Garden With Me: Starting Seeds, Pruning, Composting

I've got a lot of chores to do today at the new homestead in the garden. What I thought I would do is bring you all along with me. So this is a new style of video. I'm calling it Garden With Me. Happy Sunday, everyone. The goal is not for you to sit down and intently pay attention to everything I'm doing and saying. Actually, I'd much prefer if you went out into the garden yourself as you're listening or watching this video and did some chores of your own and sort of just soak up some of these little tips and tricks that I'll share with you. Because really there are some things that I would love to add into videos that just don't really make sense to make a video about. Just little tidbits, tips and tricks here and there. So that's what we're doing today. We're going to do a couple of different chores. First of all, you can see I have some seeds around me. We're planting some more fall seeds and we'll talk about the ones that I have here. I have to do some pruning and cleanup and then maybe a little bonus thing at the end. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button for a relaxing Garden With Me episode and let's get into it. The first thing that I've got going are some fall seeds that I planted a while back. Now, the first thing I'll say is you can completely start peas just like I'm starting them right now. These are absolutely beautiful, nice and compact. You can tell they're not stretching out because the distance between each node where there's new leafy growth is pretty tight. That means they're getting enough light. A lot of the times when people start seeds indoors, it stretches out and that distance between the nodes gets longer, which is a good indicator that the problem you're having is too little light. Transplanting peas, as long as you keep your moisture on lockdown, it's completely fine. Although I do like to add a little bit of inoculant. So there's rhizobia, which are the bacteria that partner up with the legume family to create that nitrogen fixation. So I do like to do a little pre-inoculation with that just to make sure that those are actually present in the soil. Over here, I just have your classic fall stuff. So you've got cabbages, cauliflower. I threw some chard in there. Actually all of this is cabbages. Now these are looking a little bit stretchy. So what I'm going to do is I'm putting them outside a little earlier than I normally would. Just they're stretching up a little bit too much. I want some wind pressure on them so they thicken up and I want a little bit more light because even just mild sunlight is better than most of what I can do indoors with an LED grow light. So we'll fertilize these. But the first thing I want to do is start another batch. Now I just went over to my friend Brigette's house, who those of you who have been longtime watchers, readers, listeners know that she owns San Diego Seed Company. So I have all of her beautifully designed seed packets right here. Very SoCal vibe. You can see downtown San Diego on the label. Looks really awesome. And I'll run through just some of the things she's given me to test out for fall. Cause what's nice about having a space as large as I have now is I can do what's called a vegetable trial. And so, you know, when seed companies come out with new varieties, they'll send you them if you're a big grower and they'll say, Hey, grow them out and see what you think. And if you like them, then work that into your catalog. I'm certainly not a seed seller myself, but I do like to trial these varieties. And so we'll talk about some of them. You know, as you would imagine, this one's called All Season Cabbage. This one's really cool because here in a warm climate, zone 10b, one of the problems you run into is you can't really get into that cold climate to grow some cold climate stuff. And so what Brigette has done is either cultivated or selected for varieties that will do well, even in a warm winter. Now a lot of you listening are probably in the opposite situation, but there are cultivars that work well in frosty conditions as well. So I have some stuff like that. You know, some really unique stuff, like a golden beet. A lot of people think that beets are only that purplish color and they're certainly not. But what I'm planting in this tray today is going to be an array of sunflowers. So let me get these out here. Sunflower, sunflower, sunflower. All right. Yeah. So what's nice about the ones that I'm testing, I'll run through the varieties for you. First of all, you have skyscraper sunflower. As the name would imply, flower heads can be 14 inches across and it's a multi-stalked sunflower. So if I'm creating a sunflower garden, so to speak, this one would be on the north side of the garden because it's the tallest. So I want it to shade out the least amount of things. So we've got the skyscraper. Next up, this is probably one of my favorites. It's a very beautiful one. It's called a dwarf when it's the, I believe the head structure is called like a bear or something like that. The golden bear is one I've seen before, but it's very unique. You can see the head is covered in flower as well. It's not so isolated out where you have that nice brown head on the interior. This one, let's see, only grows about two to three inches tall. So I'm going to place this one over here. So I'm going from tall to small and I'm going to plant my container like that, just so it's easy for me to remember. Okay. This one here, this is a mix. And so this is a little bit of a tricky one. So I think I'll just leave this one in the middle. It could be a bunch of different varieties. This one, you have velvet queen. Now a lot of people think sunflowers are just yellow. Well, clearly with velvet queen, you have, you have this sort of red velvet color, but on the interior, right on that fringe on the interior, it does have a little bit of yellow, which is nice. Now this one will grow year round. So a lot of you are probably wondering why am I planting sunflowers right now? All the ones I'm planting, I can grow in my climate at the very least. Next, I have lemon sunflowers. So kind of your basic. All right. Now let's plant these out. I don't have seed labels right now, so I've got my little journal here. What I'm going to do is I've got what, six columns and four rows. I'm just going to mimic that on here, just so I remember. Very simple. Labeling, hands down, one of the most important things you can do in the garden. So I'm going to put the mammoth or the skyscraper right here. With sunflowers, you certainly can soak your sunflower seeds, but it's really not required. And a lot of people say, oh, it's, you know, blasphemous. You have to soak them. It does up the germination rate, but again, it is not required. And I'm going for ease of germination, especially when I start planting out a lot of different seeds. You know, there's a lot of space here. So I don't want to be soaking, you know, five seeds at a time and this and that. So I'm going two in per hole. Very classic. Let me grab a, I have something back here. You know what? Let me grab this. I'll grab this one. I don't have a little dibber out here, so I'm just going to grab a succulent leaf and propagate the succulent and use it as my dibber. So here we go. Ingenuity at the homestead. Make little depressions. This soil mix here is called Espoma Organics Seed Starting Mix. It's just, you really want a fine grained mixture when you're starting seeds because you don't want these sensitive roots and leaves to have to struggle too much going through like a rock or a twig or some larger particle. So in goes our skyscraper. What do I have? Five different varieties. So I'll double plant some and I think I'll double plant the dwarf sunflower because honestly, I'm clearly the most excited about the dwarf. All right. When you're thinking about your fall seed starting, a lot of people ask me this question. The question that they ask is, how do I know what I can grow? Well, it really is all based on that first frost. And that's a confusing term for new gardeners because first makes you think it's when you can start doing something. But in fact, when it comes to a frost, it's the time when you can't anymore, right? It's the first frost of your winter season, your fall winter. Look how small the seeds are. Anyways, it is the first frost. So that is the first moment at which it's too cold. There will be many more moments after that, right? So the first frost, let's say today is September 1st. It's not, but let's just say that it is. And your first frost is October 15. So you have 45 days. And let's say that in general, you can push your zone a little bit and grow under our frost cover for another two weeks or so. So another 15 days. So now that that means you've got about 60 days before anything you plant really won't survive anymore. What that means is you can grow stuff, start stuff from seed now that matures in 60 days or less. That's the way to think about it. And so if you're looking at maybe a, you know, a longer version variety of a carrot, it's not going to really do it because that's a 75, 80 day crop. You're not going to make it to the point at which it will survive. Let me just label this really quickly. It's dwarf. So that is the real key. You have to think backwards in time, which is confusing and, you know, frustrating, I think for a lot of new gardeners. That's the one part of gardening, I find that most people get confused by is thinking with that extra dimension of time when you're thinking about your plantings. So even in spring, you know, your last frost, that would be the last time that it's too cold for the ground to be workable. Right? You have to kind of plan for starting seeds so that they're ready by that last frost. So as soon as the ground's workable, you can transplant into it and you can actually work that soil. So you get a headstart on your season. Cause the other alternative, what's your, what's your option, right? Let me label this one, Velvet Queen. Your other alternative in spring is to just wait until you can work the ground and then direct sow into the garden. Let's say you're growing a tomato and you have a short growing season though. If you do that, then let's say it's March, right? March. Nah, let's just go April 1st. It's April 1st, April Fool's Day. And you're about to become a fool because you have decided to direct sow your tomato April 1st, the first moment that it is workable in the ground. Well, a smarter gardener has already been conditioning their tomatoes indoors from seedling, maybe about four to six weeks, maybe even eight weeks, aka two months ahead of time. So they have a one to two month old tomato that they're putting in the ground as soon as it's workable. And you're putting in a zero day old tomato. So you can see you've lost quite a bit of time compared to this other gardener. And that's why you really do have to think about your timings. Now I'm coming out pretty soon with what I'm calling the Epic Plant Calculator or the Epic Planting Spreadsheet, Plant Calendar. I'll come up with a better name clearly. And that's designed to no matter what zone you're in, no matter what you want to grow up to a reasonable degree, I can't put every plant on earth in there, but most of your common garden vegetables and fruits, you'll be able to put it in, put your date in of your last frost, and it will tell you exactly when and how to plant everything. And so you can calculate out your garden. And it'll be kind of a living spreadsheet. So once you buy access to it, you'll have access to it for life and you'll get all of the updates as well. So that's something I'm working on for the 2021 season for you guys. But now our sunflowers are in. And so the next step is to cover this up with just a bit more soil. So I'm going to grab that in a second and then we'll water this in and we'll bring all these indoors to go under lights for just a little bit longer. Sunflowers being a taller, larger seed, just a bigger seed, you can bury them a little deeper than your average seed, like maybe a quarter to a half inch or so, and they'll be fine. So I'm not suffocating them underneath a mountain of soil here. Then because all seed starting mixes are a little bit light, right? There's not too much in the way of heavy products in there. They can sometimes be a little hard to rehydrate. So what I like to do is I'll hit it with my mister real quick. Just come in like that and we'll let that hydrate. And while I'm doing that, I actually want to feed these trays. Cause it's been about, I would say 10-ish days, maybe a little bit less. So I've got Espoma Organics Grow. This is their liquid fertilizer. You want to use a liquid when it comes to your seedlings for two reasons. Reason number one, it's bioavailable. It's not an organic granular one that's going to work its way in slowly. You need it fast. And then number two, it's because this medium is inert. There's no inherent nutrition in this. And so if I let these in here for too long without fertilizing, they're in a really bad spot. And what's really cool about this particular fertilizer is it's a self-dosing cap. So the cap here, if I dump just like that, it runs out. It won't just keep pouring. And that's roughly one dose of what I need. So that's perfect. I don't need to go too much more than that. I just need to very gently fill this up. So let's do that. And then we'll get into watering these in with some actual fertilizer. Okay. Now the thing I'll do just before I do that, now you see these trays here and the link for those is in the description because I know I'll get questions on it. It's a self-wicking tray. Many of you have seen me use these before. So let me just lift it up for you really quickly. What you can see is, well, this is kind of stuck to it because the roots are grown out of the bottom. Let's pull that out. Yeah. Take a look at those roots. That's how you know you got a good germ. So this tray has a bit of a lip here. And when I fill this up with water, which I'm about to do, just like this, we'll fill it up to, I don't know, about an inch or so of the tray. That's fine. Now it's going to wick upwards, right? And so I have a self-watering component to this tray, but I'm also going to hit them with a little bit of this fertilizer at the top. I don't really want to put the fertilizer in at the bottom. I don't want the whole bottom to be covered. With fertilizer, you can get like algae growth and stuff that way. So we're just getting it with a little bit. Again, these are going to get transplanted in relatively soon, but while they are not, we want to make sure we feed them. Couple little keys that people miss when it comes to their seed starting is, you know, not using the right growing medium. They are not giving the plant enough light. Let's fill these up really quickly. They leave it in the seed starting tray for too long. It's another big mistake. Then it's not able to actually get going because it doesn't have any nutrition in it or they simply don't water correctly. So the self-watering mass I find mitigates that pretty well. And then the rest of it is kind of on you. I mean, as a gardener, it's like having a child, right? You don't neglect the first one to three years of its life. That's probably the most important years to parent your child is from like one to five maybe. I don't know. I'm not a dad, but I'm a plant daddy. Let's put this on. So healthy seedlings equals a much healthier overall plant as the days, weeks and months roll through. Let's put this on. Again, just going relatively light here, not drenching it. Just a little liquid fertilizer for our plants to start kickstarting. All right. So that's done. We have one final step on these sunflowers before we bring everything inside. And I'll show you the seed starting setup because I get a lot of questions about that as well. Now we'll hit this with a little shower because it'll soak in a lot more. You really want to make sure that you completely hydrate it so you watch and see it. You can see the water just sinking through the medium. If you look very closely now it has a different tone to it because less water is on the surface. Very satisfying moment when it comes to gardening. That's one of my favorite moments actually is when you, you dump the water on top, see it glisten, and then you just see it sink through the growing medium. So now we're ready to bring indoors. Those of you who are longtime followers recognize this setup right here, the bamboo three tier LED system. So the LEDs came with the kit, which is in the description. Now I've got my brassicas. I got my fall peas still here. Those are going to go out pretty soon. The sunflowers obviously need to germinate. I would have a seedling heat mat underneath here, but to be honest I have no AC in my house yet and it's hotter than it needs to be. I'm sweating as we speak. So I don't need one. It's quite hot already. I will still put a humidity dome on top of the sunflowers because those are a thick hulled seed that water really has to get through before they start to germinate. So we'll leave that on. These ones don't need it anymore. Obviously they're already up and we need to clear out some room in the actual garden now for these eventually to go in. Next up on our list is taming the grow bag garden. I love this little garden. It's the first one I had at the new place. And it still is one of the more productive ones because I'm waiting on all of my own birdies raised garden beds, the ones that I sell here in the United States. So they've been on back order. I'm waiting even to order them for myself, but there should be some in stock pretty soon if you guys are interested in that. So what I have to do with this grow bag garden is clear things out. I mean, this bok choy, as you can see, it's starting to bolt. You can save bok choy a little bit by cutting these flower stalks off and then harvesting maybe next morning when it's nice and crisp. But the flavor has already changed. So I'm not going to stress myself out too much trying to save it. It's just, I'd rather clear this out. So I'm just going to cut this down at the bottom and let it be. I will save some of these leaves for a salad, but for now we can just toss these to the side. You know, sometimes you gamble on if something is going to make it through the heat. And we just had absolutely crazy heat here in San Diego and quite frankly, just all over California. So the bok didn't, bok didn't really like it. The bok choy is going to be much better when it comes to fall garden. So we're fine there. Not too stressed. You never win a hundred percent in the garden. We've got some crispy mint here. Mint, very hearty. We can cut this back as severely as we need to. We'll just bring this back a bit. So again, I like this grow bag garden because it's modular, but I also struggle with it because I'm always swapping things out, which that's just a weakness of mine. I like to keep mixing things up in the garden. So sometimes it's a little patchy. You can see there's a spot there. There's a spot here. Based on clearing out some of these plants, like that's unplanted right there. So I got to get things going pretty quickly here. And also I will say just if you roll through your garden once, even just once a week and do this clean up prune type of task, if you sum up the way it makes every little plant look a little bit better, then your whole garden starts to pop again. It starts to look really good. So there you go. We've cleared off our mint. As I said, mint's an insane plant. It'll grow back with a vengeance. So that's out of there. This is citronella. I'm experimenting with citronella as a mosquito prevention cause I've had some serious problems with it. As you can see, it grows very readily here. Doesn't really seem to have any issues with water. Grows fine in this old Whole Foods bag that I'm putting it in. So I may eventually line the side of my back patio with citronella just to see if that staves off a little bit of that mosquito pressure. We'll see. I'm not quite sure, but it's a nice plant to have. And quite frankly, it smells really nice in my humble opinion. This mint plant, as I said, is getting a little crazy. When a mint plant, so I just watered this grow bag, right? And when a mint plant gets this wild, the roots start to take up a ton of space in the container and it doesn't hold as much water as it used to hold. And so when it comes to a plant like this, sometimes the best thing to do is clip and propagate and restart the whole plant. This one's almost there, I would say. It's not quite there yet. And I just need to clear out some of this nonsense in here as I just did with the other mint plant. But it's such a ready propagator that that really is one of my best tips when dealing with mint. You can grow it forever, provided you grow it in containers and you keep sort of restarting it once it gets a little unruly and kind of junky looking. That's what I would say. Well that's going to stay for now. This lettuce is bolted. It's time is up. I got a decent harvest off of it. But again, it's time for that to go. And this cuke did not quite make it. So again, this was a late planting that was a gamble planting. And you can see it's got hit up by some powdery mildew. Not some, a lot. So we'll cut that off. We'll let that go. And I would say everything else in here, let's move back there and deal with some of the larger trellises. Hanging out back here, it's nice because it's a little bit cooler. But I got some Mad Hatter peppers, which are one of the more productive peppers I've personally ever grown. I like personally to harvest them a little green. A lot of people let them go red. I think you'll find if you struggle to grow peppers, these Mad Hatters will serve you very, very well. I wish I had my Epic Harvest apron out here, but for now, we'll toss them on the ground and we will pick them up later. With peppers, you do want to harvest as they ripen up or as you're ready to harvest them. Like with jalapenos, for example, shishito peppers, good example. You just want to do that because then that's going to force the plant or at least encourage it to produce a little bit more for you instead of finishing itself off. Because you got to remember, these plants, these plants want to propagate, right? That's why they're producing these fruit and these seeds. So if they've successfully done it and you haven't removed these off, they're going to not produce as much. Now, is that a general rule across all plants? Definitely not. But it does seem to work in the world of let's say peas, peppers, you know, beans, things like that. It works really, really well. So that's that. I'm going to now take a little bit of time to bush out this basil plant here. This is an amazel basil, great variety, very productive, doesn't flower too much. And even when it does flower, the flowers continue, or the vegetative growth continues after the flower, which is really nice. There's a couple of black cobra peppers here that are starting to get red. Kind of want to leave those on. But the real thing we got to deal with here are these three massive trellises. So when I first bought this place, it was back in June and you know, I was splitting between the old Epic Garden and the new one. And I had to restart some plants, right? I had to see if I could get what we see here is squash, watermelon, and tomato. And I planted some just as soon as I possibly could, but I planted them quite frankly at the tail end of the summer. So I said, it's a prayer if it actually works. Most of these did not work out. They got hit with some gnarly diseases and it just was too late in the season to get them to go. So I'm going to remove these huge trellises and we're going to have to plant something new in here. So out these come. These are the gardener's tall tomato trellises. Really nice. They're reinforced. We're gonna have to cut this watermelon free. I think a lot of people are probably saying, why are you doing that? Well, if a plant's just, if you know it in your gardener's heart that a plant's not going to make it, don't waste your time with it. Get it out of the garden as soon as possible. Put something else in that's actually going to work out for you and your family and you know, your goals and all that. So we're going to let this guy go. Just cut it free. So make some good compost. All right, we should be good. There we go. And then our squash down here. This one got really smacked with some powdery mildew, like really bad. All right. Ooh, the root ball came out there. Well, we'll take it out after we remove the trellis. So again, today's chores are mostly all set up for the next season. It's not a lot of glamorous stuff. It's just cleaning the garden, harvesting what's left to be harvested and all that. Generally speaking, I like to leave the roots in the ground, even on something like this watermelon here. So again, all my scraps we'll put over there for now. This guy goes, that'll all go in the compost. So already here at the homestead, the compost bin, it's pretty full. So I need to build many, many more. And this placement turned out not to be ideal. I thought, you know, it's equidistant from the front and back. No matter what type of gardening I'm doing, I can always come for a scoop of compost right from here. But I think this chain link fence, if it stays is probably going to be passion fruit, blackberries, raspberries, some sort of vining plant to cover it up, but provides a structure. So I'd much rather have that here. And I'm going to need at least three more of these, maybe five bins total, larger, maybe four foot by four foot. And that makes sense to go on that back retaining wall over there. So that's what I'm going to do. But for the time being, since that's a larger project, we're going to add our materials in here. We might even give it a little turn, but probably not right now. I just need to get stuff in here. With composting, you really have a million options. I mean, you can passively compost it if you want to, which is more what this is morphed into. It was a hot compost at the start, and now it's gone a little bit more passive. These are some overripe Armenian cukes that I don't need. Had a huge amount of harvest off of these. And then these ones are just a little bit over, so they're not going to taste very good. So into the compost they go. Surface area is important when it comes to composting. So if I threw in the huge Armenian, it wouldn't really break down that quickly. But even just breaking it down like this with my hands, that'll be completely fine. You can see these are already starting to rot out, which is what we want. What we want in this particular case. So this is going to go passive. That's what I'm trying to say here. But I still will give it a little bit of moisture. I got to wrestle around. I know my thermometer's in here somewhere. Where are you at? I think I buried it. We'll find it. Sometimes when you've got this wheelbarrow full of debris, I just like totally smashed my hand on, I think, a rotten tomato. But that's all good. Not too much left. I'll just dump the rest in. Manually, just like that. Got my little water wand. This is the Dram Rain Wand One Touch. Ooh, it's hot. 30 inches. So it's a nice compact water wand. Dram makes some really solid water products just in general. They feel very solid, feel very sturdy, and they don't break on you. They don't leak due to pressure. So I've been a huge fan of them for a while. Dram makes some really solid watering products, which I've recommended for a long time on my blog, which is a thing. Actually, the way Epic Gardening first started was writing on my blog. So if you're more of a reader, you can always check that out. I'm just watering this a little bit because I haven't turned it in a while, if I'm honest with you. So we'll get a little bit of extra moisture in there and we're good to go. So guys, I hope you enjoyed this Garden With Me series. We'll see. Just an experiment. I love testing things out here on the channel. I figured there's so much stuff going on in the world right now, I'd bring you a bit of a peaceful respite where you could just turn this on, get out in the garden, do some of your own chores. And speaking of, I've got a couple more to do myself. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.