Home Garden – Detailed Tour

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Happy growing!

it’s been a while since I’ve taken a more in-depth look in our main backyard garden at our home where Sasha and Zelda and I live on our little Halfacre I’ve talked Fair bit about this in the past I’ll link to videos throughout showing this uh space at different times over the years just recently got a whole bunch of sawdust to redo the walkways been doing a lot of weeding and planting lately it’s feeling like the space is looking looking in a nice way I’d like to walk around and look at it in detail so I hope you stick around the area that I want to walk through is this area area in here I would guess it’s about a tenth of an acre probably a little bit less overall 16th of an acre backyard garden we started this in the spring of 2013 and have evolved it over the years it’s pretty solid food Forest at this point like mainly canopied in a lot of areas but still nice little open Glades of pockets here there for annual Crop Production as well as Nursery work first I’d like to take a look in our cattle panel High tunnel all these years later boy is it 8 years old now it’s still functional just did a bunch of watering in there earlier today you can hear the dripping I’ve talked about these before these little float valves have been incredibly useful to us these are hooked up to different rainwater collection systems and I used a pump and a battery to lift water from here and water now it’s refilling at a nice gentle slow pace what got watered in here feel really nice about what’s happening in this space this year uh we have all sorts of different varieties of Basil that are on either side of different cultivar hot peppers um I think I mentioned these in the video where I was talking about the pump so they’re growing pretty nicely now we’re going to pick a few of these Peppers off so they can focus on getting more Leaf growing they’re coming up from the bottom there but we’ve got fish peppers and Habaneros and Jalapenos in here I think bunch of different Basils and then on the north side some really pungent aromatics well we’ve got our mioga Ginger which is turned into a straight up weed this is actually what it looks like when we try to dig most of it out in the spring in order all of our spring uh sales and shipping of mioga come from this high tunnel in the spirit of trying to get rid of it not because we don’t like it but because we need it for other things and the tiniest of root fragments come back it’s pretty phenomenal but we leave it wherever we can cuz it’s a beautiful and fantastic plant and then wherever there’s space we went through and put in some Tulsi transplants so we’ve got a nice uh medicinal basil in there as well as sweet margarum which is incredibly aromatic imagine you have fresh orange juice mixed with oregano and that’s the aroma that this gives so some medicine and some flavors and then this hordon NOA netting is uh installed again so we can do some slicing cucumbers that’ll climb up through there they’ve been soaked really really thoroughly they haven’t germinated yet so hopefully the the seed’s still good but that’s what’s happening in this High Tunnel right now we’ll take a quick break from The Wander for Georgia’s sake and for a little stick action this is my day all day every day this dude never wants to stop good boy can you sit good boy you sit sit take a wander into the main garden now we put up some fencing around here and mainly because our other Lenny our sweet sweet little man Lenny liked to try to jump through and so I ended up putting up 4ft tall uh 2×4 weled wire fencing around this in order to deflect him and that became a really nice trellis for uh peas we’ve been eating off of these all spring they’re starting to get a little bit hagger with the heat of the summer but they’re still putting off peas they’ve made it into our salads almost every day it’s the beauty of if you are going to install fencing around an area it becomes a trellis could there be cucumbers could there be uh peas and beans can there be Tomatoes woven through all that even hitz is doing really nicely on the edge here but let’s go into the main Garden we’re about a week out from Peak milked season it was incredibly aromatic in here not too long ago about a week ago this is a plant that we had nothing to do with planting we just work around for the most part kind of come up with a policy that as long as the milked is relatively close to the fence line in here we absolutely leave them cuz we can always throw a rope around them to help keep them up and then where they flop over into our crops and the things we’re trying to grow we pull them and we lay them into the pathway I’ll make a separate video about this soon enough but we just received a 37 cubic yard load of sawdust a few weeks ago and that renovated the pathways immensely we just uh chop and dropped a bunch of branches did some weeding through it all in the walkways poured the sawdust on top and it really helps the gardens pop that’s a really nice feature about mulching deeply in your walkways you can use pretty wide range of material that’s not necessarily ideal for growing plants this Aus is actually kind of tanic it has uh Red Oak in it and tons of carbon so it actually suppresses the weeds from growing but in a natural way I almost missed a really really sweet combo that’s happening in here there’s a sweet cherry that a um blue jay must have pooped out remember blue jay sitting over here eating cherry a bunch of years ago they sat on the metal fence and that’s about the distance of a blue jay’s butt from the fence is where the Cherry landed that started growing beautifully and then we had a Niagara grape that I was training onto the fence and it found the Cherry recently and now the Cherry has become a grape tree and we’ve got all of these just gorgeous clumps of grapes and Cherry feels relatively strong so long as I go through and cut some of these excessive uh vines off it feels like the cherri is going to be able to hold the grape crop for this year the birds seem to enjoy the cherries pretty immensely and that’s fine so long as we can get grapes from a cherry tree into the garden proper this is where it gets wild if it wasn’t wild enough it is extra wild in here this first bed has so much happening uh there’s flowers on the edges the amarinth are all volunteers but we selectively nonwe um amarinth where they show up in spots that feel really nice the rest we can pull and give to the chickens same thing with borage whenever it shows back up in the garden we let it be and then we chop and drop and feed to the chickens where they start to flop and get in the way it’s actually a hybrid bed I’ve talked about before the idea of nursery and then our crops on the boundary in this case we have the interior set to Siberian Peach these are already 3 ft tall and we are in the beginning of July they’re flanked in bronze fennel and Dill which will harvest and eat probably start need to start harvesting the these plants a little bit more assertively to promote the peach but there’s whole veins in the center of this bed the center of the next bed over there’s poppy there’s good King Henry there’s Siberian Peach and some kale just the kalees being the actual normal thing in the mix put in some effort to really immensely increase the numbers of uh sorl in the garden SAS loves cooking with this we really enjoy eating these greens they’re reliable they’re disease resistant pest resistant we’ve offered these on the website for a number of years it’s a particular variety that does not bolt and we were digging pretty deep into some of the beds that she harvested from in order to satisfy shipping needs and so this spring we doubled down and put in a bed like this another bed or two like this in some other areas and this way she can Harvest immense bowlfuls of amazing greens if you haven’t cooked with so it’s somewhere between lemon and spinach and this is a variety that never bolts it just looks like this all season so periodically we can freshen them up by cutting them really hard and sending those greens to the chickens and then it regrows beautiful fresh greens or it just sit still and we Harvest as we want Sasha and Zelda are coming out for their evening our evening salad Harvest we’ve had so much lettuce this year and it’s been fantastic let’s see what they’re up to hi she’s not so sure no no she is he’s hungry too we want salad she wants milk got some pretty complex layouts to our Pathways um lots of Little Forks in the roads little Labyrinth stuff this season we made a little cut through here and then another it’s like a zigzag walkway it’s kind of a dead end here turns and goes this way and breaking up the beds in this way feels really fun uh and pretty enjoyable it really works well as well here we’ve got some complexity again H have figured some borage that will need to cut at some point soon we had an abundance of Nanking cherry seed from last season I think we’re going to be able to really offer Nanking Cherry again in Earnest and um this is the center of the bed doing the nursery work and then we have uh celery a purple celery variety we save seed from on the edges now we grew some cultivar pemons in this bed last year it’s important to kind of remember what’s happening in these beds year by year cuz these are all root fragments of these P Simmons so when we dig the N King Cherry in the fall we can Harvest some extra bonus per Simmons as well same thing with the thornless Blackberry we had them in here once upon a time I kind of don’t really want them in here anymore they’re too big too fast but that’s where we’ll get our Nursery stock for shipping from these quote unquote weeds that we just are thrilled to bits are here we’ll just manage them as we can some beds doing things that are a little bit normal looking somewhat there’s carrots there’s beets there’s carrots there’s beets hey that’s kind of straight forward and annual is but then there’s also malokia which is a favorite green of Sasha or Jew malow it’s like a stinging nettle flavored super nutrient Green from Egypt I believe that’s in there growing and doing its thing and then the usual again some kale so it’s a really it’s pleasurable to have such wild mixes of things like here’s Korean celery beautiful perennial early early uh Rich Spring vegetable with honey berry and then kind of normal kale and why not let’s just mix all of these beautiful characters together they really do get along a little bit more uh physical complexity set up this year to help do a little bit more work with trellising and support of plants kind of straightforward some metal tsts every you know one at the end and one in the middle of the bed and then some wooden bits um with 17 gauge wire flipped back and forth and this just lets us for example here are bush beans but uh with them leaning on the wire they can grow really nicely put on a heavy crop without having any problems and then we can also trellis pretty straightforward idea our Tomatoes can be woven through there we can twist high or um make little cotton string knots on them and then train them up this whole thing we had an intense Windstorm not too long ago and this corn was growing so beautifully in such Rich loose soil that it blew over so we straighten them back up we H them to help give them support and then with these posts and the wire it makes a back stop so that if the winds pick up again we can either put a loop around them or just let them grow they seem to be uh good now they’re on their own growing really nicely these are an open pollinated sweet corn that we can enjoy and then there’s some climbing beans um some pole beans that actually make both a green bean that’s quite nice as well as a dried bean and that can climb up through this um lattice work we’ll add a little bit of strength to make it easier for them and this whole area is a really successful lucky successful I’m not quite sure the way to say it this spring this was entirely weeds and the way we converted it into this very productive garden bed with hot peppers and different waves of lettuces there’s green beans there’s sunflower um there’s celery there’s more hot peppers there’s cucumbers there’s the corn all of this was from clearing out all of the bedding from the chicken Coupe and dumping it right on top of the weeds really really thick soaking that down with rainwater and then making these dumped piles basically like wheelbarrow load piles of compost from the chicken yard and then pushing seed directly in in the form of the bush beans which now have closed canopy really nicely and just keep gushing beautiful sweet beans there’s provider bush bean and gold rush in there we transplanted in the hot peppers we transplanted in celery which is now filling out and likewise with with the corn and what a neat successful Simple Thing uh suppress the weeds not by tilling or spraying but just dump a ton of organic matter on top of them early in the season veins concentrated veins of compost and then really thick sewing of cover crop which happens to actually be food we would want the amaranth volunteered the sunflower volunteered and again we’ll just leave them unless they prove that they’re in the way but right now they’re just beautiful and nice so they are welcome to stay been really enjoying in the later day and the early morning on the hottest days you get really nice dappled shade from the overstory that’s starting to form in here in the morning it’s conferred To Us by this Hawthorne which was in the landscape when we started gardening here I kept going back and forth on cutting it cuz it had some disease issues but it seems to have grown through the disease issues because of all the compost deposited around it and on the hottest days you know 8:00 9 in the morning it’s still shaded enough in here to be comfortable so thanks Hawthorne and late day we’re finding our neighbors trees way off in the distance provide some shade and the Willows are starting to thicken up enough that we can find some shady Nooks to work if we want to it’s nice to create microclimates and protection and resilience in the form of saying yes to lots and lots of trees even in an annual Garden context speaking of we’ve got some volunteers here in the form of tulet popper now these are trees that become absolutely giant giant trees uh and what I’ve been doing is poing them so here’s one this both of these showed up on their own just kind of in a wild way and they were allowed to grow for a while and what I’ve been learning is if you do a nice poing cut a good heading cut when they’re dormant um 5 six feet or so off the ground the regrowth is often really uh useful for robins and other birds to make their nests they didn’t do it in these two exactly but a lot of the times when I polar these trees at this height the regrowth happens and then there’ll just be birds nests on top of those so it’s a really nice bonus and then it gives the option of all this mulch in the fall that can drop and a trellis for us to grow some crops up so I haven’t made the time but just recently I dumped hay on the weeds that were around this toolet popular dumped a wind R of compost will sew that out to I don’t know maybe some okra and some more beans some nice warm weather crops and then on the South Side put some cucumbers and train them with string up in into the Tulip popler and let them uh not compete or fight but let the the Cucumber use the body of the tulet popler to grow and then the fall all these leaves will drop down and feed the soil and then we can cut as we need as a chop and drop Mulch and that works pretty nicely the Eastern side of the garden moves a bit more towards the perennial picture there’s some American Persimmons this was a nursery bed that was in here A bunch of years ago there’s about five or six trees we’ll thin them down to you know one male and a few females when they are of age to show what’s going on there and they’re growing in and through this gy which we’ve just started to finalize the Harvest there’s a bit left in here there are hundreds and hundreds of fruits on just this one plant talked about this plant a little ways back really phenomenal nitrogen fixer um we’ll have to make some decisions about how it’s interacting with the Pimon Pimon is a pretty Broad and shade offering plant and the Gom would like a a little bit of light so what I’ve been doing is as time uh allows I come through and just look on the pmen for branches that have absolutely no flowers or fruit so I think that they’re males I’m not 100% sure but I think they are it’s like on this side I chopped back some of the branches to lay in the walkway so it’s weed suppression and soil building in the walkway and a little bit of a Light release to the G I definitely am not going to get rid of the pons to promote the G I think they can get along to together but you can see they are pretty intimately connected G and pon pon and Pon and Pon um so there’s four there’s five permen in there we’ll we’ll thin them down to one or two females and probably one male or no males if that’s needed we’ve got this obscene amount of growth this is all brand new growth this season from our friend Scotia amazing amazing productive Elderberry um if I can find the video I’ll link to it here where I talked about different strategies of cutting Elder I thought I was going to make the time to actually cut this flush to ground I didn’t but there’s just an immense amount of green growth in there but luckily it was enough of a reduction believe it or not this is a reduction in biomass of this elder enough to allow some light you can see this poor Apple just was not up for the competition but now there’s a little bit more there’s a couple of apples they’re forming and so I just periodically keep coming through with uh pruners and snip the Elder that’s encroaching on the apple and feed it to the apple and I’ve been doing the same thing there was an alder that showed up on the edge of this little Pond this is a a sweet little calamus and arrow Arrow root uh Pond that we have here this is not Cattails it’s entirely calamus it took a lot of cultivation to get there but this lovely lovely medicine Pond and the Alder was growing quite a bit through here and over the last few days I came through after rains cut the green canopy and fed it to the root zone of the Apple fed it to the root of that grape over there of some apricots and some peaches it looks like a sloppy mess in some ways and that’s fine if that’s the aesthetic uh or if that’s the concern that folks have I could understand that but it’s really functional so all those branches and coarse material all that green manure will protect the soil from the absolute most wild rains but also if we have prolonged drought there’s an immense amount of water that’s stored in there now and that suppressed some of the golden rod and grasses that were in here the weeds and really is promoting the apricot the English walnuts these were old Nursery beds that I’m just going to leave these plants to continue to grow and we’ll thin them out later uh as chop and drop mulch is needed a peach grown from seed with a really nice crop on it I believe this is Siberian Peach and there’s stinging nettles all throughout underneath which I did not explicitly plant but we allowed to be here for a while and I think we’re going to keep going with grass clippings and hay and all branches and chop and drop keep pinning the Nettles down and see if we can’t reduce them a little because as I’m recording this shot my ankle is fired up from just bumping into a little bit of it we love that plant they’re phenomenal and maybe they’re not the best in this particular context we’re going to think about dinner here pretty soon so I’m going to wrap this video up um boy I just really bopped around random random highlights throughout this Garden are there aspects of this Garden you’d want to see more details on are there things about it that make uh no sense to you or you’d like more clarification feel free to ask questions in the comments and yeah are there aspects that people would like a deeper dive on I think there’s a lot happening in this space it has evolved into what feels like a pretty functional and productive space we really enjoy being in this Garden um it’s incredibly low cost or next to no cost to maintain and generates both Nursery stock for our financial needs as well as food and medicine and there are so many birds that come in here and hang out in the Elderberry or come pick goomies everybody and their Uncle all the different creatures are in here harvesting as well and it seems to work it really it feels like the ideas of permaculture which are exemplified I think or Alive in this Garden really do uh confer the greatest good for the greatest being so there’s a lot less stress in here there’s a lot of shared Harvest because there’s just so much overabundance in this space and that’s it for now that’s our pretty small little wonderful backyard garden in midswing looking at probably just about 10 or 15% of what’s happening in here um and let me know what you’d like to see more of we’re going to try to do some uh more update videos around um how the sawdust went down what that whole project looked like as well as some other things here there I look forward to sharing more with folks as time allows hope everyone is having a lovely midsummer