A CLOSER LOOK | What's growing NEW this year! June Garden Part 3!

Hey, good morning everyone. Kay here on my homestead in Tennessee, picking up where we left off yesterday in the lower garden, and I just wanted to point out my luffa. I have not grown luffa since 2017, and I grew it for the second time, and I grew it up into the tree and over the roof, and you know, when you when you have no space, you grow wherever you can, and luffa really likes space to spread out. I've got fruit, I've got the little luffas forming now, and you can eat those. It's kind of a cross between a cucumber and a zucchini, and it's, I believe it's an acquired taste, but they eat it all over Asia, in Central America, and everything, but you have to eat it when it's young, and if you leave it, at some point they discovered this, I'm sure some people left the the fruits on the vines and discovered big ones, and they were all crusty underneath, and they make perfect sponges. So that's how you get the sponges, and if you want to know more about it, I have a great video, and I'll put the link right up there. So we're down in the lower garden. This is a four cattle panel trellis system here. They're not interlocked, I have a little space in between, but now I see, I tried to keep them separate, but now I see the luffas are doing this in between, so it will be solid. It will be absolutely solid. I've got a lot of blooms. Bees are already down here at 6 45 a.m, and I just wanted to give you a little bit closer look, because yesterday it was too muddy to even step in here. So let's go take a look at the beautiful corn. First, I wanted to point out this lovely amaranth. Look at these leaves. They're red with green down the middle. This is funny, this one is solid red. All the seeds came out of the same packet. I seeded a whole row here, and I only got three that made it. I just think it's a beautiful plant, even if you don't harvest the seeds, but I can tell you the seeds are very tiny, and it takes a lot of work to harvest them, and a lot of plants to get enough to make a meal. I wish there was a way to, once you get the whole garden tilled and it's ready to plant, just to come in here with an army and get the whole thing planted that day, but it's just not possible. I am me, one person and plus a helper, and it happens when it happens, and it takes time. And I started with the flower corn because that's an early corn. I wanted to get that in, and as you can see, the tassels are over my shoulder. So now I'm a little concerned about, I've got five hot wires around this, plus a fishing line, plus Christmas lights. I will set up a radio at the corn when the ears start forming because raccoons are relentless, and there may be other measures that I take. But I'm getting corn this year because this may be my last big, big garden year. You know, my knee is sore all the time, and I am really having to consider, you know, how much, you know, if I was getting millions of views on my videos, I could hire more people, and I would love to hire more people. But as it is, it's just me and one helper, and I am only sporting one row of okra this year because I just picked so much okra the last three years, more than I needed, and more than I wanted to prepare to freeze and all that. So I just did one row this year, and then we had all of that rain, and a lot of the the plants got dislodged. I reset the almost the entire row, and so it's a little bit behind the corn, but it's looking good, and I'll have okra. Right beside the row of okra, planted sorghum, and I don't know what sorghum looks like, but I think these are all just grass weeds. However, sorghum is a grass, isn't it? Just like corn. Did you know corn is a grass? Over here, I have butternut squash, and I think there's still a melon over here that's hanging on. That is a melon that I got at the co-op. It's not looking too good. That's a sunflower, and the rest are butternut. I planted just a handful of those little blackberry potatoes here, and I planted calendula here, but all I see... oh, there's a few coming up here. Not much going on there. Over here, I had between this and the next three rows, I had 39 pepper plants, and we had all of that rain, and I think I have 12, maybe 12 left, and some look like that, and some look like that. So it's going to be a long time before I get peppers. Guess what this is? Moringa! Two moringa there, two moringa there, one there, and one there. I think the six is all I've got. The tomatoes are looking good. I came over yesterday and took some lower leaves off this plant that were yellowed. Well, it's blight, so I'm going to have to really keep my eye on all that with all this rain, but check out this amazing trellis with aloofa. Oh, look at this one. That's a perfect size to eat. It's still soft. I think I saw another big one somewhere. I posted a picture on my community page of the first aloofa flower, and there were a few people who actually guessed it, but that's what it looks like, and it's in the cucumber family. You must be sleeping. Couldn't be more excited about that, and I didn't plant it down at the end. I had so many pole beans I wanted to plant. I saved one. Now I'm wishing the whole thing was aloofa. These are the speckled egg. That's an heirloom and got quite a bit of bug damage there. Got quite a bit of weeds. This is a cypress vine that came back from last year, and it needs to be managed. It is going up the trellis. These are the same speckled egg. This is the same bean. It's round, so I think of it as pea, but it is a bean. Hopefully, they'll meet in the middle at the top. See what aloofa will take over. So it's going, hey, there's some real estate right here. Why go in there and crowd myself? I'll just come over here. This is my perennial area. This is sweet Annie. It will die back, but the seeds will drop, and it will come back. Anise hyssop is the same. It is wonderful to have anise hyssop in your garden. When you're working, you can just pinch off a few petals and put them on the tip of your tongue, and you get that taste of licorice. This is Sheffield Mum. Blooms later in the year. And my coneflowers, which look stunning in the sun, but I had to get down here before the sun hit. So over here, I've got the hutterite beans. This is a chowder bean from the hutterite peoples, and this I still haven't remembered. Oh yes, this is my mystery bean. This came up in the hutterites, and it was a completely different bean. I didn't try to identify it online. I just thought, okay, I'm not going to eat it. I'm just going to save it, and plant it, and get more, and then eat it, and try it. So here are my sunflowers that I reset. They were scattered around the entrance over there, and I reset them in a row, and they're all fabulous. These are my three rows of sunflowers, and I sowed a little too heavy here. The zinnias are starting to bloom. I've got cosmos sprinkled in there, but most of this is touch-me-not, and it puts out a seed pod, and if you touch it, it'll explode. And this is the result. I've got, I've probably got at least a thousand, maybe two thousand. The whole base of that is touch-me-not. I was wondering about the sweet potatoes, and it looks like the rain really helped. So I think the sweet potatoes are off to the races, and so are a few weeds. Fortunately, after a rain, they're easy to pull out. This is the white sweet potato, and I just put slips in, and they, you know, they don't look as good as strong. All of these are the orange and purple potatoes, and they had either a clump of potato, or a grouping of slips, so they look better. This is the touch-me-not, and this is my wild goose pea, the heirloom that my uncle gave me, that my grandmother's family have grown for over a hundred years. I've got tomatoes setting over there. It is muddy, so I'm not gonna, you can see the tomatoes in there. I've got quite a few, and the corn, the sweet luck corn looks fabulous. You had a wide view of that. This is the painted wapsie. This is Mark Valaroy's creation, and as you can see, this is the Carolina horse nettle. This is a nightshade, and it is thorny, but you want to get that out of there. Okay, so I've got corn silks. Oh boy, I'm gonna have to go get my radio today, and just start with the radio at night. Look how beautiful this has to work. I have six bounds here, and this was one of the last things we planted. It's summer squash. I have green zucchini, straight yellow, and crookneck yellow in there, and there's the occasional zinnia that are volunteering around the garden. Wow, this is loaded. Look, I've tried hard to get them against the fence. Now, sometimes tomatoes do this when the leaves curl, and that always scares me a little bit, but I didn't have any major diseases down here last year, so I'm hopeful. This corn was planted right before the tornado and the 10 inches of rain, so it's a qualified miracle that and I reset a lot of it, and I'm sure I should have thinned it out one more time, because look down here. See, I've got two small ones right side by side. I should have taken that out. Down here, it gets taller. When your corn gets taller, you don't have to worry so much about weeds, because it shades them out, but right now, I can walk through here. This is pretty cool. These rows are tighter together because I wanted more space on the outside, and I wanted to shade. Here's a gap here where we missed it, where some didn't make it, so you see the stuff in the middle is much taller and farther along. A lot of this stuff down here was reset. You see how thick the weeds can get, and the reason I didn't have this tilled is because I've got some good stuff in here, but I've got really bad stuff too. I'm telling you, that has thorns all the way down to the ground. So you can see, got a lot of weeding to do. My focus has just been on keeping the weeds off of the plants, keeping the rows neat, but it needs another go over. I just wanted to point out the artichoke. This was overwintered, had a lot of hay on it. I planted six last year, and this is the only one that survived the winter, and it's looking great, very excited. These tomatoes are looking pretty good, not as good as the other ones up over there and up above, but some of these peppers are looking good, and I think this is a pepper that Jamie gave me, I'm not sure. This is the blue spice basil, and this is, oh, it's it's called that catch me, I forget the name of it, but it sticks to you, really spreads. That's that really horrible one, but before it gets too big to handle. Just wanted to give you a little glance over here. This is my big side yard. Last year I put in a squash patch, did not do that this year. Since then, one of my white eastern pines down here has died. I didn't have him mow because there are some wonderful things growing here, such as this, which is wild bergamot, and I want to do a video on that. There's some more over here. This could have been in the packet of wildflower seeds that I distributed two years ago, I'm not sure. This is, it's a Japanese beetle, they're out in force. That's new, I'm not sure what that is. Oh look, wonderful discovery. This is a second year mullein plant, and here are the flowers. So I can come and collect flowers and make some more earache oil. I have a video on that, I'll put the link right above. So there's a bunch of stuff in here, I'm not sure. Of course most of it is weeds and needs to go, and we've got a big tree down over there. You see part of it is just broken off and hanging up there. All that looks bad. I'm going to try to get after that when I get back. This is burnweed, more burnweed. That could really get out of hand. Look at all this, it's just dead here. Why would that be? Maybe it's my septic field. I'm gonna have to ask about that. That is dock with 10 million seeds, that's going to be everywhere. This is moth mullein, which I really like. I guess it's a relative of mullein, but look at these pretty flowers. This is the leaf, in case you have it. There's a bunch of it over there. And my hazelnuts, I've got a little bit of action on the hazelnuts there. The deer pretty much keep that pruned. Oh they're all, these are all two year. Some of my early ones really died off, so I can come and take these flowers. And unfortunately the whole top cone does not bloom at once. These flowers come out, you know, when they come out, and you have to be on top of it if you want to collect enough. Okay, to bring an excavator up here is pretty hard on the the ground. I thought maybe the leak was coming from the pex line that I had put in in 21, which that is has access down to the valve. But that wasn't it. I think the water's coming from higher, but you won't know until you get it dug out. Okay, so the problem has been revealed. It's coming from, oh gosh, could there be a hole in the floor? No. Where's that water coming from? What is, we got to figure out what this thing is. That thing, because I'm seeing water coming off the end of that. Is that your gas line? No, gas line goes up and around. Oh dear, what a nightmare. It's just leaking right out of the floor, isn't it? So this is the rest of the side yard that runs pretty much to the property lines, and I've got three pecan trees. I was going to call this my pecan grove, but they have really struggled. They just go down to one stick in the winter, and then they've got to put everything back, and I see some bug damage. So the other one's down there. It looks a little greener. This one looks pretty yellow. I'm sure some fertilizer wouldn't hurt, but this is what happens when you get too much to take care of. This is that oxeye daisy, my biggest daisy. Looks like it's already had its prime moment. A few more over here, and this is the black-eyed susan. The deer kind of keep these rows of Sharon pruned, although I don't see any recent bite marks. Maybe I'll actually get to see them bloom. That whole area over there is poison ivy underneath and growing up that tree. That looks like deer poop, I think, which means they've been through here. See if we can see if the light comes on. Nope, okay. Oh man, I don't see, I don't see a lot of water in there. Okay, over here amongst the weeds, I have cilantro going to seed. I have lamb's quarters, and I have the onions I planted, although it's kind of hard to see them. I need a whole day trying to get this place under control. Look at those sunflowers. Once again, last year I had two really tall ones. Did not reseed. It reseeded itself, and I got a small one there. Okay, this is what I decided to do over here. So much of this soil just gets washed out because it's downhill that way, and after 10 inches of rain, there wasn't a lot left. I did bring some soil from the driveway. Well, my helper did. I see, I see one, two, three, four need to be replaced, five. I've got some more slips in the house, and I'll be popping those in. Maybe tomorrow. It's going to be just a degree or so cooler. It is 100% humidity, and it's going up to 92 today. So a lot of the beans got washed out from the original flooding, but there are four different kinds of pole bean on here, and it will be interesting to see if I get enough for a meal. Very pretty sunflowers. Yeah, I just need to rework all this, although I did put some seeds in, some melon seeds, and I thought, well, by the time melons gets growing, I'll have been in here and gotten this weeded. This is cardinal basil. That's supposed to put out red flowers. Can't wait. I've got to get those cabbages out of here. I planted those too late. Tomatilla here, lamb's quarters and all that's lamb's quarters, and this is the red clover. I've got a red clover video, what to do with red clover, and I planted cushaw down here, but I don't see anything, and I, this is one, one cushaw right here. If I just had one good plant, I could have several, and that would be fine with me. Well, it looks like the beans did not do well. I planted a whole row of, of, I think they're goldmarie. Yeah, and it looks like I only have a half a dozen plants. These are looking good though. They're going up, and on the back side, I planted the giant squash. I thought, if I have butternut, giant squash, and cushaw, I've got enough. Let's see if we can get back here. So I've got one. Oh, oh goody. Okay, good. That's promising. That looks like three or four plants there. That would be plenty. I need to transform this whole area back here. I definitely need to get the spreading hedge out of here, because, as you will see in another video, it is really invasive, and you don't want to let that go to seed. Okay, everybody, I am back on the porch. I don't know if you can tell, but I am dripping, dripping with sweat, and it is 7 15. As you can see, there's a lot to do, but, you know, I'm very happy that I looked back last year at the clips, and in some of the departments, such as the corn, I am ahead of the game. Probably I should thin those flowers before, before they bloom, and so much more, but I'm going to Idaho, God willing. I am going to get to meet Mary at Mary's Nest for the first time. She has gifted me the admission ticket to the conference, and I'm going with my friend Teresa, who you saw. She lives in Idaho, and so does one of my sons, and so I'm going to get to see him. They're expecting a baby in August, so it's a, you know, 10 years ago, this trip would be like nothing for me. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. I used to come to Tennessee, and mother go, where are you going today? And I'd be going here, for here, for, you know, videos, and this thing, interviewing people, and, and all of that. That, those days are over, I'm afraid. Fortunately, I have a helper to do some things for me while I'm gone. I'm going to be getting hay, and get a lot of those areas mulched, because that's going to be critical for August when it is so hot. But hopefully, I will have harvested my corn before then, before the dry spell of the drought of August. I would, that would be so awesome. So anyway, thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you have subscribed to my channel, and I hope you'll tell a friend about what I do here, trying to grow my own food, you know, doing this on my own, and the challenges, and the, the joys, and beauty. So, thank you so much. God bless you, and I'll see you in the next video. For the kitty lovers, my cats are fine. They're inside. It was very early, and I wanted to get around as quickly as I could. So, you can see, you can see Spot and BJ in part one. And Patch just stays inside, so they're fine.