FULL Spring Garden Tour & Harvest! 🥕

It's misting a little bit here in the Epic Homestead as we move into spring. We're about a week away from the official start of spring. So in this video we're going to go over the late winter garden. I'll take you on a little tour, we'll do some harvests and I'll give you some amazing gardening tips along the way. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb, rain or shine. Honestly, rain here in San Diego, it's like very rare, very much a happy surprise. So I'm very comfortable to be out here in the rain, hanging out with you guys. Again, you can see some stuff has started to grow in here. It feels good. We had a soil problem early on in the winter that I had to fix. It was a calcium deficiency, which caused a phosphorus deficiency and all this nonsense. Needless to say, it's been fixed. The plants have been responding a lot better. So we troubleshot it. Now let's start out our tour, but you know what to do. Cultivate that Like button and your botanical blessing of the day will be thick stalks and fat beets. Okay? If you want that, Like the video and let's get into it. So if you remember the tour that we did a month ago where I was telling you everything I'm planting in the whole garden, you'll know this is the lettuce bed. This is bed number one here in the front yard garden. So I've got my Great Lakes lettuce here. That was my workhorse lettuce, the producer, the one that's not super flashy, but it just works. And so that's the one that I succession sowed in first. That's why it's the most mature. I've got some Lola Rosso up in front here and we sprinkled around a couple of different varieties, but you're going to probably say, why does this look so bare if it's been a month? Well, it's because I don't want all my lettuce to become ready to harvest at the same time. And so I planted week, week, week, week, and we're going to sow this one here. So I'm going to have this sort of rotating circle of lettuce harvests to do, just because I don't want all my lettuce at the same time. I want to make sure that I have a consistent supply over the weeks and months as we move into spring and summer. This bed here is the alternative greens bed or just anything that's not lettuce. And this one's doing fantastic. So we have another crop of kale coming in, some collards interplanted between, some spinach up front. That's looking absolutely amazing. The spinach is really something just likes colder temperatures. So we've actually had that here in my zone here, zone 10b. So the spinach is doing fantastic. And then in the back, which is a little bit lower, again, that succession sowing idea. These are pretty mature. I can actually start cutting on some of these collards and kales here, even some of that spinach. But I don't want to have everything coming up at once again. So I've got another round of some random greens back here and okame spinach. Some of the stuff that I talked about in that video, we did about a month ago. Underneath this weird device is maybe my most prized plant for the season right now. And that would be a giant cabbage. So this is just sort of a chicken wire cloche from Gardener Supply Company. And the reason I have it over here is because we all know cabbage, it's a brassica, which means that more or less brassicas are kind of the, the wimps of the garden, so to speak. It seems like every disease and pest wants to eat them. And this is my giant cabbage. This is the one I got from my friend Kevin Forty over at Giant Veg in the UK. He holds or held multiple world records for the largest vegetables, cabbages, kohlrabis, things like that. And so let's take this off for at least a little bit. We have a giant cabbage seed. Already, you can see these leaves are a lot bigger than your average cabbage start. And I'm babying the heck out of this thing. I've been top dressing with some fertilizer. I've of course been protecting it. I've been inspecting it daily. I expect this to actually fill this entire round tall birdies bed completely up, which is why there's only one thing planted here. So what you'll see, hopefully is a full successful gigantic cabbage video coming out closer towards the end of the season. But I'm very excited about this right now. I've got a couple of backups in the backyard garden, but this is the prize winner. This is the one I think will do the best. So let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that nothing bad happens to this. So in the second bed up here in the front of the garden, we have the root crop bed. I've got my rat's tail radish that's been started. It's actually thriving quite well. It's developing the radish bulbs already and they're, I would say about an inch in diameter. But remember with rat's tail radish, you're not necessarily trying to grow it for the bulb. Although you can, you don't have to though. It's supposed to create these little seed pods that are actually quite delicious, more mild radish flavor. That's blowing up. Now over here, I've got some golden beets that are sown in. What I noticed with root crops is, especially with beets, I mean beets are a compound seed. So you'll have more than one come up if you just plant one seed. Cause actually there's more than one seed in that seed pod thing. Just thin them out as quickly as you can if you really want to maximize bulb size. Cause what I noticed over here with these radish, just sparkler radish, Rudolph red radish, all the ones that we talked about, what I noticed is as soon as I thinned out and got a nice little rain on, they doubled or even tripled in size over the course of three or four days. And that's just going to help that bulbing process up. So if you've had problems in your garden in the past with getting your radish to properly bulb and you're not thinning out and they're too close together, I would say that's something to look at. Now up here in the foreground, I've sown three rows of carrots. I find this is my most successful way of starting carrots. You don't really want to start them indoors. You want to direct sow them in the actual bed or the garden that you're going to grow them in. And I'm a little liberal with my carrot seed. It's relatively inexpensive seed. So I'd much rather just sow it in a small depressed trench. So what I did is I just dragged my finger down. I sprinkled the packet down the other side, covered it up, added some straw mulch on top. And now you can see it's actually starting to come up, but it's way too close together. So we'll need to do a thin once these are a little bit more mature. Over here in the Greenstalk Gardens, as I promised, it's mostly pollinators or pollinator type plants in here. I do pepper in a couple of bare root strawberries, just had some extras. I threw some collards in here and some chamomile down below. But everything else is something like nigella. We've got some borage. We've got all sorts of different things in here. The goal is just to have this be exploding with color, exploding with flowers. And I want to see birds here. I want to see bees here. I want to see bumblebees, maybe hummingbirds, all sorts of stuff like that. Now a modification that I did to this Greenstalk, which is the seven tier leaf model, as well as the other one over there, which is the classic five tier model, is because this is on just normal ground with mulch and chips, what we did is I put some pavers down so there's a stable flat base. And every other day or so I just come out and I just do a 180 degree rotation, just like this, to make sure that everything is getting exposed to sun at a somewhat equal ratio. Cause the sun's going to be mostly on this side of the Greenstalk. But I mean, everything's coming in fantastically. You can see we're getting nice greening here on the strawberries. I'll show you the chamomile as well. And over in the other one, we've got a bunch of flowers going. Here in the grow bag garden, it is kind of business as usual. Everything that was in these is still in these. It's just a little bit more mature. You know, the lemongrass is bunching up. This lettuce is looking incredible. The nasturtium as you've seen in the last video is doing fantastic. Now the thing that I've really enjoyed about the grow bags is just the sheer variety of what I can grow. I mean, I've got lemongrass, I've got herbs. I have a pollinator garden in the foreground there. You can see some flowering mustards just looking absolutely beautiful. And it's just so modular. Like let's say I want to have a dinner party and harvest all of this lettuce. Well, I can just refresh this bag really quickly and then pop something else in and voila, the grow bag garden continues. So you can think of succession sowing almost on a container basis and just pop things in and out, mix and match. And the versatility is just unmatched. And speaking of grow bags, guys, the second book Grow Bag Gardening is out as of today. I'm really proud of this one. All the photography is either my own or members of the Epic Gardening Community's grow bag gardens that they sent in. And I wanted to actually celebrate and include in the book. So it's just a really cool thing to be able to connect with all of you over gardening and include some of your stuff in the book. It's a fantastic guide, I have to say. And it teaches you more about how to become a gardener in grow bags and containers rather than just like five of my best tips for grow bags. That's what I want to do. How do you actually think like a gardener, become a gardener, so you can solve most of your own problems in the garden? So if you want to grab one, it's on Amazon and you can also get signed copies, which are much more helpful as an author to buy directly from the author. So on my store, you can get the signed copy. Link will be in the description, but it's time to harvest some fatty beets. So let me grab something really quick and I'll meet you right over there. All right, my friends, we are here at the beet and kale bed. I'm rocking the Epic Harvest apron with the pupus because we are harvesting, I gotta be honest, they're quite thick golden beets. They are chunky. So let's get the first one out of the ground right now. This is a plant that I really didn't like for quite some time. I found that the golden beets I like a little bit more. We're going to go with this guy first. We'll do a closeup pull too, because honestly, pulling root crops, one of the most satisfying things in the garden. Let's do it. Ooh, look at this little guy. Now that, that's what I'm talking about. Look at that golden color on the bottom here. Let me grab this hose real quick. We'll do a little quick rinse. Let's get a rinse going. Look at that coloration. That is something else, isn't it? Okay. Why do I have this weird apron on? Because we went through about four design iterations on this, because I wanted the kangaroo pupus to just snug it away. All right. Okay. Let's do one more. I'm going to do a closeup on the next one after this. Cause this one right here is the fattest one of all. Ooh. Ooh, a little stubby guy. Man, this color is just absolutely insane. And with beets, guys, you do not have to throw away the beet tops. Actually quite nice in a stir fry. Just toss it in the pan. It's really, really tasty. So I find them to be one of my favorite vegetables. And in the past, they actually were one of my least favorite vegetables. So things change in the garden. Okay, here we go with Big Chonker. The thickest beet in town. See a little pest damage here. Not a huge deal, but man, look at that. Ready? Here we go. Really not much of a pull at all, is there? Look at this big boy. A little brushing off, a little rinse. Let's give it a little rinse here. Ooh, that is just a beautiful, beautiful guy. Well, that was a fun harvest. I'm going to be roasting those up a little bit later on for dinner, but we're in the final bed of the front yard, which is this tall eight in one bed. It's actually the largest birdies bed that I have. Now you can see, I've got some kale up here in the front that needs to be harvested. I just really like it. This particular type, the curled leaf one, you really do want to massage after you harvest. It kind of makes it a little bit more palatable, especially when you're eating it fresh and you're not like adding it to a soup or some sort of prepared dish. But the lettuce back here, it's very, very barely starting to bolt. You can tell when it just starts to kind of peek out a little bit and you're going to start seeing a flower stalk shoot up. So it's time to harvest this. But as I harvest out, again, keeping in that always be sowing, always be planting methodology, new kale's coming in. I've put some more rat's tail radish up front. I've put a little rosemary in the corner right here. I'll have this sort of trained and pruned to kind of just come off the side a little bit, not take up a whole lot of space in the bed. And in this background, now this is really interesting. What you want to do, even on a per bed basis is think about how the sun plays over the landscape. And I've got an awning right here. And so this back part of this bed does not get sun for about three hours longer than the front part of the bed, which means that I can put some of my more shade tolerant stuff here in the back. So I've put some leeks that you're actually going to grow for the leaves. This is the broad-leaved Neera leek in the back here. But a pro tip for all of you who struggle with growing cilantro, I have cilantro in the back right here because it just likes to bolt in the heat if there's too much sun. And so it's a great spring and fall crop, even more so when you protect it a little bit from some of that heat. So I've got cilantro sown in the back and some Romanesco cauliflower lining out this other side. But there's actually a lot more to show you here at the Epic Homestead. I just have so much space. So let's go into the orchard and take a look at some of the more perennials. Here we are in the front yard in the orchard side, which is sort of the unplanted zone for the very first round of trees that are here in the orchard. These are all citrus. So this is a citrus hedge. It's going straight back. I've got about 12 varieties planned, 10 in the ground. If you really want to see how we did this on the Epic Homesteading channel, which is more of a day in the life style channel of how I'm building this homestead, you can go check that out. But needless to say, the general logic here was I wanted an evergreen hedge. Citrus in my zone is evergreen as in the leaves are going to be on the plant all year long. So eventually it will kind of wall in this entire area. This vinyl fence behind me is actually going to go pretty soon. But still, I want a little bit of a barricade here and these are planted quite close together. You can see I got one here and one here and I'm not that wide. So it's about three, four feet apart. That's pretty tight for citrus. But I'm going to be very actively pruning these to manage their height. We're going to cap them off at about six feet tall and not more than about three or four feet wide and just have a continual pruning job to make sure that these stay in a kind of unique, smaller growth pattern. And the reason why is because I don't need 200 of every single one of these fruits. I need about, you know, a dozen hanging, two dozen hanging on each of these fruits throughout the season. Then that's completely fine. For my purposes, for my friends, my family and myself, I don't need thousands of citrus. So I could plant them a lot closer together. Now I have dealt with some problems here, mostly with an iron deficiency or a suspected iron deficiency. So what I ended up doing was using a foliar spray with some liquid iron and actually sprayed it all over. We'll see how that works. But I will be planning a future citrus growing problems video that'll address some of the problems I've faced and some problems that a lot of people face in general. Unfortunately, in the strawberry, blueberry and dragonfruit area, there's really not a lot of updates to show you. The biggest update is probably just dealing with some of this cactus rust that I've had on the dragonfruit, which you can tell by these little spots right here. Just some of that. You hit it with a little organic copper fungicide, it takes care of itself. But we do have some blueberries in. So there'll be a video on that pretty soon. Honestly, these are just taking some time. Strawberries have all greened up really nicely and they're starting to expand. But again, it's just going to take some time. The artichoke though has really started to pop. So it's going to be a perennial. It's at least a two or three year crop. You get a nice amount of globes off of it. But yeah, I mean, not a lot to say. These perennials take a little bit longer, but nice green growth. Been managing them pretty well. They've been holding up in the frost. Now we're here in the backyard, actually becoming my favorite part of the garden because it's in ground. And this is my first really big scale in-ground garden that I've ever had. So I'm really enjoying it a lot. What we've got going on back here are the potatoes. So the potatoes have absolutely exploded. Potatoes are sort of like a pioneer crop where you can toss them in relatively unimproved soil. They'll do really, really well. As you can tell, I didn't do anything to this soil at all. I just loosened it a little bit, dug some trenches and tossed the potatoes in. I got six different varieties here. What's really interesting though is we got a little bit of frost here in my zone, which is 10B. It's quite rare to get that. And out of all of these, the ones that did the worst were the ones called Russian banana. They actually got frostburned. I would have not expected something with the name Russian, a very cold area to grow, to actually suffer the most from the frost. But even still, it's the smallest one back here. They're still going to get a harvest. They're just very, very small potatoes. So I guess keeping that foliage lower to the ground like they were, just put them in a little bit colder micro-micro climate and they froze a little bit. So that was kind of a bummer, my first experience with that. But the potatoes, massive harvest coming up pretty soon. I'm thinking I might even do a live video here on YouTube doing the harvest. So if you like that, drop it down in the comments. Let me know what you think about that. Let's take a look at the bed right behind me. Okay. This is one of my most exciting projects that I've personally done. A lot of you have watched my garlic part one video and asked, where's the part two? What's going on with you? It's been over a year. Well, the real truth is that the garlic I planted in that video, it just did not work out for me. I was really bummed and really sort of depressed about it because I had a skunk dig it up three times. When you're dealing with a crop that grows for 150 to 220 days, if you have it dug up three times, good luck. I mean, it's really not going to come back from that, which is a massive, massive bummer. However, I've made a lot of changes to my garlic planting and care as well as my preparation of the soil. And so a part two on garlic is coming pretty soon, but I have 10 different varieties. Nine of them are hardneck varieties and one of them is a softneck variety. Now that sounds kind of dumb, right? Cause I'm in zone 10b. Hardneck varieties of garlic do really well in colder climates. So why would I try again with something that doesn't seem suited? Well, it's because I want to experiment. I want to see if I can make it happen. I've done a ton of research on hardneck garlic in warm climates. And I think I have a method that will work quite well. That will be coming up in the garlic part two video, probably in about a month or so. But I'll give you a little teaser. Lots of mulch. Put them in the fridge for about three months to vernalize them. And so we buried these about eight inches deep underneath four inches of mulch of straw, a couple inches of mushroom compost, and then about four inches down in the actual native soil. And so these little sprouts you see coming up, these are quite long already. I mean, this is about three inches, two inches of growth, but there's another six inches below before you even get to the clove. I'm trying to keep the soil temperatures really, really low. And I'm even going to erect a shade cover for this area to make sure I keep the temps down as low as I can, as long as possible. So this hardneck garlic has a chance to thrive here in my warm climate. So this area right here, we have cleared out to grow wheat. I'm going to try to grow my own bread right about there. We're going to do just sort of like a wind row type of thing. Over here is the giant vegetable bed. And so this little bean right here, not going to be a little for long, I'll tell you that much. Jack and the Beanstalk incoming 2021 because this is going to grow really, really tall and it's going to produce a runner bean that's at least two feet long, which I'm very excited about. Now over here, this area was gnarly. It was absolutely clobbered with Bermuda grass, but this is going to be the tomato row right here. We're going to do a pepper row right here and then we'll probably do some corn in the back there. So that's kind of what's going on in the backyard that's yet to come. This bed right here is just sort of a smorgasbord bed. So in here we put a ton of peas. I really just wanted to make sure that nothing damaged them at all. Of course the skunk comes in and tries to do it and that's kind of a bummer. But nevertheless, it's going to grow up this beautiful, beautiful trellis. We've got a little natural beehive hanging out up here. We'll see if that gets any action. Some chamomile, some lavender, all sorts of stuff like that going on here. And then over here in this section, I'm really excited about. In this section of the garden, I'm calling it the rhizome garden. And I'm doing it in containers because as we know, rhizomatic plants, plants that like to grow that way can tend to spread like crazy. So what we have here is ginger. This is actually not a true ginger. It's galangal. It's a lesser ginger or sort of like a Thai ginger style. This is the ginger from the How to Grow Ginger in Containers video, which for some reason or another is the most popular video I've ever done here on Epic Gardening. So if you came from the ginger video, I tip my hat to you. Welcome to the channel and thank you for sticking around. But I'm going to do more ginger. I'm going to do turmeric. I'm going to do something called a crone, which is a Chinese artichoke. It kind of looks really weird. I'll put a picture up. It looks very odd. Nevertheless, it's supposed to be very tasty. Back there, we're going to do Jerusalem artichokes or sunchokes. And so all of these I'm going to be growing in containers because I don't want them to spread too far. A lot of people will grow Jerusalem artichokes, maybe not like them too much. They call them fartichokes for a reason. So some people just don't react to them very well. And then they've planted them in the ground, which means that it's very difficult to get rid of them because they'll creep. And so that's why I think growing them in containers is a fantastic idea. I'll be harvesting this ginger pretty soon here on the channel. And so I'm really excited about this garden, kind of nerding out about this rhizome-based garden in containers. So stay tuned for more on that. But right here in front of me is a cool little idea, a little twist on growing garlic. Now some of my failures in growing garlic have led me to try to make the most of a situation. And that would be, I harvested the green garlic, just the leaves and even a little bit of that unformed clove and bulb. And I just ground it up and turned it into a garlic powder. Actually it was quite tasty. But what you can do is you can actually plant the cloves very closely together like I have here and then use it as cutting garlic much like you would a green onion. And the flavor is absolutely amazing. Whether you're making it into a sauce, you're adding it to a salad, you're adding it to a stir fry, it brings that garlic flavor in and you can just keep cutting on this throughout the entire season and you can plant it much closer than you would a traditional garlic. So kind of a fun idea if you're planting garlic and you have some leftover cloves or even if you just have some leftover cloves from garlic at the store, this could be a fun little way to add some more garlic flavor to your garden. We're hanging out now here on the seating table of which I desperately need more space. I'm going to be building a mobile seating table, which will probably end up here on the channel. But I just wanted to talk through some of the stuff that I've got started that's going to go into the garden pretty soon. So back here we have all the tomatoes. I'm going to be doing a tomato tier list video, some of my favorite tomatoes, some of my least favorite tomatoes. So that's coming up pretty soon. Needless to say, I've got, let's see, 26 different varieties of tomatoes, 18 different varieties of peppers. And we've got all sorts of weird stuff up here. I've got catnip. I've got more weird leeks that you only grow for the leaves. I've got, let's see, I've got some figs. These are the tiger stripe figs, also known as the panache fig. That's that striped one on the outside, sort of a variegated look. Really, really neat. And of course we have all of these. Everything that's yet to be started here in the Epic 6L trays. So just a couple of thoughts here as we move into spring in the garden. First of all, I just want to say thank you all for the support. This channel has just been the joy of my life. It's been so fun to make these videos for you guys. And there's a couple of things I wanted to share. Number one, that Grow Back Gardening book is out and it is ready to order. So if you want to get into Grow Back Gardening this year, I would say go grab a copy. I think you'll have a lot of fun with it. Number two, if you want the Epic 6L trays, we literally had to shut the orders down because we got so many and we're running the manufacturing plant 24 hours a day, six days a week in three different shifts just to catch up to the orders. So we'll be opening that up soon, but probably it'll take a little bit of time. So if you want to be on that pre-order list, you just have to go over to the store and click notify me when available and you'll get an email when those go out. And then finally, if you kind of want a more day in the life update of how things are going here at the homestead, I do highly recommend checking out the Epic Homesteading channel. I'll link it up there. It's just more of a freeform vlog style, kind of like old school YouTube of how I'm building this thing and all the problems that I'm running into along the way. You'll see a couple of fun episodes. We did one on the rainwater capture where we went through a bunch of different iterations on trying to get over 600 gallons of water here. So we captured 600 gallons twice in two storms and there's a lot more coming on that soon. So anyways, have a good spring guys. If you want a video, drop it in the comments and thank you for watching. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.