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Video Summary
In this end of July garden tour, I’m showing you what’s happening in my Colorado Zone 5B garden after being dizzy for about six weeks, which means there are weeds everywhere and I’m still working on getting things back in order! I take you through my four surviving tomato plants, peas that are surprisingly still producing (which is unusual for this time of year), green beans that I’ve already harvested once, carrots that I never got around to thinning, and my first pear tree harvest ever. I’m also growing three corn plants, tiny pumpkins that aren’t vining out like they should, watermelon, cantaloupe, grapes, and a variety of berry bushes that I’m still figuring out. This year I tried peppers and onions for the first time with great success, I’m growing my first tomatillo plant, harvested an amazing turnip, and I’m attempting beets for the first time. My kitty cat Milo is out with me without his harness for the first time, which leads to a little adventure at the end when he tries to explore the neighbor’s yard!
Video Transcript
Welcome back, it’s Kari at Keep It Simple DIY, and today I have an end of July garden tour for you. It’s been a minute since I’ve shown you the garden, so let me flip you around and show you what we’ve got.
I’ll start by giving you just a quick overview and then I’ll go into depth on each part. Something interesting that happened this year is I was dizzy for about six weeks, so this is real life. This is my backyard. I’ve got weeds everywhere. I’ve already spent a lot of time pulling weeds and getting things back in order, but it’s just taking a lot of time. I do have the kitty cats out with me today. Milo’s graduated to not having a harness on while I’m outside with him, so we’ll see how he does today.
Here’s my tomatoes. We ended up getting four tomato plants that survived. And over here I planted plants quite a few times and they never came up, and I also tried planting basil there, so tomatoes and basil, nothing grew in that section, so I’m not quite sure why. But in Colorado I’m in 5B, we typically don’t even start getting tomatoes ripe until August or September, so we’re right on track with that.
In this section here, I did have some radishes. There’s just one little one left that I haven’t pulled out, and then I’ve planted some basil in this section, but it hasn’t popped up yet.
The peas are just about done. I’m actually quite surprised that these peas have been going as long as they have. Peas are definitely a cold weather crop, and typically at this time of the year we’ve been way too hot for peas. But if I come in here, you can see we still have a ton of peas on here, and I just harvested every pea off this plant last week, so this is everything that happened in one week. So this is great. I’m going to probably do one more harvest on these, and who knows, maybe they’ll keep going. But this is the longest I’ve ever seen peas go.
And then here is my bed of green beans with a few onion stragglers that are from last year. This one down there actually bulbed up, and then the other two have gone to flower, gone to seed, which is fantastic. I’m going to save those seeds and hopefully be able to get a harvest out of them next year. But I already did harvest green beans once last week when I harvested the peas, and so hopefully these ones will keep going for a while too. I’m just getting into harvest season, and so this is the fun time.
And this bed here is carrots. Now usually I would have thinned my carrots early in the year, but I definitely did not get to it. There’s areas that just don’t have any carrots and I don’t know what happened, but this whole bed was originally planned to be carrots.
Something really cool, this tree, I thought I was going to need to get another pear tree to be able to get cross pollination and get pears. But this is the first year where I’ve just gotten a ton of pears on the tree, so maybe it was just that it was too young. But I’m hoping we’ll get a little bit of a pear harvest this year.
Here’s a little peek on what the kitty cats are doing.
I only planted three corns this year. I always seem to run out of time to deal with the corn, so I like to eat the corn fresh, and I figured this would be enough. Hopefully we’ll get six ears out of that. If not, so be it. And there is one little volunteer lettuce over there. I think one of these, either this one or that one back there, is an eggplant. And then I do have asparagus in here that will come up. Oh, maybe that over there is the artichoke.
And then moving over here are my little tiny pumpkins. I’m not quite sure why these are so small and not vining out. Hopefully they will start vining out, but they’re already flowering, which is kind of concerning to me because there’s not a lot of plants there to facilitate a pumpkin. So that one in the back has actually grown, sorry for the bouncing, the one in the back has actually grown about double in the last week. So hopefully those will continue to grow, but typically by now, I mean this whole area is like filled with pumpkin, and so that’s different. I also typically do a big pumpkin rather than the, I’m forgetting what it’s called, it’s like the pie pumpkins though, the little ones.
All right, we’ve got giant hibiscus, and we haven’t seen any flowers yet, but hopefully soon we will get some giant flowers. Oh look, the first one, we’re getting there.
This is a hot mess. I actually did get out and prune these a few times this year. These are the grapes. I accidentally pruned off a section that had a bunch of grapes, so that was sad. So we’ll see exactly what happens, but lots of grapes there.
Something really cool, I haven’t done this before, I put watermelons down here, and I don’t know if you can see in here, but we have one little tiny watermelon right there. So that’ll be cool. I have grown watermelons before. The plant got way bigger than this, so I don’t know how much energy is going to be able to go out there.
The peach tree did not survive, but it did get some suckers, so I’m hoping that one of those suckers will turn into a peach tree. That would be awesome. And then I did get a new plum tree. All those three little trees didn’t survive, so this plum tree is a lot bigger than the one we had in here, and hopefully we’ll get some plums in the next, I don’t know, five years.
Here we go. There’s a big bundle of grapes that are coming along. And then under here is where we’ve got our, hard to see, we’ve got our first little cantaloupe. There’s another little box under there like there was for the watermelons. And then I’ve got a blueberry plant here. This had some blueberries. I’ve never been successful with blueberry.
All right, so then we also have raspberries. These are cane raspberries, and I’ve never gotten raspberries off of them. I did buy a pH tester to see if I could figure out what the problem is. Last year was the first year they lined up like this and they look beautiful. They did it again this year, but last year’s canes all died, so I haven’t had any fruit produced from this plant. This is a research project for me. If you know what happened, let me know.
Same here, these are my raspberry shortcakes, and they were doing great and then they all just died off. So they did produce a little bit this year, but like, by a little bit I mean like five.
This here is a blackberry plant that I bought as bare root. It’s actually doing a lot better than I expected it to. And then we’ve got another hibiscus. This one was a volunteer one a few years ago that just came up in the other side of my garden, and I planted it over here and it’s doing great.
This is also a blueberry plant. This one actually, I got it to come back from last year, which is awesome. The other one I bought new this year, so I was able to keep this alive, but it did not produce any fruit. So I’m not quite sure what I’ve done wrong here. I also did add all of that extra acidifier in there. And then we’ve got a blackberry plant that I bought this year. We’ve got a few that have formed. Kind of, this has been like, I don’t know, I haven’t had the best luck with fruit. Grapes have been the only fruit that I’ve really been successful with.
Let me give you a quick overview of this area. We’ve got Lola down there. This is the first time I’ve done this. This is peppers and onions, and so this is the best I’ve ever had peppers. Now peppers don’t get along with me. They usually make my stomach really sick, but I thought I’d try it. And maybe if I grow them homegrown, they’re not from the store, maybe if I let them ripen a little bit, perhaps I might not have as much of an issue with them. We’ll see. And then over here, these onions have started to bulb up, so that’s exciting. Hey Lola, can you get off of the compost pile?
Out here I have some weeds, but then I’m also letting, I used to have strawberries where the peppers and onions are, and I’m letting my strawberries take over this little section. So hopefully I don’t get as many weeds. Didn’t get any strawberries this year, but very excited that it’s actually working. Was that scaring you?
We have in my little bit left of a compost pile, I mean there’s not much room here, we have a volunteer sunflower and we have, I think, a volunteer potato.
All right, this section, I have some celery, but my celery is so close together I don’t have high hopes for it. And then I’ve got yellow squash and zucchinis. So here’s my first yellow squash. I probably should pull that today. Can you even see that? I can’t see what you’re seeing. There we go. So first yellow squash of the season. Typically I am up to my ears in all of these, and I don’t see any other squashes really starting.
I’ve had cilantro and spinach in it. There’s just that one spinach that now is bolted. Cilantro is almost done. Those are cold weather crops. It’s been a lot colder here than typical, so that’s really interesting. And then I did plant carrots out in this bed last week, so it’ll be a while before we see those sprout.
Here’s my potato bed. This has been interesting too. The potato plants are dying back, but they haven’t even flowered yet, so I don’t know what that means for if we’re going to get a harvest or not. And then we’ve got our calla lilies and a weed, but also I think all of this extra is oregano. I can’t remember, but I think, I can’t remember what oregano looks like, but I think this is oregano. I need to verify it with my pictures to see.
And my last little bed over here has a ton of different stuff. In the back is a tomatillo plant. This is the first time I’ve ever grown tomatillos, so this plant looks fantastic. Now they are hard to get to germinate. I did start with quite a few seeds and none of them survived. And then I also planted some on the other side of the yard and here, and I got one out of about 10 that I planted overall. But one is better than none.
And then in here’s all of my bunch of stuff that I don’t know what it is. I think I had kohlrabi and turnips and bok choy. But bok choy doesn’t, I knew that wasn’t a crop that can grow here and I just thought I’d try it. It didn’t work. But down here, oh, I have beets. I’ve never grown beets before, so we’ll see how that works out.
And then back here, my turnips are fantastic. Look at that. Look at this one. Look how awesome that is. Let’s see, how are the other ones looking? Some of them are pretty tiny still, so I’ll let them keep going. But isn’t that neat? Got ourselves a nice turnip.
All right, well thank you so much for watching my end of July garden tour. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe, and I will see you next time. Bye-bye!
Milo, you cannot go over there. Hey, kitkat, hello. All right, this is the first time being adventurous. Milo, turn around, get back here. Come on, you have to go back in our yard. Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Go back in our yard. Thank you. Let me go grab this adventurous cat. Milo, turn around, you got to come back this way. Hey, go in the yard, go in the yard, turn around. No, no, no, turn around, go this way, this way, this way. Okay, this way, good job. Hey Lola, Lola, turn around. Let me check on the kitty cat. Are you back here, Milo? I saw you come back here, but yep, okay, okay, come back to the yard side. Let’s go check on Milo. Oh, there he is. Okay.
