FULL Backyard Garden Tour | Zone 8A | May 2024 | So lush & green!

It’s that time! My first official garden tour of the season!
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Hey y’all! I’m Taryn from Sow in the City. Welcome to a place that feels like peace. We hope you’ll grab a cup of tea, relax and stay for a while!
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hey y’all I’m Taran with st in the city and welcome to my channel as you can see I’m outside and that’s because I’m going to film my first garden tour of the Season I’m so excited to show you this there’s a lot going on in the garden I still have some things to do I still I still have some things to um just get ready for the season just a minor things but overall I think it’s ready enough for me to give you the first garden tour of the season so without further Ado let’s get going okay y’all you can see I’m going to show you my first raised bed I have about as you can see I have four Uh custom built raised beds and two metal ones okay so let’s start with the this one right here as you can see in this bed I have my sweet potatoes now I will say I do have some other things aside from sweet potatoes and that’s just not on purpose that’s just like how it happened you could see um let’s see of course that right there is a little weed like I do have some weeds trying to pop up not too many weeds it could be worse but there are a couple weeds but that right there is a carrot yes a carrot that is the carrot um I do know how that got there this is very odd but somehow when fall came last fall um I had just taken out the last sweet potato Harvest and I wanted to do something with this bed in the fall before I put it to bed in the winter um that probably wasn’t the best idea but anyway I decided to plant carrot and I actually didn’t get that great of a harvest probably because this soil was already so like exhausted from growing the sweet potatoes and then I was trying to grow carrots that wasn’t a good idea but this one carrot survived and it’s still here um and it’s looking quite well if I might say so myself so maybe we’ll get a carrot Harvest soon I don’t know I don’t know but that’s that bad with the sweet potatoes and the vines are growing and hopefully they continue to grow and they’ll spill out over here and it’ll be great all right so now we’re going to start with this bed this bed is doing well I will say I did have something right there and that was just another tomato but the seedling just wasn’t strong enough I think and it just kind of died back but that’s okay because I have this tomato plant right here I have this beautiful one right here gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous now we had a bad storm we’ve had a few strong storms and I think this piece of it kind of broke off in the storm so I think tonight when I get home um as sad as this makes me I might have to just go ahead and break that off cuz it’s hanging on by a thread and maybe transplant it right here and see if it’ll do anything do y’all think I could do that I don’t know um but yeah then I have another one another tomato plant right here beautiful it’s very green very Lush and green of course I have some merry Golds right here now these merry Golds were transplants they’re doing okay um they’re not getting as big as I thought they would maybe because they’re transplants so I’m going to plant some merry gold seeds myself but this is some basil that is doing wonderful holy basil look at that holy basil okay and here’s a here’s another tomato right here of course that one is empty cuz it died off and then there’s another small one right there so overall we have about 1 two three uh four five tomatoes in this bed and I’m just so grateful with how green and Lush everything is looking yay okay so now we’re going to look at our second custom built ra bed you can see look at how Lush this looks just green I love this so much green green Green so as you can see here there’s just so many tomatoes and I’m just so grateful for it okay right here you have a green tomato well a a beautiful tomato plant uh these are two different varieties I could tell because of the way that the leaves look the leaves look different um and so here’s the thing you’re probably asking these are beautiful tomatoes taring but what are the varieties the problem is I can’t tell you the variety because when my dad was planting them he goes so fast when he plants that he doesn’t keep up with the label so I I genuinely don’t know but I do know that all of these tomato plants are of the heirloom um be sck variety okay they are all beef steak for the major for the most part some of them may also be like Roma varieties but the majority are beef steak so I I do know that um but I have quite a few tomato plants in this bit I have one and you can see that we have cages so that should help you try to differentiate what plant is what but we have 1 2 3 4 five six yeah we have six tomato plants in this bed okay y’all so this bed right here this is a bed that my dad wanted to um use to plant exactly what he wanted the rest of these beds I’m very peculiar about what I plant because I want to make sure that everything goes with everything for example I want to make sure that I have beneficial plants along with all the other plants that I put in these for and five main raise beds so I can’t just plant anything so I get I let my dad have one bed particularly to himself where he can plant whatever he wants to plant and it doesn’t matter if it’s a companion plant or not he can just go like go for it so that’s what this bed is and he put a pepper plant a one pepper plant um actually I’m wrong he has two pepper plants and one two tomato plants okay two pepper plants and two tomato plants and they’re doing really well um and normally pepper plants and tomato plants don’t really go together if I’m not mistaken but he is doing really well right now and they’re looking healthy and I’m just so happy and Lush and green and you could see that we have a lot of mulch we’re using mulch this year more so than we’ve ever used it before and that’s really cool I would say that it’s working for us so far um we still have weeds as you can see like we still have weeds trying to pop up but not as much and as far as the the the harvest you can see we have one actual sweet pepper right there and it’s looking really well actually we have two right there and right there how cool is that so that’s my dad’s bed okay y’all so this is another r b we’re going to look at the one right here so it may look like there’s not much going on honestly up until like last week there wasn’t and that’s because I had something completely different planted along the edges than what I had now so um before I had actually had some squash in this bed I had some zucchini three zucchini squash and one yellow squash and at first they were doing really well but then it got to a point where they just stopped and they were stunted and I think they were already starting to get eaten by one of the you know non-beneficial insects already like I think they had already starting to get attacked and I didn’t feel like dealing with that so I just took out the squash and I planted something else so let’s look at it okay so right here you can see that some things are starting to pop up and that would be a green bean plant okay this is a Blue Lake um a Blue Lake pole beam that’s what I put right here and right there that one’s still trying to come up I might replant that um right here right there okay and over here right there okay so I have four different Blue Lake pole beans that I planted and luckily for me they all germinated so that’s good sometimes that can be the hardest part getting your plants to germinate you can also see that I have two bushier type of plants in right in the middle and these are theum these are so beneficial for your garden these are called companion plants um and so these plants help to uh distract it helps to attract beneficial pest but it also distracts the a non-beneficial pest in your garden so instead of attacking the plants that you want to Harvest they will go for the neran plants um and you can also eat the nestan plants as well you can I believe you can eat the leaves and the flowers I think so and they’re just really pretty you could see that one flower right there this is an aarian flower it’s so pretty see that it’s such a pretty color so that’s another bed all right let’s move on okay y’all so this is the last of the raised bed that we will view look at how pretty that looks just so gorgeous beautiful so this bed is really interesting because I have a few volunteer plants that popped up in this bed and I was really shocked um specifically by one of the plants because I didn’t think it would do well in this particular season but let’s get into it okay so look at this beautiful bed right here look at this I guess we should start with the elephant in the room this really big plant right here you’re probably like what is this this is a sunflower this is a volunteer sunflower it’s stunning I love this plant one because it just volunteers on its own and I might post a video about that later but when you have plants like sunflowers it’s really great because once you plant it one time you won’t have to plant it again because eventually maybe because of pollinators or because of birds you will get plants popping up all around your garden each year and I think that’s so cool so that’s what this is now uh those are some weeds I got to pick them up um those um that’s a pile of weeds that I pulled from the bed um we are using M and I would say it’s doing really well but but you do have some weeds that do pop up so I’ll pull them out but you have some merry gold right here now I said earlier these merry Golds are transplants though they’re doing decent um I think if I plant them from seed they’ll do better but then you also have this mustard green okay look at this this is another volunteer plant and I’m just shocked not really that it’s in this bed because I did grow Greens in this bed last fall but I didn’t think it would germinate in this particular season they tend to do better in colder season but yet here this is thriving so beautiful like what am I going to do with one mustard green I don’t know but you see that there and then look at this look at that beautiful plant behind it that is a merry gold that’s what this is but this one volunteered on its own and now I did also have marry G in this bed last year but oh my goodness I didn’t think they would just you know come back on its own now right here you can see I have two more of those pretty plants that I just talked about in the last razor bed and these are no stoms again you see one and two and you could see like there it’s already getting beautiful flowers look at that see that so pretty just gorgeous gorgeous so I now I didn’t really plant it just for the fact that it has beautiful flowers I planted it for the fact that I said in the other bed that it’s a companion plant and it will attract beneficial pest while distracting non-beneficial pests so now right here we can get into the main reason why I have this bed or the main plant that I put in this bed aside from the beneficial plants and the companion plants I also wanted to grow cucumbers so we have a lot going on in this bed we have cucumber here A bunch of cucumbers there and two that are kind of hidden underneath that nestum um one right there uh one right here and one right there well a few seedings and then that’s another volunteer plant all right so let’s go into what kind of cucumbers I planted the cucumbers on this row right here one two three these are Boston pickling cucumbers these are of the pickling variety these are probably one of my favorite varieties because it’s just so delicious it’s so Savory the flavor is very strong and delicious um it’s not too sweet but it’s also not too Savory it’s like right in the middle and you could pickle them right you could actually make pickles now I’ve been growing this variety for 3 years I’ve never made pickles hopefully this year will change and I will make my first round of like refrigerator pickles I would love to do that and then on this back row here one two and three these are of the silver slicer variety okay silver slicer silver slicer these are very very sweet um very sweet and delicious and I love to grow them because they’re just good to snack on and they’re very hydrating I also like to make green juice with them so hydrating okay okay and that is that is a volunteer plant that is a volunteer Zenia okay a volunteer Zenia okay there’s also another volunteer Zenia right there it’s kind of hidden in between the merry go but right there that’s a volunteer Zen as well hey y’all this might be my favorite part of the garden of all don’t get me wrong I love every part of this Garden but this bed is just so important to me cuz I’m just so excited about what we have growing you probably can tell what we have growing if you know a lot about plants but let’s get into it so right here we have our melons these are all melons so excited let’s get into what exactly like what varieties of melons that we’re growing so let’s start with this right here you may be wondering is that like a bag of soil in the ground covered with mulch yes yes it is um my dad did this he saw online that a man had opened up a bag of organic raised bed soil directly sewed some seeds and grew the melons like that so he’s trying to do that and honestly it’s working pretty well for him okay as you can see I think it’s working pretty well for him so we’re going to see how that does that is the yellow Crimson sweet variety yellow Crimson sweet and then if you look at this row you have uh about three more I take on this row yes you have one two and three these are all doing well knock on wood this row is also the yellow Crimson sweet variety yellow Crimson sweet I’m so excited I grew yellow Crimson sweet for the first time last year and it was so delicious it tasted like candy so now that’s my favorite variety seriously now let’s get to the last two rows these last two rows right here these are of the orange meat or orange flesh variety it’s hard for me to say the the actual uh name of the varieties cuz they’re just name they have such odd names but one of them the the the majority of these um orange meat varieties is the or orangello orangello variety see it’s so hard for me to pronounce it I’m not sure if it’s orango or orangello but either way that’s the variety that it is um and I got a lot of uh positive reviews off of this variety that I’m growing they said it tasted like candy like sherbet ice cream I was like okay let’s try it out so that’s what this is these two rows right here and you can see this one is doing really really really really well see that it’s just doing well it’s already start to vine and I love it so now we’re going to move to another section of our garden and we’re going to talk about the fruit trees look at this we’re going to talk about these beautiful fruit trees I’m really excited I don’t have as many fruit trees as I did last year and that’s okay but we can talk about the few that I do have cuz they’re doing really well so let’s start with this first one look at how nice this is this is our one of our peach trees looks really really healthy I don’t actually water this tree myself we’ve gotten a lot of rain which I’m grateful for so the rain just Waters it on its own I think I might want to put some mulch at the base of my trees you know like I have mulch aot around here I might want to put some mulch at the base of my trees cuz it is getting some weeds and like a volunteer plant but overall it’s swing well and look at these peaches look at those peaches super pretty so many so many peaches so when I touch the peaches they are not um soft yet so they’re not ready to be harvested but as soon as they are we’re going to harvest them and and make good use of them um I think they should be ready to be harvested maybe by the end of this month but that’s just the one peach tree let’s go look at the second I want you to look at my second Peach Tree look at this look at how beautiful that is this peach tree is much taller now than it was last year um and of course this was not started from seed but when we got it it was much smaller and now you can see all these peaches on here they are just so beautiful and don’t worry these peaches are not ripe yet of course I’m not going to harvest them when they’re fully ripe I’ll probably Harvest them when they start to get a little softness to them but right now they are still very hard but because the color has started to come in on these peaches I know that they will be ready in you know no time like I’m I’m thinking within a month they will be officially ready for Harvest so I’m very excited about that you can see that is our Plum cot tree right there now that tree is relatively new granted um we’ve had it for 2 years but it’s still relatively new and this is the first season where we we’ve had our native trees outside all winter I’ve mentioned this last year but we did realize that it’s important for our native trees to get some time outside in the winter so that they can get their you know like I think it’s called like resting hours or something so that they can hibernate basically and once they hibernate when the springtime comes it’ll make them waken up and be able to produce more fruit so this is the first time we did that and this year we actually got two Plum CS off of this tree we’ve never had any Harvest off of that Plum Tree but this year we got two so hoping that as the years go on we’ll get more off of that tree now right here this section here is where most of my sweet peppers or bell peppers are I’m really happy with how they’re looking right now now I will say I should have tupped these Peppers off specifically those two like I really should have topped those off earlier uh because what that means is when you top your peppers off you cut off like the very tops of them so that and and maybe even the of them so that the leaves and the stems will start to grow more so from the side and it won’t get so tall like right now it’s just so tall uncomfortably tall actually they need some trellises so what I did this past weekend was I actually topped them off as best as I could um so I’m going to keep my eye on these to see if they actually start to grow more bushier and not so tall especially that one uh especially that one one yeah yeah it’s really just m so yeah that’s my fault so hopefully I did a little help you know to it um I might top it off a little bit more on the sides but hey I’ll just have to see what it does but the rest are looking really good cuz I did top those off I believe it’s just these two all right and so this is the Other Tomato section so you know I have excuse me two raised beds they are with tomatoes and then I have some more right here these are looking so good except for that one you can see that one is starting to turn yellow really bad and that’s because um we’ve gotten so much rain so much rain at least twice a week Heavy Rain sometimes three times a week and it’s just got a lot um maybe too much for that little for its plant so I haven’t touched it I haven’t you know personally watered it but it’s gotten a lot rain so I’m thinking I’ll just cut off the yellow leaves maybe um and hope for the best honestly hope for the best but the rest are looking really well okay the rest are looking really well and most of these over here were also planted from seed some of them were transplants but the most of them were from seed this is my section where I have some herbs you can see that they’re all really along the fence line I thought it would be be really cool if I did the herbs along the fence line this year so that’s what you’ll see here now you could see that right here I’ll get closer for you right here I have some basil my dad planted this I believe that’s purple basil purple basil right there and this right here is oregano these were not planted from seed unfortunately I’m still learning how to plant herbs from seed but these are looking really healthy and they were from a local Nursery that’s some lemon balm of course you have some weeds mixed in here with the mulch The Mulch is helping to suppress weeds but some still get through here and then you have these beautiful eanaia plants purple eona plants these were all planted from seed and they’re literally taller than me well those two are taller than me and they are so beautiful these plants are just so beautiful so so so beautiful Eon might be my favorite flower of all time next to a sunflower when it comes to echonous I am trying to figure out if there’s a way for me to like trellis these cuz as you can see I had to put a little bench next to this one cuz it’s leaning over cuz it got so tall now we’ve had a lot of windy storms recently so that could be causing it to be a little bit more like lobster excited but also I do think it might need to be trellis so if you have echas and they are really tall how do you trellis them what do you do I need some help with that same with this one here and in the middle of these two you can see I have some more herbs Sage deal and I think another basil so yeah and there’s a bumble be right there so I’m not going to get too close but this is a milkweed so I want you to see this tree behind me can you see that look at how big it is look at that that is the pear tree it is doing so much better than last year last year I think I came on here and told you every week we have no peirs we have no peirs well look at this look at this look at how many peirs are on this tree I’m amazed look at this do y’all see this do y’all see this like wow wow oh my goodness I’m just in awe look at this these will be ready soon um and when they are ready I will be selling them so I hope that if like if you’re in the Memphis Area the greater Memphis area I hope you like pears cuz I will be selling them cuz as much as I Love Pears I can’t eat all these and this like look at how far it goes up look look look look look look look look look look woo w amazing yep okay so now this bed is a little rough do not judge we’re going to get this one together but I want to show you something I’m showing you everything okay we have to put some mulch down here obviously but the important thing is these seeds that I planted did germinate I planted some um I planted some seeds right there those are um I think those are what you call super sweet 100 right there and then right there you can barely see but they germinated now right here I’m going to pull up these weeds and add some more soil and maybe I might plant some zenas right here I don’t know I want to do that okay y’all that was the garden tour and I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it I will be having garden tours possibly weekly like on a weekly basis um because I want you to see everything that’s changing in the garden and I still have things to do so keep up for more garden tours I’ll also have more Farm to Table tours um recipe videos juicing all that stuff so look forward to all of that without further Ado I’m going to get going but remember no matter how stressful your day is no matter what you’re going through just keep sewing