My Garden Gave Up On Me

Oh my gosh. Guys,

I'm crying today. I'm not laughing. Number one, because my platonic friend Jacques is not here. Emphasis on the platonic. And also I've had some of the highest yields I've ever had out of my garden, but also some of the biggest problems ever. So it's a tour of failures.

And I wanted to show you because I think it's important to show everything that's wrong and everything that's right. Sometimes you can say, Oh, you know, he has a team helping, he's got this, he's got that, I can't do this. Look, we had some serious failures this year, despite pulling out some of the most hefty yields that we've ever had. Starting with this storage tomato setup that I put in with Paul on the team, maybe a few months back, well, I guess in spring,

you can tell these aren't looking too good. So right out of the gate, we had a little bit of a slow takeoff on these tomatoes here and you can tell there's some serious problems. Number one, there's just a good amount of mildew on these at this point in time, but there's also something in the soil. We live? Yeah. Can they see this or not? Sure can. Okay. So the problems that we've had is root knot nematodes in the soil.

We had it over there in the classic tomato trellis last year. It honestly looks like it's made its way around most of the garden this year, which is extremely unfortunate. So these were all having a problem early on. We were like, what exactly is going on? Because we were watering it, we felt enough. I think early on, maybe not quite enough.

Then we switched to watering it a little bit more. And then we started having these problems and then Paul pulled up some roots and wouldn't you know, root knot nematode. So this is one of the only storage tomatoes that has actually produced. And these are modest, but I'm actually stoked on them. So we'll be harvesting these sometime this week because all of this is going to come out.

But the thing that we learned is that you can actually combat root knot nematodes with beneficial nematodes. You need to do a drench pretty early on. We did it over in the sauce garden, which I'm about to show you. We didn't quite do it here in time. And that is why we think that this one really got affected while the other sauce tomatoes seem to have been mostly untouched. It's,

it's really unfortunate because I think one thing that I've learned over the five years that I've been on this property is as you develop the landscape and you develop the garden, you're going to have more adaptation by both the plants that you're growing and the ecosystem you're developing on the positive and the negative side. So like early on when we first moved in here,

I had a bunch of wood chips on the ground that just the movers or the flippers put in. Tons and tons of earwigs. Jacques was freaked out. He hated them. He was scared of them. And as we developed, a ton more birds came and started picking those clean. And then we didn't have as much of an earwig problem. So that pest pressure came down.

Disease pressure though has started to ramp up over the years, especially as we have plants that are maybe not as fit for this environment or the year is just not favorable for certain diseases. Like this was a weirdly muggy year, I guess you could say, in the garden, especially in the summer. It's been this kind of odd overcast, but slightly high humidity,

which is almost perfect for these types of fungal diseases. So sometimes it just be like that. So we're over here in the Marzano patch, which we did drench with beneficial nematodes. Still you've got some leaf death, but it's late in the season. It's August. We have a lot of San Marzano's here. Very pleased with this. So if you are dealing with that problem,

I would say give beneficial nematodes a shot. We'll put a link in the description for the one that we used, not a sponsor or anything like that. But I'm very pleased with this. I mean, you can have problems and you can still get pretty significant yields. In fact, probably the next video I put out on this channel for you guys will be a sauce video. And I am ready to get roasted and toasted in the comments because I make my

sauces my way. I make them my way. Okay. Everyone has their own way to do it. I'm not a Nona and I'm not a Lola either. I have a Lola, but I'm not one. So I'm going to make it my own way and you guys can get me in the comments. And if it's bad, it was Eric. If it's good, it was Kev. So these tomatoes good. The other one's bad. I do want to show you a couple of things in the front yard that we have struggled with. We're here in the front yard, my friends.

Had some success with the sweet potatoes. Our first big sweet potato harvest was last year. We got some honkers. You guys remember there was a gopher that tried to take a sweet potato out of the eight by four Epic Raise bed over here that we caught in the act. We decided to harvest it early and Jacques and I birthed our first child because the sweet potato was so darn big. So this is not a failure, but you can see some failures around the rest of the garden.

And I say failure kind of loosely because we're still getting a yield off of these plants. But again, we got powdery mildew like crazy on these tomatoes, but we're still hanging low with some juicy, juicy tomato fruits. So still happy about this, but just it could have produced for a little bit longer if it wasn't overtaken by the disease. The zinnias in Cosmos, for some reason,

also get hit pretty hard by powdery. So the zinnia has been slapped up. You can see it, it's on some of these leaves here. But I'm going to let the zinnias go until they really look dead because there's still some beautiful flowers on this. Up here though, right in this bed, of course the squash got decimated by powdery mildew, which if you do want to control it, we just put a video out on the main channel with Shani from Florida Food Forest, our channel out in Florida. And weirdly enough,

one of the best things that you can do is actually water the top of your plants because you're going to knock all the spores off. So you have to make sure you do it in the right conditions, but it's a counterintuitive tip that can actually work really well. But this is the mashed potato squash. It's a new entrant for our 2025 season for botanical. I was really excited to grow this. I hope they're at maturity. I'm going to open one up probably a little bit later and see,

but it's what a beautiful looking squash. I mean, I can just crack these guys right off because the plants are all dead because of the powdery. But I think they reached maturity. Beautiful cream color on this. And I don't know about you, but I love to crack them open. It's kind of like an acorn squash. Cut it open, bake it, a little butter, a little brown sugar. That's how we did it in the nineties at least.

And one of the few things that I really enjoyed eating vegetable-wise, because let's be honest, the nineties, we're not good for vegetable cooking methods like steaming those Brussels sprouts, burning them up. These guys should be tasty. Over here in the orchard, a pretty darn good year of yields. We did a lot of active pruning. You'll remember earlier this year, we had Tom Spillman come by, helped us understand a little bit better about backyard horticulture pruning.

Hit this apple, but we had a problem with the Apple. I will tell you about that. But first I have to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, which is our friends at Shopify. We've been using them for, Oh, over six years now, ever since the very first product I ever offered are Epic Raised Garden Beds. And it's by far the most important suite of tools that we use to run the business here at Epic Gardening. We use it at Botanical Interest. In fact, we migrated them over to Shopify right away when we acquired that business. And we also use them in person.

When we came to meet a lot of you guys at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show, we used Shopify's POS tools, point of sale, which was fantastic. And it also hooked into the whole backend. So we didn't have any sort of weird tracking issues. So while you offer products and services, highly recommend Shopify. Oh, I forgot to say, they have this feature called Shopify collectives, which allows us to hook into other Shopify stores and allow people to offer

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no matter what size from small to where we are today, it's been helpful all the way through. You can get a free trial at shopify.com forward slash Epic homesteading. That's shopify.com forward slash Epic homesteading. So when Tom Smellman cameence and disease. Because behind me, on our absolutely tanker massive honker peach tree,

we dealt with leaf curl just like we did the season prior. This tree is so big that we still got quite a bit of peaches off of it. I would say this year, it seems like there's some correlation between amount of peaches and the general sweetness of each individual peach. The less peaches, they seem to be more sweet, the more, a little bit less sweet. Now, I haven't done an official Bricks test on that to know,

but that's just my subjective taste sort of memory on that. But we had Leaf Curl on this, we had Fireblight on this. We still got apples, but I'm just a little disappointed with the size of this tree relative to something I planted at the same time. This massive peach that's going out of the frame here, but still a decent yield. It's been a while since I showed you guys Dragon Alley and there's things I'm

proud of and there's things I'm a little bit less proud of, but that's the nature of the garden. So we replanted all these with Richard of Grafting Dragonfruit, I believe in January of 2024. So that would have been probably 18 or so months ago now, 20 months ago. I'm very impressed and proud of the way that we've been able to train these up because these all came from single cuttings. One little stem cutting,

maybe about this long or so. All of these have ramped up within about a year and a half to pretty much full canopy potential. This one here, which is called Connie Meyer, you can see some of these scar marks here, had hands down some of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen. I don't think I've had a dragonfruit grow with a violet sort of

blood purple flower. The problem is it's self-sterile. So we didn't have any other dragon fruit open at the same time that we could cross-pollinate. So we had all these beautiful flowers and then we just hadn't, zero of them set any fruit whatsoever. So a win and a failure, I would say some of the dragon fruit have also had a couple of different diseases. You get this sort of like yellowy, mushy kind of rot that can come in. It's not on this one, but it's on a couple others. You can cut it out,

but it is a little frustrating to get it. Sometimes, sometimes it's also from a bit of too much sun, which the one over there is in the most sun. So it kind of would make sense that that's the case. But again, good setup year and not a good fruiting year, at least for this variety. The rest of them should be coming in around October. So I think we'll get a good yield. But sometimes it's just like that. I mean, sometimes you have to put a year in, get it scaffolded up,

get the system running and then you'll reap. Like the artichokes over here, the asparagus in the backyard. We're coming into our fourth season with asparagus. That's going to be a massive, massive yield this coming spring. Now we're over here by the pond, which I haven't updated you guys on in quite some time. Again, a story of wins and losses. We do need to clean this pond out. It's been well past its expiration date of when you should be doing a full pond cleanout.

So what we've been doing in the pond return is like power washing out some of the algae and the buildup to make sure that it still keeps falling through. But also some big wins. The lilies that we pruned up, oh maybe a month or two ago, have come back in full force. They're starting to bloom. Haven't lost a fish in many years now. And the mosquito fish that are in here, there's like, I would say probably about 500 now. The mosquitoes in the homestead,

which were a huge problem maybe in years one, two, a little bit of year three, are almost non-existent now because we've eliminated a lot of the water sources. And the water source that is here has so many mosquito fish that there's simply no way that any larva will ever make it out of this pond. So I'm very happy about that. But we are getting to that time in the life of this property where maintenance

starts to become as important as building something out. You'll notice there, there isn't a lot left for me to build here. I have a test garden over there that's been filled out. Jacques and Paul built that out while I was away on a vacation. Beautiful surprise. We've got the pond, we've got the grape trellis, we've got the banana going absolutely crazy this year. Not a lot of big structures I can put in,

not a lot of new projects from scratch, but there is a lot of refining and maintaining. You can see in this background, this landscape that we've put in has really started to fill in. And this is where you get into kind of the beautification phase of the homestead process. So I'm actually curious if you've been following along throughout the entirety of this channel's progress and you have a homestead of your own, I'd love to know what your challenges have been this season because it has been our biggest yield year as far as poundage, but also our most disease ridden year, which is a bit of a,

it's a dichotomy as they would say. So thanks again to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. Again, a free trial at shopify.com forward slash Epic Homesteading. this episode. Again, a free trial at shopify.com forward slash Epic Homesteading. And until next time, my friends, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.