The Lazy Garden is THRIVING! | FULL May Garden Tour 2026!

Welcome to Boracica Park. We also planted them here and here and here and there and here and there and there and all the way over here and in this bed behind me and basically in every single spare space that we had in the garden because I just can't ever let any good plants go to waste. We are fresh out of the car after a very long road trip to and from Texas so I could speak at a conference and now we're back and the lazy garden has been lazy gardening while we've been gone so let's go take a look and see what happened while we were gone. Just step right on over the Lucy deterrent right here as we come in. Make yourselves at home southern style. I cannot possibly pass by this sweet little baby pawpaw. Every year I am the proud mama and pawpaw of lots and lots of baby pawpaws because my pollination brush and I frolic through the woods and pollinate everything in sight and the fruits of our labor are always very very delicious. Adam you can roll the clip of me disgustingly eating a pawpaw from last year. It always amazes me when May comes around because it feels like it's just time to plant the garden and then all of a sudden it's already garlic scape season. So we've got our little garlic scapes which if you don't know what a garlic scape is you are really missing out. 10 out of 10 would recommend making yourself garlic scape pesto, chopping these up and putting them in your pasta. This is really where it's at. Plus if you're trying to keep the mosquitoes and the flies away this season just munch on one of these every day and you're good to go. I can't help but point out the self-seeded dill that shows up everywhere all the time because there are very few things greater than these two things put together in pickle form. And while we're at it toss a few asparagus spears into that jar and you'll have yourself a real party. Alexander has his little emotional support strawberry keeping oh no oh that's okay there's about 10 million more buddy don't worry it's okay he's practically already a strawberry. Oh good are you leaving lots of strawberry handprints back there? Perfect good. I'm a big fan of long ongoing experiments on this channel and this asparagus bed is definitely one of those. Last season our friends Michelle and Cody at More Than Farmers had told us that we should burn the asparagus fronds at the end of the season to deal with potential asparagus beetles if we wanted to increase our crop. And a lot of viewers were really worried that if we did that that we would damage the crowns or that something bad would happen. Good news of great joy we have had more asparagus than we could possibly eat already and it's only May. It definitely did not kill off our crowns. I have seen no evidence thus far of any asparagus beetles and here's a fun quick pro tip about asparagus. First off when you're picking asparagus you want to twist it and pick the full piece because all of this stuff while it's not super delicious and delightful to eat because it's not very tender is actually a danger to your crown in the ground the roots of the asparagus rotting if you actually leave a whole bunch of stuff up above the soil surface. So make sure you get all the way down to the bottom. Also don't pick your asparagus until it's been in the ground at least two years if they were big crowns to start or three to four years if you want to be conservative because pick it too early you can accidentally pull up that crown and lose years of input. Once you've got it picked though put this nice little stalk directly in a glass of water in the fridge and you can then save your stalks for many many days even weeks and they'll be just as fresh as the day you picked them. For those of you who don't understand sarcasm and were very offended by my reel about hating zucchini if you really hate yourself and you want to make a whole bunch of zucchini pasta and pretend like it tastes like real pasta you can plant zucchini. I just wanted to draw your attention to the fact that some of the zucchinis that I actually planted because zucchini is in fact delicious is thriving here there there and pretty much everywhere else at the end of garden rows because these things will leaf out and get all big and shade all this stuff and keep this weed free the way to be and we'll also get a few zucchinis which is great. This is a truly monumentous occasion. I planted this tree when it was but a wee little stick. We have enough pie cherries to actually make a pie. I mean it might be a small pie maybe even a wee little tart but the best news is that this tiny little stick has now grown to this towering height. It's now taller than me standing at three feet six inches tall and my they just grow up too quickly. When we were kids a close family friend had a cherry orchard in Montana and every summer us kids would get conscripted for some good old-fashioned child labor to do the cherry picking in the summers and this might surprise you but I'm fairly competitive and so obviously I was a very good cherry picker because I was constantly trying to pick as many cherries as I possibly could and always win the war there but my sister and I also had a secondary competition going and that was who could eat the most while they were also picking so we had a rule two for the mouth one for the bucket and as one can imagine August also known as cherry picking time in Montana was also known as diarrhea time and that my friends is the 2026 cherry tree harvest. It's going to be a tart and we can't walk too far away from the cherry tree without stopping by and visiting our apple tree which is the healthiest this year that I have ever seen her but quick funny comparison here I planted this apple tree on the same day as I planted that and look at all these peaches it's it's a peach tree. If I can draw your attention over here this is a blueberry plant that I'm very excited has some little blueberries on it for the first time if you've been around for a while you know I love stealing from the forest here on our property because they're locally adapted and more likely to thrive in this environment these are great starter plants plus they're free but if you look at the leaves here you can tell that they are saying oh no I need some help and love and attention usually yellowing leaves like this on any plant are a sign that this plant needs fertilizer of some kind and we are lazy gardeners we don't buy fertilizer chemical fertilizers are killing our plants and killing our soil and killing us so we don't do that but a great way to fix this particular problem is to go to your local coffee shop and ask for a giant bag of coffee grounds you dump those in a five gallon bucket of water soak them overnight or for a few weeks and then just water your plants a little bit every day with that water and it'll give them a nice boost of nitrogen and also help the microbes in the soil wake up so they can start finding all that good stuff for your plant roots for you and that my friends is the real lazy way all right it's a little hard to get up with bubby sleeping on my back but hey we're making things work self-employed no child care we got this wow it turns out the greatest gift I gave my future self was converting this musty old hayloft in the barn right over the garden into a little lifestyle apartment thing which has served me very very well especially as a self-employed no child care new mom because anytime we're working we've got a I've also had to have some naps too and that brings us to the sponsor of today's video Brooklyn Bedding. 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It is a medium firm Sedona Elite so if you want to replicate the exact circumstances of my hayloft overlooking the garden barn situation that's the one you want to order. Okay mister wait don't touch it! You ready? So the next time you need a new mattress go to brooklynbedding.com slash annavaltrades and you'll get 30% off of your own new mattress or you can use the code annavaltrades at checkout for that same 30% off. Oh no you touched it! I'm a huge fan of telling people to plant what they eat and to not plant things that they're not going to eat because it takes a lot of time and energy to grow basically anything and so why would you grow something that you don't actually like eating? And I usually grow eggplants every year as a trap plant for early flea beetles because flea beetles tend to really really love munching on early eggplants and then leave the rest of my plants alone but hilariously this year for whatever reason the flea beetles are actually leaving the eggplants alone and while I myself don't personally love eggplant my dad who I'm trying to convince to come here more often because he's often very helpful on the farm when he does plus he really likes hanging out with his grandson Alexander he loves eggplant and so I was just able to send him a picture of all these little eggplants saying hey dad I'm growing eggplants for you and I actually meant it because apparently we're gonna have some eggplants and that's pretty cool. We've got some really iffy looking cucumbers growing amongst some carrots, cabbages, some flea beetle infested eggplants. My dad loves eggplant. Hold on I'm gonna go get my vacuum real quick. Not today Satan. Back to hell from whence you came buddies. Oh hello absolutely not. It's fine my neighbors already think I'm crazy. I'm good with it. In years past for a myriad of reasons that I can absolutely defend basically all of my garden areas look like this where you have as many plants crowded into a small area as physically possible. It helps with water retention because there's basically no exposed soil to the bed below and in that the soil stays really really well shaded but I will also be the first to admit that it's a little hard to find these kind of dainty little asparagus spears amongst all of this chaos but it's also really hard to find any weeds because looking at this all I see is goodness. In monoculture row type systems you tend to have a lot more pest pressure because if one pest shows up and decides that this is a delicious buffet they can eat up your whole row in a real hurry and so you know that's how your whole crop disappears. So interplanting things like cabbage and some herbs and dill and asparagus was always a great idea from a pest prevention space maximization and soil shading technique but this is the first year that I've ever gardened with a toddler and in that I had to change pretty much everything about the way that I had previously gardened. Someone I looked up to and admired for a really long time was Michelle from More Than Farmers. When I called Michelle to ask her for gardening advice with a child she said that efficiency was the most important thing I could focus on. So if things took too long to pick because they were too crowded that was then going to cause a problem and now as I'm sitting here picking my strawberries in my polyculture system here where there's all kinds of different plants and I'm having to sort through all kinds of foliage to be able to find ripe strawberries I totally see what she means. But one of the things that keeps me motivated to continue gardening is constantly learning things from other people and then taking those learnings and turning them into actual knowledge by applying them. These two rows here are basically as close as I think you'll ever see me getting to a monocrop system and we've got my tomatoes on this side and my hot sauce hot peppers on this side. These beds themselves are experiments because I wanted to see if I could create you know just a bed of tomatoes without a whole bunch of other stuff growing all around it and also not have to weed it and in that I'm a woodworker. I come up with a whole lot of sawdust and sawdust when used correctly will compress and create an impermeable surface but right below this impermeable surface which is naturally weed resistant is a really really fertile garden bed. It might be great it might be a real disaster so we'll see how this does. As lazy gardeners we love any natural pest prevention tips that we can get and one of the best things you can do for your tomatoes and peppers and other nightshades is plant their favorite companion plants like marigolds which are fairly effective against a lot of nightshade pests because the flowers reek and nobody wants to get close to that nasty smell. Another great companion for our nightshades are basil plants but of course the best companion for any one of our plants is healthy soil and that is something we're going to harp on again and again and again but sometimes it truly does not matter how many companion plants you've planted or how healthy your soil is there are in fact even in the best conditions little jerks that put their little chompers around some of your baby plants and get to them and it's really discouraging when that happens. This this this and this are the work of cutworm chompers and there are a lot of nightshade pests that can do this kind of work to our tomato and pepper and eggplant plants however really early in the season it is most definitely the work of cutworms. The good news is that if you're noticing cutworm damage in your garden there's a very quick very cheap very easy way to prevent further damage and it's a whole bunch of these. Using cut up toilet paper or paper towel rolls or basically any plastic pipes little paper cups anything you can do to basically get an inch down into the soil around the plant and create a little protective collar here is all you need to protect your plants from cutworms and as soon as your plant seedlings are a little bit more than just seedlings like when they start to get a little bigger they're no longer susceptible to the cutworms and then it's time to bring out the big guns our black light flashlights to start looking for hornworms. It's always something my friends. Here we are in our new and hopefully improved raspberry patch that's the product of a few very important things. First these are all raspberry canes that I initially got from my gardening mentor in Washington who was 93 years old when I met. He lived to the ripe old age of 103 years old doing one thing and one thing only. He said you got to keep your body moving every day because once you stop moving you start turning to stone and he was right. He stayed moving every single day until the very end and Frank what a legacy. Now every single time I think about or look at any of these raspberries I think about Frank and his amazing legacy and it's just the best but I nearly killed all of these raspberry canes moving them across the country and not realizing how different gardening in Tennessee was from gardening in Washington which I mean they're both 7a 7b so it shouldn't have been that different but it was. When I had all of these raspberry canes in our main garden I realized really quickly that raspberries hate having their feet wet. Raspberries need a ton of drainage so I moved them from up at the top of the hill where they had lots and lots and lots of water all the time to down here where they've got a lot more drainage now and we're doing what Michelle and Cody at More Than Farmers told us to do which is I cut all of my canes to the ground in spring instead of doing that in the fall which is really supposed to help us with a lot of the issues that we here in Tennessee tend to have with raspberries because they tend to be more of a cool season loving crop and so the theory is by cutting all these plants down to the ground and letting them grow up over the summer season here then they will put up a whole bunch of fresh new growth and you won't have nearly the fungal issues that you would otherwise have and it's already so much healthier looking than it ever has been this time of spring before and as fun as it is to pick a few raspberries every day all season long I actually am very excited to have one big bumper crop in the fall that we can pick all at once put in the freezer turn into jams and that is one of the many many efficiency tips that we learned from Michelle because boy howdy does that lady know how to get stuff done you know you read what others had done and you and you took the next step you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don't take any responsibility for it which then brings me back to this area I've lovingly called Brassica Park and there's actually lots of brassicas other places too but this particular row is yet another experiment in what I'm going to call monoculture it's not actually monoculture because there's lots of different kinds of brassicas in here but the me of a few years ago would have told you not to put all your brassicas in one row but to intersperse them all over the garden because then if you do have pests that absolutely will come especially if you don't want to use those little cute white flowy row covers that I hate because I'm lazy I would have assumed that these things would have been absolutely decimated by pests but my friend Jill who I also interviewed and asked her how she dealt with these things and she was like oh well I just plant all my brassicas together and then whichever one gets absolutely decimated by pests that's the trap plant and then generally if you leave that one trap plant the rest of them pretty much thrive and so far she's not wrong this very chewed up looking plant right here it turns out has been a great trap plant protecting all of the plants around it from a lot of early chewing bugs and in one of our last garden tours I introduced this little beauty as what it was sold to me as which is wasabi. Wasabi is like the champagne of France technically it can't be called true wasabi if it wasn't grown in Japan. Turns out it's actually just a regular peasant's horseradish very spicy very delicious semi-related to wasabi but horseradish nonetheless the good news is we raise a whole lot of steak here and horseradish and steak are great together so there's that just protecting all the other plants win win win and getting some nice spicies as a result. As we're walking past my little fruit tree orchard here to get to my propagation station I cannot but just stop and look at this in absolute awe. This is a tree that started as a wee little stick three years ago and was one of my very first propagation experiments and I mean it's pretty big it's pretty cool to see these things actually turning into like legitimate trees what a world. This is where I've been doing all of my propagation experiments and so you know right here we've got some native cherry trees that I've grown from seed and this will eventually become a rootstock that I can grow other more desirable cherries like rainier cherries onto after you know this has gotten a little bigger and I can actually graft something onto it. This is another one right here this is one of about 150 fig experiments that I've got going on in here we've got some pawpaws that I finally after five years of trying got to grow from seeds and so this is very similarly exciting from these native rootstocks I'll eventually be able to graft on different cultivars and have all kinds of different kinds of pawpaws growing that's very exciting. This is another cherry tree experiment that's a little further along this is a little cry for help that's asking for some nitrogen so so badly. We've of course got my famous rhubarbs that I brought back from smuggled on the plane from Washington state and they're thriving this is a little tea tree that is not much of a tree yet but it will be. Some blueberries stolen from the forest more little pawpaws grown from seeds. This is another pawpaw that's further along some trifoliate orange which especially around here you definitely want to keep inside of a pop or it'll spread. I kept noticing when I'd come back here that it looked like some of the soil had been disturbed in some pots and it turns out that there's this little squirrel who's been planting walnut trees on accident in almost all of these pots so every once in a while I see a walnut tree suddenly pop up that I definitely didn't plant because this dang squirrel is trying to hide all of its nuts and then clearly forgets where it's One of the things I've always prided myself on since the very beginning of my gardening journey is my compost game. I've always had multiple compost piles going at any given time and prior to having a baby I was really really good at keeping my compost piles really really well managed but then this spring when it came time to kind of fix my garden beds that I'd let go fallow last year while I was you know out having a baby and whatnot all of a sudden I started having some really really bad results. I ordered this very hard to find purple passion fruit vine and as you can see it is not thriving nor is the pomegranate these orange passion fruit vines this tea tree nor these smaller pots that have pomegranates. It's very likely that the compost that I used to fill these buckets sucked and that's probably the problem here. I took a soil test from all of these pots from my pile over there where I got the soil from to start with I sent it into Redmond and I realized that yeah basically the only nitrogen going in those piles was the poultry amount from my two miniature donkeys which don't poop that much. Yeah we're missing some nitrogen and we need it back. Well how do we fix that? Enter the true hero of our farm my house bunny Eugene who creates perfect little garden fertilizer nuggets in ready for plants to consume but not actually be burned by the sweet fertility that she has to offer. And so hopefully these sickly little plants have enough life left in them to survive long enough for these little turd nuggets to do their work. I definitely have learned the lesson to not just blindly use my compost because I'm prideful and I know what I know what I know except when I'm not paying attention. You will remember to wash your hands before you eat anything. Some of the best advice I got early on was never compare your beginning to someone else's middle and 15 years ago when we lived in the city and I was just thinking about growing my very first garden I knew nothing about any of this and I've learned a lot over the last 15 years but I never want to stop learning and if you've been really paying attention you might notice that this year's garden looks really really different than gardens past. Ever since our baby was born I have a very very different motivation in everything that we're doing here on the farm. I want to grow as much of our food as I possibly can and we're not just two people who don't really like vegetables anymore we're a hopefully growing family that is going to need this stuff all through the winter long. And in that we started a new series on this channel this year because I wanted to keep learning but I wanted to learn from some of the people I have learned the most from that I admire the most. We just visited our friends Ryan and Jasmine who have five kids, work full-time, and grow most of their food literally on solid rock. So if you think you've got tough growing conditions and you need a little encouragement definitely go check out that video. I'll see you there. Cheers!