My biggest garden fail 🌿 A day of a dozen jobs!

I would say this is my biggest vegetable garden failure ever. Well, hey everyone. So I was thinking this morning how interesting it is how spring and fall are so incredibly similar in the garden. In spring I find myself running around doing, you know, 14 different jobs in a day because they're all little things that have to get done and here it is fall and that's exactly what I have to do today. So here's the state of the garden as it exists right now. I'm currently over here watering the banana in the pot because we've not had a frost yet. Quite interesting. I would say, you know, I think our first average frost is somewhere around mid-October. It is not uncommon to have one until Halloween. Last year we skipped the light frost and we went straight to a freeze. We had a big snowstorm last Halloween, which is always at the top of my mind when I'm thinking about what needs to get done in the garden. But the forecast as it is right now suggests nothing through the first week of November as far as frost goes. That can change on a dime. So I'm always trying to be a little bit ahead of the game. Today you're just going to come along with me because we're going to be doing tons of things in the garden and I don't actually even know what they all are except for this one, which is watering. So I am also very cognizant of the fact that the hoses will have to be shut off soon. And that's not to say I won't disconnect them during periods where it's not going to freeze. But I also know it's just a lot easier to do as much watering as I can before we shut those hoses off for the first time. All right, so come along. Let's go see what we're up to in the garden today. There's so many things to do. It's one of those deals where you turn around and you go, do I want to do that? Oh, I could do that. And I could get lost in the corner of the garden and never come back to what I had started intending to do. So let's just get on with it. Come on. Let's go. Come on. Where's your toy? Magnus. Mags, come on. So this year, this is what so many people use is just flagging tape to label dahlias. And while I have most of my dahlias labeled with kind of semi-permanent slip through plastic ties, anything new doesn't have one of those. So I'm going to go through and tag dahlias as I can to start the process of getting ready for digging them. So I've been pretty satisfied with my dahlia labeling process that I use, but I'm always interested in trying something else. Since so many people use this, I thought perhaps it'd be a good idea to try this too, because maybe everybody else is on to something better than I am. Magnus, really? Also, I can tell you right now that today it's not going to be a day for uninterrupted work in the garden because this puppy's kind of nutty today. OK, well, as I suspected might happen, everything had to get paused so that we could get some exercise into the dog. So we went to the beach, did a little walk on the beach. That was nice. Came home, made some pizza dough. And now we are right back where we started. It's shocking to me how dry the soil is around some of these things that I'm watering because I've really been keeping up on the water. At least I thought I was. And some are just, I mean, it takes it like the soil is almost hydrophobic in some places. OK, so there might be a little bit of lawnmower noise here for a little bit because it's much more patient. It's going to run around and suck up a bunch of leaves on the grass here. I have not finished tagging all the dahlias, but I'm getting real bored with that. So I've got most of them done and I can finish the rest some other time. Now I'm going to plant just a few more bulbs. So I am over in the sort of new woodlandy garden that we planted right over here. And I have already planted some camassias and there was kind of a dark blue camassia. I think the camassias are going to work really well here. Those bloom a little bit later, I think, and they're a little bit taller. I think they'll be very pretty in here during that time. So I ordered I ordered a lighter blue one called Blue Heaven, and there's 10 of them here. And these bulbs look much bigger. Oh, what? Huh? Well, this is quite strange. The camassias I planted before were teeny tiny little things. Look at the size of these bulbs. OK, so anyway, I'm going to put those in here because I think the combination of the dark and the light blue is going to be very pretty together. I also got 25 snowdrops that I'm going to put in this area, just kind of cluster around. This is the tool I'm going to be using to plant these. If you watch Gardener's World, you've seen this tool. This is the Dutch trowel. This is what Monty Don and Adam, the other guy on there, Adam, what's his name? This is what they use. And Seaborg sent me this to try to see how I like this compared to what I usually use, which is the planting spade. I have been using this. I quite like this tool, but you'll see how it works when we're doing this. So the best way to plant snowdrops is to plant them in the green. They take much better, apparently. So that means that you divide them after they flower and then you move them around. Since I don't have a lot of snowdrops, I'm sort of a recent snowdrop convert. I don't really have any to move around. But the ones that I planted in the bulb mound last year came up very well from bulbs. So I'm just digging into more bulbs and someday I'll have some to move around my garden and divide. For now, I got to stick with bulbs. All right, so we'll walk to go move the hose again. I have been using this tool for planting like orange pots, too. Here's my thoughts on it. First of all, I have learned about myself that I very much like tools that work with a push or a pull. I don't love a lot of wrist action. I can no longer use tools that require me to like spin my wrist, even things that have a lot of like upward bending motion of my wrist. I'm not that interested in much rather use a tool where my wrist stays pretty straight. And this is a tool like that. So I'd like that. I like this handle length a lot. It's good for obviously working on your knees. Here's my my one thought on it. If I were designing this tool, I would make the handle thinner. And, you know, I mean, there's a reason why, you know, Monty probably likes this tool. He probably has, you know, bigger hands than I do. But I think that I wish this handle were a little slimmer and maybe they can't do that because of the leverage on it. So it needs to be bigger. But that's my only I I'd like this tool a lot. My only complaint is that I wish the handle were a little slimmer. That said, I can certainly see the application for this over my Great Dixter planting spade, because this definitely, you know, when you're right in there at the soil, you're not using that top part of the handle on that Great Dixter planting spade anyway. So, you know, this foot long or so handle is a pretty nice length to be able to get enough leverage, but not have like extra handle flopping around. OK, I'm trying to make my way over to the vegetable garden to do a couple of things over there. But I just saw the aluminum sulfite in the garage. So as long as we're watering everything in, I'm going to treat all the things that need a little bit of acidification in order to either perform or turn blue. And so I'm going to stop here by the tough stuff, put a little bit on there because everything's going to be getting a really good dose of water, which is you got to water this stuff in, obviously. And as long as I'm here with my pruner, I'm going to grab whatever I can. You can see that we really need to be pruning on this espalier asian para here. I'm going to need to bring a ladder over for the tall ones, but I do whatever I can while I'm over here. So I'll have to bring the ladder over to get that top level, which needs it very, very, very badly. Right off the vegetable garden. It is such a mess in this vegetable garden, and I just it's not very fun to clean up, clean this up. So I'm just kind of working on this as I chip it away at it little by little rather than turning it into a big thing. So beans were growing in the middle here. So the beans, I definitely make sure to cut off at the roots because they're nitrogen fixtures. So that will be good for whatever grows here next year. And this was celery, which I harvested all that was left of it. So it's my first time growing celery. I bought starts and actually that was fairly enjoyable. I like that. This clematis, I'll leave it here. But this clematis that's growing in these two pots is such a seeder. I've never had a clematis that seeds around. Some of them do. This one is clearly one of them. So there's some in this bed. I'll leave that there. I can always dig that out if I need another plant. There's a plastic pot, something I didn't plant, I guess. I'm going to pull out the nasturtiums. Everything's still, you know, looking fairly good. But I'm going to try to hit each bed just once, probably. This bed has been empty for a bit now. I can, as I clean things out, I'm going through and turning off the drip irrigation to each bed. I don't actually think this soil is quite moist. I don't think we need to drip on it all anymore, even in the beds where things are actively growing. Across the way here, I am growing a fall crop of peas, but it hasn't been that productive. So mostly I just come over here and eat them. Yeah, there isn't that much sun in here even anymore because the days are short and the sun is low. So, OK, you can see we are halfway through emptying out the pond. Once again, I missed my opportunity to bring the lotus in to try to overwinter the lotus. It cannot handle much cold at all and has gotten colder than it could have, you know. I didn't even get a flower on it this year. So I guess when I buy one next year, I'm going to just buy whatever's already in flower because that was a bit of a bummer. I still like the leaves, but it would have been nice to see some flowers. OK, we do have an important job to do over here, which is check in on this year's vegetable garden experiment. Almost every year there is some experiment. This year, it's sweet potatoes. And I see that the foliage is starting to turn a little yellow. So that suggests to me that it's time to that it's maybe time to at least theoretically, I think they can stay in past frost. But I think we should start digging and see what happens. I should have turned the water off over here. I think it's quite damp here. Unfortunately, it's probably not great. I also have beets growing in this bed, which I should harvest those too. So this is certainly my first time ever growing sweet potatoes. I gave up growing regular potatoes because I felt like they weren't worth the space in the garden when you can buy pretty good ones at the farmer's market. So I don't know if our season is long enough to get anything decent here. I did buy ones that, you know, are supposed to be go pretty quickly. I'm not seeing a single thing yet. I see nothing. I say, OK, that's a beautiful vine, but maybe I could get the fork and dig more. I mean, they wouldn't be that deep, would they? I'm definitely coming across roots. I'm not coming across anything even remotely resembling a sweet potato. My sweet potato vines in my containers grow better sweet potatoes than that. OK, let's try this one. I mean, see, this concerns me. This looks like a sweet potato root that should have become a sweet potato. I can't believe it. Not a single sweet potato, not even a small sweet potato. Not even really a sign that sweet potato was thinking about growing in there, with the exception of some sort of thicker roots. I like to do these garden experiments where I try to grow kind of strange things. And the thing is, is that of all the strange things I've grown, I think sweet potatoes are the least strange. I mean, there are people who grow sweet potatoes very well in my zone in Wisconsin. There's nothing there. This is my I would say this is my biggest vegetable garden failure ever. What a bummer. I just remembered that the hose is still running, so we need to run back. So I have a thought on why the squash and the sweet potatoes may not have had a good year. Well, I actually have no thoughts on sweet potatoes because that was just like the most epic fail ever. But I imagine it could be related to what I think happened with the squash, which is that since I had the tomatoes in the bed to the south of them, I think there was not a lot of sun on those beds. And I underestimated how much having the tomatoes in that spot would affect that. Fortunately, I didn't have that hose on very high, so there's not like a flood all over the place right now. I'm trying to water the tiny tough stuff hydrangeas because look at how sad they're looking. Everything is just sad. So that's we're trying to get this row watered now. Well, speaking of things that didn't really grow that well, my euonymus pineapple lily did none of them flower this year. Now I have I forget what this variety is. I did buy this variety special and I planted them individually. I've never actually planted them in the ground here. I've only ever planted them in pots. They've always bloomed for me. Oh, here I actually have the label so I can tell you. Sparkling burgundy. But for whatever reason, none of them bloomed. I still like the foliage, so it wasn't a total loss. But they can be overwintered. I'm actually going to have to do a little bit of research about exactly how to overwinter them, because in the past, what I've done when I've grown them in pots is I just bring the whole pot inside and just stick it down into like the dark, cold storage with the dahlias and the bananas and stuff. But since I'm digging them out of the ground, I'm hoping I can just maybe just like throw these in like a paper bag or something and call it good. But we'll see. I'm going to have to research that a little. Clean that off a little. Maybe I'll leave a little bit of that soil on there. Nice root system on them. There's the bulb and they look fine. They just didn't do anything. Thomas Edison dahlia still looking phenomenal. Started late, but boy, are they beautiful. And actually not been eaten by, troubled by all the insect problems that so many other of my dahlias had this year. Ow, ow, ow. That was a rose. Well, I'm encouraged that they all look so good. The bulbs look great. The foliage looks good. There was just no flowering. So I'm going to have to, like I said, I have to look up how to store these. If I kind of hoping I don't have to replant them. I suspect I can cut the foliage off of these and let them just dry down and then replant them. OK, I'm going to water one more thing on this side before I take the hose around over by the new hydrangeas on the other side of the house. And that is the rosy teacups dogwood, which I will show you here is fairly well established, but a little water wouldn't hurt it. It is showing beautiful fall color here. I love these flowering dogwoods. I think they're such nice, small trees, pretty slow growing. I mean, this is now five years old. I bought this in 2019, if you can believe that. So fairly slow growing, I would say. But, you know, beautiful flowers, not much fruit on this one. I actually don't know if I saw any on it at all, but the fall color here is great. Anyway, we're going to give that a really nice watering because we like that tree. We want to make sure it's well taken care of. All right. While I've got that hose running on the dogwood, I'm going to set up to do a little bit of mulching. Watch out, Magnus. I'm going to go mulch over at Roy's Garden, which hasn't been mulched for a while. And I don't have any pine straw left, but I do have some of the saltmarshay left. Oops, I got to move this hose too. Hold on. I was doing the house halo hydrangea over here. Do the one on the other side now. Those were planted last year, so. All right. Anyway, so I have some saltmarshay left, which is not like the prettiest mulch for an ornamental bed, but but I think it'll do the job. And I suspect it's going to and we'll see what it looks like in spring. I suspect it'll just kind of nicely blend in with the bed as it ages. And I can always throw pine straw over the top of it next year. So this garden got weeded the other day, so it's ready for mulch, which is nice. I did end up caging this pagoda dogwood here. It just needs it just needs a little bit of a break from the deer. Those pagoda dogwoods, they do fine once they're established, but they just need a chance to get growing. And then the deer don't seem interested. The deer never touch the ones out by the end of the road. So I think it just just needs a little bit of time to get through a winter and a spring fenced in. And then I think we'll be it'll be off to the races. So the reason I'm I'm mulching this bed is because this it desperately needs it. This this bed has been extraordinarily difficult to keep moist. It's been the plants are not. I wouldn't say there's a lot of thriving happening. Things are surviving. There's not a lot of thriving here. It definitely needs whatever I can do to help it. And I think mulch is a is a really good first step as we go into winter here. I won't cut back this garden until spring, but when it does come time to cut back this garden, this is a chop and drop situation over here. So I will just cut everything and let it lay, which is also another thing that they sort of recommend. What looks good, I don't want to say they recommend because I don't think there's a lot of recommendations, but for jumping worms is to let plant material lay because it's less less interesting to them than leaves. And wood chip mulch is also not a good call for those. Hence why I'm sort of backing away a little bit from arborist chip mulch too, which is a big change in direction for me because I've been, you know, talking about the benefits of arborist chip mulch and leaves for years now. And I still believe that those are great things to have in your garden. There's just this big asterisk now in my garden. OK, there it is almost. It's not the most attractive thing in the world, but I feel better that I've got some organic matter in there that hopefully will help build the soil rather than perpetuate the problem. And I also feel better because I think I'll be able to actually use the sprinkler and have some of that moisture actually stay in the soil. This is something I should have done. Well, I should have done this in spring, to be perfectly honest, and I didn't. So now we do it now because we just do the best we can do. So this is something that I've talked about in some of the garden strolls this summer. So here you see a ginkgo. This is gold spire. Is that the name of one? It's not very spire like because when we had a tree removed over where Roy's garden is now, it actually fell right on top of it when it was a young plant. And so it sort of lost its shape and I tried to create a new leader with it, but it didn't work great. So it's got this kind of odd shrubby shape to it. And actually, I think, well, I don't know, I'm not. I was saying I was thinking I might limit up from the bottom, but actually, I think I'm just going to leave that while I think about that because you can't put the branches back on. But next to this over here, this is the backside of this. We have these two Ogon viburnums. The one on the right right there. It's pretty nice, although quite tall. This one is not doing much. So I'm actually going to cut this down to the ground. Oh, not Ogon. Ogon. Here, it's right here. Onondaga. All right, so I'm going to cut my saw, hand saw, chainsaw would probably be better for this. And we're going to slice away. See if I can get at it. Also, before I do that, there's also some maple, pretty sturdy maple stems that come up through this. This is one of them right here. So I'm going to get that first on the one that we're keeping. Come on, man. Actually, that should be a pruner. That is ridiculous to saw that. There's another maple through here, too. Oh, yeah, it's huge, too. Holy smokes. I can tell because it's got the smooth bark on it. Watch out, baby. I think I need a new saw. Sticking off the top of this. Yeah, that was like a. Hang on, let me take this out of here so we can see how big that was. It's ridiculous that that's been escaping in there all these years. How did that maple tree escape all these years? Oh, for gosh sakes. I think it looks much nicer. I think it gives some room for the dry. Oh, I forgot that I want to do him. The tricolor beach, which I'm going to throw some water on. That's the him I was referring to. I think it gives some room for the tricolor beach to stand out from there. I think that was good. Maybe. Maybe I'll cut just some of these branches, prune some of these branches on this existing Onondaga just to see if I can't get they won't flower and the flowers are gorgeous, but maybe to see if I can't bring the growth down a little bit. Well, maybe we'll take a few of these down to the base if I can try to encourage new growth from the bottom, that might be might be the ticket there. That's a sanguisorba that I transplanted from my mom's house a couple of weeks ago. All right. OK, maybe I can get these into the dead hedge, which I don't think I've ever shared because it's not exactly it's not exactly doing the dead hedge thing correctly. But here's my attempt at a dead hedge. I started it last year and it's it's not great, but I try to put the woody stuff in it. Most of this in here is like hydrangea stems. An idea of a dead hedge is it kind of creates almost like its own little like wall. But more than that, it's just a way to kind of an ecologically friendly way. Oh, Magnus, to get rid of material. Now I'm trying to weave. I should be weaving in between here. Poor example of a dead hedge. If you want to know how to do a dead hedge properly, there's a bunch of videos on YouTube about it. Generally go with a brick because they're the ones who do it best. But they will show you how to do it. And and when done properly, they're beautiful. Honestly, since it's I mean, I am trying to create a little bit of a wall over there is a little bit of a stopgap measure between us and the other road. But more than anything, I just wanted a place to get rid of woody material without having to burn it. Basically. So that's a nice wildlife friendly way to do that. So let's just take a quick after look here at this opened up. I'm really happy with it opened up. Interestingly enough, this actually lines up quite well. Not that you can probably see it through here with the Pagoda Dogwood over there where I just mulch. And again, we get the tricolor beach gets a little bit of room to breathe, so it's not so packed in there. All right. With the tricolor beach getting a little bit of special treatment because it's a special plant, it gets special treatment that is basically trying to think there's a couple of things over there that I need to water, but I either have to hook up a hose extension for that or take a watering can. So everything else has had a really good drink of water. I feel very good about that. I feel like if the hoses have to go away tomorrow, that things would be in as good of shape as they could be for winter water wise. Also got a whole bunch of other things done and I am absolutely beat. So thank you for joining me on this completely. What do we call this miscellaneous fall jobs? I guess I don't know. Anyway, a little bit of everything. Thanks for coming along. I hope you're having a good day in your garden or even a great day. That's what I'm supposed to be saying. And I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for watching.