Prepping Garlic for Storage, Planting fruiting Cherry Shrubs & Rose Pruning! 🧄🍒🌹 // Garden Answer

Hey guys, how's it going? So today we're going to be working on just several odds and ends around the garden that I need to take care of, starting off with our garlic that's been curing in the high tunnel for about like 12 or 13 days at this point. So it's time to get those cleaned and put in the root cellar. So I'll just show you that process. We're also going to head out to the pumpkin patch. I'd like to give you an update on how things are going out there. And I haven't really actually looked super duper close at them for the last day or two. And there's several hills, like they're still pretty small, but there are several that the plants are big and we need to take the laundry baskets off the top of them and just pray that the magpies do not take after those plants. And then I still do have another Colette rose to prune back. I was going to do it last night after we got all of our west side cleanup done. I left the ladder out and I just, I just didn't. We did other things. So we still have to do that. Um, things like that. That's what we need to do today. I've got my basket. We've got gloves, my pruners and a pop-up bag. That's what we need for this garlic cleaning process. Okay. So here's the garlic. What a difference from the day we put it out here to now look at how much these stocks have dried down. They look really good. The soil has completely dried like completely. Ooh, I gotta be careful. I don't want to knock off the skins. The papery skins are what protect the clothes underneath and keeps the storage life long. So we're going to go through, we're going to knock off just gently as much of the soil as we can. If we need to use our pruners, we're going to cut off roots kind of like that. And then we're also going to cut the stock so that we end up with garlic. That looks kind of like this. And then we'll just lay it in our basket and then our stocks go in our bag. I find it funny. All of the ends are like trying to turn toward the sun and bloom. So those are the scapes. You can harvest these when they're still, you know, not in bloom stage and use them. I don't typically do that. Also, if you remove the scapes as they start to form up, it will send more energy into your garlic heads and you'll usually get larger size. So you can see I did not do that. So we might have ended up with larger garlic heads had I gone through and removed those. Okay, so this is going to be a pretty quick process. Once we have our basket full of garlic, we'll take it out to the root cellar. We can talk through all of the like what situation it stores best at. 63 heads of garlic, which I think is awesome. And only three of them aren't really like I must have nicked one of these with my my digging fork or a couple of them. See, this one looks pretty good. So just two. I'll show you a close up of these. So these two right here, you can see that we've got an exposed clove that's damaged on one side of that one. Same with this head right here. So we'll use these first in the kitchen and then the rest of these can go into the root cellar. For one three by six raised bed, I feel like that's pretty good to get 63 heads and that's more than one head per week, which I do go through that much. This was a very light garlic planting year for me. It is quite nice though just to have a smaller harvest and smaller processing and all of that. Let's get it to the root cellar. You can tell I'm used to bigger harvests with the size of basket I just automatically reached for. Okay, there they are. We are in the root cellar right now. You can see we've got some onions from last year sprouting, but I still root through there and I get some pretty good onions. In fact, I need one for dinner tonight. So look at that. There's still some, the skin doesn't look the best on that one, but these are awesome. Super firm. Yeah, a lot of these. And I think these are like, those are wallow. No, I think both of these are candies. So we'll need to go through it. You can still use these. They're still nice and firm. You just take the middle part out that sprouted. This is going inside with me, but garlic and onions typically store the best at between 32 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit. And I think I've got a chart here, 60 to 70% relative humidity. So we just have to find a happy medium in this root cellar because we do tend to store a lot of different things. We store potatoes and onions in here too, of course, dahlia tubers throughout the years. I've stored carrots in here, root vegetables in general, but I do have some garlic left from last year's harvest. So this is a year old. You can see I didn't clean it. And I'm wondering, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see what kind of shelf life we get out of these, but these are still pretty decent. Although quite a lot smaller last year than this year's harvest. So I'm super happy with the size of the heads this year. Like for example, this is this year's, this is last year's. But like, if you feel these, they're not even, like they might give a little bit, they're a tiny bit squishier than this right here, but we're still using this, which I think is just amazing. Now, when we lived in our townhouse, we had an unfinished garage or no, it was finished. It was a finished garage. I don't know what I'm thinking about, but it wasn't heated. So it stayed like 55 ish, 60 ish right around in there during the winter time. And it actually kept my garlic and onions and potatoes decently. So that's where I would store them if I did not have a cold room like this one. And this is a six by nine room, just in case you're wondering. And we have done videos about our setup, but we've got a fan here that automatically adjusts based on, you know, temperature and humidity. We've got our AC unit, and then we've got what's called a cool bot. And that's what overrides your AC unit because it's set to like turn off if you go below a certain degree, but this helps it to go down lower than you typically use it. It is chilly. It feels so good. It's like 96 degrees outside today. So you can actually step, and I know the boys come in here, they step in here and they'll cool off and they use it to store a lot of stuff like drinks and things like that. So they've got them handy right out here because right now I think this room is right about 35, 40 degrees. So it does feel pretty chilly in here. Anyway, it's just going to sit here right on this shelf and we will use out of that this winter. I'm so thankful to have that room though. I don't know, some of you guys might remember what it looked like before we put in that cold room. It was kind of already sectioned off. So we used the bone structure of what was already there. And so it was like this little cubby, like a six foot wide cubby that was just piled full of scrap lumber. And it was lumber that I didn't even know what it went to, what projects it went to around the house. We kind of sifted through it and gave away, you know, pieces to Paul and Co. for whatever projects they might need it for. But anyway, yeah, so that is such a better use for us and our needs at least. And all of our potatoes and onions that are still out growing in the dirtlands right now will end up in there at some point. I was noticing, and maybe we can take a look when we head out there. That's where we're going next. We take a look at the onions because I'm noticing that they're starting to bulb out a bit. Okay. First off, before we look at the onions, look at these pumpkin plants, especially, okay, I'm not wearing the proper shoes at all to be out here. I have sandals on right now, but like see this right here, we've got to get these off. And I just, I drove by last night. It's like they did it overnight. They grow so darn fast. Freedom. Yeah. My goodness. So we're just going to spend a few minutes taking these out from their little cages. Now these are the dollar store garbage cans, $1.50 a piece. They worked out beautifully for this, for our purposes here. What variety is this Samantha? These are the hot chocolate variety right here. Hot chocolate is what they're called. That must've been one we needed to reseed. It's still really small. Can you get that babe? It's kind of in there at a little tough, isn't it? Look at that. That one will leave baby. Cause that plant's kind of small. I mean, if the magpies want to mess with these, I just don't even know what to do. See, these are still a little bit on the small side. You can see them in there. They're filling up the base and you know, maybe we should just so that this doesn't happen to these plants like it did to the others. Maybe those are big enough. The magpies will leave them alone. You got that one, babe? Well, that one's pretty small, baby. Why don't we leave that one? Can you help me with the next one? All right. You can lift it off. Nice. You can do some weeding while we're at it, huh? It's pretty easy, isn't it? So what are these? These are Igor's. Oh, look at how beautiful. It's kind of nice. Cause you get an up close kind of look at how these plants are doing. You can look for any kind of squash bugs, that sort of thing. Make sure that, you know, nothing has found them yet. Okay. So we're just going to continue on unearthing. It'll be interesting to see how many we still have left out here by the end of this process. So far, every hole has a plant. Success. All right. We are back at the high tunnel area, both to unload the laundry baskets into the red barn. That's where I'm going to store them along with their landscape staples. So next year, should we decide to plant pumpkins again, right after we're done planting the seeds, we can come get the baskets, pop them right out, and then they're good to go. And we won't have to worry about magpies or try to like, have to go through and do what we did this year. I also came back to load up four of these cherry producing shrubs. They're called easy as pie and they are a shrub form tart cherry plant, which is amazing. And they are absolutely loaded. So again, these produce tart cherries. So they're good for baking, preserves, things like that. And cherry pie is one of my dad's favorite desserts. In fact, we had cherry pie on father's day, but we've got three of these already planted. We're going to add four more so that we have a lot. Now these grow three feet to four and a half feet tall and wide. Isn't that awesome? You don't have to dedicate a space for a big cherry tree. You don't have to prune the cherry tree. You don't have to just do all of the stuff or get ladders out to harvest your cherries. They're all at an easy to reach height, which is so awesome. But not only do they produce the cherries, you know, before they have cherries, they bloom beautiful white blooms. So you get to see that show in the spring. Um, I don't recall, but I think mine turned yellow in the fall, I might be mistaken. And I'll show you because we're going to plant these right next to the other ones. We've got two of them are not even this big. And one of them, uh, I think it got stepped on at some point and it might've been me that stepped on it. Anyway, it's little, it like broke off at the ground. And so it's got a little tuft of leaves coming out of the ground and that's it. But we're going to amp up our supply. And I also figured since we were back here again, one of you was asking about our grape trees. You wanted to update on those. So let's take a look. So right here inside this door of the high tunnel, you can see our grape trees. One of which I really need to, um, restate it's like right in the wrong position to where the wind kind of blows it over. It's doing okay. And it's like holding up. Okay. But you know, once the grape clusters get heavier, it's going to need more support. So we've got, I think two different varieties here. They're both red table grapes and I haven't done any pruning like zero on them this year. And you can see that there's some low branches, but they've got grapes on them. So I might wait. Isn't that just amazing? The only thing I've noticed in terms of maintenance is that they have dealt with a little bit of leaf miner activity. See that right there, little caterpillars get in there and make tracks through the leaves. You can see exactly where they ate their way through. And I don't think there's any, I can see where one maybe ate their way out right there. You can spray for that. It's typically for like these trees. I noticed last year I didn't spray them cause I didn't want to with the fruit on there. And it just turned out to be an aesthetic thing. Like they never made the plant sick. They didn't, um, hamper the plant's ability to produce fruit. So I just didn't worry about it. And that's kind of my stance this year too. So long as it doesn't spread to anything else, but the plants look really good. I really would love to display these out somewhere, but until I figure out a more solid staking situation, which what I need to do is I need to get some larger pots, get some thick wood stakes and put them in there. Somehow maybe brace them down in the pot before I put these in like transplant them. I need to figure that out. Once I've got that figured out, I feel like I can display them out. But right now, I mean, based on this flimsy situation, I would never subject it to the wind that we're probably going to get, um, this week because of that cold front coming in. I think we've got a 91 degree day and then a 74 degree day. So we'll have a nice big windstorm to bring that through. Not that I'm complaining. I'm going to love the cooler temperatures. Anyway, that's how our grape trees are doing. And our, um, little miniature fruit trees are doing well too. Um, you know, we lost most of our fruit from that 29 degree night and I was hoping that they might be safe because they're just inside the door, but the door was open and they were full of blooms. I don't know that we ended up with any. Did we end up with peaches? Oh, there's one right there. That's kind of how I feel like our orchard trees are like, I can find a handful of fruit. There's a second one right there. And then I did see there's nectarines on this one right there. I mean, we'll get enough to eat a few fresh, which that's nice. Anyway, I want to get these cherries planted out. So the cherries planted and then our colette rose pruned. And I think that's going to do it for today. I might even wait till this evening again, uh, maybe for all of these projects when it's a little bit cooler out. Oh my goodness, you guys, I just must've been an autopilot. I set the plants down. I dug the holes. When I went to go grab an extra bag of biotone, cause I realized I was out. I realized that I never set the camera up. So I don't think I've ever done that before. Oh my gosh. So this is where we're at. We're in the backside of the dirt lands here. It's really coming together though. I mean, with Aaron's grass pathway and that's like the color from the bubble gum over there and all the other plants just thriving and growing, it's just really looking good. So here are the three cherry shrubs we have that I planted last year. So these two are looking pretty good recently have been treated with iron because it's looking a little bit on the yellow side. And then this is the one that just broke off on the base or right at the base. And it's coming back, but it's little. So we'll just give it time. It should be okay. And then this is where I placed the other four got the holes all dug. And now I just need to get into our bag of biotone. We'll put some of this in the holes and then I'll plant them and water them in really well. They should be acclimated to the heat. We've had these here for a while. These came with our shrub load. And I can't remember if even when that was, was that like the first week of May somewhere right around in there? And they've just been back at the high tunnels. We keep them watered. So they shouldn't shock or we hope that they don't shock when it's this hot. I mean, we continue planting even when it's, you know, really, really, really hot and really cold. I think the key is just to make sure you keep moisture on them and don't let them dry out too much. And they usually are okay. As long as they're acclimated like these have been, they've been sitting out on the gravel, hot gravel in the hot sun. So better than most, I would say it being able to handle it. And there we have it all done planted, watered in really well. In fact, I used the hose to add some cool water around each root ball before I even tucked him in with soil and then gave him a deep soak after that. So we should be good. And this is just kind of a little cherry corner out here. I think it'll be really fun to see how they all do out here. It's interesting to see, you know, how they react in our soil thus far. So it's just something that we're going to have to keep our eyes on for chlorosis issues. And that's really kind of typical. I mean, not of this plant necessarily, but just of a lot of the things that we put in the ground because our pH is so incredibly high. So that's likely not something, hopefully, that you're dealing with, but there are cherries on these. Look in there. They did bloom beautifully. They bloom on old wood too. So they only are producing fruit on the stuff, you know, from last year. So all of their new growth on the tips don't have any fruit, of course. So they're just kind of hidden in there, which is kind of good. I mean, maybe the birds won't see them quite as readily as if they were, you know, all perched on the top. But these look really good out here. Super happy with it. That pretty much sums up our projects, at least for this part of the day. So I think I'll just end our video here. I'll toss the camera up though when I trim back the colette later on this evening, so you can see that process. It's always a little bit satisfying to see a new walking path carved out because these roses are so big. They've grown so, so wild. They do it every single spring and we'll have to cut them back pretty hard this fall as well. Colettes are just a really productive plant. They do really well for us and they don't struggle with really anything. So it's great. So anyway, thank you guys so much for watching our projects for today. I hope you enjoyed seeing the updates, seeing how things are coming along, and I hope you enjoy seeing the rose project here in just a second. We'll see you guys in the next video. Bye.