Lazy Gardening Has Paid Off! | FULL Spring Garden Tour 2024!

Time for spring planting is right around the corner and at the beginning of the gardening season most people's gardens are bare dirt waiting for seeds but mine is already in full swing and I haven't even had to lift a finger. Let's go take a look at what last year's lazy gardening has already provided this spring. Right off the bat please note my anti donkey entrance device. I would like to introduce you to the world's largest stock of asparagus. What a mouthful. I harvested the seed that made this from the biggest asparagus that I'd ever seen growing in my garden prior but let me just tell you it wasn't quite this big. The thing that allows me to have harvestable produce this early in the season is the fact that I am able to leave plants in my garden for two plus years because I don't till or plow and we'll talk about that a little bit later but first check out my bees. I have a really funny story to tell you about them. I really like trapping native bees because having pollinators in my garden is really great but also because I'm a lazy gardener I don't want to have to do very much work to maintain them. So basically I caught this wild swarm of bees and there is a rule with beekeeping that if you're ever going to move your hive you need to go three feet or three miles because otherwise the bees will lose their way and this isn't a video about beekeeping it's a video about gardening so I'm going to skip that part and just tell you that basically that three foot three mile thing can be hacked by shutting off the access points to the hive for a couple days to make it so that the forager bees have to re-establish their flight plans anyway but rather than stapling mesh across the front of my hive and doing what most beekeepers do when they are in fact resetting the flight patterns and moving a hive I only had a bunch of jumbo marshmallows that were left over from a recent bonfire so I shoved those into all of the open access points for the bees and carried the hive down here to where it would be a lot easier to manage and maintain it right next to my garden where the bees can also very conveniently pollinate all my plants but contrary to popular belief honey bees are not actually the only thing we need to pollinate our plants so come over here and I'll show you something really cool this is a pawpaw tree that I found in the forest a few years ago and when I found it it looked just like this I dug it up brought it back to my garden and planted it and it's been here for three years now and it is flowering for the first time which means that it's finally big enough that it's ready to start putting on fruit and pawpaws are so cool for so many reasons I mean it's the only tropical fruit that grows areas where it snows the fruit tastes like a mixture between mangoes and bananas it is one of the only trees I've ever seen that flowers before it puts on leaves and it is not pollinated by honey bees in fact if we had a smell-o-meter you could get nice and close to one of those flowers and you would smell the same thing I do which is a combination of yeast rotting flesh and something else gross and the whole point of that is to attract flies scorpion flies and ants which are what actually pollinates the flowers on these trees but because pawpaws are a rhizomal species which means that they spread not necessarily just by seeds but sprout other trees like this right here the fruit from this pawpaw tree will not actually be able to pollinate the fruit on this pawpaw tree because pawpaws require being pollinated from another rhizomal species how the heck that actually happens in nature like the chances of a fly visiting a pawpaw tree deep in the forest getting some pollen on it and then flying all the way out here with said pollen on its body and then visiting these flowers and actually successfully pollinating the fruit are pretty dang small so I spent the weekend as one does traipsing around in the woods and collecting other pawpaw flowers from other trees that are not attached to these and collecting the pollen on my little brush to then come and sprinkle into these flowers as well and I will admit that this particular task is probably not in keeping with my theme of lazy gardening because it's a tad ridiculous length to try to go to hopefully achieve some fruit maybe but I'll say right now that because I have to spend so little time doing other gardening tasks that most other gardeners have to do have a whole lot of garden time left over to do ridiculous things like this also just look at how cool this is like what an insanely beautiful shade of purple cool flower absolutely wild to me that this will turn into like delicious and delightful fruit and speaking of free fruit check out these figs they don't look like very much right now because they need a little bit of pruning work but this enormous bush believe it or not started as one little shoot that I brought down off of my much larger fig variety that was already growing on this property when we moved here up at the top of the hill over there the cool thing about my figs though is that just like my asparagus regardless of what's happening up above the ground all winter long even if the top part does get damaged by frost which is obviously a huge possibility around here the bottom part when properly mulched and we all know how much I love mulch is protected from the frost and the plant itself has such a healthy well-established fruit system that the new growth that it puts on will be so vigorous that will still get fruit every year my extreme frugality in the garden is dictated yes of course because I am on a budget also because it is a bit of a game to see how inexpensively I can do this stuff but also because I started in a small space expecting to expand it to a much larger space that without my propensity for propagation would be hugely expensive you can see behind me about a thousand things that I have propagated in this garden that I expect to be able to propagate out in that part of the garden very shortly but this didn't all start as one seed it actually started as a few plants that I've now propagated to be this whole row of asparagus that I can now pick a huge bounty from all spring long look at these monsters the wild thing about these green ones and these purple ones is they are different varieties but when you cook them they both turn green this fern looking thing is actually one of the asparagus heads that I chose not to pick because it was a little bit too spindly and it in fact will grow up and create more seeds that I'll be able to harvest later on this season and that's actually kind of part of the goal with asparagus is knowing exactly how much to pick and how much to leave to make sure that there's enough foliage that can collect sunlight and send it down to create more roots to create a healthier stronger bigger fatter asparagus next year now that we've picked enough asparagus for dinner let's move on this is genuinely borderline ridiculous and I truly didn't actually intend for spinach quite this big but let's just say healthy soil healthy plants and perhaps I do truly pride myself in growing things this enormous because I've been made fun of my entire life for being so small but whatever the motivation I'll take it it feeds my family well that's like a whole salad in one piece of spinach really good thing to remember when we're picking spinach or lettuce is to never take more than one third of the plant at a time so we'll take one third of the plant's growth as we are picking but no more than that and also no less and here's why because if we were to just leave this it would put on exactly the right number of leaves for it to collect enough of the sun's energy to create seeds which would then keep the species going but by picking part of the plant we are actually able to stunt the plant's growth a little bit and trick it into thinking that it actually has to grow more leaves before it makes seeds so we can basically hack nature and get more food as a result and after a quick little sprinkle thank you for watering my garden we are back so actually the fact that it just rained super hard for a few minutes reminded me that I wanted to tell you about a big mistake a lot of gardeners make so you'll notice that the top of the soil here is really wet and a lot of gardeners will water their garden every day or every other day for like a few minutes at a time and the problem with doing that is that do you see how just underneath the top surface of the soil it's still pretty dry in here as lazy gardeners if we are ever going to take the time to water our gardens which I pretty much don't but if we are going to do that we don't want to give it a sprinkle and just kind of like run the hose over we want to do a deep soak once every week or every two weeks to make sure that we're actually penetrating the top layer of the soil and getting down to the plant's roots what's really interesting about this little rain shower experiment that obviously I orchestrated is that we can just pull the soil surface back and we can see that right here it's a little bit dry however because my soil is so healthy and because I've gone to such huge lengths to protect my soil from evaporation from the sun if you actually even push this dry layer a little further back you can actually see that down in here where the plant's roots actually are even after almost a week of 80 degree days it's still nice and moist down here where it actually matters and that's why we as lazy gardeners really want to focus on building up our soil health which a big piece of that is adding organic matter if you want to know more about what I do in my garden to reduce my need for watering check out my spring garden prep video it's somewhere here and you can click on that and go watch that too let's go look at the rest of the garden so as we walk this path over here you'll see the start of my little pea shoots and don't be fooled by the fact that I just said that it's been 80 degrees for a few days because here in Tennessee we don't have four seasons we have 12 and we are currently in what's known as the spring of deception where the sun shines and it feels really warm and wonderful but we're probably still in for another frost so don't be one of those suckers that goes to the home center on the first sunny day and buys their tomato plants only to have to go back and buy them again a few weeks later when it's actually time to plant them right next to my peas here you'll see my hops starting to come up and this is actually my favorite time of the year for hops obviously not because they're actually growing in a usable hops for my beer brewing but because I love propagation I love getting more free plants from the plants that I already have planted and hops are actually really tricky to propagate if you try to do it later in the season but due to my extremely loose soil and the fact that I really pay attention I can actually grab some of these shoots that are headed in the wrong direction and they have enough root structure in and of themselves to actually just pop them out here and we can take them and plant them up against the fence so we can get a little bit of shade cover for our strawberries so that we can get some more strawberries in the heat of the summer sun as we come along here we're going to revisit the asparagus patch for a second so because asparagus is an early season crop and it's one that we have to wait for two years to harvest from the time we first plant those seeds we want to think about what else we can plant in these beds with our perennial crops the ones that come back year after year and one of my favorite things to interplant with my asparagus is garlic and onions which we eat a whole lot of here the cool thing about all of that is that mid-season the garlic and the asparagus are done which then leaves room for all kinds of summer annuals so things like beets and carrots and other things that are going to go deep in the soil break it up even further bring nutrients up from deep in the ground up to the top layers of the soil which will then serve next year's short annuals like our garlic and our onions another especially cool thing about planting onions with my asparagus is that aside from the awesomeness of the natural pest repellent that comes with planting onions because they're stinky is that asparagus really likes to just keep having stuff mounded on top of it so i'm consistently throughout the season top dressing this as needed with compost which makes a deeper bed makes for a richer planting medium and just keeps everything nice and healthy in here because i did make the mistake last year of using a lot of fresh leaf mulch in here there's a ton of little leaf seeds in amongst this stuff which is really frustrating to have to deal with but honestly i don't actually weed my garden i also don't really care if those are growing if they grow up into something big and obnoxious obviously i'll take care of it but in the meantime i just let it happen because it's okay but another way that i'm combating that is actually just by planting strawberries in here because these strawberries will provide great ground cover throughout this whole area over time of course as they spread and that'll help to keep the asparagus weed free and also provide some extra snacks along the way and since we're down here already i'll just point out some little baby asparagus asparagus if you will this is what they look like the first year that they're coming up from seed and it's just like a tiny little asparagus fern here you'll see a female asparagus plant yes there are girl and boy asparagus plants we know that this is a female because look at all of these seed heads actually i don't really love having a lot of female asparagus because they put a lot more energy into producing seeds than they do into producing edible asparagus spears but you know we love propagation around here so we have to have at least a few seed producers and just for the fun of it i planted a couple grapevines in my asparagus patch this year because again we're not going to be digging this ground up anytime soon and it'd be cool to either let this mature and leave it forever and maybe make a little trellis of some sort down this thing eventually or you know just pick it up and move it when it's ready to move somewhere else my favorite thing about constantly making more free plants for myself is that i never have to be too precious about any of them as we move on down this line you'll see that i have planted an invasive species in my garden this is a trifoliate orange this is a citrus plant that grows citrus successfully in a winter climate but again it is somewhat invasive so i may or may not regret actually putting it in here time will tell this here is my hardy kiwi plants i need to do a little bit of maintenance here because you can see they're starting to compete a little bit but that's no problem every time i need a thin plant is a fantastic opportunity to create more of them ah i hope our pollination worked with this pawpaw i would love to get some of my very own fruits this year patience it turns out is a virtue in the garden here we've got some more great plants and we're still holding out hope for this plum tree that daniel and i tried to rescue by the way if you are planting any fruit trees this year make sure you check out our fruit tree planting video 12 mistakes that are probably killing your fruit trees and you can see everything that i did wrong when i planted this plum tree four and a half years ago that has now led us to being four years behind on getting plums which conveniently leads me to where i was going to plant these hops we just pulled out because you can see some weed pressure coming in from the edges of the garden i'm actually about to move this entire fence because we're expanding the garden out into this whole pond area here so these hops aren't going to grow up along a fence and do anything really for us but what they will do is grow all through this area and keep these weeds at bay at least until i get something else down and again free plants no problem no preciousness and because we're not 100 sure about the success right here we're going to plant two of them just to be sure and speaking of ground cover here's some oregano that i stole from another area of the garden because again when there's weed pressure coming in that we don't want we want to replace it with stuff we do want and oregano is in the mint family and it spreads like wildfire too so between the strawberries the hops and the oregano i think we should be covered around here that wasn't even an intentional pun either high five right in here since i happen to have my transplanting shovel handy i've been propagating the dahlias that i brought all the way from montana and have transplanted in every house we've lived in since we got married my dad and i planted these together for our wedding and like back in the day i remember being super precious about everything dahlia and now i'm like these dahlia weeds have got to go and if you're not blessed to be gardening in the great state of tennessee where even annuals like dahlias turn into perennials that multiply like bunnies you probably don't get how i'm calling a dahlia weed because i also for the first 12 years i was doing this thought that these were more precious than the sun however the sun is not that precious here either it's getting real hot already in april i'm just gonna put these in a little pot for my dad it's my dad's birthday in a couple weeks and i have a dahlia growing competition every year spoiler alert i win so i just figured i would toss these in a pot for him just to twist the knife a little bit happy birthday i win also these are fig roots we'll just tuck those back into the soil over here look at my little baby figgies coming up this also is from the great fig propagation project of 2023 by the way as i'm digging all through here check out all this mycelium and those beautiful root hairs just grabbing everything and holding it together one of our biggest secrets to plant fertility and also water retention in the soil is continually adding organic matter that will encourage mycelial growth because mushroom fungus mines phosphorus the p in the npk formula if you've ever bought plant fertilizer you've looked at the label as good lazy gardeners we don't want to have to add anything ourselves we want the plants to go in search of it themselves as you can see below me i'm still in the middle of my spring garden refresh project every year i take the pathways that have decomposed a little bit and i rake them into the garden beds that becomes the refined mulch to keep my garden beds nice and moist all summer long and then i put down cardboard to help with weed pressure and to be totally honest now that i'm this far into my gardening project and the weeds have been pushed out to the garden edges so successfully i wouldn't actually need the cardboard if it weren't for a little prideful mistake i made a few years ago that i am now probably going to spend the next two or three years having to undo and i'll show you that come on over here i spent a lot of my young life in asia and passion fruit is one of my very favorite fruits it happens to be the state wildflower of tennessee and i was so excited to find it in the wild and plant it in my garden and every tennessee native told me not to plant it in my garden mostly because it spreads like a noxious weed i was very stubborn i said the more passion fruit the better and i now will literally and figuratively be eating those words for forever because the number of passion fruit vines literally everywhere has become the new bane of my existence you know you win some you lose some oh sweet we're getting more wood chips a gardener's dream look at this daniel what a hero the best lazy gardeners befriend their local arborists because not only will they help you fix every problem you've caused with all the fruit trees on your property but they'll also come and bring you sweet beautiful organic matter to spread all over your property and improve your soil yeah he's good to just keep coming i actually did a little accidental excavation project looking for a water line and uh so this would be great actually joy to the world sweet you are the best we'll use the tractor and get those out the chickens will love it thanks bro appreciate it okay back to the garden here i'm just going to while i'm standing here with my shovel grab this little sunflower that planted itself yes this is the lazy gardener way which we love except this thing's going to be about 14 feet tall and i don't want that right here so i'm going to put it over here where i do want it the raspberry patch loves a good sunflower in it and by that i mean i love a good sunflower and raspberry patch because it looks cool just give it a little they're a little old to eat but we've got some wine caps in here these are a little past their prime but look at those root systems we love some mushroom growth in the garden oh oh my gosh look at all that mycelium that's the good stuff right there you guys keep doing your thing oh more passion as long as we keep feeding these wine caps new wood chips every year they'll keep spreading their mycelium around and we'll have more and more wine caps every year now we've got some grape vines i found in the forest back here you've got all kinds of muscadine grape vines that grow back there so why not plant native tennessee plants in my garden where they're going to thrive because obviously those ones take care of themselves just fine hopefully these ones safe from all of the uh snackers in the forest will provide me with some delicious and delightful grapes you can see about 10 bajillion strawberries that are about to come pro tip don't plant your strawberries this close together hilariously i thinned my strawberries massively this fall and they still came back with this much vigor so we're just going to have to try harder and by thinned i mean i pull each of the crowns and plant them elsewhere which is how we started originally with 25 strawberry plants and now we have 7 billion over here you can see the dahlias that survived the thinning they're all growing up in this row i decided one row of dahlias is fine mostly because i don't need six rows of dahlias and no room for the actual food that i want to grow and over there you can see that if you watched our spring garden setup video you saw me throw a whole bunch of seeds out in my newly prepped garden bed and they are now coming up in fact so prolifically that we may have to in fact do some spinning but that's okay oh passion vines everywhere i would i'm trying not to be too tempted to get distracted and not pull them but every time i see them i just want to nip it right in the bud it's okay i'm not too proud to admit that i was wrong oh we got a good chunk of it there all right i'm gonna stop fishing picking passion flower vines at least for a few minutes okay i like let me just get this one it's not technically weeding if i planted it well the good news is it did us the favor of really loosening our soil deep down to the center of the earth whoo self-control self-control and we're doing a tour with some spinach you can see some little amaranth coming up that's fun amaranth is an ancient grain which is also a really beautiful pop of color in the garden and a trap plant which traps a whole bunch of unwanted pests in the garden and they come and eat it instead of eating your beloved plants oh a strawberry ha ha the best part about having a garden is all the snacks and might i introduce you to one of my favorite lazy gardening hacks letting all of my annual plants the ones that have to be planted by seeds year after year go to seed after they make these really beautiful flowers this is arugula also known as roquette but you see their little seed pods coming up here this actually came from a seed that was accidentally spread by a plant last year and we're just going to let that whole process keep going because then we'll get more and more arugula throughout the season without having to go to all the trouble of tossing a tiny seed in the ground to some little wine caps coming up over here some brassicas some dill that's self-seeded weeds but we don't care too much about those oh a zinnia is coming up that's cool some buttercup lettuce that came up from some accidentally planted seed all of these onions came from one onion plant over there that went to seed and just spread its seed oh i see my cilantro is actually almost going to seed and here's a little pro tip we talked about with greenery and stuff not wanting to pick more than one third of the plant at a time but you can actually circumvent that rule in cases such as these or when you want to try to discourage the plant from actually going to seed and you want it to kind of start over the growth process this is going to massively stunt it and it may not actually recover that well but the chances are kind of high that it i'll be able to get at least a couple batches of cilantro from all these plants after doing this before it puts all of its energy into seed making plus cilantro is both my bunny and my donkey's favorite food so not a bit of it will go to waste and you can also see we're not super precious about how we pick it either howdy hey bubby you want a little snacky there you go make sure you share with bella don't get a tummy ache now the donkeys are on a diet mercifully this stuff isn't too fatty but look at how good they are i really wanted to make this like rocky style like fitness video showing them getting in shape but i didn't get around to it look at you look how good you look buddy oh and as you can see some more of my handful seed broadcasting has paid off got some buttercup lettuce some spinach some more brassicas also all this may look like i actually bought something for the garden but let's not be fooled here this was actually bedding from my bunny cage and i put all the little bunny poops straight into the garden bed and the plants as you can see are quite happy about all the free poops bunny poop is one of the few poops that you actually are okay to put directly on your garden before composting it literally any poop is going to be better for your garden if you do in fact compost it first however if you put chicken poop or anything else in your garden right straight from the chickens butt you are really going to regret it because it's going to burn your plants which kind of leads me to one of my favorite gardening misnomers that i hear youtubers talking about all the time and that is just let your chickens run through your garden and they'll poop in place and they'll fertilize and they'll eat all the bugs off your plants that is idiot advice please don't follow it um chickens will ruin everything that you love because they are the worst oh and since we're here i want to point out that my blueberry bushes that i stole from the forest are totally thriving and actually i have a confession to make one of the really delightful things about one of the learning disabilities that i've always struggled with is that sometimes i will like convince myself that the exact opposite of what is actually true is in fact the truth so i had gotten it into my head that fire ashes are really good for blueberries which is in fact the opposite of truth however looking at these blueberries i am going to say that seems like the ashes actually did something good for them but there is why we really want to things can still really survive through our stupidity howdy don't be a jerk share with your sister please remember folks oh bella good for you bella showing who's boss now remember folks it's really important to grow nutrient dense food for your families look at the nippies oh my gosh this is the best part right here now it is one of my biggest pet peeves when people call my farm animals my children but i will lean into that for just one second and say that my children have no problem eating the vegetables that i grow take that as a lesson vegetables are delicious and howdy and bella think they're cool and since we were talking about mistakes why not just lean hard into that so when i initially planted this peach tree i put the stake here to try to straighten it when it started growing crooked and i have never been able to get the stake out but now it's a fantastic place for me to point my swarm traps directly at my neighbor's beehives so that when those guys start to swarm this spring we'll catch even more little honey makers i don't really understand how bees will literally swarm into just like some random tree somewhere and like make a hive in the middle of a tree but yet your swarm trap has to be perfectly level for the bees to want to move into it but that is a thing so let me just fix that really quick while we're here now they've got like 27 hives over there surely we'll catch one of them don't worry they don't watch my youtube videos as we're walking past the peach tree i do want just point out the enormous number of peaches that are on it after daniel and i have done some very extreme pruning both last summer and this winter and after we saw all of the buds on it this year we were like man we are going to get some good peaches this year which in response to the thousands of comments we got on that video about how trees and nature just take care of themselves why would we need to prune our trees the answer is production if you want more than two or three peaches that the birds won't just immediately eat and you'll never actually see the proverbial fruit of your labor you want to keep your stuff pruned also please note how tall i am five foot two with shoes on is not going to reach very high without a ladder and i've fallen off ladders doing much dumber things than picking fruit so we got to keep these things low to the ground and speaking of fruit this probably doesn't look like fruit but this is my absolute favorite fruit i think i've actually said that like seven times already in this video but just like best friends you can never have too many this is rhubarb and you can actually see i've just pulled off a seed head because it is really again like unreasonably hot already for it being early april but this rhubarb tried to go to seed so i pulled the seed stock off hoping that it would put on a few more leaves rhubarb is just like asparagus in that you do not want to pick it until year three you can sometimes get away with year two but anyway this is now year three and i will get so many rhubarb pies and i cannot wait what fur oh this fur okay so this is dog fur which is a sensitive and so throughout the winter i want to shield it from damage from the frost and so in that i put it amongst a whole bunch of june's fur and some bunny poop secret weapon for rhubarb by the way bunny poop makes the happiest rhubarb you could possibly imagine so between junie's fur and the bunny poop she real happy lots more strawberries more blueberries i stole from the forest the former site of the plum tree we had to move which is now the current site of many blueberries i stole from the forest oh look some of them are even growing that's kind of miraculous i always forget to bring my shovel when i'm in the forest so i literally just grab them and pull them out and hope for the best and the best is usually that they don't live through my disastrous disastrous propagation attempts but no problem because it's mushroom season i'm in the forest every day uh oh wait let's go look at the garden expansion come so if you saw any of our gardening videos from last year you probably saw kevin bacon and kevin bacon and kevin bacon my three pigs building me this beautiful pond which will soon have fish in it i'm so excited but a big piece of that was that i wanted to expand the garden so we're actually moving that garden fence over to the bridge over there and that will isolate this entire section to now be a permaculture food forest and therein lies a lot of my motivation for constant propagation so you'll see a ton of figs we're propagating like different some different fruit trees some bald cypress to go along the fence there to hide the traffic that you sometimes hear in the background of the videos we've got the nectarine trees that i so preciously planted two years ago and they're finally looking almost like trees now that's very exciting got lots of strawberries tons more hops and again this is mostly for ground cover more than anything else just because i want you know i don't really care how things look i mean that's a lie i do care how things look but i don't have to take care of a lot of things so i'm putting hops on the ground instead of things like buttercups it looks a little bit more like we were intending to put something there than just a bunch of weeds everywhere over here we'll just walk you through all of these again are just more trees and other things we're going to be putting in this area this is a combination plum variety tree and if you are not as nerdy as i am about propagation and stuff like that check out rain tree nursery i'll put a link for them down in my profile they have all kinds of you know just the normal stuff but also so many cool varieties that i'm putting in this year in fact i'm actually waiting for a package as we speak i was hoping it would be here in time for this video but it's not and that's okay we're getting some keen some japanese persimmon trees some more varieties of winter tolerant kiwis some hazelnuts pecans i am so excited to get a little bit more diversity because diversity is the cure for all of the woes that happen when you are a monocropping farm over here my healthiest baby nectarine that i planted myself it's now as tall as me and i'm really proud of it i hope it actually puts on some fruit someday but we're probably another year or two away from that oh the pigs were so kind to plant me some pumpkins or something here one little way that i help the animals naturally avoid parasite problems is by feeding them pumpkins and other things in the cucurbit family because they help the animals to naturally get rid of the parasites that you would otherwise have to treat chemically and of course for the sake of my animal's health i am not in any way opposed to using modern medicine when we have to but if there's a natural solution why the heck wouldn't we use it interestingly the leaves of things in the stone fruit family are actually poisonous to a lot of livestock if they're consumed but the wild thing about this is that a well-fed animal will actually know better than to eat too many of the leaves and in fact eating a little bit of cyanide will help them to manage parasites as well mr garden spider you can go back to work i hate to prove daniel wrong but daniel and i had a little argument about whether we should or shouldn't put cardboard down so i said okay daniel we'll do a few experiments where we don't put cardboard down around the trees because he thought that if we put mulch down it would be enough but i told him in my own experience here in tennessee well mulch alone is fine for some climates like when we're in washington i never had to use cardboard but you see this stuff this is the bane of every southeastern gardener's existence crab grass johnson grass creeping grass and if you don't legitimately crush and suffocate it it will ruin your entire life actually that's an over-exaggeration it'll just make a carpet of grass around your plants but i don't want grass i want edible things so we got to get rid of this i will very lovingly tell daniel that he was wrong and then maybe do a little happy dance but we'll see oh more pumpkins that's fun actually this is kind of great because the pumpkins will spread out in this whole area and they'll shade out the grass which means that their little solar panels won't be able to get access to enough sun to make their root system strong and make them grow so if you shade out plants for long enough then they won't continue to grow so there is that the pond is looking a little gross right now and that's because i am currently speaking of solar panels learning about solar power so that i can harness the sun's energy to run my aerator my pond pump that will help keep the water moving when the fishies come so that it doesn't get so gross also all of those plants will be conveniently eaten by my grass carp that chew the corners of the grass and make it look all nice over here we have more of my precious nectarine trees another something i forgot to label but we'll be able to look at the leaves pretty shortly here and remember what it was oh more pumpkins and apple tree apple trees here are not always the most successful so i actually asked my friends at rain tree nursery to suggest some apple trees that might be a little bit more successful than my previous attempts and so i'm really excited to see how those do as well some more of my baby nectarine trees if you haven't noticed already i'm very very fond of stone fruit which is good because it's one of the only fruit trees that's really successful here over here i am using the rocks that the pigs unearthed while they were in this area over here to build the foundation for what's going to eventually become a little fishing bridge so you can sit on the bridge and look out at the beautiful garden and catch some fish which i'm so excited about but i feel like we're kind of getting actually a little distracted from the garden so let's come back over here this will all be a garden soon i promise and i will say that this looks awful right now but it is in fact going to be a lush vibrant beautiful garden very soon and i definitely think that there is something to the measure of possible or potential success for true lazy gardeners is in direct proportion to your tolerance for things looking a little chaotic i think sometimes my neighbors might get really annoyed with the fact that i have no problem with this little area right in front of the road oh there they are now looking like absolute garbage but i also know that pretty soon it's going to undergo a huge transformation and being okay with the in-between is literally what's going to allow that to happen and that's genuinely because all of this stuff that looks like a bunch of weeds i mean it looks like that because it is that but all of this is great organic matter that i actually want right here as soon as i'm ready to plant my kind of spreading crops like popcorn and sweet potatoes and pumpkins and all the things that i haven't had enough space to grow very much of over there we'll be able to move down here and spread out and i'll be able to grow a whole lot more of them and all this wonderful organic matter that's right here will literally just get covered up with the cardboard that i put on top of it and it'll add hugely to the health and fertility of the soil beneath which will help me to grow healthier plants without having to lift very many fingers which is exactly what we're trying to do here and i think my tolerance for chaos is also very much measured at this point after years of proof that knowing how good this is about to look tempers my embarrassment about how bad it currently looks and actually that applies to the chickens back here as well too chickens when left their own devices will absolutely strip the earth of course i did some tractoring that also stripped the earth over here but all it'll take is one season of the chickens being in this area with continual organic matter being added to this that will ultimately make probably some of the best soil on our farm again without me having to lift a finger and i come on over here when i was filming my spring garden prep video for that garden over there i got so many questions from people looking to start their own lazy gardens completely from scratch and so i'm currently in the middle of filming a video right now which actually might come out before this one we will see but i wanted to show you how to start a lazy garden completely from scratch in an area with really compacted soil with tons of weeds and seeds without any special tools with all found free and recycled items and in addition to the video i also have a step-by-step guide on my squarespace website and ofalltrades.com that you can go to and learn how to start your own lazy garden from scratch as well squarespace has been a fantastic resource for someone who is not super tech savvy like me to be able to document and share every step of my journey from being a total city slicker who knew nothing about any of this 12 years ago to now when i still don't know a ton about it but i'm learning more every day i have shared so many of my hard-earned lessons on my blog and if you'd like to avoid making the same mistakes that i have go check it out squarespace also gives me the option to host online courses so if you want to dive in even deeper than you can through my blog my youtube videos go check out my online store and you'll find all those resources as well as all kinds of merchandise and project plans and other cool stuff as well and if you're looking to start a website of your own maybe you have a great idea that you want to share with the world or some photos that you want to share with a client squarespace has tons of beautiful artist design templates that allow you to just drag and drop whatever you want to share with the world that then shares it with the world so as you build your site check out squarespace and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash animal trades for a 10 discount howdy oh forgot to close my garden gate and we've got some assassin snackers howdy no sir hey no sir no sir you go in the way you came out come on you know how you got in here you go right on out excuse me sir those little garden snackers antics with animals are never a boring adventure if you want to see a really funny video about the day i asked the internet to name my new cow go check out this video i'll see you there cheers howdy i gave you snacks as a precious little gift you really need to not bite the hand that feeds you literally figuratively and everything else but you're so cute how could i stay mad at you