Extreme Heat Garden Tour - What Actually Grows in 100+ Degrees.

Is it possible to grow food in an area that gets 100 degree temperatures on a regular basis? Some would say no. I would say it really depends on what you want to grow. So let me show you around my central Florida garden in the middle of summer and see what is doing well and what is not. So let's start out with these four beds right here. In this particular bed I had some flowers, I had some peanuts, nothing wanted to sprout. I was just having a really hard time. So I went ahead and switched it over to a cover crop of sun hemp. This is going to help feed the soil while we transition and wait for fall gardening and on my other side here is all sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are like the number one thing that you can grow in a hot tropical climate and they do so well. As you can see they've got chewed up leaves and everything they don't care. It doesn't matter if you're still going to grow sweet potatoes down there but they do take a while which actually works out for me because we have a long hot growing season so those guys are super happy. There is one other plant over here in this back bed on the arch that's super happy too. That's going to be things like right down here this tomatillo. I cannot believe it but these are all volunteer plants. Something that isn't a volunteer but is doing super well is going to be this melon right here. Look at it! These are called onzas. They are a small personal watermelon so it's not going to get much bigger than that. I also have some little ones hanging right there and I expect even more if we come around here. Look at that little guy! I'm going to have so many on here. I'm so excited about this one. Wouldn't that be the cutest thing if the entire arch trellis right here was just covered in little baby watermelons? I will lose my mind with happiness. Over my other shoulder right here is my cherry tomato plant. I call it that because I don't know what variety it is. I suspect it's like a super sweet 100 but this was a volunteer plant that just popped up in my garden and it has outgrown this and has now fallen back over way down here collapsing on itself. It has produced so much. It's still producing fruit to this day which is pretty shocking because there's really only one variety I know that does that which is everglades but this one is doing it which is really really cool. It's really big. It's starting to show somewhere but I'm gonna let it keep going because it's really the only plant in the garden right now that's giving me tomatoes and they are a decent size. They're a substantial tomato. The everglades are fairly small but these guys are like what you would expect from a cherry tomato which is nice and the skin is thicker and for me I feel like they taste better too. Also in this bed are my Puerto Rican black beans that are just now starting to dry. This vine is actually going to take up this whole area eventually. It will cover this entire trellis. It will be crazy how wild this is going to get and I'm just going to let it keep going until I need this bed which is probably going to be like September-ish so I should be able to get a pretty good supply. Maybe not a year supply but pretty close to a lot of black beans. Then we have my long bed right here. It goes all the way there, all the way back. In this first one I have watermelons and these are supposed to be everglade tomatoes but they are not setting fruit so now I'm questioning if the seeds I got were accurate or some other kind of current style. I have a bunch of little sunflowers. We just had a storm take over and they kind of are falling over but look how cute that sunflower is. I think that one's called a lemon pro cut something. I got it from Haas. It's beautiful. This whole watermelon is called the moon and stars watermelon and I have my first fruit. This one takes a little bit longer than the Owens's because they're so much smaller but look at that. That's my first fruit of the moon and stars. I've always found that the moon and stars works really well. It's a large watermelon so I can't grow it on the arch trellis like I was doing the Owens's but I have to grow it down on the ground here so that it can sit because these things get big. I had one that got 30 pounds. Huge and they take forever and there's a lot that could go wrong. I love them. I love them very much but I like the smaller ones just for like ease of eating and not having to figure out what I'm going to do with the other 20 pounds of watermelon because I just don't eat that much of it. In this bed I have some sweet potatoes but mostly this is just flowers. I did have my tomatoes on the flat panel there, the flat cattle panel there but those came out a while ago so now we have these beautiful zinnias in like every color imaginable. There's like a little orange one. Here's like a yellowish orange one and then we've got these little powder puff pink. Oh they're so cute. There's these white speckled with the red and then some of the more traditional that you might be used to seeing. These are the pro cuts that came from Haas. They're just now starting to come in. They're a little bit smaller. I'm thinking that they'll get taller as we go. One of the most important parts about growing in a very hot weather climate is consistent watering. I want to thank HoseLink for sponsoring today's video. They gifted me their classic 82 foot retractable hose reel and I've been using it to keep my fruit trees watered all summer long. Whenever a project says easy installation I'm always a little bit skeptical because my definition of easy and other people's definition of easy is very very different. I am not a handy person but thankfully this one actually was pretty easy and straightforward and very cool. They send a video that shows the installation instructions as well as written installation so it was a breeze. It only took a few minutes to install and once it was up it was all ready to go. The 82 foot hose easily reaches all the way across my backyard orchard so I'm not dragging multiple hoses around or carrying around heavy buckets of water. With how hot it's been outside lately I don't want to be out here long so I could just grab the hose pull it to whichever tree I need watered and then it just retracts back up and that way I get back inside into the AC as quick as possible before I melt. If you'd like to check one out I'll leave the link down in the description. You can also use my discount code 2026homegrown. This is going to get you $15 off a purchase of $75 or more. Thanks again to hose link for sponsoring today's video. Now let's get back to the hot weather garden tour. Now I know this bed looks like a hot mess but there's stuff going on here like this right here is a carrot. So that carrot went to seed and now the seed is drying out and it takes forever for those seeds to dry out. So I'm just letting those go. I also have some different kinds of little sunflowers. These are dwarfs. I think these are the sun spot sun short stuff. I can't remember. I'll put it right here which kind they are but those did really good but they're kind of ending their time but I do have melons in here and I have one that's ready so I thought maybe we could try it together. These are called mango melons. They're basically like a cantaloupe but they're supposed to taste kind of like a honeydew. Now I've never grown these before but I am told oh look at that just popped right off that when you pull on them slightly if it's ripe it'll just fall right off which is exactly what it did. Oh that smells good. Oh that's interesting. I'm really holding out a lot of hope for this one because it grows super easy. I have a bunch. I think I've got like one two three four five six seven eight on one plant which I think is really good but it's got to taste good right and it grows during our summer and stuff. This plant's not looking super happy right now but I think I've got some issues in this bed that I got to deal with but let's open it and see first what it looks like and then what it tastes like because there's been stuff online that's like oh they're amazingly sweet and there's other people that are like it doesn't taste like anything. So now I'm curious. Oh it's definitely white. It smells like a melon. Just see white on the inside. Kind of like a honeydew. It has a very sweet smell. Let's try it. I like that. Okay that's different though. It is not like a honey. It's not like a cantaloupe. I was kind of thinking it would be like a cantaloupe because it looks like a cantaloupe. It's uh it does kind of taste like a honeydew. That's good. It has something different. Almost citrusy. Yeah that's what I'd give it. It's like a honeydew mixed with a little bit of lemon and sugar and something else. I like it a lot. Not what I was going for. I really thought it would taste like a cantaloupe. So it doesn't. It has the texture of a cantaloupe but it tastes kind of citrusy which is different. I didn't expect that. It's a good thing. It grows really well and it's a good thing I like it but it's not what I expected. It's not like any other melon that you're going to eat. Man I wish I could place that flavor. I really like it but I just can't. It's very weird. I don't want to say weird because weird sometimes people take that as like it's bad. It's not bad. It's really good. It's just so different. Like a lemon citrus but not like tart lemon. I don't know. If you guys have grown these before help me out like in describing them because I'm having a really hard time with what that flavor is. It's kind of like a lemon but not tart like a lemon. Sour a little bit. I don't I can't describe it. It's really difficult to describe. Head down to the comments and let me know if you've grown the mango melon what you would describe the taste like. Now we moved into the last two beds. It's going to be this one which has my peppers. It also has some of the sweet potatoes that I'm growing that I think it's a purple murasaki or something and then right here we have some more sun hemp. Now let's go through these peppers because I think I think there's going to be some surprises here because a lot of these are new to me. So starting with these like three right here. These are all bell peppers and this is going to be They did good. Better than most bell peppers but I wouldn't say that they're amazing. I think that they did okay and they're still doing it. They're still setting fruit which is cool because most bell peppers don't set that much fruit in the heat like this. Then I have these guys. These are there's little little bugs all over. Thankfully those are ladybugs but this one is the mad hatter and then right beside it is the starfish pepper. Both of these are sweets and they kind of look alike. Very very similar. The bottom is a little bit different. I think these have done really well. They take forever to ripen. I will say that. They're a little bit of a pain in the butt because they take so long to ripen. This one right next to it. This guy with these little baby peppers. You can probably see a little bit of the red in between. This is a roulette habanero which I think is just the funniest name because it's a roulette I guess because you're spinning the roulette to see what you get. I don't know but they're habaneros and you guys if you've been following this channel for any length of time you know I'm not a spicy person so why am I growing a habanero? This is a sweet habanero. It's bred all the heat right out of it and it's just a sweet pepper and I really like them. I also like Iquitos. That one was the one I grew last year that did incredibly well as a sweet pepper but it was bred from a hotter pepper. Well this is kind of the same situation. These ones that were bred to be sweet from a hot pepper seem to do so well in my garden and this is also one of them. The roulette habanero tastes really good. It's got a good flavor to it. Not quite as sweet as the Iquitos but still really really good and very prolific. Right beside it these three have not done well. The Jimmy Nardano has done okay. Nordello has done okay. It took a little pause. It's starting to flower again. The one right next to it I honestly don't even remember what this one is. I lost the tag too dang it. I'll have to go look on my app and I'll put it down here what this one is and it it is actually doing quite well but it feels like it's taking forever. Oh I remember this one. This is Delola banana pepper which is a larger banana pepper and I have already harvested two or three times for it and it's putting another round on and it's really really good. I like this banana pepper quite a bit and the one on the end here is the yellow hostinator. This one just got shaded and it feels like it's just growing very very slowly. Heading down fruit row. Here's Peachy. She's sowing some sign of nutrient issues and that fertilizer is really going to help. Right over here the figs. They look pretty good. I had most of them stolen by a rat recently but we caught the rat so he's gone. Now the plum tree that has been struggling with nutrition issues for a while. Now this next feeding is going to help it but you can see the new growth is nice and green but that old growth has still a lot of problems. It's going to have to like grow out of this. Hopefully by next spring it looks better. The Indian berry never came back so my husband and I are going to cut this one down here soon. Elderberry is putting on fruit right now and so that's just going to keep growing. It usually grows the entire length of the pitch of the roof. It'll get that high before these are all ready. The loquat has also put on a lot of growth and it's doing very well. Hopefully this year we're going to have a much better harvest on the loquat. We had hit some really cold temperatures and it never it didn't do very well but we still got some loquats from it but I'm hoping we have a mild winter this year so we can get a lot of loquats. Now here I have our blackberries which are a little sparse over here but this is where I planted those new blackberries of Primark Freedom and the Nanchez and so I still need to do my pruning for these guys and I'll probably do that here shortly. I'm going to rip out. I have like a squash plant in here that didn't really work out. It's just not enough sun over on this side. I think that's probably why the blackberries have not done amazing because this is a a shady spot with the trees and my neighbor's trees and stuff. It's just it's a struggle for them but I'm going to prune those back and see how they do. Pomegranate is once again doing nothing. No fruit whatsoever. No flowering even though we opened up a lot of the pruning down there. I pruned off and kept just the mature shoots. It's still not doing anything. Can you believe how big the mulberries have gotten? Y'all were with me 60 days ago when I chopped all these mulberries down and they are back at it so we're gonna have to chop them again. We also have our namwah banana that is getting some height. I don't think it's going to produce this year but if I can get it through this winter I think we're going to be really good. Our fantastic avocado is also doing really well. It's put on a lot of new growth and I will probably disconnect it from its little stake here once we get past hurricane season. Now let's get into everything I'm growing in containers. I have down here these are all the blueberries. I'm probably going to pot up the little ones here shortly. I try to pot them up every single year. The big ones I don't think need it quite yet. I have been monitoring how well they're holding their moisture in the soil and they're doing that very well so I don't necessarily feel like it needs an up pot this year but the little ones definitely do. This is my star fruit and check out all of the little flowers. I'm hoping that means we're going to get some fruit off this tree at least. I'm not going to let it keep much but maybe like just maybe five and see if it fruits well. If it fruits well this is what's going to take the place of the pomegranate. We also have some of my herb green stalks. I have different things in here like ginger, mint, oregano, rosemary, the Vicks vapor rub plant. Here's the strawberries. They're not doing super well as I expect they won't be but we do have some runners and these little cups come in such handy. I took the runners and I've been putting them in here to try to get some new plants to replace all of what has died unfortunately. Then over my shoulder here I have our container. We're going to do a video comparing this sweet potato to the vertical container sweet potato to the in-ground bed sweet potato. See which one gives us the biggest harvest. I also have our guava. I think that's the ruby supreme guava and right behind that I have my pigeon peas in a container. I know people think I'm crazy for growing pigeon peeing in a container but I just I don't have a spot for it to go on the ground right now you know that it would like. I just have shade spots. I feel like usually what ends up happening is something happens to one of my trees and then I have availability and I'm like oh okay well that's where you're gonna go. At least that's what I'm hoping for otherwise it will live a little while longer in that pot and we'll see if it actually produces. I do have some more herbs. If you remember these came from the Haas subscription. This is my basil and it's so cute. I got to thin it down. The thyme is doing what thyme really does down here but we're gonna see if it's got any longevity. Then I have all of my jabotacabas. These are babies. This one's a two-year-old baby that I grew from the seeds from my jabotacaba harvest and I've got some new little ones. I try to grow a few every single year and then I give them away as gifts. I might give them away as a giveaway once they get a little bit older. That one seems like it's old enough to probably do that with. Down here we have our colomondens. I'm so excited. Look at that little thing. It's so cute and then the finger limes. I have not found any fruit on these. I hear they don't fruit as easily so maybe not this year. Right here is the Meyer's lemon that has citrus greening disease but it's still putting on good green growth so I'm happy with it. I have the truly tiny banana right here. That one died back from last winter but now it is coming back again. The jabotacaba right here with actual fruit and flowers. I swear this thing just fruits and flowers all year round. Look at that thing. I love eating these when I'm just like out in the garden. Oh my skin. Sorry, I take the seeds and I actually plant them. While I sit here and have little snacks I'll, instead of just spitting the seeds out, gross right, I actually put them in these little trays and that's how I get my little seedlings. So you go in there, you go in there. Second to last, this one is the mandarin, the sugar bell mandarin. Can you guys see? Oh I've got a bunch. I think, well it's the first year that it's fruited and I kind of let it keep most of what it wanted to fruit as long as it wasn't too close together. That one I think has like a dozen on it. So if it's got a dozen and it held a dozen and it holds all dozen of those until, you know, it's time to actually harvest them then I know that it is now at the full fruit bearing age and I'll have a really good harvest next year. I'm probably not going to prune it at all this year. I kind of want it to get a bit more bushy. But you gotta, you gotta balance that right because it is in a pot. And then last but not least we're back to the raised beds and then right here I have the Barbados cherry in a full sun spot and it has, I don't know, probably quadrupled in size. It's doing very well. I'm thinking I'm going to have to up pot it before spring. That would be pretty crazy because it is so young. I didn't expect to up pot it within the first year because I did put it in a larger pot. But yeah it is, it is growing pretty, pretty amazingly. I hope this gives you some idea of things that you can grow in your warm weather environment. You can grow fruits, you can grow herbs, you can grow vegetables. Just gotta look for the ones that absolutely love growing in the heat. And then just roll with it. When things don't work out, you just replace it with something else. Thanks so much for hanging out and seeing the garden with me today. There's stuff that's doing good, there's stuff that's not doing good, but that's typical. I hope you're having fun with your summer garden. Happy gardening guys!