Garden With Me As I Plant My 2026 Spring Garden!

Welcome back to Jacques in the Garden. It's mid-March. Spring is literally just around the corner. While I have already declared it spring here in San Diego, as you can see, it has clearly arrived. We have calendula blooms, nasturtiums all over the place, greenery, but tomorrow and the next day are supposed to be in the upper to mid-90s. So it's about to get roasting out here in San Diego and we haven't even hit spring yet, so today we're going to try to get some normal spring gardening done. We're going to get some determinate tomatoes in the ground, we're going to get some peppers in the ground, sunflowers, bush beans, compost, mulch, all the normal things that we normally do for a spring gardening day. That's what we're doing today. So come garden with me as we try to beat the heat and get as much done as we possibly can in the next couple of hours. Right here in the front yard, usually an area I don't film very much in and an area I don't do that much in, I have this one garden bed back here where I sometimes will plant things like corn, garlic, or onions, things that I could just kind of set and forget off to the distance. It's usually too busy and loud out here to do much in the way of filming, so we got some tomato fertilizer here, got some mulch in the box. So what I want to do here with determinate tomatoes is we're not pruning anything, we're not planting them extra deep, we're just popping them right into the ground with a healthy dose of fertilizer. So just to give myself enough space, I'm going to go ahead and go pretty central back here because we're also going to be using tomato cages. Now in general, I would say tomato cages are not very useful. That's just the truth. But when it comes to actually growing determinate tomatoes, they can be quite useful. That is basically where they shine the most. And you'll see why in a moment here. But let me dig out these holes and I'll drop some fertilizer in and I'll show you exactly what I'm doing for planting. All right, so these guys are definitely ready to go. Let me show you what it looks like. So here's the root ball itself. You can see it's definitely quite loaded up with roots. I'm going to break this lower leaf just to kind of clear it off the ground here. But what I want to show you is the very tip of the growth here. Because the way that you could tell a determinate plant is it produces these flower clusters on the main branch, like where it seems like it's going to be producing a new growth. Instead, you get these flowers. So usually on a regular tomato, that would be where a node would be, like a new branch coming up for indeterminate. But on the determinate, they end with the flower cluster. So that is very normal. That's kind of a little way you could tell if you have a determinate versus indeterminate if you're not really sure. First one in. So this one, I kind of bent the stem on it a little by accident. But since it's a tomato, I'm actually not worried at all because tomatoes don't seem to care. So as you'll see, I'm not removing the actual node, like the new growth in there, but I am snapping off that lower leaf just to keep it from touching the ground. In fact, I'll do that on this plant over here as well. That shouldn't affect too much of the yield in general. With, remember with determinate tomatoes, they have a determinate amount of growth they could put on and that's it. So you don't want to sort of overtake from them. If you chop too much off, if you prune too much, you're just not going to be able to support the amount of tomatoes they want to produce. So tomatoes have now been planted and we're definitely going to put straw here. Remember I said it's going to be in the 90s. So we want to give these tomatoes as much support in the heat saving and water saving department as possible, especially since this is in the front yard. I'm not really checking on these much. I want to make sure they're covered with as much mulch as they can possibly get. And also I will say they have a simple irrigation timer here. This is one that is just off a regular timer that you attach to your hose bib, nothing complicated. It's just designed to turn on. I think I set it to like every two or three days and that should be plenty for this kind of garden. Actually, since I added that little timer on the hose there, the garlic and onions behind me have also been growing much better. And so when in doubt, one of the best investments you could ever make in your garden is automating your irrigation. Watering the straw just keeps it from sort of flying away and just locks it in place. And watering your plants helps reduce any air pockets that might be in the ground when you're doing that planting action. And you just want to avoid air pockets directly up against your roots. So there's the first project done. Four determinate tomatoes planted in the ground with fertilizer, with extra mulch. And I finally get to use my tomato cages because like I said, they're never going to be big enough for any of the normal indeterminate plants I prefer to grow. But for determinates and for peppers, eggplants, these things are amazing. I'll put a link in the description for them. So now let's pop over to the regular garden and do some work over there. The next project on our list involves filling this up with, well, plants. But before we do that, I wanted to show you one of my prides and joys here in the garden, and that is my wheat patch here. It is growing so well. I did not expect it to be this vigorous and actually come to near maturity already before we even hit spring. This is actually a winter white wheat that I planted, I believe, back in December. It's already plumped up. It's already done its pollination. So all of this is fully pollinated. And now at the ripening stage, I'm so excited to do it again. I think I skipped last year. I can't keep track of time anymore, but I had so much fun growing it that I wanted to do it one more time. I mean, just look at this movement, guys. Do you hear that? Beautiful stuff. So beyond that, I'm also extremely happy with how the garlic looks this year. It's very tall. It's actually above my knees at this point, and it's looking very nice and green. There's only a little bit of yellow fringing on some of the leaves, but nothing that I'm worried about whatsoever. I'm just really happy to see that there's no rust on it. I think I'll get a really, really good harvest out of this. Now, the area in question that we are here to work on is that over there. It might appear like it's a bunch of plants, and it is. But hidden beneath all this right here is a raised bed. So what we need to do here is unfortunately destroy a lot of this really, quite honestly, beautiful nasturtiums. I really love this Fiesta blend with the beautiful pink blooms. But we got to get in this bed. We got to do some resetting on it. I want to add compost. So let's go ahead and start ripping and filling that bin. All right. So this is going to be a little bit sad just because the nasturtiums are beautiful, but we just got to get in there and just deal with it. Now, in this bed, I did have peppers that I've been talking about for a while. This is what they look like now. Not much left to speak of. They've basically been allowed to just sit here and rot. Now, in theory, I could overwinter some of these, but I'm over it. I'm ready to actually move on from these. I did enjoy this Lemon Aji pepper, but it wasn't like my favorite. There's actually a couple peppers on there. I'll go ahead and toss the peppers aside. Maybe we'll pick through those later. Maybe not. I'll just toss them. Who knows? But for now, I can't decide. So I'm going to just move stuff aside. Apparently, I had some potatoes growing in there too. So, I mean, I had potatoes growing in here last year, but I haven't seen the plants. So they must have been hiding in that nasturtium mess. I'm going to get rid of all this nasturtium over here too. Honestly, at this point, when you have this much nasturtium, it also starts to become a really good place for things like rodents to hide in. And I don't want to give them any hiding places. So let's go ahead and move this out of the way. We'll take a look at this bed. And my prescription this year is to basically try to add compost everywhere I can. So I think that'll also probably be what we do here. So the soil actually feels really dense. I didn't feel it move an inch when I was stepping on it. So I think this is honestly pretty heavy soil as it is. I'm starting to debate whether I want to compost. But compost is the good solution for all problems. But I think we actually have to physically break this up a bit. It's really compact. So let me grab some tools and then we'll come in close and get some work done. It's times like this where I'm really glad I got a wheelbarrow because even though my garden's really tight, I could still maneuver the wheelbarrow through most of my garden. That's about as far as we could go. The rest is going to have to be done with shovels. So let's pop over to the bed. All right. So here's the bed in question. And I don't know why it's so compact. It's literally coming up in these big chunks here. It's not really very friable. Now, there are a lot of big chunks in here, so I don't understand why that is. Maybe there's just actually a lot of organic matter, which is a good thing. So what I'd like to do here is break up the surface layer a bit. And then we're going to be applying some compost throughout this whole bed just to try to get even more organic matter in here. That's kind of the name of the game for me this year. But basically, organic matter is a good thing when it comes to nematodes and pretty much anything else in your garden. So the other thing I didn't really think about is that part of the reason I am so motivated to put compost everywhere right now is that I have to empty out my compost bins so that I could rebuild my new three bay compost bin. So that's another one of those little pressures on me right now is I just have to get this compost used and out of my bins so that I could build that new one. So that's pretty good there. Honestly, we don't have to do that much in here. Now let's start shoveling. The first layer I'm going to be putting down is actually all of the compost. I want to get the compost into the base layer as much as possible here because that is where I want it to be preserved and not sitting on the top where it's a little bit exposed to the elements. So let's go ahead and start shoveling. I'll probably mix it in a little bit to this base layer. Then we'll top it with that ocean forest bag and then maybe put even more compost. Very happy with how this ended up filling out. It's looking perfect, exactly what I was hoping for. So let's get all this irrigation line back on. Now if I were a patient man, I would rotate and I would not plant peppers in here right now, but I have peppers to plant. So that's what we're going to be putting in here. If I had another free spot in the garden that didn't have peppers before, I would plant there, but that's the card that we have. So I'm going to pop forward to the greenhouse, grab a flat of peppers, and we'll load this bed up. So we have some absolutely beautiful peppers to plant here. It's a mixture of Italian peppers, like long frying peppers. These were actually ones that I got at the nursery, I want to say over a month ago. And what I did is I bought two six packs. I potted them up into these deep four inch four cells and that's allowed them to get really truly gigantic. And this is mainly because I kind of mentioned it when I started all my peppers and tomatoes in that video, is that I started a little bit late this year. So this is my way of sort of catching up here. All of these are sweet peppers, except for the shishito of course can be a little bit of a wild card. But this is a total of 12 peppers and I think we could fit all of them in this bed. So let's go ahead and start laying these in here. I don't know if we'll actually get all 12. I kind of want to try spacing peppers out a little bit wider this year than I normally do. So what I'll go around doing first is I'll take my trowel and start marking out some ideas of places where I would plant them. So here's what I ended up with. We have three rows total. The first row over here is three peppers, middle row will be four, and then the end row will also be three. Now they are offset, so it's not going to be one, two, three. It's one, two, three. So you can see I have this triangle here. That gives them a little bit more space to bush up and have a little bit more space to grow properly. Now this is 10 total. I've got 12 peppers and I've decided that while I could split it even 50-50 and do five of each, I like shishitos the most. So what we're going to do is put six shishitos on this front half and then the four of the Italian frying peppers on the back section of the bed. And each hole is going to get a handful of this tomato and vegetable fertilizer. And just a quick note on these fertilizer formulations. Sometimes they do say specific things like tomato and vegetable. Just know that when it says tomato, probably the only major difference here is that it's going to focus more on the middle number, which supports fruit, and then it's also going to have some calcium added, which yes it does, to help prevent any of those blossom end rot diseases that things like tomatoes can get. But if you don't have a specific fertilizer like this, like their all-purpose one, it's great for literally everything in the garden. You don't have to get specific, but if you have it, you might as well. So we don't like to pull the plants directly out. First give them a nice firm smack on every single side. That's going to loosen up the walls and let these roots slide out beautifully. So here we go. Pepper one. First pepper of the year, not counting the peppers we just pulled, that's actually going in the ground here. So very exciting times here. Cannot wait to have a wonderful shishito harvest this year. I feel like now that I think about it, I don't even remember planting shishitos last year, which is kind of embarrassing. So this year we remedied the problem by planting six of them. Just take a look at these pepper plants. They are so beautiful. Already have flowers on them. Very very excited. I'm not excited that it's hot. I actually hate that it's hot this year and that it's going to be so hot, but hopefully I'll at least get some beautiful pepper production out of it. And the final step here is of course the application of straw, which if you didn't know is actually the bottom of a weed plant. So soon I'll be able to make my own straw mulch here, because once you collect this head, the seed head, the rest of this plant dries out and that is literally what straw is. So I'm basically growing my own mulch right next to this bed that I'm applying mulch in. Well now this bed is absolutely glowing with this beautiful straw mulch. And now let's continue on because we've got more gardening to do. I almost just bamboozled myself into thinking I was done here, when I'm clearly not. All I did was plant and lay down the mulch. And while I'm very happy with how this came together, we still need to support these peppers. Now I did mention earlier that you could put a cage, but there's a lot of cages that would need to go on this. I think I'll reserve the cages for my potted plants. And instead, since I have some nice very good strong vertical growth on all these peppers and not low branching, it's super easy to support using something as simple as a single bamboo stake. So all we have to do here, is I'll do it on this one up close here, is that you take your stake, go next to your plant, plunge it as deep as it'll go. That should be deep enough. And then in this case, since we don't have strong branches, what I like to do is I'll tie a double knot on the string directly to the bamboo first. That way that'll stop the string from moving up and down. And then what I'll do is I'll pull the string around and just tie a simple knot two times over, but with plenty of space. Now what this is doing here is very simple. All it's doing is the string cannot slide up and down, and the pepper cannot move outside of the radius that I've provided with the string. So now this is effectively supported, and that's probably the only trellis thing I need. Any of these other side branches that develop, if they're super heavy in fruit and they break, no big deal, because I'm going to eat them all anyway. So let's go ahead and stake all 10 of these peppers. So here's the first place in question where we will be doing some direct seeding. Now this trellis, I can't really find a good use for it in the middle of winter season, or whatever you want to call it here in San Diego. So I kind of just let it go wild. In the past this year, I basically just put a bunch of kale on every panel, and that's it. So what I want to do now is add some runner beans. We're going to go with the Scarlet Emperor here, and that's going to go up against each one of these poles. And then on some of these empty spaces, I actually don't have many of them, I'm going to start putting in some sunflowers. Now these are the three that I've chosen for now. We've got all three are branchers, Lemon Queen for a nice yellow, then we've got the Rouge Royale and the Evening Sun for those beautiful red deep colors that I just absolutely love. So let's go ahead and get these in. And like I said, the sunflowers, we're just going to go with wherever our heart tells us to put them. So here we are over in the South Garden, as I call it, because it is on the south side of my property. And we're in this big old cedar bed here. It's a four by eight, and I've just figured out what I want to do with it. First of all, on the end here on the trellis is various peas. I've got some sugar and snap peas, very excited for those. And then on this side over here, I've decided that what I want to do is actually put some bush beans. So I've got two different kinds here. I've got the Gold Rush bush bean and the Blue Lake 274. Both of these are very productive, very delicious, and that's all I really care about. Now that's the reason why I'm putting them on this side is important because on that side, I decided I will be putting four tomato plants. So I've got an eight foot span, should be able to fit four or three plants at the minimum. And that way, I don't really care if it's blocking much sun. I don't want to put on this side because then I'll shade the rest of this. But on that side of the garden, I can't really get that much going anyway. I've already got a huge grape that's going to be trellised over there. The only thing I really try to put on those edges are greens, which is great for a little bit of shade. So hopefully those tomato plants will be able to provide it. If you're looking at this, you're wondering, wow, what the heck is that? That's, of course, a Brussels sprout plant that is actually ready to harvest. Actually, you know what? I will pull it. All right, guys, there we have it. A nice Brussels sprout stalk from the garden. You could go ahead and knock these leaves off. The leaves are edible, by the way. I just don't need them. I've got so many collards that I literally could eat collards for the rest of this year and never run out. So here's what we've got. A nice, pretty decent Brussels sprout for San Diego. This isn't a plant that does that well here in our climate, so I'm just happy to be able to get some of these sprouts. Some of the outer leaves look a little bit gross, but those should peel off and turn into beautiful sprouts beneath, just like you get at the grocery store. The main thing I'm happy to not see on this is aphids. Because aphids are disgusting and they're terrible on Brussels sprouts. So there we go, guys. A beautiful Brussels sprout. Now let's actually plant something else in this bed. I'm gonna just go ahead and nestle it right there into that pile of nasturtiums. So let's smooth that back out. So anyway, beans. So let's go ahead and we're gonna plant them pretty densely. I find that with beans, you could get pretty wild with it. Like, the packet even says you could do every four inches, which is tighter than pretty much any other plant I could think of. So I think I'll do here is I'll go with the yellow beans from like here to here, and then I'll go green beans on this back half. Now I do have, I should have a third. Yep, another line right there. So what we're going to try to do here is we're going to just try to stay close to these drip lines to make sure they get adequate water. Now I could probably go as much as four deep, but I don't want all these beans to come at once. So what I'm going to do is succession sow these. Now the easy way to do succession sowing in this case is that what I'm going to do is I'm going to plant my beans on this side. And then once these beans emerge, like once I start to see maybe like four sets of leaves, I'll plant the next row, then the next row, every time I see those sets of leaves come. And what this will do for me is it'll allow me to get a window of a harvest that's much, much longer. If I were to all these beans at once, sure, I'll get a ton of beans, like literally maybe a ton of beans, like almost not exaggerating there, but I don't want that all at once. I want that spread over the course of say like two months instead of like two weeks. So that's a great little strategy there. Just make sure that you remember to come back through and seed these beans continuously. So that's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. You know what? I think I could get away with two rows right now. And what we'll do is we'll do the next two rows after these emerge. So first in with these Goldilocks beans, and then we'll hit the green beans. So here we go, guys. I got the mulch and we're going to just mulch this entire bed, including the area we didn't sow into, just because I don't think it's responsible for me to leave this soil exposed to the sun. Clearly it's drying out way too fast. And with the heat wave coming up, I want to try to lock some moisture in. So we'll go ahead and run the irrigation for a while after this, but let me spread this out and I'll meet you over in the greenhouse. So here we are inside the greenhouse and I wanted to show you all the seedlings because what I need to do today is pot up. Right here you could clearly see that I've got a lot of potting up to do. That's all tomatoes. I've got some more tomatoes over here, some peppers, mostly peppers. But let me just give you a quick little tutorial on how I like to pot up because it's very fast. I think a lot of people are a little precious about it. They're a little scared that they'll damage their seedlings. So let me grab one of these and I'll meet you outside and I'll show you just how easy and how rough you can really be with your seedlings. So here we are up close and personal with my tomatoes. Now in the back here I've got a lot of various potted up tomato plants. You can see some of them like this guy right here looking really happy and healthy. And then I also have some that are in the four inch four cells like these over here. Again very happy, very healthy. So here's what I like to do. At this point I will be using exclusively potting mix and my favorites are like the Happy Frog or the Ocean Forest from Fox Farm. And what we want to do here is loosely fill a container. Remember loosely and I'll show you why in a moment here. All I'm going to do is actually you know what I'll just do it up here for you guys. I'll make a little mess. We're going to loosely fill this. So just throw your soil right onto it. You're not packing it in any way whatsoever. Just go ahead and fill it literally to the brim like so. Once it's filled to the top whatever container you're using take your hand and then just scrape the top off. We're not even trying to compress. We're just moving that excess soil out of the way. So there we go. Now this is ready to go. So we need some seedlings. So let's get in here. We've got some Lemon Boy Plus. Why not? That's one of my favorite varieties. Pop the plug. Pull these out. And this is where people get very scared. Look how rough I am with these. It doesn't matter. They could take a beating. I could drop this. It doesn't matter at all. Even if I ripped all these roots off they will still grow just fine because remember a tomato can grow from a cutting. It doesn't even need those roots in the first place. But obviously we prefer to keep as many roots as possible. So here's the best way to do it. Take your plug. Roll it between your hands. That'll loosen up all that soil and the roots will start to strain themselves out. And then grab some of your seedlings and just start to like bounce and tease them apart just like that. So you see right there we've got plenty of roots on this. Plenty of roots. No big deal there. So we'll lay that right on top. Break off another or two. There we go. And so here's the beauty of potting up. A lot of people at this point are like, oh I have to baby it. Make sure I get every single root tucked in nice and easy. Not at all. Here's what I like to do. I got my fingers. I pinch part of the root ball itself like that. And I also pinch the stem to give it some support. So something like this. That's basically all I'm doing here. And then I'll take that plug. I'll take the soil like this. And I just push all the way down just like that. So what we've done here is we've buried a good portion of the stem like half an inch. That's going to help support and anchor this. It's also going to encourage more root development along that stem. And now of course we have a gap because remember we filled that soil in loosely. Which is perfect because now what I'm going to do is come back through. Just top it off a little bit. Tap it in. And there you go. So let me just do a couple more just to show you how fast and easy this is. So there. Boom. That's potted. I'm squishing that one. Doesn't even matter. Boom. That's potted. Now we just need that last one here. Now in this case I have a whole plug with one seedling that's extra small. So I'm just gonna toss that. I don't really need that many seedlings guys. This is already more than I really need. If you don't want to break up your root ball you don't have to. Like let's say you have one uh one seedling in your plug like this. Then I just take my two fingers here and I just make a nice wedged opening. Push down the center a little bit. Pop that in. And then boop. That's it. Very easy. Very rough. You don't have to be careful at all. I'm not being careful as you can see. I'm really actually yellowing this entirely. So tuck this all back in. Make sure we get all these roots settled. So you do want to give it some nice firm taps at the end here. And make sure that there is soil all the way to the top. And then get your tag. Pop it in. And now as we're pressing these down by pushing those plugs in, what we've also done is allowed all that soil to reach the bottom so that it's nice and flush at the base. Which is also going to allow us to bottom water these plants. So there you go. How fast and easy you could pot up your plants. This can work in any container but especially in the four cells it makes it very fast and easy. Now I just gotta do that like 30 more times. So thanks for watching today guys. Hopefully you guys learned a couple things along the way. And I'll see you guys next time. Good luck with your tomatoes and hopefully spring is around the corner for you as well.