May 2024 Vegetable Garden Tour

Welcome to the May vegetable garden tour 💚🌱 !
I am growing in Zone 6a, Ohio and focus on growing things I love to eat (vegetables, fruits & herbs), with a few flowers thrown in here & there- primarily for the pollinators. This video showcases what I am growing, garden projects I am working on and a few lessons learned so far this year in the garden. I’m glad you’re here!

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00:00 Intro
00:38 Weird Weather
01:52 Garden Insect Pest Challenges
08:10 Garden Tour

good morning everybody we are nearing the end of May and I wanted to share an update of what is going on in my garden right now for anyone who’s new to the channel I’m gardening in midwestern Ohio in zone 6A I’m glad you’re here now let’s take a look around you never know exactly what you’re going to get when you’re gardening in Ohio every year is kind of a cra shoot and this year is no exception it’s been a very interesting season already and we’re just getting started the first example of this are the strawberries this year this year is the earliest I’ve ever picked a ripe strawberry in my 40 plus years of living in Ohio the mild winter and warm spring I’m assuming are the cause not that I’m complaining but ripe strawberries on May 4th is a little weird a full month earlier than normal ripe strawberries are great but the unusual warm weather has been a concern with my cool season crops we’re at near record highs here today hitting almost 90 over 10° higher than average many cool season crops will tend to bolt when temperatures are this warm I’ve been relying on shade cloth heavily this season I think I’ve been using it off and on since nearly the beginning of April I was just telling my husband the other day it’s pretty sad when I had to go straight from frost cloth to shade cloth you can see here I’ve still got all my various cloths out insect netting shade cloth and frost cloth we went from below freezing to unseasonably warm way too quickly so my cool season crops seem to be putting up with the warm weather for now we’ll we’ll see what happens after the end of May it can get pretty dicey here hopefully I’m able to get a harvest off of this stuff but putting up with it for the time being but something else unexpected that is happened I suspect largely in part due to the warm weather due to the mild winter is that I am seeing insect Pest and insect behaviors in the garden that I have never seen before and that I’m completely unfamiliar with a really good example of that this spring has been with my cabbage worm so typically in the past for decades of gardening cabbage worms have been my number one cool season crop pest cabbage worms love to munch on brasas you will see the adult the Cabbage White butterfly fluttering All Over the Garden in the spring and this was the m pest that I have always had to deal with in the spring garden a couple years back I discovered that the easiest solution to dealing with these pests was simply to use insect netting placed over my seedlings as soon as they were transplanted out Simple Solution worked really really well well this spring I can count on one hand the number of cabbage white butterflies that I have seen fluttering around the garden and that is extremely unusual usually there’s just tons of them pretty much from late March to Mid April onward so to see so few is really really strange in fact I’ve been able to leave a lot of my brasas un netted which has never been the case in the past here however it seems It’s always a tradeoff very few cabbage worms but I am seeing insect pests that I have never seen before or at least never seen this early in the season before an example of that is in this lettuce here this stand of lettuce looks beautiful just a few days ago but you can see now I’ve got a caterpillar in here which is decimating this lettuce crop lettuce is typically a crop that I can grow with very very little problem hardly ever any insect damage once in a while some slugs chewing on them but really other than that I’ve never had any issues with lettuce and I’ve certainly never seen any feeding damage to this extent but that’s one of the things about gardening it always always keeps you on your toes just when you think you’ve figured everything out it throws another problem at you in a way I guess this is good I feel like it ensures that we are always learning now I’m going to have to go learn about this pest learn its life cycles learn about some natural ways to prevent it and deal with it but it is very frustrating when you think you’ve got something nailed down and then you come out and see this kind of damage it’s very humbling for sure um another example this spring has been the Slugs now slugs are a pest that I’ve dealt with before but typically it’s just I have a few chewing holes here and there I come out I handpick them it’s not a big deal this year I had so much slug damage on my young seedlings that I was worried I was actually going to lose them at seedling stage in the past I would typically just use dious Earth dusting my plants and the surrounding ground and that seems to help with the slug problems a lot but this year it’s been so wet we’ve had rain so frequently the Dew has been so heavy that I was having to come out and reapply to M’s Earth every single day if not every couple of hours because as soon as it gets wet it’s rendered useless so that really was not helping me a whole lot um I’ve tried beer traps I tried them again this spring I’ve tried them for years and years and years in the past I’ve tried all different size containers I’ve tried all different types of beer thinking that maybe my slugs had a very particular taste in beer everything from expensive craft ipas to like Old Milwaukee and nothing has ever worked I don’t think I’ve ever caught the first slug in a slug trap um I know it’s worked for a lot of you you have told me that and I would say if you have problems with slugs just it’s worth a try for sure but be warned that your slugs may be like mine and just don’t seem to have a taste for beer um so that didn’t work so I actually ended up resorting to using a slug and snail bait this year that has iron phosphate as a active ingredient now my first choice um and I honestly don’t know how very effective this was it seemed like it maybe slowed down the damage a little bit but I was also having to come out almost every day check my plants handpick slugs throw just threw them in a little glass of salt to kill them and I’m still seeing some damage the other thing that I did was typically I will mulch my soil almost immediately after planting this year I actually left the soil bear for a time after planting my Brasa seedlings because slugs do tend to prefer areas that have natural mulch that they can hide under so by leaving the soil bare I was hoping maybe to discourage them again I’m not so sure how much that helped things I did not try were copper barriers I’ve heard folks say that they use crushed up eggshells or coffee grounds I didn’t do that but as we’re getting warmer and drier I’m definitely seeing a Slowdown in the slug damage now but it’s something that probably from here on out I’m going to have to be on top of because I don’t see this problem going away and in general I don’t see this problem going away of just having new and different insect pest in the garden every year I think as we see weather patterns changing as we see different types of Seasons especially these really mild Winters we’re just going to continue to see different insect past in the gardens that have never been here before a lot of this being because the weather does definitely affect those life Cycles also if we’re staying above a certain temperature threshold we’re going to see insects being able to overwinter here that haven’t been able to before we’re going to see earlier emergence in insect pest because they’re hitting those degree day thresholds earlier in the year than they have in the past and that’s going to change their eating patterns they’re going to eat what’s available in the garden at a certain time if they can if they’re not host specific so again I think it’s a really good valuable lesson in just continuing to learn continuing to expand our experience and our knowledge but it is still very very frustrating but enough boning my insect problems let me show you what is actually growing and doing decent in the garden right now up in the front of the garden first I’ve got this area which is a relatively new addition to the garden and it’s still a work in progress but when I started this a couple of years ago my intent was for this to be a kind of medicinal and culinary herb garden of sorts with more perennial plantings than the rest of the garden a great thing about a lot of these herbs is that in addition to being medicinally valuable they’re also very attractive to pollinators so you’ll see a lot of especially bee activity on these flowers right now these chives are great for that I love the way they look and the bees love them I got some ripe strawberries in here tucked amongst my raspberries on this side of the entrance trellis I just planted hops a couple of weeks ago and I’m trying out some new more disease resistant varieties this will very very quickly climb up the side of this trellis in fact hops is so vigorous they should actually have a bigger climbing space than this but I’m going to make it work here I’ve got several herbs that I started via the winter sewing method um two Winters ago some comfrey that’s doing beautiful and some valaran some lemon balm I’m thrilled that my fig is making an appearance now typically figs will winter kill here in my area but they will Sprout back from The Roots so this is Hardy Chicago fig just planted some skull cap and some dream root near this Gooseberry here and over here I’ve got Sage which I just love the smell of I love to use it in cooking and you can’t beat these blooms another one that the pollinators just love out into the main part of the garden got some lovely volunteer muuline or muin here another great medicinal herb and I just think this is a really impressive looking plant I’ve got my cattle panel trellis all set up ready for tomatoes Tomatoes could have been planted out over a month ago it’s that’s another reason it’s been a weird Year my typical frost date is miday and I don’t think we got any Frost after about the third week of April this year um but I’m behind on everything and so my tomatoes aren’t quite ready to go out yet I will most likely be planting them out um towards the end of next week I’m probably going to go in with dwarf sunflowers in this front row once I terminate the hary vet cover crop my container rhubarb here is doing pretty well despite the heat I definitely need to get in here and harvest some of this rhubarb pie is one of of my absolute favorite Garden Fresh treats I don’t have anything in this bed yet I need to do some repairs before I plant this but on this side of my trellis I’ve got one of my old favorites this is sugar magnolia pea some beautiful Mayan Jaguar lettuce here this is a new variety that I’m trying this year and I’m pretty impressed so far just with the appearance alone someone commented that this reminded them of the freckles variety which it definitely does my carrots were a late plant so they’re all pretty small yet just transplanted some lemon basil and a few later planted lettuce transplants over here in my Blackberry bed I’ve got some red giant mustard I do like the flavor of mustard but I honestly planted most of these Ju Just for their ornamental appeal I love the way these plants look and then my rhubarb back here you can see just how much more slug damage is on this plant versus the one in the container primarily due to the fact that this is a much shadier damper spot versus the much more exposed plant in the container plus the benefit of being in the container is that slugs are kind of deterred from crawling up in there still harvestable just not nearly as pretty and then a ton of berries forming all my black berries here I am starting to have trouble with spotted Wing drosophilia here in this area so that’s another pest I’m going to have to figure out some natural preventatives for I showed you this lettuce bed briefly but interestingly sweet Valentine is the variety that I’m getting the most damage on which tells me it’s probably a little more tender and sweet than my other varieties but I’ve got my old favorites winter density and red velvet planted in here as well and in the back I’ve got some Endive which is definitely a tougher more bitter green and accordingly the insects have pretty much left that alone I’ve also got some cilantro tucked back in here amongst the volunteer bachelor buttons I’m hoping that by benefit of the shade of the bachelor buttons I can prevent that cilantro from bolting just a little bit longer into the season but it’s pretty heat sensitive and it’s going to be bolting soon regardless of shade or not unfortunately this was a bed where I had gooseberries just kind of taking over in here they will spread like crazy so I dug all those was out earlier this year and I’m still working on kind of revamping this bed but right now I’ve got some late planted cabbage some wild thyme and marigolds some wild patunas that I just transplanted and a few bunching onions and not to harp on the pest but I just noticed here some damage again bunching onions onions most aliums have been a crop that in the past I can grow with no problems no pests no diseases I just noticed that this stalk is chewed open with frass in here and what do we have here looks like another type of army worm just completely again decimating this onion so this is something I’m going to have to be on the lookout for from now on unfortunately my double raised bed here is typically the one I always use for carrots but I have had overwintered carrots in here that I just harvested not too long ago decided to just give it a break so right now I’ve got more lettuce in here some more of that mustard I’ve got peas climbing up the fence and this Elderberry volunteer and then my plan is to plant some red Malibar spinach along this trellis that is a warm season Vining green that I really really love again it’s a good the flavor’s fine um some people tout it as a warm seasoned spinach Al alternative I could take it or leave it but it’s a beautiful ornamental so that’ll be going in here and then carrots will probably go here for a fall planting I got my trellis and my layout reconfigured here the way that I had this just was a little crowded and it wasn’t working super well so I like this a lot better right now you can see here I’ve got hary vet cover crop planted in this bed this was sewn last fall and again this is just one of those it’s really really beneficial to the soil but it’s just a beautiful ornamental as well again the bees love it they have been all over this thing since it started blooming and I typically grow this like creeping along the ground but just by benefit of having this trellis here they’ve climbed up the trellis and I really love the way this looks just last week I cut down all my winter Ry so that’s what you’ll see on a lot of these beds that’s turning kind of this straw colored I’ll let this sit again probably till the end of the month I will clear this out a bit and then come in with warm seasoned crops and plant most likely some Tomatoes my melons and winter squash things like that maybe some more beans this trellis is up and ready for cucumbers I had tomatoes on this last year so I’m switching it up and doing my cucumbers back here this is one of my h culture beds this was another area where I did a little reconfiguring of the layout this used to be completely closed off so in order to get into this section of the garden I had to go out of the main Garden all the way around and back in just the tiniest change of cutting into this fence has like improved my enjoyment and access of the garden a th% so I’m really glad I did that and it was super easy I’m kind of kicking myself for not doing it sooner but in the Hogle culture bed here I’ve got horseradish a lot of strawberries some raspberries that I really need to thin out and build some supports for and some honey berries or hasc caps now another great learning experience for me I know that I should not over fertilize strawberries but I did not think about planting strawberries in an area where the soil is just too rich because let me show you what happens these plants are huge I mean some strawberry varieties do get big but this is not one of those and these are probably two to three times the size that I would expect them to be tons of lush growth No Berries hardly anything to speak of the only place I have Berry formation is up here in the front where this soil is more poor but actually on the Hogle culture bed itself I have not the first Berry so what’s happening here is the soil is just too rich too much nitrogen these plants are putting everything into fure growth and nothing into Fruit production ction so I’m going to let these go for this year but in the future I’m going to be transplanting these out of here into a different area of the garden but some of the plants are doing great these has caps love it um this is the I can’t remember the second or third year I’ve had these in here and I’ve got a few fruit you can see these aren’t quite ripe typically with the honey berries they’ll just kind of fall off at the slightest touch you shouldn’t really have to pull them off of here so these probably need another week or so and my raspberries are growing like crazy I’ll thre you another cattle panel Arch on this one I have planted the grape that wouldn’t die I talked about this in another video but this was an old concord grape that my trellis fell down and I already had one and I decided I just wanted to get rid of it so I chopped it completely back I had it covered with black fabric weed barrier for like 2 years and I pulled that back one year and the darn thing was still growing so I thought you know what if you’re not going to die you deserve to have a chance dug it up transplanted it here now it looks kind of cruddy right now because of course spray drift damage um grapes are one of the most susceptible crops to herbicide spray drift that I grow here and I get damage on the leaves every single year typically they will grow out of it and still put on a crop but man this kind of breaks my heart every time I see it I am working on building more of a barrier between our property and the Farmland next to us but it just continues to be a problem every year on the other side I have some ornamental honeysuckle not the invasive honeysuckle definitely not um but an ornamental honeysuckle planted I may end up digging this out of here and planting something edible but for now it’s a plant that really draws in butterflies and hummingbirds so it’s going to stay and there hasn’t been a whole lot else that will grow in this spot because this is really wet and clayy so we’ll see how that does and then back behind me is the second Hogle culture bed and this thing has had kind of a little bit of everything planted on it at this point right now again I just cut down a rye cover crop but I’ve also got several apricot and necac cot trees planted one of which you can see desperately needs staked because it’s growing crooked and I will probably be planting my winter squash and pumpkins in here as well this year back out into the main part of the garden here first up we’ve got garlic and I’m very interested to see how much earlier the Harvest is on this this year because of the mild winter this started growing earlier than I would normally see it and I’ve already got scape formation on some of these which typically would not be happening for at least a couple more weeks and down this aisle more Rye this was a rye bch mix that I just terminated Under The netting I’ve got some mermaids Aurora cabbage collard greens that I’m trying out new this year some more Endive col Robie this is some volunteer chamomile and then some broccoli and cauliflower under here again these were a bit late planted so they’re a little smaller than I would typically see this time of year but doing okay more mixed cover crop this had a whole ton of stuff in it mustard vet winter Peas I think some oats or rye um this will probably be terminated in the next couple of weeks I just transplanted out peppers I have a few eggplant in and the flea beetles are already hard at work so I’m going to have to get out here and coat these plants with my surround kale and Clay my sweet pick shell peas are starting to put on pods these should be ready for Harvest within a couple of weeks my cauliflower here under the shade netting I’ve pretty much just been leaving the shade netting on the cauliflower whenever it’s over 80 which has been more often than not recently again just because it can it’s so temperamental when it comes to whether it doesn’t like onions I could kick myself I left these under the insect netting too long and they grew up into it and the top started to bend over which is why you see all these kind of bent over crooked Tops on my onions volunteer chamomile more Peppers add a lot of peppers this year and we’ve got nestum and broccoli interestingly the Slugs don’t seem to favor the broccoli they favor Chinese cabbage I’m to the point now where I might just plant Chinese cabbage as a trap crop for Slugs they love it more than anything else I plant in my garden more onions more bent tops again I had that netting on too long and then this is the new purple magic broccoli I talked about this in my video about favorite varieties from last year just a beautiful plant this will put on really pretty purple broccoli heads and then another favorite from last year Blue Lake Superior bush bean I planted these way too heavy but I wasn’t sure if all the seed was going to germinate it did of course so I’m going to have to thin these out a little bit back up to the front of the garden here I added another cattle panel Arch I just cannot get enough of these on one of these I’m going to do my lofa gourds I I’ve also got some Moonflowers to plant out um more cucumbers more Tomatoes there’s so many things that can be planted on these I just find them incredibly useful in the garden plus once the plants grow up them they look really pretty and here I’ve got top chop collards Joy’s midnight chard this was a variety I fell in love with years ago and then they stopped carrying it and they got the seed back this year I was so so excited love this red chard variety both for Taste and for looks Dragon fennel I had bunnies nibbling on my fennel up here in front you can see that’s why these are so short rabbits love those fennel greens some late planted beets these were planted at the end of April and volunteer lettuce and all I’m if you see all this black landscape barrier fabric weed fabric I’m trying to smother out uh my mistake of planting mint I had it planted in a like a raised bed planting container but of course it escaped cuz it’s mint it was a really dumb mistake on my part and I knew better but now it’s growing everywhere so so I’m trying to smother it out more lovely sugar magnolia snap peas here you can see this is a purple potted variety just starting to put on little baby pods I just transplanted these zenyas this is Queeny lime orange and then these beets down here these were an experiment I wanted to see how transplanted beets would perform as compared to my typical direct sewing and I I think I just waited too long to transplant you can see they’re doing this weird above ground root formation which is not what we want these are not going to be very nice but I can always eat the greens and I’m going to try this test again this fall just getting them transplanted out at a younger stage some Rainbow Lights charred up here again more Rye which has just been chopped a lot of volunteer borage volunteer Nigella and my consort black currant which looks to be loaded with fruit this year outside of the fencon Garden area there’s just a lot of bed cleanup going on right now this is an area where I had a lot of potted plants in years past I’m trying to convert it over to inground beds right now unfortunately it’s just kind of full of thistles but I’m working on that I’ve got a dwarf wza Cherry planted back here some raspberries and then my flat wonderful peach tree this is my favorite Peach variety of all time just the best eating quality unfortunately I’ve got Peach Leaf curl going on with both my trees it’s something that should be treated in the late winter early spring before the signs of the infection are apparent but time just got away from me this year I’m hoping this tree can make it through one more year and then I’ll I’m telling myself I’ll be on top of it next year but I do have some fruit on here so I’m hoping that I can at least get through this season in this bed kind of the same scenario I had containers in here last year but I’m trying to convert this over to inground beds I started a bunch of rustic colors Rudbeckia from seed and have just transplanted these out I love the colors on this one so I’m hoping these thrive in this spot here I’ve transplanted a bunch of Yaro from inside the garden to Edge the outside of this fence this is just a standard white yarao and it’s super easy to grow and spreads like crazy so it wasn’t a great fit for inside of my garden it kind of just smothered out my other plantings but here along the fence line I think it’ll do a great job smothering out weeds and grass it’s a wonderful plant for attracting pollinators and predatory insects so I love having it around everything is fenced in because my chickens are basically free range and they’ll scratch up anything they can um so this stuff all has to be protected from chickens at least while it gets established I’ve got Sun choke growing along this fence again this is another fairly aggressive plant these will spread but I found that they work well along this fence they suppress weeds the fence gives them some support as long as I keep the volunteers pulled from spreading in the garden this is a pretty good arrangement this fenced in area is a newer Garden as well this is an area that I kind of reserve for those bigger crops so last year I had sweet corn and watermelon back here this year I’ve got potatoes I’m going to do sweet corn again possibly some winter squash right now it kind of just looks like a weed patch but it’s I’ll get on top of it eventually you can see here I’ve got some potatoes popping up unfortunately I think I had some bowls in here and still do and I suspect in these areas that are blank they may have gotten in there and chewed up my seed potatoes I’ve got another favorite this is mirror green pee some pod formation happening these will be ready like in a couple more weeks sweet Corn’s going to go in this area you can see all these straw B around the fence I’m working on conditioning these my original intent was to do sweet potatoes in these straw bales I’m still considering it because I don’t really have another place for the sweet potatoes to go my concern here again is the vs um FS I think like sweet potatoes more than any other crop I grow and I’m just not sure that I want to set myself up for that disappointment so we’ll see what happens I’ve got a couple random apple trees trees in here this was one of those situations like I don’t have any place else to put these right now so I’m just going to stick them in here and worry about it later well like whatever two or three years later now they’re clearly too big to transplant um this one’s actually got a decent crop load on it this year this this is an older variety called Liberty I was testing out Liberty and Triumph because they are the two apples on the market that are supposed to have the highest resistance to Cedar Apple rust Liberty by far was more resistant here than the Triumph in fact I lost one of my Triumph trees this is the other one and it’s just it’s struggling um and it definitely gets a lot more cedar cedar Apple rust on the leaves than the Liberty does so I’m really impressed with this so far I was worried that I was not going to get any fruit because they need a cross pollinator and I didn’t have the Triumph didn’t Bloom I don’t have any other apples so I was a little surprised when I came out here and there’s apples all over it what we figured out is I actually have a wild crab apple or some typ type of apple over here in the woods and must have cross-pollinated so hopefully we get some good apples off of this this year and you can see here too some volunteer potatoes that I missed digging last year and finally back here in this corner my spinach planting this served as another one of those Garden lessons to me this year of course I planted spinach up in my main Garden it did terribly this year it struggled it was too hot it was too wet just it did not do great this was some very old spinach seed that I figured probably had very low germination and was not going to grow so I was like I’ll just throw it out in the back there I had this whole garden covered with a layer of sheep manure EMB bedding and I just threw the seed out on top of it that’s all I did and of course this spinach did just beautifully while my other stuff suffered now planting in composted sheep manure had a lot to do with it but it also kind of reinforced that lesson with me that sometimes we just make it too complicated sometimes we just do too much sometimes tossing seed out and letting it do its thing is going to yield much better and easier results than us fussing over it now that is definitely not always the case with all Garden crops but sometimes it is and sometimes I need to remember not to over complicate things now this definitely needs to be harvested again because it’s going to be bolting really soon with these extended warm temperatures but it’s really good spinach now I mentioned those V problems I’ve been having and Vols are especially problematic in the garden because they tunnel everywhere and they eat everything they love vegetables they especially love tubers like sweet potatoes they have eaten my cauliflower heads down to Nubs and they’re extremely prolific so VES can really do a lot of damage in the garden a cat that’s a good Mouser can go a long way but we can’t keep cats here because my dogs won’t get along with them so I’ve been searching for naturalist solutions to deal with my Vols because I really prefer not to use poison well a lovely viewer emailed me and told me all about the method that was working for her and this is ingeniously simple but it is quite effective so I’ve been testing this out and I’ve had pretty good results so far and this is all it is you get a tube cardboard PVC pipe anything that’s going to be tunnel like and put two standard mouse traps set at either end no bait in them and then sprinkle sunflower seeds in the middle the vs smell the sunflower seeds want to get at them walk right across the mouse traps and they’re done for now I’ve had the best luck with these when I first of all obviously set them in a place where I see V AC ity but also when I kind of shelter them or put them under in particular this black weed fabric I see a lot of w tunneling under here all the time so this just kind of adds a level of security for them they’re not wary of it they’re not exposed and they walk right into those traps so I have four of these set up in various places around the garden where I see a lot of V activity and I’ve been catching both vs and mice but at least two to 4 every single morning when I come out here and check so I’m sure there’s a lot more to go but it does seem to be effective for now past my other concord grape vine here unfortunately you can see the spray drift damage on these leaves as well but this was really overgrown I trimmed this back super hard late this winter early spring kind of time period I was a little nervous to do it but I think the plant responded really really well you can see all this fruit formation on here and pruning perennial fruit plants and Vines and trees is something I get a little nervous about because I just always feel like I’m going to screw it up but I love with the grapes in particular that it’s really really hard to screw these up terribly they’re really forgiving they respond well to heavy pruning and sometimes with this Garden I’ve learned I just need to jump into it and quit trying to be a perfectionist about everything and just do it and try it and see if it works and in this case it did elderberries are just starting to put on blooms here and then this is my other flat wonderful Peach and then quickly I wanted to show you a few things that I’m working on up by the house they’re not pretty but they again are Works in progress the bed behind me it was my first herb garden this is really convenient because you can just walk out the back door from the kitchen and cut the herbs the problem I was running into is the dogs like to run through it the chickens like to scratch in it kind of everything was getting destroyed so I’m slowly working on repairing replanting basically figuring out that I have to fence everything off till it’s established which is a pain but not as bad is doing all the work and then having it ruined by my animals who I love but kind of drive me crazy sometimes ha yeah you so right now it is overgrown but I do have a lot of fun stuff in here a lot of lemon balm some oregano there’s a super DWF Apple tucked in here this is a new planting this is sweet hips Rose which has great big edible rose hips I’m definitely trying to focus on more things that are dual purpose so hopefully have ornamental properties but are also edible and or medicinal my Berry I’ve had up here for years I love this plant I’m hoping to take some cuting this summer and plant out more of these this is a great again edible berries it’s a nitrogen fixing shrub this is actually volunteer Elderberry maybe not the most advantageous spot to have one but I couldn’t bear to cut it down and it is doing really really well you can see what I mean here this was a little area that I had to fence off just to allow plants to get established in here but these nice cheap temporary fences seem to do the trick this is another work in progress bed and this is up close to the house more of what you would typically associate with like Landscaping but again I was hoping to have plants with more of a dual purpose in this situation so I’ve kind of got a mix of a lot of different stuff I don’t know if all of it’s staying and it’s like I said definitely a work in progress so this gets partial Morning Sun so I can’t do things that absolutely require full sun here but I can grow more than I actually anticipated so you can see here again I’ve got elderberry I’ve got a gooseberry in here I’ve got some alany viburnum this not for everybody but this is actually a Birdo plant and many consider this a weed but again this has a lot of really nice medicinal values that root is very beneficial what folks typically don’t like are the great big Burrs that form on this plant but I found that if I just cut those stalks off before they get mature it is much less of a problem we have these popping up everywhere but I left this one in particular because I think it looks really cool this is another one of those dwarf cherries I think this one is Juliet I’m not for certain and then I’m planning on planting some winter squash or pumpkins on this side of the Hill that gets the most sun because I had a volunteer grow here one year that did quite well I’m also growing an assortment of other herbs which I plan to transplant to this area things like wood betany Eastern purple cone flower mother wart and mug wart and others which prefer a bit more shade or a bit more wild weedy or spreading to behave properly in my more contained herb garden out back and this little fun addition behind me is another future hugle culture bed my son and my husband dug this for me with a tractor thank goodness for not having to dig another one of these by hand I love them but they are a lot of work and I’ve been waiting for like two months to start filling this up but we’ve had just consistent rain and this is a low-lying not well- draining area which is the reason that I wanted Hogle culture here in the first place but this thing has been full for 2 months and this is about 4T deep So eventually someday when this dries up I’m going to start hauling bigger log pieces to put in here fill this up through the season and my plan is to plant this with more native trees and shrubs so right now I’ve got quite a few things potted up ready to plant whenever including some paaws Carolina all spice spice bush some P Simmons I’m trying to remember what else I’ve got a whole huge assortment but a lot of those types of plants are going to go in here and the plan is to do several more of these hugle culture trenches along our property line again just to increase the variability of what we’ve got growing here as well as to provide kind of a barrier between this agricultural field and our property well that pretty much wraps up what is going on in my garden right now if you enjoyed today’s video please consider subscribing to my Channel growfully with Jenna thanks for watching and I’ll see you next time