Full Winter Garden Tour

Six months ago, I shared my first ever full garden tour in one take with no edits. And a lot of you really appreciated that format and asked for more videos just like that. So here we are now in the end of winter. Last time was the middle of summer. So the garden looks very, very different right now than it did then. But once again, I'll take you through the entire garden, my backyard orchard, the raised garden beds, the subtropical food forest, and show you everything along the way. I'll also talk about a lot of the maintenance and projects that I'm working on right now to get ready for spring and summer and give a little bit more details about some things that many of you have asked about, like the blueberries, like the passion fruit trellis. And also talk a little bit about my upcoming spring plant sale that I have every year. I pretty much only talk about that on Instagram, but I'll give you the dates on that here on YouTube for the first time because it's a fun plant sale. I start 2,500 seedlings, all of the vegetables that I grow in my vegetable garden, I sell there. And I'm also gonna have a lot of very rare, unique plants from my subtropical food forest. So I'll talk a little bit about that. But let's check it out. So starting here, kind of the overview of the backyard from my back deck. I've got a little privacy screen that I made with some jasmine in pots right here. And this is something that I haven't really shown before, but I just used cattle panel and conduit pipe that I spray painted. And it's been a solid little privacy screen right here for the deck. Speaking of privacy screens, a lot of people ask about this hedgerow along here. And I have a full video on that. That's a bay laurel hedgerow that I planted when I moved in. It grew in really quickly, stays nice and thick. And it's only about 18 inches wide. So it's a nice narrow hedgerow. And it's bay laurel, so edible culinary leaves. Right here, a couple of avocado trees. The younger one here is a Mexicola grande. And right here, we have a fuerte. The fuerte is starting to bud out. It's gonna have a really nice crop of flowers and hopefully get some more fruit this year. This year, I harvested my first avocado actually just the day before yesterday. Still a couple of avocados hanging on there that will hopefully ripen up soon. Then we get into the orchard. Down the center, I've got this bocce ball court slash pathway. Put this in just under a year ago using stabilized decomposed granite. I lined it with four by six redwood. So coming down this side of the orchard, first tree right here is a giant fuyu persimmon. It's the only tree in the orchard that hasn't fruited yet. So hopefully this will be its year. Next to it, got a flavor delight aprium. So apricot plum cross. You can see it's got a lot of fruit already setting on it. I've got a lot of videos on this orchard from the day of planting, all the pruning. First day I planted all these trees, I pruned them all down to knee high right there making one cut. Next year, prune them a little bit higher and just kind of keep that going. So I've got a lot of pruning videos, both summer and winter pruning, for all of the trees here in the orchard if you're interested in learning more about that. This beauty right here is a double delight nectarine. So it has these beautiful pink double blossoms all over it and one of the most delicious nectarines you'll ever eat. This is a shinseki Asian pear and then we've got the pink lady apple. This is a beautiful productive tree, very delicious fruit and it's a variety of apple that's actually self-fruitful in my area. So it doesn't need a pollinator. You can see it's getting a lot of little pink buds on it right now. All these little green spots that you can see at this point are gonna be little flower clusters. That'll get a lot of fruit. So I'm done pruning all these trees but I will have to thin the fruit of these trees once they start to set. This is a blackjack fig. I plan on doing some grafting onto this fig tree pretty soon to get more varieties on it. This is my tiger stripe panache fig. Beautiful yellow and green stripe figs with bright red flesh that tastes like raspberries. Here's my lee jujubee. This is actually the only one that I haven't pruned yet. Hasn't started a bud out but I do need to prune these. These are pretty wonky and strange to prune so I'm making a full pruning video for this. I started filming last year at this time so I'd like to be able to show you guys not only the pruning cuts that I make but the results of all those cuts. I think it helps with confidence because pruning can be very intimidating. This right here is my o'henry peach. It's my later peach tree. This is a spice Z nectar plum. And then next to it we have the Eva's pride peach, earlier peach. You can see it's got quite a bit of leaf curl on it and the reason is that this year I tried something different. I tried not to use liquid cop, the copper spray that I normally use and went with a different more organic product and it didn't work so I don't think I'll be doing that again. Then we have a giro fuyu persimmon, different type of fuyu. Then you probably noticed on both sides of the path I have these potted plants. So I've got 10 different varieties of blueberries all in these 18 by 16 terracotta pots. A lot of people asking about these blueberries so I'll definitely do a full video just on the blueberries but I want to give you a little bit more information in this video because so many people have been asking about them. So these I start fertilizing with a organic fruit tree fertilizer and a soil acidifier fertilizer just about a month ago right when I saw that they were just barely starting to wake up from dormancy and you can see they are absolutely loaded down with flowers right now. If you watched my tour last summer they were loaded down with fruit. Seems like we'll have the same outcome once again. So all these pots like everything in my garden are hooked up to automatic irrigation so you can see a little irrigation emitter right there in the center of this pot. These plants actually get watered twice a week which is the most anything in my garden gets watered. So they take quite a bit more water than some other things because they are in containers and because blueberries have shallow roots. So yeah we'll have a full video on the blueberries pretty soon. Then we get into the raised garden beds another section that I do have a full video on basically creating the most important part of this section which is the infrastructure the irrigation that goes to the beds the pathway all that stuff a lot of stuff that you can't actually see but it makes all the difference in gardens that are weed free minimal pests and minimal maintenance because with my work in the fire service I'm gone a lot has to be kind of set it and forget it. These trellises last summer had a lot of tall vining crops like cucumbers this time of year. I do a lot of peas. Peas are like the cherry tomatoes of winter or spring and fall in some places but we've got pretty warm winters here. So snow peas on that one some sugar snap peas on some others. This is all Salanova lettuce a beautiful easy to grow butter lettuce. Not all the beds are full right now because I've already started to remove some crops to prepare for summer planting. A lot of kale in this bed. This is red Russian kale. People have asked me recently well I always get asked about pest management. That's a huge topic. I practice integrated pest management so it's sort of integrated into everything. There's not one or two things that I can mention but one thing I'll mention about pest management for kale is that I've learned that well you probably noticed kale cabbage moths cabbage worms are one of the big predators on kale. Those little green worms that tend to hide right on the stem of the kale. So one nice thing about purple varieties like this is they just can't hide on there. So they usually avoid it and if not you can find them a lot more easily than you can on the more regular green kales. That tastes really good and looks beautiful. A little bit of arugula here. This bed is all garlic so I plant garlic in mid-September. I have a full garlic growing video. This is pretty much set it and forget it. You plant it in fall. Let the rain water it all winter. Start feeding it a little bit this time of year with liquid kelp and fish and then once about three quarters of the tops have died back then I'll harvest it. There's a bunch of bolted broccolini so you get brassicas that start flowering. They're pretty much done. Happens when it starts to get warmer and drier and I don't have much irrigation on these. So leave those for a bit for insects to enjoy it then I'll remove that soon. A lot of spinach growing here and then cilantro all on this side. A lot of people in warmer areas like mine make the mistake of trying to grow cilantro in summer but it's just way too hot here in summer so it'll flower and bolt pretty quickly. Then you have coriander but it's tough to get cilantro here in summer so I grow it from fall through winter and into spring. A little view looking back from this section. Some people were asking about these trellises. These are just simple arch trellises that I grew my tomatoes on last summer. I'll grow them in a different area this year because I always practice crop rotation. So these will go away but people were asking how to make them. Fairly easy to make. I have videos on cattle panel trellises. This is pretty similar. Basically I just drove a rebar stake into the ground, slid this half inch conduit pipe over the rebar and then took the cattle panels, cut them down to this width. I think it's somewhere between 18 and 24 inches and then just bent them over and hold it in place with some zip ties. You could use a metal wire but because this was just a one-year thing for me here, I used zip ties. Now we'll get into the subtropical food forest. Probably the most sad looking section of the garden right now because these plants are not necessarily adapted to grow in a colder winter area where they're native to. The winters are pretty warm and pretty dry but everything in here is surviving and some of it's still fruiting so we'll take a look at it. One example right here, got the passion fruit vines. So I'm growing a lot of passion fruit in here. Very delicious fruit. If you've never had these fresh, they're very good and that's one that grows really well here. Speaking of passion fruit, this wall right here was covered with passion fruit up until a couple of days ago when I gave it a really heavy prune. It grows very fast so you have to kind of give it a big reset every once in a while but this gives me an opportunity to show you guys the trellising system that I have along here. So being a fast growing vining plant you need some sort of trellis. The taller the better in my opinion. All I did was I bolted in some eye bolts into the eaves. Basically the two by fours that go along the roof end right there. Bolted those in and ran these metal cables down and at the base of them I drilled and anchored into this little foundation piece next to what is my detached garage and I add this turnbuckle. This turnbuckle allows you to tighten up this wire. So really nice taut wires. Very sturdy and stable. You could grow any vining plant on something like that. Right here I've got one of a few little makeshift nurseries in the backyard. I just transplanted a bunch of lemongrass. These are all things for, well a lot of these are for the upcoming plant sale. Some of them will be planted here. Tamarillo, tree tomato. Got a big one of these back there that I'll show you guys. But my spring plant sale this year will be at Cannon Restaurant on April 19th. So it's always on a Saturday in the middle of April. This year April 19th. I'll have more details on Instagram showing the exact time and date and some of the plants that'll be there pretty soon. Right here we've got a wax jambu or wax apple. Right next to it is a rose apple. Two plants here in the food forest that have been thriving but haven't fruited yet. Got a big old java plum right here. Moringa tree, great one to grow here but it does go dormant in the winter. So it looks kind of like it's dead. It's just dormant. If you ever wonder if a plant is dead or dormant all you have to do is scratch the bark. So if you scratch the bark and it's green underneath it's still alive. Scratch it and it's brown, it's probably dead. A couple of avocado trees right here. I just harvested an avocado from this Zutano avocado. And over here we've got a big old ice cream bean. This one actually fruited for me this year and I harvested about a dozen ice cream beans. I just found this one on the ground yesterday. It is well beyond being edible but the seeds will be viable in it still. So I'll plant some of these. I will have some ice cream beans trees at the plant sale. Right here we've got a black sapote, chocolate sapote. This is a babaco papaya. Delicious cold hardy papaya variety that is all female flowers and it's self-fruitful. Great one to grow in this area. Does not look or taste like the papayas that you might find at a grocery store. And here's the stock tank pool that was full in summer. My little plunge pool back here. This time of year I just cover it up to keep all the fallen fruit out of it. Got some more passion fruit right there. Over here one of my favorite fruits. This is the white sapote. Vernon white sapote is what this one is. I grow a few different varieties of white sapote but Vernon is the one that I've been getting a lot of fruit on. And it's a vigorous grower. I've actually pruned almost all of the trees here in this food forest recently because they're just starting to wake up. So right now is a great time to prune citrus like that big old orange tree or any of the evergreen trees at least here in my zone 9b because the threat of frost is gone and they're just starting to put on their new growth. So it's a good time to prune them. Right here this big old tall tree is a male oak leaf papaya. So I started this from a seed two years ago and now it's about 20 feet tall. Because it's a male it's not fruitful but it does provide some nice shade and it looks pretty cool back here. But I'll probably top it this year so it doesn't get too tall and then eventually remove it and replace it with something else. But just amazing that something this large grew from a seed in two years. Right here we've got all of the mango trees. They're all doing pretty well. Give them a little pruning but as you can see they're exposed and they didn't mind the freezes or the frost that we've had this winter. I've got a full video on this subtropical food forest showing it in a more fruitful time tasting a lot of the fruit that has been produced on these plants. So I won't go over all of it right now. You can see this guava right here is just starting to wake up. If you look close at these little nodes you can see all that new growth coming out. So that's why I know right now is a great time to prune. Basically you prune just beyond whichever node you want to become a new branch and that's what it'll do. A couple trees here that still have some fruit on them. The oak leaf papaya. This one right here. I'll have those at the plant sale. Quite a few of them. And then the tamarillo or a tree tomato. Another one growing from seed. And fruited for the first time this year. Quite a bit of fruit on it. And actually all the fruit starting to fall. I've been harvesting it for a while. It's a delicious little fruit. It kind of tastes somewhat like a citrusy tomato. Not like a regular tomato because it's not a tomato even though it's nicknamed a tree tomato. Very productive fruit though. Yeah, a little citrusy tomato. They're delicious. There's a lot of different varieties. Some of them are more sweet tropical flavored. Some of them are a little bit more savory tomato flavored. I think this one is a little bit more of a tomato flavor. More guavas. Here's one that I just planted two days ago. This is called a peanut butter tree or peanut butter plant. It's been in a pot all through winter and it's done fine. So hopefully it does well here in the ground. More passion vines. Star fruit. Gurumi chama. One of the things I'm doing. Here's the gurumi chama. One of the things I'm trying right now is some air layering. So I haven't ever done air layering before. If it works, and I hope it does, I'll have a video on it because I have been filming the process as I do with pretty much everything I do here. But the goal is to air layer some of these plants so I can sell and share some of these soon. Jabotacaba. And then we get into the little fire pit seating area over here. But first, of course, we have to stop at the staghorn fern. This beautiful specimen. So I actually got this from an estate sale in Monterey. My mom had it at her garden in Pacific Grove. It's kind of turning yellow and wasn't doing very well. So I brought it here, attached it to the fence. A lot of people ask what I do to keep it so happy. And honestly, it's just the environment. Here we have really hot, dry summers. So I'll spray it with a hose every couple days. And that's really it. I don't feed it. I don't irrigate it otherwise. It just lives right here in a fairly shady area underneath the orange tree and the camellia. So it gets dappled light all year long. Look at this camellia. This thing is incredible. Another thing that I wish I could tell you, there was some trick to growing a massive camellia, but it's just time. My house is 104 years old and this tree was here long before I was here. So I don't know how old it is, but it is a beauty. A lot of people have been asking about this grass. So this is a native mow-free sod blend. I got the sod from a company called Delta Bluegrass and it's nice. I like having a big open space back here, especially having a dog. It's got a spot to run around and it's very low maintenance. I do mow it once a year in late spring. It'll start to put up flower shoots and so I'll mow those down and that's about it. Otherwise, I give it some organic fertilizer this time of year and I water it twice a week through summer, which is for a place where we have a lot of days over 100 degrees and it's really dry. It's not very often. Right here is my little hot tub area. So it's just an inflatable hot tub inside a livestock tank. Just trying to buy some ferns. I grow flowers in this area in spring and early summer. Right now it's artichokes and cardoons. So cardoons are a relative of artichoke, but rather than harvesting and eating the flower bud, we actually harvest these stalks and they're often breaded and fried. It's an Italian vegetable. They're pretty good and they also make really beautiful flowers. So if we come back up here on the deck, you might notice that this railing is a lot different. That was a project that I had this year that I haven't talked about at all. It was just a solid railing. I put in these cable rails so that when I'm sitting up here on the deck, now beautiful, unobstructed view. So that's been a nice improvement and pretty easy little project that I might share a video on soon. Another little nursery over here with a lot of plants for that plant sale. A pinot dulce. Here's a babaco papaya that I grew from a cutting of the tree that you just saw with all the fruit on it. Yeah, a lot of fun little stuff growing there. So I told you I'd tell you more about the blueberries. This right here is the potting mix that I use for the blueberries. Any organic acidic potting mix should be good. Like it actually has a picture of blueberry on it right there. And then E.B. Stone is the organic fertilizer company that I use for pretty much all my stuff. So I fertilize them with an azalea and camellia fertilizer for the acid and then a fruit tree fertilizer that I use also for my fruit trees, my avocados, all that stuff. I just have this here to show what kind of the company looks like. But any organic fertilizer should do well if it's meant for fruits. And Sure Start is the one that I use pretty much when I plant anything in the garden, whether it's an annual vegetable or a fruit tree or anything. The other project that I'm doing right now is painting some of the fruit trees. So this is an organic tree paint and it's not necessary for everything. I don't have to paint these trees in my orchard right now because they're going to be full of leaves and they've got pretty thick bark on them. I did paint them when I first planted them because they were very exposed and they had thin bark. But what I do paint every year is any section of my avocado trees that have exposed bark. So avocados eventually will have nice thick bark that is not very susceptible to sunburn. But when they're young, they have very thin green bark like this that is extremely susceptible to sunburn. So this is south facing. If I didn't paint this, that would sunburn within a couple weeks once it starts getting warm here in spring and summer. And that would create a wound on that tree that would probably never fully heal. So do not underestimate the importance of painting your avocado trees, citrus, anything with thin bark. All right, that's the state of the state for the winter garden. If you enjoyed this video, hit that like button. If you want to see more videos like this, consider subscribing. And as always, if you have any questions at all about my garden or your garden, ask them in the comments below. Happy gardening!