Full Garden Tour Planting Our Greenstalks With Flowers

About eight weeks ago when I planted strawberries in these two green stalks, I had the vision of interplanting petunias with the strawberries and it's finally petunia day. So I thought it would be fun to take y'all along while I plant these and give you an update on what the garden is looking like. It is mid-April and spring has officially sprung. I'm seeing life all over this little garden and I think it's going to be our best season yet. I think our best bet to plant these out is to take them apart. I think that's just going to be the easiest way to do it but these are super easy to take apart so you shouldn't take any time at all. The very first year we gardened, I bought a couple strawberry plants like that were already in bloom like this from our local co-op and I didn't get any strawberries like at all. I planted them in the dirt out in our main garden and they just didn't do well and I was so bummed but this year growing them in the green stock has absolutely changed the game and I think that it helped that I grew them from like dormant plants. That's what it's called. I couldn't think of it. I have noticed that my soil level is kind of low in some of these each individual tray. They give you very specific instructions when you order your green stock to fill it all the way to the top and I did but when you water it sometimes that soil well a lot of times that soil will go down so I'm just going to refill this as best as I can without disturbing those strawberry plants or burying the crown so I would definitely recommend when you're filling these to maybe water it in and then see if that lowers the soil level and then add more soil. This is my first time using green stocks and I absolutely love them. I think I'll use them forever. Just incredible how you can grow so many plants in such a small area. Look that's gonna be so pretty and they're so easy to water and you don't have to deal with weeds. I could go on and on. I don't know if you can tell but it's starting to rain but I don't really mind it. I hope you don't. I love being outside right now. I got white, pink, and yellow petunias because I thought it would be fun to kind of interplant them so that they're just a variety of colors in here. Originally I thought that I was gonna do two flowers per cell but these will grow and I honestly think that it'll be better to just do one and then I have more plants for more areas in the house which will be good. And y'all are probably about to think I'm crazy because I'm going to water this even though it's raining just because after getting in there and filling all that soil I feel like this could use a really really deep watering. Just making sure everything is level and in here right. All right I'm gonna have so many extra flowers which is a good problem because I'll get to use them in my pots and we'll get to do those arrangements not today but definitely a day soon. And this right here is what makes me love this thing even more. It's so easy to water. Okay so it's the next day. I don't know if you could tell that it was about to storm last night and so we are back and it is beautiful outside and I want to tell you about the sponsor of this video. We are so thankful to get to work with Greenstock on this video. This is my first year using their planters out in our garden but it will not be my last. I'm absolutely in love with these planters and I think they're so easy to use and so beautiful and they are offering these cutie little berry cups this year which is perfect for our strawberry plants. So here's what they look like and right here we have got a runner that our strawberry plant is sending off and all you gotta do is guide that runner over into the berry cup and put a little landscape pin down and water it and now you'll be able to propagate your strawberry plants right off of your tiered Greenstock which I think is absolutely genius plus these berry cups are just adorable. I absolutely love them. They have a little lip right here that just slides right down onto your planter and I just think somehow it makes it even cuter. If they couldn't be cuter now they can. So Greenstock is having their biggest sale of the year right now for Mother's Day. You can get $50 off a tiered planter just like this and they are offering us a discount to share with you. You can get $10 off a purchase of $75 or more. All the details are down in the description below this video if you want to get a Greenstock. I cannot recommend them enough. Now I want to give you a tour of where our garden is at in mid-April for 2026. So let's go over to the entrance of the garden and walk in together. This is still a big work in progress because it is still the beginning of the season but when you walk into our garden we have got our four blueberry bushes right here. Two of these are well actually just one of them is new. This one right here is a pink lemonade blueberry bush and it is new so it's still really little and I doubt we'll get any berries off of it but these other three bushes are three years old. This one by far looks the best and we are going to get a big harvest of blueberries this year which I am so excited about. We planted these three years ago and I'm not sure if you know the saying with perennials but they say that the first year they sleep the second year they creep and the third year they leap and I'm definitely seeing that with this blueberry bush. There are well I guess on this one there's not really any berries but on this one over here we have some berries coming in on it as well. Not as many as the other but this looks like a different variety than that one. I think they are but we also probably stunted the growth a little bit because we did transplant all three of these. They were back there in the garden. Yeah but we moved them up when we extended the garden this year. So that's what our blueberry bushes are looking like. I guess I'll walk you through this kind of orchard area of our garden first and then we'll get into the main garden. Now originally we had the idea of having grape vines on a big arch here at the front of the garden but Chris did not want to do an arch so we have our grape vines here in buckets and they need to go somewhere so I don't know if we'll get some kind of trellis to go over here but here soon. That's a project for Mr. Chris to get these grape vines into the ground and up against something that they can climb against. But over here we have got an apple tree and I know that you're not supposed to let them put on fruit this young but they are starting to put on a little bit of fruit. The leaves look a little curved up so they might need to be watered but it is their first year and sometimes the first year that you plant any type of perennial it will look kind of wimpy but it just needs to establish itself and it gets better and better as the years go on. But we don't know anything about fruit trees so if y'all have any tips for us please leave them in the description below. And actually I have a question because I just saw a video from Mi Gardener about apple trees or fruit trees that you buy from like hardware stores and he was pointing at like leaves that look like this that are all like he said it was called fire blight and he said it's really common with buying you know fruit trees from stuff so it's like where the leaves are like shriveled up like that. Like it's common with buying fruit trees from big box stores? That's what he was saying and so I think that might be what that is. So if you know anything about fruit trees and you think that that might be what we're dealing with with this tree let us know what we can do about it because it's too late we've already planted it. Yeah. Over here we have got a pink lady apple tree. This one looks really good. Yeah. Compared to the other one. Yeah. It doesn't have any fruit on it yet but it looks healthy. It does have some. It does? Yeah. Oh yeah looky there. We have another apple tree over here. This is a red delicious and it's putting on some fruit but it kind of has the same issue going on as well so we need to look into that. We have not had time to research or dig into it. Look at this one. I love it. I have always dreamed of having fruit trees. We have a peach tree right here that's looking pretty good as well as another peach tree right here that also looks pretty good so so far so good. Our blackberry vines look absolutely incredible and we're seeing them already put on the start of a bunch of fruit so I think we'll actually get a harvest of some blackberries and this is just the first year these have been in the ground and I did not expect that at all so that's really really exciting. And then the last tree we have out here is a cherry tree and it has just about lost all of its leaves so we need to do some work on that too. If y'all have any tips for us please let us know. We only planted one cherry tree. I know a lot of people said that maybe we need another one and I would say that we have the space for another one whether it be over there or we could just do it out you know even here in this area. We've talked about doing a pathway into the garden but we're not sure if we're going to do that or not because we don't know how long we'll be in this house so we don't want to do anything too too permanent because we don't know how long it'll be here. But that's a little look at this area and of course you know about the green stalks. They are putting on so many beautiful strawberries and I love the way our petunias look interplanted with those. All right let's head out into the main garden. Right here we have got all of our seedlings. These are going to get planted into the garden today and that will be a separate video so if you want to see that be sure to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss out on all of our gardening videos. A bunch of our tomatoes look good. A bunch of them look kind of pitiful and I learned a good lesson. These right here I planted with chicken manure that I got out of our coop because I read online that that was a great way to fertilize your seedlings when you up pot them. Well what I didn't know is that you have to let that manure compost otherwise it is called hot compost and it will fry the roots of your plants if you put it directly in the soil with your plants. So lesson learned and if you didn't know that now you know and we won't make that mistake again. So I don't know if we will plant these in the ground but this is just part of gardening. It's one of the reasons I love it so much is because I am constantly learning something new. I feel like I quit learning when I got out of high school and with gardening I am learning all the time. So these don't look that great but thankfully we have got a lot, well I don't have to pick them up, but we have got a lot of tomato plants that are nice and green and healthy. We also have a bunch of our pepper plants and so we're really excited to get all of these into the ground. Our potato beds are looking absolutely incredible. We have Kennebec and Yukon Gold. They're starting to put on flowers which is a great sign and you can just tell by how tall. Chris give them a look at these vines. I mean just so tall and healthy these plants are and potatoes are so easy to grow. They take such minimal effort. All we'll do here in a couple of weeks is dress these beds with some more compost just to put even more soil in between the sunlight and the potatoes growing underneath and other than that these will just do their thing until we dig them up. So that's a huge reason why we love growing potatoes. They are so easy and we have four beds of those. We also planted out some planters right here and our flowers need to be watered. We've been on the road so we need to come in and give everything a really good watering, but I do think as these grow they'll be a beautiful entry into our garden which will be really nice. All right Chris let's step over all these plants and come out into the main garden. So we are dividing our garden into grids this year and this is the first time we've ever done this. Usually we've done long rows and we're really excited to try grids because it will help us with crop rotation with the seasons to come. So in our first grid we have got our onions planted. We have some yellow sweet onions planted as well as some red onions planted in here and these are growing pretty good. Now I have never had great success with onions. It's something that I have had to try and fail at and try again with every single season, but I will say they've put on a lot of greens up top which is a good sign. I'm not seeing big bulbs really forming yet down here, but I'm hoping to as the season goes on. So we're just going to keep our eye on them and let them keep growing, but we're really excited to at least have the progress that we have right now. Now we sowed some carrots in between our onions right here. You can see where some of those seedlings have popped up. I also have not had great success with carrots. The best success I've had with them has been in raised beds. Carrots need really loose well-draining soil and I don't know if our backyard dirt is the right place to grow carrots. So my plan is after we pull up our potatoes in the fall, well we'll pull them up in the summer, but in those same beds we will do another round of carrots for a fall garden and we will grow carrots in the raised beds and give that a try this year. But we have some popping up that we planted so we'll see how they do and who knows maybe we'll get some carrots out here in the main garden as well. Now looky here these look like they're kind of starting to bulb out a little bit. See that? Yeah. Maybe a little bit. I looked back at our video when we planted these onions and they were tiny like they have grown a lot. Yeah they have and I'm curious. I love using green onions in cooking. Can I trim some of these and use some of these tops to cook with or do they use the tops to get energy from the sun and bulb out? So if you know the answer to that please leave it down below. All right so we don't have anything else really going in the main garden quite yet. We still have our arched trellis. This will be just a pole green bean trellis this year. So we're just going to do green beans pole beans vertically and then we'll also do some bush beans right here next to that trellis. We're going to do corn up here this year. I don't know if we've decided what we're going to do over here. Maybe peppers? I think we said maybe squash. Maybe squash. That's what we're going to be deciding here shortly when we plant this thing out. And then back here at the back of the garden Chris set up our cattle panel and our t-posts and we are going to use these to trellis our tomatoes this year. We have tried a lot of different methods for trellising tomatoes and we grow mainly determinant varieties because I do a lot of canning and I love to make sauce and things like that. We don't grow a ton of like slicing tomatoes. So we have done the Florida weave method. We have put little wooden stakes beside each plant and tried to like go through and tie string to keep it upright. We just plant so many tomatoes. We have never gotten into tomato cages because we like to plant around 90 tomato plants every season. So we would need so many tomato cage or yeah tomato cage. So this year we're going to try cattle panel and we got some of those little clips so that we don't have to tie knots with string because it turns into a big job and a lot of upkeep to come out and constantly tie new string on. So we think those clips will be a lot more efficient and we'll just plant our tomatoes right along this cattle panel and fill this up with tomatoes and I'll do some marigolds and basil and stuff like that to deter pests in this area as well. And then we've got some more cattle panel that we will either do more tomatoes with or who knows maybe we'll do something else. We love to just get out here and get in the dirt and make our minds up and decide what we want to do. So that is a look at where we stand with the garden here in mid-April. We live in zone 7b in middle Tennessee if you're curious. This is our third year growing a garden in our backyard. We have learned so much and we love being able to share everything we've learned, everything we grow, and harvest what we do with those harvests with you. And we're just so thankful that you take time out of your day to spend it here with us at the Sasser house. So if you want to see more videos like this and keep up with our garden in 2026, be sure to subscribe to our channel so you don't miss any of our uploads. We love y'all and we'll see you on the next one. Bye y'all!