Not Throwing In The Towel Yet | Huge Late Summer Garden Cleanup

I'm obsessed with gardening. That's no secret. And as such, my social media feed is like 98% gardening, gardeners, that kind of content. So I see all the trends in the gardening world. And right now what I'm seeing a lot of is the ode to the late summer garden. And usually the gist of those odes is that the garden in the late summer is wayward, that it is lost to nature, lost to the gardener. It's just time for the gardener to throw their hands up in the air and say, what will be will be. Let the garden go. It's wild now. It's outside of my control. And while I generally do subscribe to the same thoughts where this time of year, I'm tired, neck deep and canning, tired of processing fruit from the garden. I'm tired of cutting out disease. I just, I'm ready for fall. At the same time, I'm not ready to give up on the garden yet. I live in a medium season, medium length season area. I'm in Ontario, Canada, zone 6b. Our last frost in spring is sometimes mid-May. And then our first frost is expected the first week of October. So it's, it's not the longest growing season. I've only been harvesting tomatoes in earnest for about a month, like a little over a month. That's not enough time for me. So I think a lot of these people who are writing these odes to the summer garden or the late summer garden, and they're ready to just be done. They may be coming from warmer climates, from places where there are longer seasons. And so sure, if you've been harvesting heavily and cutting out disease and pruning and all these things for six months, you've earned your break, you're done. But I'm just getting started. Our garden doesn't take off and start requiring work until the end of June. So I'm just diving in right now. I'm going to start cleaning up the garden. I'm going to cut out some plants that have gotten overgrown. I'm just going to do a cleanup, a reset. And things are still going to have a chance to grow back so that wildlife can find refuge for winter. I'm not going to clean up my space like a barren field. I'm just going to do some, some tidying and some organizing out here. So this is a day of deep cleaning the garden, because I want things to keep producing. I don't want things to get diseased. I want lots of productivity out of this garden still. So come with me as we do this garden deep clean, sort of reset for fall, but not really more just like I'm going to keep maintaining this space because I still want more out of it this summer. It is still summer. If you're new here, my name is Amy, and this is the Hobby Homestead. I'm going to start today by cutting a bunch of flowers, because once the flowers start to go to seed, they tend to stop producing as many fresh blooms. Now I have here a queen lime zinnia, which I love, and it will keep flowering into fall. Zinnias are one of those that outlasts most of my other plants that I have here in terms of bloom time, including my my native plants that are designed to bloom in the fall, but in general it's a good idea to keep your flowers cut back so that they keep putting out new flowers. It is not too late for these plants to put on more blooms, and while I want to leave a couple for seeds so I can save the seeds, I am going to clean them up quite a lot and take a nice bouquet into the house with me. Here are some that are ready to save seeds from. I'm going to label these as salmon zinnias, bring them inside. This calendula behind me is pretty covered in powdery mildew, so I'm going to do a real hack job on this. You can see my good intentions here of bagging the blossoms, thinking when those are dried I'm going to grab the seeds, they're going to be saved in here, and then I forget about it. These have been in here for like a month ready to harvest the seeds, and now they're all moldy and rotting in there, so I'm really going to hack this back. I've already ripped out a couple calendula that really got hit with powdery mildew hard this year. That's not always a problem we have, but this year it is. Everything on this end of the bed should do a little bit better now that there's airflow again, and I fully expect this calendula to put forth a ton more blooms for this fall. Marigold is one of those that usually needs a lot of deadheading, but this is actually looking pretty good. I don't have to do much deadheading on it. This marigold has become massive. This is my daughter's garden. We've got the grape behind me. I just had to prune a ton of this out, and I didn't even have the camera on, but I am weeding her garden a little bit and also just cutting out some of the calendula that's gotten powdery mildew all over it. You can see down here she's got a pumpkin. This was a volunteer. There were dozens of volunteer pumpkin plants in her garden because we spread chicken coop bedding, like composted chicken coop bedding, all over her garden as a mulch this spring, and the chickens get our jack-o'-lanterns in the fall, so this is a jack-o'-lantern pumpkin. She kept one in her garden, but they do take over. Pumpkin vines get huge, so I've been trying to come through here and keep it really cut back. At this point, it's pretty much ready to be harvested, but I've been trying to cut back the powdery mildew off of its leaves too. I think it's almost time to get this out of here and clear the space out completely, but this pumpkin vine is the reason why all this stuff is really suffering from powdery mildew because the pumpkin vine just laid on top of it, and I'm going to deadhead or take off the fresh blooms here, use them in teas or in infusing them in oils. We can make skin products with them, and picking these is going to look sad for today, but by tomorrow there will be a whole new set of blooms open. I have multiple heaps of scraps right now all throughout the garden. We'll go through and collect those later. Back to deadheading. This part of the garden has really been bothering me because pretty much everything here is done blossoming except for the calendula. I've been leaving a lot of this stuff. I wanted my dill to drop its seeds, which it has. Dill comes up nice and thick here every year, and this dotted horse mint, the wasps were still all over it, but there's a lot of fresher dotted horse mint blooming now, so I think it's time I can finally come through and really clear this space out. I see a lot of weeds growing up down below all of this, so it'll be good to get this cleaned out. I lost my my trimmers. I had to go find different ones. I don't know where I put them. They're probably in my pile of scraps. So right now I've got this one side all weeded. There's more bare soil than I would normally have in a garden. I'm actually seeing some areas I've missed already. There's a squash here that just was not getting enough sunlight. It's just a summer squash, so there's a chance it'll produce some fruit now, but it's opened up in here, and I've left my feverfew because it is starting to bloom a second time. This is after I cut back my feverfew. It sent out a second bloom. I'm leaving my plantain along the front of this bed because to me it's not a weed. It's useful. I've got a little bit of dill coming up amongst it, and I weeded out this whole area here that was wild strawberry. It's revealed my hollyhocks that I cut back because of the rust. Wild strawberry makes an excellent ground cover, but it does cover that ground. It goes a little wild, and I think I want something a little bit prettier and showier right here next to our dining area, but this is the heap so far, just from here. Now it's time to do the other side of that little pathway. Oh dear, I lost my mic. I've now lost my burning shooters and a mic. One is significantly more expensive than the other. It's not in this pile of weeds. Leaf blowers are not for everybody in the garden. They can be pretty loud, but this one is an electric leaf blower, and it works really, really well to clean out our hardscaping. If we don't keep it cleaned up, then all that plant matter decomposes into our rocks. We've got all this hardscaping, and then it becomes soil, and then weeds grow, so we like to keep it blown off a couple times a season. No big deal. It really does help, and I found my mic. Luckily, I had a backup, but I was getting pretty worried that this was at the bottom of a brown bag. That would not have been ideal. Very, very ripe mini white cucumbers. These are not mini nor white anymore. I miss them. I miss them growing here. Here's an actual mini and white. All right, I'm gonna go find my my snippers, and I'm gonna cut back some of this powdery mildew. There's really not much I've left on this cucumber plant in terms of leaves. I've left a couple with a bit of powdery mildew, and hopefully I don't regret that. I wanted to leave just enough leaves that this plant will hopefully bounce back. If a cucumber plant is healthy enough, all of this hard pruning should encourage it to send out fresh growth. I actually have another cucumber plant that I thought was completely dead. It ran out of nutrition in a pot. I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and the leaves were very yellow. There were no signs of the CMV, cucumber mosaic virus, no signs of powdery mildew. It just went very pale, stopped producing. So I added some fertilizer to that pot, and now let me show you. Look at this cucumber plant. Like pretty deathly looking, right? Very, very yellow and crispy, but it's sending out some fresh growth. And I left that cucumber in the pot because I was anticipating a brand partnership where there was a soil test kit and some amendments that would have been good for container gardening. But the US and Canada are having some issues right now, and so that did not pan out. And I had left it there as like a before to show, okay there's something wrong with the soil, let's test it. And I'm glad I left it. I put some kelp meal in there, diluted kelp meal. It seems to have revived that plant. This is one area of the garden that very badly needs to be re-trellised. This is a climbing nasturtium that has just refused to climb. It's just sprawling everywhere. Nasturtium can be a little bit tricky to force onto a trellis because the stems are a little bit delicate, so you can snap them off easily. But this plant is so huge that it's fine if I break off some pieces. And of course, I got distracted because there was a tomato plant in my way, so I ended up pruning just a little bit of tomatoes. That's a sneak peek to later on in the video, but sometimes you just have to deal with the task that's literally right in front of your face. This plant is parsley. I'm tying it up because I want it here going to seed. It just gets really, really big when it goes to seed. I want it to spread its seeds so we get more parsley next year. But it's shadowing other things. It's draped on top of other things. So I'm just tying it up and then tying it to the trellis to keep it out of the way. Here's our baby bok choy for fall. These were sown July 29th. They are about a month in growing and the beets here, the goldfinches, have started eating beets again. It's interesting the preferences of the animals, the wildlife, as the season changes. They go through periods of wanting seeds and then periods of wanting caterpillars and then periods of wanting leafy greens. But there is that time of year where goldfinches just can decimate beet greens. One of the things that needs re-trellising the most is tomatoes. You gotta stay on top of these guys. I like using this stuff, Velcro straps. You just cut a little section off and then it's just a little like strap of Velcro and it's pretty soft and gentle on the tomato stems. So I'm going to add a little piece there. Okay, apparently this is a tomato pruning video too. My goal in pruning these is to just get as much airflow as I can, get any signs of disease out of here. This Armenian cucumber was looking a lot happier when I first started filming today and I'm worried that I must have nicked it or damaged it somehow when I was pruning the zinnias. It's all still attached so I don't know but it's all of a sudden all the leaves are wilting so I'm hoping after the rain it bounces back. I am I think I'm done. I think I'm done tomatoes. Wow, look below me here. That's a lot of tomatoes. Not tomatoes, just their, just their branches. Okay, there's something here I really wanted to show you and I should have done this task a while ago but I wanted to make sure I was out here with the camera to show you. I'm pulling these bush beans out. These were the beans from May. I didn't write the date. I sowed these in early May under a plastic grow cover so they were the first succession of beans and I've got backups over there already flowering. I've got backups over there producing. I've got whole beans here producing. I do not need these and I want the space for fall crops so I could pull up the bean plants which would actually be quite a lot easier. Okay, this one's a poor example because there's not actually that many on it but there are these root nodules right there. That's nitrogen. The bean plants pull nitrogen from the atmosphere and they put it in the soil and you want to leave those in the soil if you can. There's a lot of little nodules on the roots and these legumes bring that nitrogen from the atmosphere, process it somehow through their vascular system and then it ends up in these little nodules on their roots so you don't want to pull out those plants when they're done. It's best to cut them off at the base and leave those roots in place to break down. So this is one of my prime fall gardens. I've got these hoops right here so I can put plastic over top if Kim doesn't get around to make me a cold frame which I'm hoping that she does this fall. I've got more spinach. I really would like to fill a bed with spinach because it's one of those things that you don't have a whole lot of time to harvest before it stops growing because the days get too short or the light gets too weak. So it's like plant it late August early September like we have with these and then by the end of September it's pretty much done. It's not going to keep growing so you can't keep harvesting from it but it's nice if you can have a big bed full of it so you can just harvest. You don't run out and you can harvest through the whole winter from spinach especially if you have a row cover on. I've even dug the snow away and harvested spinach. So I'm going to plant more spinach in this bed here and I think I'm going to do my own my own safe seeds. This is a cross and I'm sowing this quite thickly or densely because it's going to be baby spinach. The spinach is not going to have a whole bunch of time to grow into big leaves and I'm not even going to water it in because it is going to rain all day tomorrow. This is a bed that I had decided to dedicate to fall stuff and now sadly I'm thinking I'm going to pull up all my leeks because there is leek minor leek moth in them and they're probably not going to last the winter. I might leave a couple just for fun but I am going to have to load up my dehydrator with alliums. It even got into my garlic so a lot of the garlic is going to have to be processed right away which is a shame but that's going to be for another video. But it is time to harvest these kohlrabi and put something else in their place. This is dill. Dill is going to come up in this bed in the spring. I have to remember that now and these are parsnips on this side. There's a little row of fennel coming up right here. I think what I'm going to plant right here where I just took the kohlrabi out is some radishes and I saved these seeds from watermelon radishes from last year. I had a big patch and I forgot about them. They were hidden amongst the mess in the garden and so I didn't get to them until they were fully gone to seed but there was a whole patch of them together which means there was some cross-pollination which means that these should be pretty good seed. There's a little bit more cleanup that has to be done. This is luffa. It's just growing out on top of everything. Hard to get through here. Now we've worked our way back to the hill garden which is a jungle and I'm not even sure where to begin with this space. I'm going to be doing quite the refurbishment on this space in the spring. There's just there's plants that are way too big. There's monarchs dancing around the cop plant and I wanted to get rid of that one but those plants are so tall they're drowning out what fruit trees I have left in that garden. It's definitely time to just at least get a start on ripping out a lot of the stuff that's here. I started by removing the squash leaves that had powdery mildew on them from one of my summer squash here. Also I had a baby haskap in here that had gotten buried in squash on other weeds so it's a good thing that I pulled all this stuff out. I also got a good start on ripping out a lot of the wild strawberry. I don't know how much more I have in me. I just weeded or ripped out all the wild strawberries from along that area that's flanking the back of the raised bed there. That's going to be a couple years worth of work keeping all the wild strawberry pulled out of there. It just really liked it there and so it took over. I don't know if I have the energy but I really really would like to pull a lot of the powdery mildew covered leaves off of this squash patch here behind the chicken coop. There are some gorgeous squash forming back in here. I'm just gonna start working see how far I get. I did it! I didn't think I could but I did. I got pretty much all the mildewy leaves out of here and I only broke off one underripe squash. Last time I did this I accidentally cut off a vine that was feeding multiple large squash so I did better this year. Most of these vines actually grew through the fence and they're on my neighbor's side so there's a ton more pumpkins and squash over on his side. Thank goodness he doesn't mind. Also there just isn't the same powdery mildew problem back there probably because this is like a tight confined space holds the humidity in whereas on the other side of the fence it's much more open. It is definitely time for me to call it quits right now. I am hot, I am sweaty, I am dirty, I am rashy from all the squash vines. I think I accomplished a lot. I've got six full brown bags and again we don't normally use the brown bags for this kind of thing but our compost bins are heaping full. I can barely get the lids closed and I don't necessarily want to just make a big pile of diseased things like mildewy things because that'll just perpetuate the problem, it'll spread. Some of my treasures from today include some beautiful flowers and poppy seed pods that I can use for arranging. Look at all these beauties. There's some you know peppers, cucumbers, that kind of thing and I got a basket of calendula. We're gonna infuse this in some oil, maybe that's what I should put on my rashy arms. That's what it looks like to try to keep your garden thriving throughout the fall instead of just letting it go. This took the better part of a day, I'm not gonna lie, but instead of just letting it go if you can devote a day to cleaning everything up, cutting back disease, keeping things fertilized or even if things need a little bit of top up of compost this is not a terrible time to do it. Keep your flowers cut back so you get more blooms, keep things trellised if they're starting to fall off trellises or just like grow in whatever direction they want and even if you live in a place like me where our first frost comes the beginning of October you could still get another six to eight weeks left of wonderful garden enjoyment because even though a frost comes doesn't mean everything has to die. I was gonna shower but I think I need to soak in boiling hot water to get myself cleaned. Most of this is tomato gunk, well I don't know, and apparently if you put an acid on like vinegar it helps get that off the the green stuff you get stained on your hands from tomatoes. Okay enough's enough, it's time to call it. Thank you for watching and I hope you come and grow with us.