What's growing in my garden in December? | Garden Vlog Ep 20 2025

Welcome to December in South Carolina and despite the cold there's actually a lot going on in the garden and I can't wait to show you. Over the past month or so we've had quite a bit of cold but also a fair bit of warm which is typical for South Carolina. It can never really decide that it's winter this time of year. So we've had a low of 21 so far Fahrenheit which is about negative six Celsius which is pretty cold for this area but not the coldest that it can get and it was only very briefly that cold. Today it's about 50 degrees Fahrenheit and you know it's it's mostly pleasant out here and this is kind of the baseline for what a winter day is going to be like. Filming this time of year gets a little bit harder because of how low the sun is in the sky but because of our temperatures here I do get to grow a garden year round. So before I fully get into the tour I do want to make an announcement for all of you. I am starting in January a free online course. It is going to be hosted right here on YouTube using their new courses feature which I'm currently still figuring out but every day in January a new video in the course is going to come out. Like I said it's entirely free and it is focused on new gardeners and taking you through planning your garden as a new gardener. If you are not a new gardener I still think it would be helpful for you because a lot of the stuff that I'm going to go through in the planning process is stuff that you might not have considered before. A lot of it was stuff that I certainly didn't consider until I was farther into my gardening career. So you might just want to watch out for those videos if you do want to catch that and you are not already subscribed to me subscribing will definitely make a big difference in whether or not those videos are actually shown to you. So just keep that in mind. And now let's get to the tour. So starting off with what would normally be the tomato row here. I have planted a bunch of different brassicas along the edge and then directly underneath there is a row about three wide of garlic. These first ones up here are brussel sprouts. I started these from seed a few months ago now and you can see they're just now starting to make little baby brussel sprouts. So that's pretty exciting. And as we go farther down the row you can see a couple of them have kind of died for no apparent reason. These two right here are kohlrabi. I think this one might actually bulb up we'll have to see. My sage over here this I got this pretty late in the summer actually and it is doing amazing. It's like quadrupled in size since I got it. And then I think I didn't label because that's how I am. I think the rest of these down here are going to be broccolis of some kind. I haven't seen any evidence of them heading up at all unfortunately. Also I'm working on mulching. I don't I have done like about a third of the garden at this point with this wood mulch but there's still a lot more to do. You can see the line where it stops right there. Anyways coming back to this corner of the garden. With everything all cleared out here the rosemary has finally had space to kind of spread out and I'm hoping that it will take up more space next year and be just like another barrier plant for me against the grass against pests etc. Unfortunately the lemongrass does not survive the winter here. I have already taken out some pieces of it to grow indoors for the winter like I do every winter and I will have to replant it from scratch. But for now it's fine being dead where it is and right next to it are some of the first winter plants that I put out so they are the biggest. I have a couple of kohlrabi here as well. You can see how much bigger this one is and this one was actually looking really really good until it just split open and I'm not entirely sure why it did that but it has been home to some ants ever since then. I also have this gorgeous spinach here with these red veins. I have a randomly variegated cabbage. They're not supposed to be like this but this one just got the genetics for it anyway and it's actually maybe starting to produce a little bit of a head in there so that's exciting. And this one is also a brussel sprout and then next to that is this gorgeous bronze fennel. This is not taking the cold as well as I expected but I think it will survive and this fennel is supposed to be a perennial so it will hopefully be here year after year and get a little bit stronger for next winter. So one of the things taking up the most space in the garden right now is actually onions. You can see where the line of mulch ends. That is where the edge of onions begins. It's about this wide right here and I'm just not mulching over the baby onions with the wood mulch. I'm probably going to come in with some straw mulch later. You can see these starts right here. They are starting to put out new leaves since I put them in so that's a good sign that they actually are getting rooted and are probably going to survive. This pile of mulch and every other random pile you see in the garden, these are all turmerics that I am protecting for the winter so that they come back in the spring. As we come down along this path in the garden there's not really a whole lot going on. Lots of weeds and stuff. I took all of those sweet potato vines and piled them up here as just kind of mulch for this general area since I'm not planning on having anything there for a few months. And then this section back here where the corn was and where my pigeon peas still are and hopefully will come back next year, we have another patch of onion. I planted 300 onion starts this year because I was realizing that my perennial onions just haven't gotten quite established enough for me yet. So hopefully this will be the last year for annuals but I said that two years ago. I did go ahead and cut back this lemon balm that was here. This is another barrier plant. It is supposed to help kind of take up space and be something tall as a physical barrier but also hopefully shade out some of this grass that is trying to get into my garden and it actually does a pretty good job. And at this point, as you may know, the work is going to be in keeping this thing from taking over rather than actually taking care of it because at this point it is very well established. Right over here on the last row, these are also some brassicas that were planted a little bit earlier and this is mainly where my kale is. I've got a lot of purple kale this year which I think is just really really pretty. I also have some walking onions over here. They are finally looking sturdy to me and I think they will do a much better job. I really had to dig some of them out of the grass over here. They were teeny tiny and being shaded out but now they are kind of spread and looking good. I do have a spinach back there but it's not doing so well and a bunch of different types of kale as well as I think this one is a broccoli just based on the way its leaves are. This one's obviously more kale, lots more kale and then this section over here, these are cauliflowers and these are also not heading up quite yet and they theoretically should by now. That would be ideal but I was a little bit late on all of this and I'm just kind of happy to have what I have. Now if you take a look right in here you see those little sprigs coming up that is some more garlic that I put in. Right in here we have a little bit of garlic. I have garlic everywhere. Last year I did not get nearly enough garlic. I felt like I kind of had to ration it out. I'm still rationing it out because I am not going to harvest this garlic until June or so and so I went pretty far overboard on the garlic for this coming year and hopefully I will have as much as I want. This section right here was supposed to be my lettuce patch. I tried really hard to plant it with like kind of a variety of stuff. I put a lot of lettuce seeds down but I also put some radishes and some carrots and I found out later that those lettuce seeds were too old. None of them germinated anywhere I planted them and so instead chickweed grew in its place. This is actually edible. It's not as tasty as lettuce but it is nutrient dense and you know edible like I said. You can see there are like some carrots that did manage to come up in here so we'll see how those turn out and they do have a couple of radishes as well. You can see down there that poke of red and so I do come out every once in a while and grab a radish or two but this area did not turn out like I had hoped. And the rest of the row here is just my dead sorghum stalks. I decided to leave them just because I don't have anything to put in their place. I'll tear them out when I need the space and until then they're fine to just be there. They are actually probably insect habitat at this point. A lot of insects like to overwinter in dead stems so if you want more beneficial insects in your garden you might consider leaving something like this over the winter for them. The raised bed area is actually looking really nice for how cold it's been. A lot of the stuff especially up here is pretty much evergreen. I mean there's not much you can do to sage to make it unhappy in my experience. The fever few is having a good time with the cold and the oregano is also kind of at peak right now. I've been harvesting a lot of it to dry. My thyme plant, it looks a little worse for the wear. If you look closely you can see that it still has leaves on it but a big section of it is dead and I will have to trim that back eventually but again this is good habitat for now and I'll probably do a lot more of that trimming in the spring especially when the plant has the energy to kind of recover from a big trim. In the tiered raised bed we still have garlic tribes which have gone to seed and are kind of, you know, they're not going dormant for the winter but they're definitely not looking their best right now. This thyme over here is actually doing really well. This is the one that I harvest from right now just because it looks so so nice and these right in here are my onion chives which if they survive the winter that would be excellent because last year my onion chives did not survive the winter. And then this upper tier right here we have some very sad but surprisingly still alive dill. You can see it almost looks like it's like frost damaged and like this section here definitely is but it kind of frost damages not to the point of death so it's still alive in a lot of ways. And then my carrots are coming back. These are the ones that a caterpillar ate all of them like almost fully to the ground and they've been taking a long time to recover but in here I've been seeing some like actual carrots forming so I am hopeful that I will at least get something out of here even if it's not as good as it would have been without the caterpillar. This section down here is the Greek oregano so the other one we saw was Italian. They have slightly different flavors and growth habits. This one grows kind of more flat than the other one and excitingly in here we have a new type of perennial onion. This is a mountain multiplier onion. Hopefully I can go ahead and get these established as well for yet another perennial source of onions. And this raised bed right here is empty right now but I actually have a lot to tell you about it. So this is where all of my sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes were as well as my American ground nuts. And so I came in and harvested all of the Jerusalem artichokes and they have spread. Like I thought having them in a raised bed would keep me safe from how easily they spread but they went under the side of the raised bed and started kind of making roots in the edges of the yard. I moved this out of my way while I was harvesting just to have more room and underneath it more sunchokes. So we'll see in the spring I bet they will be coming up in the yard all the way around here. We will have to definitely mow them down to keep them in check. And so I also as I was going through here I could not help but pull up the ground nuts but they were not very well established and not very ready so I just kind of stuffed them all back in and hopefully they will survive another year. We'll see. This raised bed here I've actually had a lot of trouble with. I've probably planted it like three or four times at this point trying to get something to survive. I did get really good radishes in here, icicle radishes and now everything that's left is huge and so they're not going to be very good for eating but they will make good seeds and the seed pods are edible as well as I would just also like to have seeds for next year. And you can also see I do finally have some little lettuce starts in here. I got new seeds and then they came right up but by the time I had figured that out it was getting much colder and so these things have been growing much more slowly because it has been so cold. So this raised bed right here this is where my asparagus is. I do need to cut back these ferns and the strawberries that I put in last spring or I guess this spring, previously this year, they are starting to take over and I bet in the spring I will have fruit from them finally. This giant mass right here is my yarrow and it is doing a really good job taking over so I think I need to dig up some of it and kind of reduce it in size. I'm probably going to try and transplant it over to the main garden as more of those barrier plants like I was talking about and I probably will eventually put it all in the main garden but for now I'll leave a little bit in here just because I know it'll survive in case my transplants don't. The rest of this raised bed is some calendulas that look very very sad but are somehow still putting out flowers. Some more strawberries and some of my saffron right here. They've all bloomed. I collected my saffron and now I think they'll just be like this for the rest of the year. This final raised bed here is also planted entirely with garlic, like from edge to edge, fully planted. You can see some of it started coming up but a lot of it has not and they probably won't until spring now that it's fully cold. I'm checking out the berry patch right now. The St. John's Wort is doing a good job being a cute little ground cover. Over the summer it got kind of crazy. It got really tall and right now when it's cold it's really it stays close to the ground and it looks really really nice. My blueberries are turning for the winter because of the cold and it's so pretty. I also have another garlic chive here that went to seed. This one looks a little bit happier but still not quite as fluffy as it would be in the summer. And some of my strawberries are actually surviving. If y'all remember the grass got really out of control here this year and I had to do some massive trimming work to keep the strawberries from being shaded out and I'm really happy to see that a lot of them survived. So hopefully we can put in a little extra effort to help them take over back from the grass. And then coming over to the blackberries, I am thinking that I might start cutting back the blackberries as in cutting them so that I have fewer blackberries. I just don't like them as much as my raspberries and I'd rather my raspberries start taking over this direction. Down here below them I do still have my rhubarb. This I haven't harvested from yet but you can see it's still putting out new leaves. It doesn't mind the cold all that much although some of these bigger leaves seem to have gotten damaged a little bit. I swear this little plane is doing circles above my house. Goodness. Something that I think is really interesting is if you look at the difference between the grass, the dead grass in here versus the dead grass over here, I haven't cleared this area out at all. This has just got so much less grass in it because the leaves from the rhubarb were so big and shaded out the grass really really well. And then this area didn't have any of that so the grass was able to grow. I do need to come through and kind of clear this out. I don't know when I'll do that. At some point before spring. And it hasn't yet gotten cold enough for the raspberries to fully die back. You can see they're still making new little leaves right in there so you can see that's not quite as cold as it will eventually get. And then past the berries is all the new trees that I planted. The pineapple guava looks like the temperature has not changed at all. It is just having such a good time with the cold, with the heat. It doesn't seem to really care. Everything else though looks really sad. My figs definitely crispy crunchy. My pomegranate tree also crispy crunchy. And if we come up to look at the citrus, I actually have an interesting situation here. So I have some incandescent Christmas lights wrapped around my citrus to kind of help keep them warm at night. I'm sure my neighbors are a little confused as to why I put up Christmas lights just on these twiggy little bushes. But I think it does help and if it gets any colder at night than it currently has been, I will also put frost fabric over the top of these. But you can see, as it is currently, they seem to be handling the cold just fine. The last little area to look at is just right here. My elderberry tree is coming along. It is suffering from the cold but hasn't died back very far yet. I think it will die back some more before the end of the winter. My raspberry that's over here, this one has fully lost all its leaves. Hopefully it comes back. This plant was pretty tiny when I put it in. And then this fig right here which I thought died last year and did not. We will see if it comes back to live another year. So the garden in December definitely is a lot less work, a lot less stuff going on than in the summer as you saw. But now that I have gotten through all of the planting of the garlic and the onions, gosh the onions took forever. Now that I'm through all of that, I do get a bit of a rest here in December and January. And then February, already it's gonna be time for me to start seeds for next summer's garden. So I'm going to try and take advantage of the break. And like I mentioned at the beginning, I am putting out a free course in January. So if you do want to catch that, make sure that you are subscribed. Thank you guys so much for watching and until next time, happy gardening!