Everything I'm Growing for a Summer Full of Food | Sub Tropical Australia

September was the month from hell. I lost my little white Pomeranian Ella who had been such a huge part of my life. And then just a week later my Google account and both of my YouTube channels were hacked and completely taken from me. And on top of all that, my mum's dementia has kicked into the next gear and we're dealing with major paranoia. So yeah, it's been a lot. All I can say is that I'm so grateful to be able to come out here into my garden for a little bit of peace amongst all the chaos. I actually sat out here on my garden bench with Ella laying in my arms for the two days before she passed away. And I told her how much I loved her. I thanked her for being the best dog I'd ever had. And I told her how grateful I was that she came into my life all those years ago. I cried a lot of tears sitting right here with her. But I also have so many happy memories with her and I think those memories are what make the pain a little easier to bear. I'll talk a little bit more about what happened with the hacking later in the video. But I really do want to say a huge thank you to everyone who messaged me on Instagram and told me that you hoped I would get my channels back. It honestly touched my heart and it kept me fighting for my channels at a time when I was very close to giving up. Kevin wouldn't let me give up either, even though it was one of the most stressful things I've been through in a very long time. So to everyone who was checking in on me and cheering me from the sidelines, I just want to say a huge thank you. It meant more than you probably realize. And thankfully, I'm back. And now that we're in the full swing of spring, it's time to start looking forward to the next few months. Because this is the time of year when the garden really starts to get exciting. The winter crops are coming to an end, the days are getting warmer and I'm starting to fill the garden with all the things I want to grow over summer. So today I'm going to show you everything I'm growing for a summer full of food. And I'll also show you what I've been up to in the garden over the last few weeks. Over the last few weeks I've been harvesting the winter crops as we've needed them. I harvested one of my big grow bags of potatoes as well as one of the smaller ones and got a really decent haul. And of course the first thing I did with them was make a potato salad for dinner. I also harvested a red cabbage, some carrots and spring onions which all went into a big coleslaw. And let me tell you, one big cabbage makes a lot of coleslaw. We were eating it all week. It's actually been really nice being able to just come out here and harvest what we need for dinner. I've also been on a bit of a mission to find old terracotta pots on Facebook Marketplace and give them a new lease on life. I've been painting them and using them to plant more fruit trees. I picked up this plum fruit salad tree from the Queensland Garden Show back in July and I thought it would look lovely in this big pot that I painted up. I just love the idea of having lots of fruit trees growing in pots around the garden. It means I can move things around when I need to and I can squeeze even more food into the space that I've got. And this pot is going to be for a fig tree cutting that I took a few months ago from my brown turkey fig when I gave it a prune. It's actually growing really well so hopefully I'll be able to pot it up soon. But today I really need to get stuck into this garden bed. I just harvested the last of the cherry tomatoes and I need to pull the tomato vine off the trellis. And the sweet peas are also finished so they're coming out too. And once I've cleared everything out I'm going to give the bed a bit of a revamp and get it ready for my first lot of summer crops. And I've got corn and cucumbers ready to go in so let's get this garden bed sorted and get some summer food planted. So while I'm ripping out the cherry tomato vine and collecting sweet pea pods and ripping down the sweet pea vine. Let's talk about my two YouTube channels getting hacked. So it started with an email that I received from Red Points which is a company that chases down people who use songs without permission. They flagged a song that I used on one of my travel channel videos. But I have a license with Epidemic Sound for all the songs that I use on my videos across both channels. So I thought I would quickly let them know this was a mistake and move on with my day. I googled the company to make sure they were legit. And I put the email into ChatGPT to make doubly sure and it said yep it looks fine. So I clicked on the link that said submit inquiry. And I had to enter my Google account. I was a bit worried about signing in with Google but I have had to do that for something else once before and it was fine. So even though I felt apprehensive I still did it. I was in a rush and just wanted to get it off my list of things to do. I couldn't remember my Google password so I tried a few different ones and even created a new one because nothing really happened. Even though I did enter the correct one which I realised later. So it was all a bit confusing. Later that night I just had this feeling like I'd been hacked. I checked my recovery email account that I had set up and that's when I realised yep I got hacked. There was a list of security emails about 10 long of all the things they did within about 2 minutes. They changed my passkey, my recovery email, my phone number. They set up Google Authenticator app and created backup codes. I was completely locked out and had no idea what to do. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos telling you what to do and by about 2am I was so tired and stressed out that I just passed out. The next day I woke up to someone telling me that a live American NFL game was being live streamed on my gardening YouTube channel. That got shut down pretty quickly so then they did the same thing on my travel channel Risk Adventures and that channel got shut down. I had to create a new email and as you can imagine with having the one email for about 20 years everything was linked to it. So I spent the entire day changing my email address over to the new one. Then I had the battle of trying to get my Google account back so that I could get my YouTube channels back. That was an absolute mission. Google wants you to go through the account recovery process but that only works if you can still log into your Google account which I could not do. The hackers had changed everything. The only option was to create an ex-account previously known as Twitter and put a post out to at Team YouTube asking for help. And you only get 180 characters otherwise you have to pay to be able to write more. So that was challenging. Every day I would have to write a post and once they replied with some response that did not help at all. I kept trying sometimes twice a day. I found that if I posted around 9pm Australian time at night someone might reply. After almost 2 weeks on a Friday night I finally got a response from someone who seemed to know what they were doing. They sent me a form that I only had 24 hours to fill out. So at midnight that night blurry eyed I sat in front of my computer and filled out as much as I could. I waited patiently because I had heard they can take 24 hours to respond. I think it was on the Sunday I finally got an email from YouTube support telling me what to do. Oh my god such a relief to finally get an email from an actual person. They wiped my Google account and I had 24 hours to log in and change everything. My passwords, phone number, recovery email etc. So that meant I finally had my Google account back but not my YouTube channels. I tried to log in to my YouTube channels and the only one showing was my travel channel. And it said there was suspicious activity and I had to click on a button and answer a whole bunch of questions. I couldn't see my gardening channel at all which was a bit stressful. So I made sure I wrote in one of the answers that that channel was also hijacked. I replied to the YouTube support email and told them that I couldn't get into my YouTube channel. And then on Monday afternoon I got a reply saying they had been restored and to check everything looked normal. I first logged in to the travel channel and that looked fine. And then I logged in to my gardening channel and it was back. Oh my god the relief that washed over me. I did not realise how stressed I was from all this. All those years of work that had gone into both channels being gone in the blink of an eye. It was devastating. Anyway I know there are people with bigger problems in the world. All I can say is I'm very thankful to have my channels back. If anyone wants a more in depth video about this and how to protect your account against hacking let me know in the comments below. And now back to gardening. I did not realise how bone dry this garden bed was. I normally try not to dig too much in the garden but there were huge clumps of dry dirt in this bed. So I had to break them up with a rake and pour a ton of water into this bed. I then added some blood and bone and rooster booster. Also release fertiliser. Some rock minerals. Then mixed that all through. I also added some coconut coir that I had soaking in a tub of water. I'm trying this as something new this year to help with water retention as we're going into a super El Nino. So I think it might be a dry summer. I then added the compost that I just got out of my compost bin that had been breaking down for a good 9 months. I also added some perlite for extra water retention properties and another load of the compost from my compost bin. And I added the soil from the grow bags where I had my potatoes to fill the bed right up to the top. Then it was finally time to put in the corn. I love growing corn. It's one of the easiest crops to grow. And there is nothing better than the taste of fresh growing corn. I just bought seedlings from Bunnings this year because my germination rate with stunning corn seeds is dismal. I did try some this year but I only got 5 out of 12. I will put them in the garden in a few weeks because they are a different variety and I don't want them cross pollinating. But we now have 19 corn plants in the bed. Next up it's time to plant cucumber. I'm putting them on this trellis as they grow so well climbing up and over. I've got 4 of the sugar baby watermelons to go out once I harvest a few more of the winter veg this week. And 2 of the golden honey watermelons which is a new variety for me. Jimmy Nardello Capsicum has finally germinated which I'm really excited about and so has the eggplant. And I have 2 of the patio snacker cucumbers which I will grow in pots. This is a new variety for this year and I still have a pickling gherkin to plant somewhere. The sunflowers are finally starting to germinate. I've had terrible luck with these over the years. And I'm starting a whole bunch more cosmos because I love them, they are so pretty. And I need to get the rest of these tomatoes planted out this week. San Marzano Moneymaker, Gross Lisee and some more Sun Gold. So when I look around at the garden now it's actually in this really funny in between stage. The winter garden is finishing and the summer garden is only just beginning. But underneath all these tiny seedlings is the potential for so much food. And that's really what I'm trying to do with this garden. I want to be able to walk out here and grab tomatoes for dinner, cucumbers for a salad, chilies when I need them, herbs, fruit and eventually hopefully enough food that it genuinely makes a difference to our grocery shopping. And after the month I've just had I think that's probably why I'm feeling particularly excited about this next season. There's something really comforting about planting a tiny seed and knowing that you can't rush it. You just have to give it the soil, water, sunshine and time. And I think I need a bit of that at the moment too. So that's the beginning of my summer garden. The corn is in, the cucumbers are getting started and I've got tomatoes, capsicum, eggplant and watermelon growing away in the seed trays. And hopefully over the next few months all of this is going to turn into a whole lot of food. Thanks again to everyone who supported me while I was trying to get my channel back. It genuinely meant the world to me. And now let's grow some food. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one.