I'm working on planting them out. That's actually what I was doing out here when it got too dark. I did get another new one. I gave away a couple okay. I gave away a couple to a friend so just to find more color. See I'm moving back into a very colorful phase in my garden. I went very neutral and black for a little while and I've missed the color. So this is the Razzleberry. It is back for the sale. I was very excited because that was one that I really like these deep rich jewel tones. Anyway links down below. We're going to start down on the other end of the garden and I'm going to show you what we have going on here. All right we'll start in the high tunnels. Someone gave me the name suggestions a while ago to call my high tunnels hither and yon. So this is yon. It's the one that's over yonder for this one. As you can see it's about peaking right now. I mean it's absolutely beautiful in here. I'm gonna set my tea down and hopefully nothing gets in it. So I mostly planted this high tunnel out in about January. A lot of it was direct sown with seeds and as you can see a lot of it is about to the place of starting to harvest. So far the only thing I've really harvested out of here is radishes and I've got a lot more. You can see a couple of them are starting to go to seeds. We've had the weirdest spring. So anyway harvesting a lot of radishes. I just want to take some pictures out here first and then also my broccoli. This is actually probably going to go on the dinner table tonight or tomorrow because as you can see it's just kind of starting to get a little bit loose. When your broccoli does that it's time to get it picked because it's about to start blooming. All broccoli is is little flower heads. So I've got a few that are starting to loosen up. So yeah I need to do my photos like probably today honestly. Here I have some turnips that are really lovely size. More broccoli heading. I tried planting since I was planting everything at the same time. I did a few different varieties this time instead of all the same because I wanted to be able to stagger the harvest some and I'm glad I did because I've got like eight heads of broccoli right there that I need to use. Down here these are beets and when I looked the other day they weren't bulging a lot but I just noticed looking down starting to get a little bit of shoulders on those. Here behind it they're leeks and I was noticing yesterday that my red onions are really beginning to bulb. You can see those guys but the others won't be far behind. Yeah it's just gorgeous in here. I'm so happy with how this space is. I've had a little bit of pest pressure. Specifically you know I had a lot of roly-polies. I used I ended up using some spinosad to knock those guys back which is an organic pest control. I don't even like using that stuff but sometimes it's necessary. I wasn't gonna have a garden otherwise. They were eating everything. Look at that. This chart is looking really pretty. Let's start using that. I've got garlic here on the back. Right here this bed is cilantro which that one is really starting to be ready. What I'm going to do with the cilantro which is big enough now I can go ahead and start harvesting it. I'm going to dry this. Potentially freeze dry some of it and save it for salsa season because I cannot grow cilantro during salsa season. It just is too hot here and goes straight to seed. I'm hoping I've got a few plants down here a few plants down on the other side and I'm hoping to get a good bit of cilantro saved so I can use that for salsa season. Here I have calendula. I did several plants of this because I wanted to make some salves and stuff. Every couple years I'll do that. I don't have to do it every year because I end up making so much but it's time. I need to re-up my calendula salves. Here that's all fennel. This is where the celery is and unfortunately I've also got lamb's quarters growing in here which lamb's quarters are actually edible but they just grow crazy here so I need to weed those out. What do I have down here? These are rutabagas. They're not rooting yet much. Oh well there's a little baby. More beets. I told you I wasn't going to show you everything and here I am listing it all off because that is what I do. Yeah the radishes. I wonder if this one that's yeah see this one that's going to seed doesn't even have a root. That's a black that's a black radish. I'm actually going to leave the others. So radishes when they go to seed they make little seed pods. This one isn't yet because I just pulled it out. The seed pods are just as delicious as the radishes themselves and so if you're having a hard time with your radishes and they keep going to seed you know just learn to like radish pods. Oh look at that. Cute little baby kohlrabi. This looks awesome. I'm actually working on a cookbook right now and I've been waiting for the garden season to come back. The cookbook itself is almost entirely done. I'm finishing up a few final things on it but the photos of like lifestyle photos I've been waiting for the garden to be like beautiful to take the pictures and so that's what I'm waiting on for this space is I was waiting for it to be like really pretty to kind of photograph doing some of the harvesting. So it looks like tonight's going to be the night for that. When that cookbook comes out you see pictures you're going to be like hey I remember the day that those were taken. This is definitely very beautiful. I'm very happy with the way that it looks. All right into the next space. Let me grab my tea so I don't forget it. So here Strawberry Alley. If you can see here I don't know if y'all can catch a look at all the red that is here. I harvested with the kids day before yesterday probably about a gallon. We didn't come out here yesterday and honestly we should have because I'm seeing a few that are looking really ripe. It really needs to be an everyday job but we'll come out here tonight and it looks like we're gonna have like a really big harvest. So typically when the berries start coming on for the first couple weeks like you know they're just coming in a little bit at a time they just all get eaten and everybody just feasts on strawberries until we have our fill and then I'll start actually making stuff out of them. I did put I did cook some down last week. I had probably a quart or so that we had harvested that nobody ate. They're so good. Look at that red all the way through. You know it's good when it looks like that. Let me show all the strawberry juice all over my face while I'm trying to talk to you. The number of times that I'm editing a video I'm like girl from eating in the garden. I got stuff on my face. Anyway I cooked down some strawberries with some other berries I had frozen and made kind of like a compote that we've been putting on top of like yogurt and oatmeal but today when we pick all these I'll do a really big batch of jam. I'll probably between what I have in the house left from day before yesterday of course everybody's been eating on them and what we get today I'll probably put up at least two batches in the canner of pints of strawberry jam. We don't eat just a ton of jam. I mean it's great but like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then putting it on biscuits and stuff like that we'll do that and between strawberry season and peach season specifically which those are the two things that I end up with just gluts of here in South Carolina. I usually put up something in the range of like 35 ish pints of jam a year and I make a lot more than that. I give a lot of them away for gifts and stuff but for my family I would say probably in the 30 to 40 range and I know some people are like I can't imagine oh my god that's so many but you have to consider how many people are eating at my house regularly. I don't think that that's a lot of jam considering you know we can open a jar and half of it be gone in a morning with a number of people who are using it but it's not something we eat like every day or anything. So yeah this is gonna make a significant dent in that. In the middle I've got dahlias, zinnias, that's actually there's thistles coming up in that that I gotta weed out. Man so I sowed zinnias in here. I don't see them. I'm gonna get to this. It has been the driest spring in South Carolina since like the middle 1800s or something. We're in complete drought. We've not had a drop of rain in over a month which is unheard of and I'm having to garden a little differently. That's a dahlia coming up in here. I planted calla lilies in here but I don't see any of them yet and I've got dahlias coming up down on the end and then the blueberries. I sowed a bunch of stuff as I normally do just direct sowed into my garden beds like you know three weeks ago end of March and normally that that works. Normally I don't have to water my garden until June. The last all the years that I've lived here in South Carolina like I've not turned on a sprinkler until June. That is not the case this year and I've had horrible germination just because whenever you put seeds in the soil obviously you have to keep that top layer of soil very moist and in these raised garden beds when we're hitting 90 during the day which we have been that's 32 celsius. I mean very warm days for spring and then it's bone dry. We do not have the humidity we normally have. We have not had any rain. My seeds aren't germinating well. Now they're still in there if they start germinating obviously they'll dry up and die if they get too dry but I can't just I I'm I'm watering I'm watering everything. I do have my drip which we need to put some more lines in on the drip because it's not fully covering the beds so I'm still doing a lot of hand watering. I'm still moving sprinklers around and I just can't stay on top of this big of a garden when the days are that hot and the soil is getting that dry to make sure that the surface of all of this soil is staying damp enough. So I actually had to just pivot and I went to my greenhouse and I've started the 10 trays of stuff that I would normally direct so my okra and cucumbers and melons even squashes. I don't like starting those because it typically doesn't get you ahead normally when you direct sow those things because they don't like their roots being messed with. You have just as much of a head start as if you're transplanting but not if it's not going to germinate because it's too dry. So I put a bunch of zinnia seeds in that bed. I have watered it many times but at some point I don't know if it got too dry for a day. They haven't come up so I've got a couple trays of zinnias. I've got sunflowers started. I mean just all the things that I would normally direct sow are in my greenhouse now because there I can actually control the watering a little bit more and make sure that they have what they need. I have started to plant out here. It doesn't look like much now but it will. What I'm doing this year for my, normally for my peppers, I just plant a whole bunch of peppers in beds and this year I'm actually separating them a little more so I know what's what. So like here I've got, those are actually sweet pea flowers. It may be too warm for them. I've got like here's some tomatillos and then here is a large roasting pepper and then here I've got some cantaloupes on this trellis, some more fennel. I planted so much fennel this year because I fell in love with a salad last year that I'm really wanting to recreate. Here's poblano peppers. I did try to direct sow some seeds here. We'll see. I may, I may end up moving plants out. Here I've got some celery and then more peppers and then I've just separated things out a little bit more and I've still obviously got to finish planting out this whole tunnel. On this side I did a long row of different tomatoes. These are mostly hybrids that I purchased specifically for greenhouse growing. They are meant like to grow in greenhouses and I'm excited for those. They're about ready for a trellis. I'm just going to do a cattle panel trellis in here. I was going to do two long rows and then it occurred to me that putting a wall that's going to be full of plants along both the sides here would probably really hinder the airflow and be a problem. I may end up doing a couple of short rows here through the middle and that's why I decided to not do that over on the other side because I wanted to make sure that we had ample ventilation. I actually shot a video with my kids of planting these tomatoes and our potatoes and I can't get the memory card to work. I'm gonna try a couple of things. If my next video is that you will know that Tech Jess was victorious and if my next video is not planting potatoes and tomatoes you will know that Tech Jess doesn't actually exist. We'll see. I have faith in myself. I think I'll be able to get it but I'm not sure. Here are the potatoes. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 rows that are about, I don't know, 15 to 18 feet or something like that and they're just starting to pop up here. There they are. I ran out on this end and I think that I'm probably just going to plant some corn or something like that. Weeds are already starting to pop up so I need to get something in there and get it mulched or else it's going to be overrun. Unfortunately my mulch had a lot of seeds in it so it's a lot of grass popping up in it but that's fine. Typically what I do is let the potatoes come up and then lay another thick layer of mulch down so I'm probably not even going to do anything about that grass because it's going to get covered up. Down here are the berry beds and they are looking pretty good. I had to replace a few things last year. Some of the things I transplanted just didn't take very well and that's probably on me honestly. Now I think these could probably use a good feeding but you can see the blackberries down on the end are pretty happy. The blueberries are happy-ish. These blackberries are looking pretty good. I'm still harvesting a lot of asparagus but I think probably I've got maybe another week or so depending on the weather with the asparagus and I'm going to have to let it go ahead and go to seed. Eventually it just kind of throws in the towel. I will say normally I think I get a little more asparagus than I did this year but I think that how dry it's been has affected that some. I try to get the sprinkler over here at least every couple of days and water it pretty good but you know nothing does quite what rain water will do. All right here's the building status. You guys see all these posts? I'm pretty sure that tomorrow this is going to be there's going to be another big boost on this. Maya got all the posts set and now all he has to do is do all the boards. So this little area here that you're looking at this is going to be a chicken yard. I'm going to have a chicken coop here right next to the garden. I'm so excited for that. You can see here this kind of frame looking thing. This is a pergola right here. It'll look more normal once everything is done and everything's grown up but I've planted a lady banks rose right on the other side and my hope is it's going to grow all up over this and here this is just where the the fence is to keep the chickens out. So once this is all done it'll be a little more obvious and these posts that the pergola is built on these are the posts that hold the shade cloth over these beds which is where I typically will put a lot of tomatoes. I haven't planted these out yet which we'll get over here and show you what I have done but this is going to be really cool. This is just going to be really cool to have. It's gonna be cool to have chickens by here. This is gonna be gorgeous when it's overgrown with that lady bank. Now planting tomatoes out is on my list. That's definitely something that I gotta do this week but as I said the weather's been kind of weird. It's been insanely windy and it's demonstrating that now hopefully not ruining the audio of this video but my tomatoes had gotten so tall that I was hesitant to move it out on these really really windy days. I think that we're supposed to get a little window that I think will be good for transplanting. I'm definitely doing this row in tomatoes. I'm definitely doing that row in tomatoes. I may not do this one. I can't believe I'm saying this but I don't know if I need that many tomatoes. I know that's weird for me to say but there's a lot of tomatoes going on. That real long row in the high tunnel plus I think I'm gonna do a couple more rows of those hybrids plus I've got a lot over here plus I did a lot in the green stalks. I just don't know and so I'm leaning towards putting something else in that middle row. I'm not a hundred percent sure what yet. The garden plan is evolving as we go and the garden is evolving. Look at this. Can you imagine that fence going around? We have the arbor. I have one tangerine skies arbor rose that I'm gonna put here and I want to get another one. I want to have them on both sides. I've just got to wait for them to come back in stock. When people are like, Jess you talked about things and they went out of stock and I wasn't able to get them. Girls, same. I wasn't able to either. We'll wait together. Here I've got a lot of wildflowers again. Putting a sprinkler on it regularly trying to get those to germinate. I've moved some things around. This is the side the mint took over. This garden is about as weeded as it's gonna get. There are still quite a few weeds coming up. I'll probably pull a little bit more but things are really starting to take over and it'll look beautiful soon either way. As you can see the irises are blooming. The roses are blooming. Everything is just gorgeous. I'm spending a lot of time out here right now. Look at that rose. That is so covered in buds. It's exciting. That's one of my David Austens. I can't remember the name of it. I'll have to look it up. I'll take a quick peek in here. Yeah, see look at these tomato plants. They're so tall. It's insane. My peppers. I up-potted these and I'm just letting them get a little more established. We've got a couple of cold nights coming. I have already planted ones out in the garden that I bought but these are all the ones I started from seed so they're not really acclimated for cold yet. I was just waiting to put those out till they were a little bigger. Here you can see all the things I don't normally start inside. Squashes and okras and melons. Lots of flowers that I started and then the tomatoes that are a little on this. These are my smaller tomatoes. They're huge too. So yeah, I still have some more transplanting to do. My and the boys are going to town. Yeah, it's gorgeous out here. Here's the Jerusalem artichokes getting big. Everything looks so pretty and happy. Now out here I have begun planting but again between roly-polies and drought it's been slow for things to fill up. I do have some things coming up and that I've really babied. Like out here I moved Armenian white cucumbers and the roly-polies just decimated them and so I resewed some and again spraying the spinosad and then just making sure the water stays on. They're up a couple inches so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I am having one really silly problem which is because of my bad habit of just like dropping things. Like oh I missed this okra and it got too big. I'll just drop it. I've got volunteers. That's an okra right there. I have lots of volunteers of plants I like but that are growing in the wrong places and I am weeding the garden daily and pulling out Bermuda grass which is unfortunate and is making its way into my garden beds and I hate that because gosh it's the worst once it gets in. It's hard to get it out and then thistle and then all kinds of plants like okra. I've got bitter melons coming up like crazy that are all over the place because of leaving fruit out here that just got too big and then it got spread. Squashes, lots of basil everywhere. It's kind of funny. So down here I've got this is all cherry tomatoes. Cherry tomatoes down on the end there. These are all big slicers and they're almost to the point some of those are reaching the trellis. That trellis is hung a little lower than this one but they're almost to the point of needing be pruned already. They are really doing pretty well despite how dry it's been and then this trellis is going to be tomatoes. So I've got this one to plant, the two long ones to plant. That's why I'm debating whether I'm going to do the third long one. I'm gonna do some corn in some of these raised beds. I'm gonna do some okra in some of these raised beds. Normally I do a lot of that stuff in the ground but I'm not doing a lot of my in-ground garden this year. I was just really overwhelmed by it last year and so instead of doing more space I'm trying to do less space more efficiently. Obviously there's not a ton of garden space. I've got two high tunnels that I'm gonna have more or less fully planted at the same time. Now I'm starting to harvest the cooler weather the brassica tunnel now and it'll be fully harvested by like June which is when the hither high tunnel, the one closer to me now, that one will really be kind of like coming in to being harvested. So they will trade off but yeah between those two and this garden it's plenty of space to grow everything that we need. I mean every year I have plenty of food I share it with a lot of people and then of course we feed our animals a lot out of our garden. So I'm not really concerned about using that in-ground garden but a few of the things that are a little easier to grow in an in-ground garden I'm still gonna just go ahead and do them in the raised garden beds. So in the green stalks I've got my strawberry green stalk which I've got some bare roots I'm gonna fill in some spaces. I transplanted some and some of them I think I dug them out too late they didn't like it. This one is all micro dwarf tomatoes every single pocket is micro dwarf tomatoes of different varieties and a container tomatoes I guess they're not all micro dwarfs these are like tumbling tomatoes so that'll be cool looking. And then over here in these three I'm doing kind of like a garden mix. So I've got like a mini watermelon the French quarter okra which is supposed to be a more compact like three foot okra and I tried that in a few pockets. I've got some small sunflowers in these I've got more tomatoes some herbs and different things. So if you were watching last year Ben had a green stalk up in the front that he helped me it started out as my project he ended up taking it over and he's actually pretty invested in these as well. Where I just wanted to see okay if I just treated this like a whole garden and see what I could grow and we harvested many bowls of food out of like we would take the big colander out and just fill it up with the stuff with cucumbers and some peppers with tomatoes we did greens in that one I didn't put any greens in this these because those two do typically go to seed for us is that other stuff's coming on I didn't want any blank spaces. But I went ahead and put flowers in with them this time I did some zinnias and some sunflowers as well as the herbs and the vegetables and I'm excited about them I think they're gonna be really good. I'm not quite done planting I've still got some spaces if there's anything that you think that I that you've loved growing in a green stalk that you would like to see me try please let me know in the comments and I think what I may do is do like a green stalk garden tour because I've had a lot of people tag me in their their photos recently where they're primarily growing in containers or green stalks and or maybe I could just do a container garden tour where I show you guys what I've got going in containers if nothing else for the camaraderie of that. And my last one is gonna be more strawberries I don't really obviously need more strawberries because I have two 60-foot rows growing in the the ground. Green stalks were the first time I successfully grew strawberries because I had such bad slugs in Arkansas that any strawberries I planted in the ground just got decimated. That really hasn't been a huge problem here I have dealt some with the roly-polies and the green stalks are nice because they really do help keep pests off because obviously your stuff is up off the ground but I usually like to have a couple of with strawberries growing here in the pavilion simply for just snacking on because it's nice to have them for snacking fresh so these primarily are for that and I'll typically have ever-bearing strawberries in them so we have snacks for longer. That is the status of the garden over here this is set out of the way but there's the little arch for on this end and it's going to be right here built in just like that other one except for the other one he built on the inside because he was going to put the boxes around him this one he's put building it on the outside and putting a box just you know so that it's not interfering with the walkway that'll be just a little bit different but I know he's going to do some boxes here on the outside that I can put some flowers I got some star jasmines and I think I may try to find some yellow jasmine also that's the the state flower of South Carolina and that would be really really pretty growing down the fence I've actually got when my friend did the stone here in the pavilion he left some holes here which I can't move this to show you but there's actually a hole down the soil here and down on and down there and I'm going to try putting some jasmine in there I don't really know how well it will do but my thought was it would be really cool if it could grow up the side of this this is a really cool plant this is called a Biltmore ball gown I got this at the plant sale the fella I bought it from told me to cut it off so because it's the fresh growth would bloom so it's got new leaves coming up in a lot of the areas where I chopped it all off but it's so pretty it's like it's called a flowering maple but it said it wasn't a true maple the leaves definitely do it maple the flowers look like a you know an upside-down ball gown like a swishy skirt they're really pretty and then here I have this is a little Japanese maple that my mother gave me when I was in Arkansas last time and I brought it back and I I was gonna prune this off but then it started really trying I probably should prune it off this one branch is looking kind of rough but I don't know he looks happy in there all right I could keep showing you guys the specifics that I wasn't gonna do that this whole last couple weeks here we obviously been working out here a lot and the whole time I've been like it's almost time for a garden tour but walking through this today I'm like yeah there is definitely there's a lot definitely worthy of doing an actual full garden door I don't know I could love walking you guys through my garden I could do that anytime it would make me happy thank you for hanging out with me today I bless you until next time