One of a Kind Garden Tour Big Updates

Today's the day. It's time for my first ever garden tour. I'm going to show you all the fun stuff I've been working on in my backyard and also update you on some recent projects I've been doing, including my huge Jade plants. All right, let's go. This is what I call my electronics department, where I find at thrift stores and in my house old electronics and I turn them into planters. I do old cameras, you know, come check out the printer here. I've got the printer and some of these take a lot of effort cause they're made to last. So if I like open up, I had to make a little separate planter area for this string of rubies here cause I wanted to make it look like it was printing plants, right? Got the typewriter, you know, one of my first videos I did to show people what I do. I did this toaster and this was two years ago, two years ago. This has been in there, so it's looking good. This is my favorite one right here and I'm working on a new version of this and this is, I call it succulent reality or the succulent vision pros. I need to tighten up this strap, but you get the picture. It's super fun. And this thing, it's been in there about, I think we're going on a year and a half now, but I'm going to do a fun video on like making a better one for sure. This is the bonsai Jade that I rescued. It's doing really good. I just moved it into the sun because it's winter time and I live in zone nine B and that means that the temperatures get pretty cool in the winter and my plants take a beating. For instance, I have this Jade minima, which is a dwarf Jade variety here and I just moved it into the sun and you can see the leaves. They're starting to turn red whenever you put a Jade plant into the sun and it gets considerably more light. You're going to start to see the redness on the leaves. That's a reaction of the plant. It's not a big deal. It just shows a little bit of light stress, but it's natural. I do like doing like some standard succulent art pieces and this was an old watering can of my grandmother's. These, if they get too tall, these are like a mini pine tree. It's a type of Cressula. I topped them and you can see by me topping them, all these new shoots coming out and they're not going to start to like drip, go down like this one over here. It's kind of like swooping down like that. This backyard garden is very special to me and that is because I have been gardening in this backyard since I was very young. I think I'm around five or six years old here and this is my grandparents backyard. I helped my grandpa out and in return I get to take care of this garden and put my own special touch on it. But what's really cool is since my family's been here for so long, we have some awesome, like I call them heirloom plants. This is a weeping blue spruce I think, or a weeping Atlas cedar. You can let me know in the comments if you know better. And my grandma planted this when my parents got married. It's called the wedding tree. So it's about 40 years old. What's really cool is my grandmother was a creative gardener herself and she was able to manipulate this tree as it grew to give it this super cool design. I think that there's some symbolism here with how my grandmother trained this tree. You know, it has, it's almost like a windy road and you know, relationships, marriage, life in general, there's so many twists and turns. And I really think that she had that in mind when she was training this tree. I wish she was around and I could ask her. I miss her very much as she was my inspiration to gardening. Below the wedding tree is a hidden treasure and it's my grandmother's Japanese theme garden. So this angel vine or I think it might be a maiden vine like takes over the garden, but below it, there's like this fountain and some other Japanese themed stuff over here. If you want to look through the middle there, um, that's in here and I need to uncover it because it's kind of a hidden treasure and it's really cool. My grandmother had my uncle Kurt who's nice enough to be filming today, make this Japanese window cover for what was just kind of the usual window frame here and it turned out really good and has lasted a long time. Kurt, when do you think you built this? Oh boy, 1980, 1980. That is interesting. So the Japanese garden came before the wedding tree. I didn't know that. That's fun to find out. I pretty much have free reign to do what I want in this backyard garden, but sometimes my family has to reel me in a little bit. I wanted to have this weeping structure of the tree, go all the way down and kind of create a portal through the backyard here. They said no and promptly pruned it before I could put up an argument. I love going to thrift stores and finding cheap little pots that people have thrown out and planting succulents inside of them. Eventually I'm going to start selling them, but around the garden you're going to see all these cool little knickknacks here that I have done and I just really like it. They look really cool. Eventually I'm going to have this place bursting at the seams, but that's fine with me. Or again, until my family gets sick of me. I've gotten a lot of comments about the giant Jade tree cutting that I got from my aunt. And as you can see the pot that I put it in is empty and basically the thick trunk did not make it, but I still did something with the rest of the branches and cuttings. And I'm going to show you that coming up. This giant Jade plant cutting was I believe the only failure I've had propagating a Jade, but I know where I went wrong. And what happened was my soil medium was too thick and not well draining enough and I over watered it. And even though I'd let it callous for a very long time, the issue is that it's still rotted at the bottom because if you don't have well draining enough soil and you keep a fresh cutting wet for too long, that's just the perfect conditions for rot. This is my supervisor, my assistant, my co gardener, Andy. He is on my hip all the time. You might've seen him in a couple of my videos. I'm sure he'll be in many more because he's just always with me. I got a handful of really good Facebook market scores when it comes to plants and this was one of them. This is a really nice arrangement of these tree aeoniums with these stone crops. It's been getting cold. It's winter. My plants are getting a beating, but this for $40 in a wine barrel, whoops, broke that off. That's great. But you know what's nice? Put that baby right there. It'll go, but I'm going to find a better place for it right now because we're about to go into my propagation area, which my family lovingly refers to as my back 40. This is my propagation zone and basically it's built around these old railroad tie garden beds that my grandma scored when they took a railroad out of the neighborhood. I cleaned it out about a couple of weeks ago, but usually I would just take plants like this one, dig a little hole, shove it in there. I'm going to get it in there better later, but that's kind of the vibe. Everything in here, I've just kind of shoved in there and then I have all of these little plants I've been buying to plant in those pots and containers I buy at thrift stores. I buy a lot of them online and then these trays right here and one of the trays over there, these are actually cuttings from my own personal collection and I'm slacking. I got to do these too. Sometimes I run out of time, but you can see I've got some little, I think they're donkey tail guys here that I need to plant. I like to buy new plants online. It's an addicting hobby. It's my vice and I think it's a good vice to be able to just buy plants. I spend all my money on plants. This is the orange tree in my neighborhood. We have a lot of these orange trees. They were like a really popular tree that was planted during this era that my grandparents owned the house and they built this one and there's some tasty oranges that I pretty much grab one a day and sometimes I'll grab them in between gardening. It's like a good break and a good snack, you know, so good. In my most recent video I got some giant succulent cuttings for my aunt and I made kind of this ghetto rig where they don't get a ton of sun but they get enough of it diffused to create a good situation for them. They went from sunny coastal Southern California to cold foggy Northern California. I'm happy the sun came out, but my point is is that these conditions are different. It's going to take them a little while to really get rooted and settled in. Come on in Curtis. The weather is warm in here. And that's another thing is I wanted to get warmth because the warmer temperatures are better for propagating. And then look, I've got all these other little projects that like these agaves I need to propagate these jade cuttings I need to propagate and then I'm kind of slacking but I'll like collect leaves and all these will eventually turn into new succulents and shoot roots out. This back 40 area is also where I keep and do my creative planter projects for the most part. And I got some fun stuff that I'm saving like this toilet planter I'm going to do. It used to be a coffee cup. Nom, nom, nom. Uh, I like to do all these little animals, these animals like animal heads. Like I'll put plants inside the head of an animal because you know, some normal like cool pots where I know that the plants will pop when I put them in there. I've been collecting a lot because my goal is to eventually start my own little boutique plant nursery and I hope to do that sometime this year just to show you a couple of ways that I'm really cheap propping up this greenhouse material is this old rusty shovel and it's sitting in an old dresser that I turned into a raised garden bed and then over here, same deal. I've got this old metal rake holding it up but it seems to be working. We'll see what happens when the next heavy rain or wind gusts come through here. I just got this amazing plant. It is like a crawler of an elephant bush I think. Correct me if I'm wrong in the comments. Got it for $25. I'm so excited. I'm going to put it in a creative planter. That's going to be super cool. But sometimes I'm like, look, it's my hair. This is the lemon tree. I don't think we've ever pruned it and it puts out a ton of lemons that I can't give away fast enough. Um, I also over here, I have some giant cactus cuttings that I am letting dry out for a long period of time. And so I am going to be planting these pretty soon and making a little video. I mean, look at this thing. It's like just as tall as me. I'm not just a full on succulent guy. I do a lot of vegetable gardening. These are my hoop houses and my raised garden beds that I actually put in here about 10 years ago. They're still holding up strong. Originally my plan was to do a winter garden, but I just have not had the time. But you can see I went with this weedless mat here and eventually this area will get more sun also in the summertime and that's when it's more ideal to plant things in this veggie garden here. One of my biggest transplants was this tree aeonium that I rescued out of an alley. I planted it into this cement mixer and it has been in here now for almost a couple of years. It's doing really good. And the whole point of this was to kind of pour out of there. That was always my goal. I actually had a guy that owned a cement company inquire about buying it and I might sell them to him. We'll see. I'm pretty attached to it though. Curtis, do you remember this thing? Ah, yes, this, this came out of the alley behind your house. Your neighbor was throwing this giant aloe arrangement out. The pot is cracked. It's giant. Oh, it's been over on me right now. I mean, look at the roots of these things. They are just like going crazy. He tried to like use some classic, I don't know, metal there to hold it together. I try to average an hour in my garden every day, but sometimes I have to make up that on the weekends and sometimes I just can't hit that goal. It's really hard. Now the olive tree. This is a very old olive tree. In fact, it's been here since before this house was built in the 1940s. In the late 1800s in my city, it used to be all of orchards in this area and if you go around the neighborhood, you can still see some of these olive trees that are well over a hundred years old. We used to harvest the olives off of this tree. We stopped doing it because at some point I got on the big ladder to get up there and this tree is really high and it fell over. Oh boy. While I was on it. I can tell you what, I was pale. Luckily I escaped without any, uh, major injury, which was good. This is my grandmother's rose garden and it's winter time right now, so it's time for me to trim it back. I'm a little bit late doing that, but after my grandmother passed, my grandpa turned in into a memorial for her. So if you come check it out over here, Kurt, um, he, you know, put in this statue, I believe he had a lot of free time after my grandma passed. And then down here, I'll just pick it up. I don't think it's too sacred. Um, he made a less plus G. My grandparents were married for over 60 years and lived in this house since the early seventies. And so it's very special to me. And now that I take care of my grandfather, you know, I try to do my best to think about what my grandmother would do and how he would do it. Cause he doesn't garden as much anymore. When you get into your nineties, it's hard, man. It's hard. There used to be a diving board right here, but I broke it and my family is never going to let me live with that one down. But after I broke it, my grandmother started adding pots to this area and putting various plants in there. And I've been adding plants in here. It needs a little bit of a facelift, but something that's really cool that's going on right now is this death bloom. And this is, I believe, a purple people eater agave and it's starting to death bloom where they're monocarpic. And when that means is when they come to the end of their life, they shoot out super tall, crazy looking what people think is like a stem. But if you come a little bit closer, you'll see there's these little future flowers. And what happens is these flowers are going to open up and they're yellow. They're very pretty. I've had a couple of these do this. And then once the flower dies off, new little plants, um, pups or bulbous, I forget the term. Oops. They will start to form, which is super rad. So basically I'll have one, two, three, four, five, six, a bunch of new plants from this and I give them away or maybe sell them in the future. We'll see. Or maybe find some more toasters to put them in. Find some more toasters or crazy stuff. We'll see. I'll have to drag you down to the thrift store with me someday and we can dream together. Yeah, I'll bring my pickup. I mentioned before in previous videos that this Jade tree was my first ever succulent that I got as a small cutting from my aunt about 15 years ago. So the tree itself is about 20 years old. Um, and because it's the winter time, it's taking a beating. I mean, check this out right here. I'm going to shake it and you're going to see some leaves fall. Yeah. Look at that Jade plants. They prefer coastal warmer climates and we get temperatures that get into the freezing zone, 32 degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees Celsius. And they're not always too excited about that. But when springtime comes they bounce back and that's when it really takes off. So you got loads of peppers. Yeah. These are pepperoncinis right here. And I'm letting them, um, over ripen because what I'm going to do, and I'll just bust this one open right now. You know, whenever you're taking seeds, you let them over ripen and the seeds become mature. So I'm going to open these up like this, take these out, dry them and then plant them. And I'm going to sell some vegetable starts this year and I'll make a video on how I do that and how it works out. I planted this habanero plant super late, but I was optimistic that I would still get a good harvest because I love habanero hot sauce. It's delicious. I was going to make hot sauce. We had three weeks where we didn't see the sun here. And that's kind of was the turning point where all the leaves dropped off and it turned into like what looks like a pretty cool thing right now. So those never fully ripened? No, no, no. So, you know, a habanero is really bright, dark orange, but these ones that are trying to ripen, they're turning into like almost ghosty. If you look, they're almost like ghosty white. They're not going to reach there. You know, I could probably get seeds out of there maybe, but I'd be pessimistic. These aren't going to ripen up correctly. I'm still not going to touch my hands on anything now because one day I ate one of these that was ripe and it was the worst two hours of my life. You know, this is my hand washing sink. I got some other peppers here. I'm going to do the same thing. These are some Anaheim's right here. You know, it's probably more cost effective to buy the seeds when I think about my time, but I just really liked the process. I really love gardening and it's just so fun. You know, it's so fun. This is my cactus corner as I like to call it. And it's my little zone where I have most of my cactuses. If you've seen the video, I put this Eve's needle cactus in this beer keg, which was super sketchy, but I've got some other really cool things. I just got another Eve's needle, but it's crested. Um, when you see a succulent or a cactus that's like this, it's called crested and that's the shape that it's growing in where it grows real wide. This is actually the same cactus as this one. I believe here an Eve's needle, but the crested look is so cool. And then, you know, I've got the barrel here and some other different varieties that I really, really like. I'm going to show you something pretty cool. Common misconception is that you can't grow plants in glass or without drainage holes on the bottom. But this cactus has been living in this glass container with no drainage hole for two and a half years now. And you can see here the roots are white. They're healthy and there's a little bit of green going on in there, but that happens every rainy season. But I do try to put it behind something slightly because if too much sun hits those roots, then you're going to have a problem. In one of my more recent videos, I gave this Jade tree a prune and I put it inside this Scott's. What is this Kurt? Uh, it looks like it's to spread fertilizer to me. Yeah, that's right. It's, it's a vintage fertilizer spreader, but I found this in an alley. I love the patina. Someone was throwing it out and I understand why. I think it's from the seventies or sixties and I thought, Oh, it's going to be cool. And it is, it turned out really good. It's a big hit with my family. It's blooming. It looks good. And of course, I had to name it Scott, you know, Scott the Jade. I like the colors. Yeah, that's why I got it. The colors are so cool. It's just like a classic vintage patina going on there. The orange really pops with the, uh, all the green plants. So this is my bed frame garden bed that I made and I grew watermelon and peppers in it this year. Now, since it's so cold, I moved a lot of my succulents and other plants here because it gets the most light with how the sun goes. So I've got all of these little string of rubies that I'm propagating and working on. And here's some of those little agave from a previous death bloom. So basically I got all these plants, including these agaves off of death blooms and these I got off a neighbor's tree. Thank you neighbor. I'm going to drop one off on their porch. They're about a year old, but I will open it up and look at that. That's some healthy root growth right there. So ready to go in the ground off of death bloom, free plants. I mentioned earlier that I was going to show you what happened to that giant jade plant I got from my aunt and well, I cut it up and I propagated it so it will live on. We had filmed this yesterday, but we had some technical difficulties. So you can see I've got all these different jade plants here that came off of that giant jade. All of these small cuttings, they're obviously all rooted by now. Roots are shooting out of there. This one's going to be one of my favorites. It was one of the bigger branches and it's going to end up turning into a cool bonsai, a jade plant like no other, that's for sure. And as you can see, I'm always propagating jade plants. These are from the bonsai I saved. I've got a ton of aeoniums here and all these different propagation projects that I'm working on. I'm constantly propagating, constantly collecting new plants. I've got some skinny finger jades here. I've got a whole bunch of stuff. You'll notice I got a dead tree here that's not in the ground anymore. And that's because my grandfather had these crepe myrtle trees. They all died when we had a serious drought and we couldn't water for a while. Kurt, you might remember that and it sucked, but my grandpa's not a fan of change. So I've kept them and this one finally fell over. The year before last I grew green beans up it, which was super fun. And then this year I grew vine tomatoes up the trees and trellis. So I had a bit of a tomato tree going on. These Thai chili peppers are still going strong in January. I was going to dry some of them out, chop them up because I love spicy food and then just kind of pepper them onto things that I eat. You ever seen a red jalapeno? Well, these are red and that just means they're overly ripe. So the jalapenos are still putting out again. I could, no, not going to do that. Not going to do that. I just got this cool new aeonium from my local community college ag department and it's variegated. It's some kind of like variegated aeonium. It's got these cool purple stripes down the middle. This is one of my favorite plants in the whole garden and it's actually a tree. It's a granny Smith apple tree that my grandmother planted and you'll notice it's growing sideways and that's because she utilized the espalier technique, which really condenses the tree and she did it because she didn't like this ugly wall and now it's a really cool apple tree. But she passed away around 10 years ago and no one had taken care of this tree and it didn't put out a lot of apples because my grandpa kept pruning it incorrectly. Last year I decided to figure out how to prune this tree correctly and it's a granny Smith apple tree and I ended up getting, I think over 200 apples off this. I stopped counting at 200. I filled up a bunch of five gallon buckets and they store really well so I still got some. They're really good. Curtis got some and I'm going to make some applesauce for my grandpa pretty soon because I don't even know what to do with them. Kurt's feeding them to cows. I got some more than for the cows. They like them. They do. I bet. I, uh, I was afraid they would choke on them. So I, I fed him one and it looked kind of dangerous and so then I smooshed him. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I like that. Like a bird, you like pre-chewed it for, for the, for the cow. That's pretty good. I like that. This is a Jade tree I got from my mom. This one goes by Shrek or ogre ear because if you come over here, you can see it has these thick leaves as opposed to a Hobbit or a Gollum. These are thick. And also you'll notice again, wintertime taking its toll on this plant. So I could shake it probably. Oops. Shake it or break it. Yeah. Shake it or break it. Throw it in there though. It'll grow. I really like this one. It hasn't really been pruned like I normally prune Jade. So it's got more of the bush vibe going over here. Trailing elephant bush plant here. And then I really like this. I'm not an artist, but a really cool thing that you can do that my grandma has here are old windows and you paint over them and they just look great. Even if you're not a good artist, this is a fun project to do. And I encourage you to find old windows for pennies on the dollar. You can get them for sometimes free and then do some artwork on them. They look really cool or find somebody project with your kids or something. I'm pretty much propagating plants everywhere. And right here by the back door, I am propagating some angel vine, maiden hair vine here. And then I've got these Tanzanian zipper plants that you might've saw in my last video. These are cuttings from my aunt's house. And I'm keeping them closer to the house cause this stays a little bit warmer in the cold weather. Next to my skateboard here. I also got some other little knickknack plants here. I need to redo this. I haven't touched it in a while. It's not really maintained, but I like this little, I love little things like this, like the little chair. You know, my grandma, she has, she has one gnome and I keep moving him. I move them just about every month to a new place so he can bring good luck to the garden. That's a wrap on my first garden tour. I hope you enjoyed it. I didn't quite cover everything because that would take a very long time. And by the time I do my next one, things are going to look a lot different. I got so many cool projects that I'm working on and I'm also working on starting my own little boutique nursery beer garden and I might post some videos about that. So things are going to look a lot different.