WWIII Victory Garden: High Desert Edible Landscape and Productive Garden Design

Do you think it might be possible to incorporate edible plants into your landscape so that nobody even knows they're there? Hey Provident Preppers, I'm Kyleen and I'm Jonathan and today we're talking about Victory Gardens and no two Victory Gardens are just the same but we want to show you some friends of ours who have created their own Victory Garden on a typical third acre lot but they've made it anything but typical. They've done some really great things. Now these people live at a fairly high elevation about a mile high. They're zone five. They have a lot of wind where they are and they only get about 10 inches of rain a year so you know probably not the most ideal conditions but you make it what it can be. And I'm so impressed at how much they're growing and the beautiful design. And so today in this video while they take you for a walk through their landscape, pay really close attention because she's got some really valuable tips on how to make things grow. Good morning. We thought we'd give you a tour of our typical one-third acre suburban garden. We are in a zone five. Now in the front yard it looks like a typical suburban garden until you look closely for a few things. First you'll see that we have a couple of currant bushes here which have been harvested. Behind them we have an elderberry tucked in. This is a nova so he only gets about six feet tall and wide making him perfect for limited spaces. As you continue to look around the yard you'll see that we have other things tucked in. For instance we have some lavender and again most people driving by don't even notice these things but we know that the medicinal herbs are there. And we also have some catmint tucked in. The catmint has been harvested once and cut back so it's getting ready to bloom again. And of course you need to have roses for the rose hips. These are a pink double knockout rose. They've done really well here in our zone five and we actually have nine of them currently on the property. They make great barriers when they're close by a window. The thorny bushes tend to deter anybody who might want to get in where they shouldn't be but we also really enjoy the rose hips. Then we also have another patch of lavender close by the front door. This one's just about at the end of blooming and we've harvested off of it but it brings in a lot of wonderful pollinators. The bees love it. There's always bees around on it and even some bumblebees that I saw this evening. There he is. He's got a lot of pollen on his legs ready to go back. And then we have some bee balm or monarda as it's all so known. The first two patches here have finished blooming and are waiting to be deadheaded. And then the third patch over here is just getting ready. It's just starting to bloom and it will take over and fill in that spot. Then in the island we have calendula in the front and it self-seeds. We plant it at once and it just self-seeds and fills in and grows really well. And next to the calendula kind of behind the rock tucked there is a comfrey and we use both of these the comfrey and the calendula to make herbal healing salves. Then as you continue around to the back of the island you'll see that we have cone flowers here again that are self-seeding. And over on the east side yard we have some pots with some again more herbal things in them. We have some peppermint, some rosemary that we've harvested a bunch off of, and some aloe vera that we've divided this spring. We probably gave away 50 about the size of that one that we've replanted. And now then looking over on the other side of this side yard is where we have our blackberries growing. And yes we have to net our blackberries otherwise the birds would clean us out and we would get nothing. So the whole top part of this arbor serves as a platform for us to be able to drape the netting to keep the birds out. And then the simple explanation is we grow our blackberries more like grapes. There's a whole technique to it that we've developed over the years. Out of our four plants when we have four full mature plants in through here we get about a hundred pounds of blackberries for about six to eight weeks depending on the year. It varies just a little bit but those blackberries are so sweet and they're about the size of almost ping pong balls. They're just huge and unbelievable. We absolutely have enjoyed them. We do have problems with the ones closest to the street. You'll see that those are new ones when we go pan back that way. This is just showing you some of the berries and the trusses that are hanging there waiting to be picked and they'll be ready any day now to start picking. But as I was saying the ones over closest to the street unfortunately we have some neighbors who spray their weeds with liquid weed spray and it volatizes when the temperatures get high and drifts over and it has killed off our two big mature blackberry bushes that we had there. So we have replanted them again and we're trying to do some education with the neighbors so hopefully that'll make a difference. This is an example of the size of the blackberries I was talking about. Looking through the gate and into the backyard we still have some projects to do. On the left will be another medicinal herb garden and over on the right we'll be putting in three big terraced areas where we can have some more level land where we can continue our planting. Lots of work yet to do. At the bottom where the patio starts is where we have our green stock. It's for high so we have 24 pockets of strawberries that are luscious. The plants look really healthy. Unfortunately my husband had picked this morning right before I did the video but as you can see the plants are doing really really well. So this is the basket of berries that we picked. So you can see that yeah we're really enjoying the strawberries. We also have an additional bed of berries growing in a traditional way and then we have a high hoops greenhouse. Right now there's nothing that is being grown in it because we are in the process of renovating the beds and raising them up higher so that with my back issues I'll still be able to continue to grow in it. This picture will be in February, middle of February and you can see all the luscious greens that are growing in there and this is without any supplemental heat. This is all totally passive and again there's nothing like having those greens in the middle of the winter. As we continue down past the strawberry beds we'll come to our winter squash. We grow a bush butternut because it only vines about four to six feet out and gives us a smaller butternut squash but it stores really really well for us. So we've really been happy with that one. As you continue on we have another little spot where we've got some herbs tucked in. These are oregano and thyme and we have harvested them a couple of times and they're now letting them go to flower again for the beneficials to give them a little bit of extra pollen sources as well. And then as we go around you'll see that yes we do have chickens. We have a chicken coop and an attached run for the girls. We have shade cloth that we put on to help them with the summer heat and yes they do get out to free range occasionally but only when we are there to babysit because otherwise they will devour the whole garden. Now these are our tomatoes and I'm sure you're wondering why we have this netting over it. First of all the netting is called micro mesh and it's we order it in bulk and then we cut it in size in the sizes that we need and we make a micro mesh sleeve just stitch up the side and it has a casing that we stitch around the top run some yarn through it so we can close it up tight and then as we put it over the tomatoes on the day that we plant the tomatoes out we put the cages on them then we put the micro mesh and we tuck it in around the bottoms so that nothing get in there. We have a little insect that's called a beet leaf hopper that will come and some years we have lost 50 percent of our tomatoes to it because it brings a virus called curly top and once you have that virus there's no getting rid of it you just have to get rid of the tomato plant. Since we started doing them this way we have not lost a tomato plant and these will be coming off any day now as you can see the tomatoes are bursting at their seams so we need to take them out and put the stakes in and get them tied up. We also have purslane that grows everywhere in the garden and we pull it up occasionally and feed it to the chickens and we've got dill tucked in here and of course marigolds all around and we've also got some parsley tucked in around the tomato plants as well. A closer look again of that micro mesh and again these will be coming off probably in the next day or two and of course here are the girls they're begging for treats they love anything that comes from the garden and over here we have what's left of our spring beets and carrots and they'll be harvested probably tomorrow and then this bed will be replanted this is where the garlic used to be we'll replant this with more carrots and beets this is an example of our garlic that we harvested these are our storage onions coming along nicely they're bulbing up really well next to them we also have some shallots and this is an example of one of our onions from last year and part of our harvest from last year from our storage onions we also have basils tucked in and dill that we're letting go to seed for next year and our spring chard what's left of it the girls still get treats from it but we're letting some of it go to seed as well so we can save some seed for next year there's a nice seed head developing and over there we have our bed that has our potatoes in them they're doing really well we're expecting a really good harvest out of the potatoes and over here it looks like these two beds are empty until you look closer but this is where our spring peas were grown and now we have corn planted in it so this will be a fall crop of corn and the reason we've done this is we just cut the peas down we didn't pull them up because as you know peas fix nitrogen into the soil but they do it along the roots is where the little nodules are of nitrogen so if you pull the pea plants out you actually are removing the nitrogen so we just cut ours down let them be dead and then we plant the corn in the same area and that helps to give the corn some of that extra nitrogen that corn thrives on but there's still plenty of time left in our summer for that to be able to harvest the corn you'll also see that we have pinwheels out although there's not hardly a breeze this morning but the pinwheels help to deter the bee or the birds because they love those the corn as it's coming up this is an example of our corn and tomatoes one day picking from last year and then this is our zucchini we grow a variety called desert because it is one that the squash bugs don't like as well and we have icicle radishes planted around it and those help to deter the squash buying bore and then next to the zucchini we'll see that we have peppers we have two jalapeno peppers in the back a not a pinwheel in the front and then on over to the left we have four california wonder peppers and again those have done really really well for us in the past the jalapeno peppers are called crakes grande then we have some green beans these are basically just for fresh eating this year because we had so many last year i've still got a ton on the shelf and behind it we're experimenting with a dried bean called tiger's eye it's kind of like a pinto bean we have our little cucumber that's really struggling it was some old old seed i was trying to see if we could use up and it's more an experiment this year we have some more basil tucked in some celery back through the beans marigolds tucked everywhere and then in this backboard bed it's our shadiest and we have additional shade cloth provided we have our summer broccoli and we have in the front we have some chard and some kale and the broccoli runs all the way along the back of this bed and then over towards the end of the bed you'll see that we are growing uh some cabbages this is a late flat dutch a red acre that's just beginning to head and a green acre that's just beginning to head again tucked in is our sage plant we've harvested off of it once and now it's going to flower and again we're letting it do that so the bees and other pollinators can have at it these are our goji plants we have three of them they're a phoenix tears and we're growing them in pots right now these are three of the plants that will move over into that bigger terraced area that i showed you as we just came in through the gate and i said that we've got a lot of dirt work to do there but these are our goji over here we have our compost bins we have five of them each bin is three feet high three feet wide and three feet deep and ours are arranged so that the most finished compost is here closest to the tap and then as we and it had each bin has slats that slide in and out so it's really easy to get in and get to the compost to turn it this is our most finished bin and then the one that isn't quite as finished and then again yet again less finished compost and then our two over on the left are both ones that are being filled right now and over to the left of the bins you'll see two plastic trash cans on wheels with lids one of those is to hold ground materials until we need them and the other one holds extra finished compost until we need it you'll notice that in the middle of each one of these compost bins we've inserted a drainage tube we call them air tubes they come like this from the big box store and my husband of course took out the drill and drilled a lot more holes in it and the reason for that is not to get water into the middle of the pile but it's to get air into the middle of the pile when there's no air into the pile then you the decomposition stops so that helps as we go through the gate into our east side yard or west side yard excuse me we have our columnar apple trees they're an urban columnar apple tree from a company called rain tree they actually only get three feet tall or three feet wide and eight feet tall and we have bagged our apples so that we don't need to spray we garden everything is organic so we look for other ways and we found that bagging the apples works really well we don't have hundreds of them to bag and we don't have to get up on the ladder so that makes it doable but as you can see the apple trees are really healthy and thriving this is only their second year that they've had any apples on them and so we're excited to see how they do now if you look down to the base of each apple tree you'll see more comfrey the comfrey has been harvested once already cleared to the ground and this is our second growth spurred on it we use the comfrey medicinally we feed it to the chickens and then anything else we take and we cut and put into our compost so that we can spread those wonderful nutrients that it's bringing up from deep in the soil all through our yard the whole yard can benefit and over on this side this was our latest leveling project and we have over here we are growing an apricot tree and a peach tree and we are using a method called grow a little fruit tree so these trees will never be any taller than about six to eight feet tall and six to eight feet wide we're hoping to keep them at the six foot mark and both again so there's no need for ladders and there's no need for climbing up on anything and it's all done through summer pruning and then we're looking back at the elderberry where we were looking at the beginning of the video so we're looking back out to the street this empty space between the apples is where our beehive goes last year it's the hive starved out and so we are in the process of building a new hive to replace it and to go in here thanks for coming along we hope you've enjoyed the tour a huge thank you to our friends for sharing this beautiful landscape with us i love i can't wait to see when all the infrastructure is in place how incredible it looks and i'm seriously jealous of the high hoop house someday someday i want one someday yes and now for the question of the day what are you doing to maximize your growing space and how much food you can produce comment below and thanks for being part of the solution