Harvesting The Garden For My Wife.. I Hope I Did It Right!.

My wife has left me to harvest this garden completely by myself. I was just walking through the garden this morning. Emily is out on tour. She's a country music singer if you don't know. She's gone for the next five days and I told her I'd check on her garden for her and harvest anything that needed to be harvested. So I was walking around the garden this morning watering in some seedlings that she just planted and I realized I don't really know anything about gardening. I just listen to her. I'm like the hired help. I do whatever she says. But now that she's left me to harvest, I really don't know what I'm looking at and if stuff's ready or not. So this will be kind of interesting. Hope I don't make any mistakes and harvest stuff when it's not ready. But it looks like there are a bunch of things that are ready in our backyard garden. So let's get started. Before I get started in the actual garden, I got to stop at our raised beds and give it a little update because these plants look terrible. And I got to put this out on the internet so Emily knows it wasn't me that did this. This is the first day that she's been gone. So this problem has already been happening. It definitely looks like we got all kinds of squash bugs or something that are eating these plants in our raised beds. Let me show you an up close. Look how long that vine is. But here's the problem. So a bunch of these leaves and stuff are dying right here and if I go over here. Let's see if I see them. Okay there's one of the bugs right there. Earlier I put my hand down here to look at this butternut squash. I don't see them anymore. Literally probably 30 or 40 bugs got on my hand while I was reaching down there. They all looked like that one. So I assume that's a squash bug. Oh here we go. I see some more bugs on the back of this right there. I'm sure they're boring into that vine and it's going to probably ruin that butternut squash. We have a few butternut squash though despite how bad the plant looks. Look there's another one of those bugs. We still have several butternut squash so hopefully we'll still be able to get some out of that. But over here I noticed. Look at that. You can tell those bugs are just boring into the main stem and just destroying these plants. So I don't know if those are going to make it. If we're going to get anything out of those at all. The same thing is kind of happening over here. We have two more raised beds on this side of the garden and I'll show you how those are doing. Kind of the same situation just bugs are destroying the plants. We still have some fruit but who knows if they're going to actually make it. Now this farthest raised bed I don't even know what types of squash plants we planted in here but actually they are doing the best out of all the raised beds. I mean I can tell that there's some stuff happening down there. Bugs are still getting to it but for whatever reason this bed still looks really good. It's like thriving. Moving along to our squash grid in the actual garden. Kind of the same story here. We had a row of zucchini plants which normally do really well for us. They literally just shriveled up and died. I think it was the squash bugs. So we pulled those plants out and tossed them. But fortunately our green striped cushaw squash are actually doing pretty good. For whatever reason it's kind of like the bugs just have avoided these plants. I guess because they got so much more to feed on up in those front raised beds. But like I said I don't really know how to tell if these are ready to harvest yet or not. Emily told me she thinks they would be ready. I sent her a picture and I'm still waiting to hear from her but it's way too hot out here to wait. So I'm just going to start harvesting. Some of these are huge so they have to be ready. Okay here's one right here. It's a pretty good size. I hope that that's ready. It does concern me because they have such a big thick stem and it's I don't know if it's supposed to dry up or not but it was not very easy to get off the plant. I don't know. But this next one back here is huge. Wait till y'all see this one. So I've already pulled this one off the vine too and I pretty much destroyed that plant trying to get it off. But that is so big. Look at that. That's amazing. That has to be ready. I don't remember them ever being this big last year when she harvested these. Maybe it's too late. I have no clue. Again I told you guys you'll have to let me know down in the comments because I don't know anything. I'm just a help. But when she goes out of town and leaves me at home and stuff needs to be harvested I've got to do it. Now these green striped cushaw squash. We love to grow these. I do know this because she makes a delicious pie out of them. Kind of like a pumpkin pie. Maybe not quite as sweet but it's delicious. So that's the reason why we planted them in the first place. Hopefully those are good size to make pies. Okay I think we got one more back here. There's actually a couple more back here but they're much smaller than those first two. So I'm only going to get this one. Okay okay this one's like a really weird shape. Here let me show you. I really don't know if that's ready. You'll have to let me know. But that's three pretty big squash to me. I can't get them to fit in this basket together. Okay there we go. So let me know what you guys think. But that's everything for our cushaw squash. Okay we got one of these little yellow crookneck squash that I think are good size. Oh looks like a bug's actually been boring into that. That's not good. Look at this. Okay I don't know if you'll be able to see. You see those holes? Yeah definitely bugs been eating on that and it's kind of soft down there at the bottom. Not good. Yeah Emily ain't gonna be happy but the deer will. Okay moving along to the back of our squash grid we have our cucumbers. So I built these trellises for our cucumbers and they were super easy to make. I don't know if we just haven't trained them up the way you're supposed to or if they were a fail. But they're not really working. However we do have some good cucumbers. We got one right there. We got one here. One or two little ones there. Got one there. Maybe a tiny one there. I probably should get that one. But first I'm going to get rid of this basket and get a smaller one. There we go. That's better. We're just going to harvest the cucumbers. Okay we just got our cucumbers. Look at those. See how many we got. We got one, two, three, four, five, five and a half. I don't know if that's even worth saving. But about five to six cucumbers. Okay before I leave this area I'm going to try my best to just trellis these cucumber plants up a little bit because I really want them to work. Look how long that vine is. I think we've just not done a good job at training them if I had to guess. There we go. Yeah that looks so much better already. Oh look at that. I missed some of these cucumbers. Uh actually let's let those stay. I think they can grow a little bit longer. Look at that. Yeah we just had to train these up which we were not doing. That's not even a cucumber plant here. The watermelon plants just kind of took over that area. Wow. See I didn't even see that cucumber. It's crazy how much more you can see what's going on on the plants whenever they're up off the ground like that. I've been needing to do this for a while. Also did not even see this watermelon over here. So we'll have to get that in a second. Almost done. Look at this. So much better when you get them up off the ground. You're seeing cucumbers that I didn't even know that we had. Let's see there's more somewhere over here. Some of these down here. So that's a lot better. And then I didn't even know this watermelon was here. Let's see if we think it's ready. It's got a dried tendril. At this point, this late in the season, I'm just going to harvest any of the watermelon that are still left. Our watermelon grid has become an actual jungle. Now that the plants are starting to die back some, the weeds and the grass are just growing up so much. Originally, Emily wanted to just leave all of the leftover vines and plants and all this stuff in this patch for the entire season. Let it kind of decompose, I guess. Put nutrients back into the soil and then we would just till it back in in the fall or spring of next year. I don't think that's going to work because the grass is just going to get like waist high if we do that. So we'll have to talk about that. If you have any recommendations, if that's something we should try to do or if we should just after we get all the watermelons today, if we should just pull all this up and, you know, till it up or something, let us know what to do there. But I do think we have a few more watermelons that we're going to actually get today. So that's exciting. Let's see. Need to make sure this is actually ready though. I think it is. I wonder what it means whenever the skin is starting to come off of the watermelon. Here, let me show you. So what does this mean when the skin is coming off? Oh, look at that. It's a bug. Oh, there's like those same little squash beetles on this. So maybe that's why. Maybe they're eating it or maybe they're boring into it. I'm not sure. If you know what that means, let us know in the comments. I'm going to just go through here and harvest any of the watermelon that are left that seem like they might be ready or even close to being ready. That one looks pretty good. Here's another one. We've got a few more big ones back here. We've got one of our seedless varieties and then look at this. This is one of the stars and stripes I think it is. Or not stars and stripes, moon and stars. Yellow fleshed, but it grew to this weird shape. Is that even edible? It literally fell off the vine. Let us know. Something had to have gone wrong I feel like. Well, we ended up getting 10 watermelon today, which is crazy because this is probably our third or fourth time harvesting this amount of watermelons this season. We've been giving a bunch away. We have eaten some, but at this point I just don't know what even do with all these watermelon. Let me know down in the comments if you have any ideas for us. Maybe Emily can try some watermelon jelly or something. I can't believe I'm actually saying this, but I even left a few out there still and it looks like I've gotten some new cantaloupes on the vine that are just getting started. I don't know if they're going to make it in this summer heat, but it's crazy that this watermelon patch has produced this much and is still producing this late in the season. All right, let's move on to the rest of the garden. Just a quick little update. This grid in the garden next to the watermelon patch, I think we mentioned this already, but the other day we planted for our fall garden. We have a bunch of broccolini. I think it's what Emily called it. We've got that. We've got a whole row of green cabbage and red cabbage and then some regular broccoli over here. It's just getting started though. Then our green bean grid is completely finished. We have to still clean it up a little bit, clean off all these vines and then I don't know what she wants to plant in there, but something for the fall season. We also just planted two days ago, peas on all three of our cattle panel trellises. This is where our tomatoes were earlier in the season and I know Emily wants to plant peas here for the fall, so it puts nitrogen back into the soil. So I've been watering those every single morning. Once the plants pop up, we'll stop watering. And the last area in the garden to harvest from today is our pepper grid and it looks like we have a lot of pepper, so I'm going to go ahead and get another basket. Now, peppers are a little easier for me to tell if they're ready because they simply change colors when they're ready, or at least most varieties that I know of. We're going to start with these cayenne peppers, which have done so well for us this season and we only really have, what is that, two? We've got two bushes and we've gotten so many cayenne peppers already and this should be a big harvest today. I love growing cayenne peppers because I actually use these. I love to freeze dry them and turn them into crushed red pepper flakes. I can use crushed red pepper flakes on pretty much anything and they're also really good for your chickens. There is our cayenne peppers. Now we're going to harvest our serrano peppers and a few of these have turned red as well. I don't really know what you do with these peppers, but that's not my job. Emily will figure that out, I'm sure. I know we've already harvested a bunch of these this season, so I'm sure she, by this point, has a plan for them. Every time you look somewhere else you see more. There we go. Next, we've got a few banana peppers. I heard Emily say the other day that she probably won't grow these again because we don't really eat them. I know I don't eat them. There we go. Here's a few of, I think they're called tangerine dreams. These are like snacking peppers, I think, which I also will not be eating any of, but Emily does. They look like that. It's getting so hot, so I'm just going to go down this entire row with a new basket and see if I can fill it up. This has our jalapenos. I think it has some anaheim green chili peppers and maybe santa fe grande. I'm not sure. Don't take my word for it, but I'm going to harvest all of this row and I'll show you what we get. Okay, we didn't get as many as I thought we were going to, but still a pretty good harvest. So, we got a bunch of jalapenos, but then we have a bunch that are like starting to crack and change colors. I think that means that they're going to be really hot. I don't know. And then a bunch that turned red. There's all our jalapenos, and then we got a bunch of these peppers. I can't remember which ones these are, but I think they're the green chili peppers. Okay, now we're going to grab one more basket, go down our final row, which is our bell peppers. Our bell peppers never really do that great. Some of them look like they're starting to rot on the vine, but we are still getting more than we used to. Got five yellow bell peppers. Oh wow, this is a big one here. Wow, that's probably one of the better looking bell peppers we've gotten this year. It's a red bell pepper. A bunch of these are still green. Emily does not like green bell peppers, so we only planted like the colored ones. There are a bunch of good looking green ones. We're just waiting for them to turn. Let's see if there's any more that are not green. Maybe right here. All right, there is, see look, some of them were kind of rotten, but we could still probably use these. Got five of the yellow. This is a pretty good looking red bell pepper. We got two red bell peppers. All right, here is everything I got out of our backyard garden today. We got 10 watermelons, three of our giant green striped cushaw squash, three baskets of peppers. We got jalapenos, cayenne peppers, serrano peppers, anaheim green chili peppers, snacking peppers, banana peppers. We got a basket of bell peppers with some yellow and red bell peppers. We got five cucumbers. I really should go check the chicken coop for eggs. I know we probably have a bunch, but it's way too hot out here. I feel like I'm about to pass out. I don't know how Emily does this and still looks as good as she looks when she's gardening. This is a lot of work. I'm ready for her to be home. Now I got to get all of this stuff back in the house so it doesn't go bad and figure out what to do with it until Emily gets home to preserve it. This is a pretty good harvest I feel like. Hopefully my employer, my wife, will be happy with everything we got and how I did it. I know this video is a little different since Emily was not here and it was only me out in the garden today, but hopefully you guys still enjoyed it. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate any of you who subscribe to our channel, leave us a like or a comment, and like I said, hopefully Emily will be back for the next video. See you guys on the next one. Bye y'all.