How to make a gardener swoon.

Hey there darlings, welcome back to Roots and Refuge Farm. It is a cool and windy spring day in the garden, which might not be the most conducive for shooting videos, but it is really good for getting a lot of work done. So if you can see here, I've got this bed full of tomatoes. I've got this bed full of tomatoes. Doing something a little different in my garden layout this year. I did more cherry tomatoes on this little end right here. This has been okra for the last few years, but I'm growing a different type of okra this year, and a bunch volunteers here, so I'm going to have to pull it out. I won't be able to tell the difference. I'm going to plant okra elsewhere and just do like a short row of these. These are all cherry tomatoes. This is more cherry tomatoes than I usually grow. Normally I just do this row, but Ben is wanting to sell them at my friend Jody's Farmer's Market between Saluda and Greenwood. He asked me if he could sell cherry tomatoes, and I was like, well, yeah, but I do grow extra. I usually have extra, and I was like, but if you're wanting more, then we're going to have to plant more. So he picked out which ones he wanted to help me put them in. He's going to be on top of picking those. That's going to be his job. Maya is getting a lot of work done down today. His brother and our friend Wes is down there, and they're all working together. I'm doing quite a few tomatoes in the high tunnel this year, and they're getting that ready. So I have these little cuties that I'm going to put on this green stalk. The first one to tell you today, well, the day you're seeing this video, is the start of my Roots and Refuge green stalk sale. So they are actually offering a special sale for my viewers. I'm going to get the details out so I don't tell you wrong. So it's 30% off with the code Jess. That's not my normal coupon code. This one is special for this sale only, and you get 30% off of all five-tier basic and basket weave, seven-tier basic and basket weave, and three-tier basic and basket weaves, and you get the free garden lid. This cute thing keeps bugs out with the purchase, and they also are including the ultimate spinner, plant supports, and berry cups in that 30% off. So that's a really good deal. They also asked me whenever they were planning this sale if there was any color that had been retired, that had been a limited edition, that I would like to have back for a limited time. And when the blackberry green stalk had come through, you know sometimes you'll be really restrained. Like, no, I'm gonna not buy that. I don't need that. Like you talk yourself out of it, and then the opportunity passes, and then you think about it a lot. Every time I've seen a picture of this green stalk in somebody else's garden, I've been like, man, I should have gotten that one. And I talk myself down, being like, girl, you don't need that. But I got it. They asked me if there was any that I would like to see for a limited run. So there's a small amount of these available for a limited time during this sale. So I have the berry cups. Now what these are for is for catching runners of strawberries. And I'm about to show you how this works. Previously, I have used solo cups for this. And what I will do is, hold on, let me grab one, is I've just taken solo cups and just kind of shoved them down in the sections here. The problem with that is, if you have any wind at all, they blow out. And that was my little improvisation. But when they released this product, not only is it way cuter than having this shoved in there, it clips on. So it's not going to blow away. So when I set up this green stalk this year, I actually went and gathered strawberry plants that had grown from runners, where we had just plugged in some extras in the ground and just dug them up. So this is entirely plants that I dug up. I've had a lot of different varieties of strawberries, but my absolute favorite is called Ozark Beauty. It has done way better for me. And I'm planning on switching over some of my other green stalks. I started moving the strawberry plants that were in there and filling in spaces in my in-ground garden. You know, they're not, those aren't my favorite varieties. They're just random ones that I tried. I would get like on clearance at a box store or whatever. But I'm planning on capturing the runners from my favorite strawberry plants and putting those in my green stalks. So this cup works like this. You clip it onto the side and conveniently this strawberry plant here started sending off a runner. All right. Now what runners do is they send off a little stem and on it will be a little nodule areas where they'll start trying to root down. I don't know if you guys can see that little bump right there. That's a future root. And what you do is just kind of press it down into your soil. You may need to cover it up a little bit at first, kind of press it down like that. And then you just leave it alone. You know, you, you will have to water these. They're not connected to the watering system. I have my green stalks out where they get rained on, but just check on those to make sure that they're watered. And depending on the plant and the berries, it may take a little bit longer. This is not a regular strawberry. This is actually probably some sort of wild variety, but we're going to just use this to show you. That will grow its own roots. And once its roots are established enough that when you grab it and you just very gently like tug on it like this, and it doesn't go anywhere, that means it's fully rooted. You just cut the runner off. You cut the stem off where it's connected to the mother plant. And then you take this off and you have your own, another strawberry plant. And you can just take it off. You can fill in another space in your green stalk. You can move it somewhere else, but strawberry plants multiply. And normally if you have them in a container like this, they're going to send off those runners. And if you don't grab them and let them root onto something, they'll just dry up. Now, another thing I've done with my green stalks before, if I have a runner, I may take it over and just kind of tuck it into the pocket next to it and let it root. And then they'll just be a little bit thicker in there, but you can only do that so many times. Obviously you don't want to overcrowd, but yes. Aren't those adorable? I just think they're the cutest thing. I am most surely a complete sucker for a cute product. All right, I'm just going to pop these on here. I think it's as good as any place to store them. Obviously, oh wait, no, that's a runner too. Yeah, these are wild strawberries. I dug these up not realizing. Look at, that's not the same. That's okay. I'm not going to capture that runner because I'm going to dig that guy out and replace him with the variety that I want. I'm just sticking these on here now because then I'll know where they are when I need them. And I think it's extremely adorable. So over in this green stalk, let me put his hat back on. I took that off to put my camera up there so I can talk to y'all. Green stalks are very convenient tripods if that's a need you have in your life. This is all micro dwarf tomatoes. So golden hour, patio choice yellow, dynamite delight, mini marzano, eye candy, cherry falls. It's a lot of the repeats of those. I think that's most of them that I did. Anyway, I just put these in a couple of days ago. You know, sometimes they'll have just a tiny bit of transplant shock, but everybody's looking super happy now. I think they've probably already grown a little bit just in the last couple of days. I'm really excited for this. I think it's gonna be really cool. So I will put a link to the sale. It goes April 8th, 9th, and 10th. So it's only three days that you can get that discount. And they did warn me that it was a fairly small run of the blackberry planters. So if that's something that you have been wishing you had bought too, now's your time. All right, next task. Y'all, I got something to hang out in my garden. This is so funny. Look at this. It's true. This is, this is it. This is the, this is the, uh, the credo of this channel. All y'all are welcome, but you gotta act right. Um, I saw this on Pinterest and I was like, yeah, I need that for my, my garden or my greenhouse or something. Okay, I've got some towels I'm gonna lay out here. I was gonna do this in the greenhouse, but it is a particularly breezy day and that's very good, uh, for my purposes. So I'm going to do it right here at the table in the pavilion. I've got eight, I think these are all eight pound bags. So 24 pounds of seed potatoes. I picked these up at my local, like it's a local store. If you're local, it's called, uh, Taylor Family Farms on Highway 1. It was six bucks for each of these. I got what they're calling white seed potatoes, which are like a really light kind of yellowish. And then I got some red potatoes and they're really large. Um, obviously they're already sprouting, which is good, but I'm going to go ahead and cut these up into smaller bits and let them lay out on these towels in the pavilion where it's really windy so that they can kind of scab over a little bit. You can plant potatoes whole, especially if they're smaller. When you have a big potato like this, I mean, this has, let's see, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 defined eyes on it. And kind of what happens when you plant like a big potato that has a whole lot of eyes on it, whole like this, it's like planting a bunch. I mean, you are planting a bunch of plants really close to each other. So think if you separate out your lettuce starts every 12 inches, you end up with heads of lettuce because they have plenty of space. They're not competing for resources. If you sell them really close together, that's what you do when you're harvesting baby greens, because they're going to stay small. Um, and they're going to stay really dense. They're not going to form a head when you've got them planted, you know, less than an eighth of an inch apart from each other. So with potatoes like this, if you like harvesting your potatoes small, you like new potatoes, um, you can plant them whole and that's fine. You're just going to have plants growing really densely and lots of small potatoes growing close to each other. If you want to grow larger potatoes, you do need to cut these so that you can space those plants out and they don't have to compete. But if you cut them and then put them directly in the soil, you're essentially putting an open wound on that plant in the soil where it's going to be susceptible to like bacteria and you, you stand a higher chance of having disease when you do that. So you want to cut them when you can lay them out and it does not take very long, especially if you can put them where there's a breeze. This will just harden. I mean, if you ever cut a potato and like left it on your counter and it kind of like shrivels up and hardens a little bit on the cut side. Uh, so you want to do this at least a day before you're trying to plant. If you're doing it in like your garage or in your basement or in your house where the air is not going to be moving, it may take a couple of days for it to be nice and calloused. Out here in the breezy pavilion in the middle of the garden, I expect I'll be able to plant these tomorrow, which is kind of what I'm trying to do. So you want to do kind of like inch and a half or so chunks. Have at least, obviously you need at least one eye on each chunk, but a couple is fine. And then you should lay it out on your towel with the cut side up. So it can, can obviously have the air hitting it. So if I have a kind of a larger piece that only has two little eyes on it, I'll just leave that larger. All right, there we go. I kept my, my, uh, varieties separate. These are the whites. Those are the reds. You could interplant those. It wouldn't be that big of a deal, but a lot of times different varieties come ready to harvest at different times, you know, there may be a week or two ahead. And so by keeping them separate, I think if one starts dying back, I can see that all of that variety is dying back and go out and harvest all of those, rather than having to try to determine at each plant, whether I need to pull it up or not. Oh, 24 pounds of seed potatoes. Those bags were, I think they were $6 each for the reds and $8 for the white. So 20 bucks of input. And that's at least a couple hundred pounds worth of food. Um, on a decent year that would yield 200 pounds worth of potatoes. Um, on a really good year, it could be more than that. So that's, that's awesome. We're actually planting a little less space than I've done in the past simply because I don't have storage to keep the potatoes fresh that long. I could grow a whole bunch of them and then try to can them or freeze them and all that stuff. Um, and I do can some, I'll use them in recipes, but I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of canned potatoes. I've seen a couple of ways of doing it that I've not tried that I would like to try this year. Uh, which is one of the reasons why I got the bigger potatoes and I cut them to grow them larger because for canning, you have to peel them in order to be able to can them. And so if they're small, that would be very fiddly. Um, as far as cooking, I actually really love small potatoes. I just, I like cooking whole small potatoes and roasting them. Uh, but you always can have some of those. You just harvest a little bit earlier, but I wanted to have the option of letting them grow larger and getting really big for the sake of storing and preserving. And I mean, that's still a lot of food. I may, I'm going to get these in the ground. They're already like, they're not by any means dry enough, but like they were super slick and juicy when I first cut them and they're already kind of getting a little tacky. So with this breeze, I expect they'll be ready to go in tomorrow and I'm going to get these all planted, see where I stand, make sure this fills out my space nicely. If I need any more, I'll swing back by and get some more. And I'm going to experiment with a couple of little grow bags with potatoes in them. I don't really need that. Obviously I've got space, but I'd like to be able to instruct people on how to do that because I think that it would be really nice. Even if you have a couple of potatoes in your pantry that started to sprout, don't throw them away. Just go put them in some soil. Like you'll definitely get nothing if you put them in the trash can, but I've done that many times where I have a potato that sprouted. I'll just go stick it out in the flower bed. And by the end of the summer, I pull the plant up and have, you know, a pound and a half, two pounds of potatoes. And obviously that's not like any massive amount of food, but it is two pounds of food you didn't have before. You coming buddy? You know, Toby has this puppy who is just so exuberant and just jumps around all the time. And Bear, bless his heart, he's only eight. So he's, he's not quite an old man. Um, and I expect many more years with him, but he's definitely, uh, he's definitely not as bright as Gus is whenever, whenever we call him. Sometimes he's like, oh, all right, I'm coming. You know, every animal has its voice. Do y'all have voices for animals? I know you do. I know we're not the only people who do that. Bear's voice sounds like he are a lot of the time. So this is the potato area, which this is going to look massive on the camera, uh, because it's wide angle and this is no small space. Don't get me wrong. It's, uh, I think it's 60 feet this way. And then Bear, come here. Come be the, come be the model for this, for the garden. Come here. Let's go stand in the middle. Okay. All right. Lay down, lay down, lay down. Good boy. All right. So here's Bear. This is a nice space gauge for you to see how big the garden is. Bear's a big dog. All right. You can come. Oh, stepped in the beds. That's okay. I set him up for that. So yeah, here are the beds. They're probably, these are, I don't know, two dads wide or so. Um, maybe 12 feet this way ish, something like that. So definitely still a lot of space. I do expect those potatoes I just cut up will fill this space up. Um, spacing them out. I'll, I'll plant them kind of like one here, one there, one here, one there. And then I've got this straw from where, uh, we did at Ben's birthday, we built like a redneck water slide and that was the pool at the bottom of the slide. And, um, I saved it to do the potatoes with. So I'll, I'll nuzzle them in the ground, cover them up. I'll show you guys that process. I'm hoping to get out here in the morning and do Oh, this is glorious. Look at this. So Maya just dug up a bunch of thornless blackberries and he is planting them along the fence line there by the entry. Um, and this is nice and ready. So I'm doing tomatoes in here. I'm going to get out the little auger to plant them and I'm going to go all the way down these rows, one on this side and one on that side with tomato plants. And then my peppers will be in the middle of this tunnel this year. That's the only part of the in-ground garden I'm planting this season. I'm actually leaving the rest of that covered. And if I can, during this growing season, I would really like to get my hands on some wood chips. Um, I've signed up for chip drop. I just live, I live out in the middle of nowhere. So it's very inconvenient. And I'll call like tree services and stuff, but usually I'm not on the way. I've had one load dropped off before, but usually if we get wood chips, we have to go pick them up and we may just end up doing that because I would like to get that like really reestablished as a no dig. I did it that way for a couple of years and it did pretty well, but I was, I had a hard time getting wood chips. So it was hard to maintain. Um, the potatoes will be very heavily mulched. So the weeds shouldn't be too bad there. And otherwise I'm just leaving that tarp in. I, in the past I've felt like, Oh, I really need that space to do all my sprawling things. And it is really nice to have it, but I have to look at the last couple of years. I've been very overwhelmed by that garden and it ends up being very, very weedy by the middle of the summer. So this year I'm just going to really challenge myself to make the most of this other spaces that I have. And then if that goes well, we'll re-expand back into that. Hopefully in a way that's a little less labor intensive by doing like a heavy wood chip mulch. We have had a couple of ripe strawberries this week. Definitely going to have a whole lot more. Let's see here. They're pretty loaded down and these are looking good too. Oh, yes. Oh, I picked it too soon. It's not going to be red all the way through because it's not even red all the way around, but it's still really tasty. Oh, baby dahlias popping up. Oh, look, I found one that passed the test. Yes. Y'all, look at that. Thornless blackberries going all the way down that fence. Jeremiah has gotten so into the garden this year. And let me just tell you, if y'all are sitting here watching this show with the love of your life and you were thinking, how can I woo this person? I just want to let you know, if they're a gardener and you decide you're also going to be a gardener and you get out there and you ask them to teach you stuff and you start having ideas that you want to do and you start checking on the plants, I mean, swoon like you would not believe. He's always been very, very faithful to show up and do it for me. But like he's getting interested in like this was purely his idea and like something he wanted to do to put thornless blackberries all the way down the fence. And I'm like, yeah, I mean, that sounds great. And I'm like, well, you know, we've got to consider weeds. And he's like, no, I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to scrape the grass back and then mulch it really heavily and all this stuff. And I'm like, OK, I like that. I think that's a great idea. Oh, look, broccoli time. I didn't expect this to be so soon. I have already harvested a few radishes. Oh, here I am showing you guys a little garden tour. I need to get these radishes out because this is where my calla lilies are and they're starting to pop back up. But it's conveniently timed. I mean, the radishes are ready to come out. And I actually just spotted this while I was talking about Jeremiah's super hot gardening interest. That's a little rutabaga right there. That may be a turnip. I have to look at my notes. Usually rutabagas have a little more purple on their shoulders than that. Robby, looking good. This is great. What are you looking at? Flying the drone. Oh, you're flying the drone? Are you messing with Wes? No, he's messing with me. He goes down there and plants lots of blackberries. And he looks up at the camera and Hey, little baby Elijah. Hey, you having a good day? Yeah, are you? Nice work. Thank you for your help. That's Jeremiah's little brother. All right, here we go. So yeah, these are thornless blackberries. I'm gonna go all the way down here. I mean, this is over 100 feet and they will end up completely taking it over, which will be really wild. I expect, so the deer hang out up here a lot. People ask me all the time, how do you not have a fence around your garden? How do the deer not mess with your garden? Honestly, Gabe is right on the other side of that fence. I think that's a deterrent. They have hundreds of acres that way. That's not our land. And then they have hundreds of acres that way, which is not our land. They have plenty of space to be. I think they have plenty to eat when they don't have like a giant dog barking at them. But I do expect here, these blackberries will end up getting some deer action, but we'll still get plenty of them. You said deer action? Yeah, like I think the deer will end up, like they bed down right here in this little section. We have a fence, then we have animals. Right, yeah. Once this is fenced and like the dogs can run around more here, it'll deter them. But I don't mind. I mean, like having this huge, there's no way we're going to pick all of these. Okay, I was about to say, I was like, are you using them as like, yeah. You'll convert blackberries into venison? Yeah, well as far as Toby's concerned, it's all deer jerky. Deer jerky. Every deer he sees is a featured possible deer jerky. Yeah. Oh, that makes me so excited to see. And this, ready garden spaces are so full of potential. Oh, I've got to go inside. My kids have their online classes two days a week in the morning where they do math. And so I'll be outside the whole time during that. But I do have to go in and do the rest of my responsibilities. Thank you guys for hanging out with me this morning. I bless you. Until next time.