EVERYTHING Growing In My Garden in April

本站添加: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]What's going on everyone? Been a while since I've done a walk and talk tour here at the Epic Homestead, but we just have so much growing, such a diversity of crops growing here in the garden. I thought I would take you around and show you everything that's going on and some observations that might help you as we really crank into the spring season. Of course, here we are in the front yard raised bed garden. And what we've [music] got in this bed is strawberry and celery. I just ripped the stock of celery off. I really want to show you this. You need to have a solid core on your celery, otherwise it's going to taste absolutely terrible. That's really a watering issue. Keep it nice and moist. Mulch if you have to. We've been harvesting off of this patch for a few months now and we're very pleased about it. So over here we've got all sorts of different greens. I think it's fine.

[00:00:40]Sometimes you can't eat every single thing in the garden. Some of our lettuce is going to bolt. It still has a nice aesthetic, a nice look, and until I have something better to put in this space, I'm fine having a little lettuce go just a touch over. If you remember from a few episodes back, we put some leaks in here. These are really starting to size up, but we're nowhere near [music] harvest yet on these. And then here, we used to have sweet potatoes. Look at this cabbage, though. Look at this beautiful cabbage. Nice firm head.

[00:01:09]That's really what you're looking for.

[00:01:10]It's like, can you can you knock on that door? And does someone answer? That's really what you're looking for. Look at that. Absolutely beautiful. Flipping around here, we have probably the most classic bean pole [music] you've ever seen. And we finally reached the top there. Look at that. So, this is just two or three very large bamboo stakes lashed together with climbing beans or pole beans planted at each of the bases.

[00:01:34][music] And it's doing exactly what you want a bean to do, which is just twirl and swirl right around there. Makes it really easy to see the beans. Makes it very easy to harvest the beans. And then when you go over here, you can start to see we are in that season changeover.

[00:01:48]Look at this lettuce. This is a truly bolting red leaf lettuce. That's crazy, honestly. So, this is going to have to come out soon. I've noticed this season that our kales aren't bolting and they're staying relatively healthy for much longer. You can see this one here.

[00:02:03]There's some in the backyard. I'll show you. They're just very [music] tall and they're holding up to the heat cuz we have had a hotter spring than honestly I can remember in the last few years.

[00:02:12][music] We were touching temps of 85 Fahrenheit over 90 Fahrenheit in March before the spring equinox, before the 21st of March, which is just absolutely bonkers. And as we move over into the orchard, the rosemary has decided to deliver. Look at this. We scaped it a couple months back. We gave it this nice sort of globular scape with a hedge trimmer. And I have to say, it's looking good. Although, it's overtaking the bed a little bit. You know, this is about the whole bed at this point. I don't know that we necessarily need a rosemary that big. Our poor oregano and lemongrass and stuff getting a little bit choked out, [music] but that's okay.

[00:02:49]Okay, the Ciccil Bruner climbing rose is starting to crank. We're starting to see a bunch of clusters of flowers here. But of course, we're going to have to do some pruning. You can see these these [music] guys coming right up the top.

[00:03:00]We've got these guys kind of shooting out the side here. We don't really want that, but nevertheless, it does feel good to have the roses in bloom. So, I've put a lot of time into the orchard this season, making sure that this fig tree is pruned as best that I can. This is by far the most lush this fig tree has ever looked. If you remember, this is a yellow long neck fig that's coming kind of outwards. The trunk does not come up vertically. It more comes out horizontally. So, I kind of had to prune it in this bush structure. I would say [laughter] I would say I got the job done. So, I'm starting to see figs show up very early.

[00:03:34]We'll see if we get a nice harvest this year. Last year was a little bit light.

[00:03:36]I think I may have overp pruned it just slightly. We made a whole video on fig pruning. I may have gone just a little too heavy. Normally, you don't want to cut off more than about a third of the plant material. I think I went to about 50% last year. Might have shocked it a touch. Obviously, the lowquats in the background are going nuts. We're just coming up on the end of the harvest season there, but they've been very productive and very delicious. Now, let's check out the orchard. So, this is the little papaya that could Jacques put this in many moons ago. Actually, this down here was the original papaya. And then we decided to let a stump offshoot really start to go. And I'd say it worked. Look at these guys. Got some nice juicy boys. Although none of us really like papayas that much. So if you know what to do with them, let me know.

[00:04:18]Now down here you can see the remnants of a very heavy prune job we did on pomegranates. And I would say we did the job here. We've got a wonderful variety and a parfankca variety right now. But they kind of blend together at this point. The one thing I think I might do is bring this one down to match the height of this one. I'm kind of growing them as one overall plant, but I've never seen this many flowers on my pomegranates this early in the year [music] and they're looking very, very healthy. It's kind of hard to see if if you're like me and you're red green color blind, but they're all over this tree right here. And we go down the orchard on the outside layer. Look at the apple. Remember last year we pruned this down with Tom Spelman of Dave Wilson Nursery. The apples are extremely productive this year. And then of course the Avis Pride Peach, the pride and joy of the garden. Again, I did a very serious prune on this, bringing down about 3 feet of vertical height and bringing in the canopy quite a bit cuz this is my most vigorous fruit tree. And it's paying me off. I think I have got maybe two 300 peaches on here. May need to do a bit of a peach then. And what I mean by that is on every stem, especially ones that are overhanging a lot, I'm going to want to bring it down to about this amount of peaches. There's about three or four on this branch. I think we've done a pretty good job already. If you see something like this right here, three right at the end might not be the best idea. So, sometimes you're going to want to sacrifice, in this case, probably this one right here.

[00:05:46]This is the smallest and least developed one. And I can probably let these two go. You're just going to get a higher quality fruit off of that. And then as we go down into the citrus orchard, I would say we're finally at the point where it's a true hedge wall. So, let me venture on under here and I'll kind of show you what it looks like. Look at that. I mean, as I go this way, I'm kind of holding it at eye eye height here and I can't really see past the canopy, which is the exact dream I was I was hunting for many years ago. One of the biggest changes in the front yard at least is coming through the rose arch and looking to the right. Normally, you would see the rainwater capture and you'd see the asparagus, excuse me, the artichoke patch, which is still here.

[00:06:28]You can see this beautiful artich choke green globe just coming up really nicely. [music] But you can tell there's a lot more wildlife attracting plants in here. We used one of our botanical intra seed shakers and we just shook in a bunch of wildflower mixes. That's really taking this spot over. And of course my orange bracked bugan villa as we go all the way up. Look at that. Look at that.

[00:06:52]We've had to prune that back quite a bit. We might even have to do a little bit more. But it's starting to look really nice here. And then finally, I'm happy to report Dragon Alley is back in full swing, guys. This is the craziest growth dragon fruit I've ever seen. I had to prune this back significantly, and it still looks absolutely insane up top. But we do have our very first fruit of the season coming out here. This is the Ecuador Pola, or the yellow dragon fruit with the white flesh. The one that makes you poop your pants, but it tastes so good, you're going to poop your pants anyway. Just wear a little diaper.

[00:07:23]You'll be fine. Now, as we move into the backyard, I haven't shown you some of this area in quite some time, mostly because it's kind of just on autopilot.

[00:07:29]There's nothing that fancy about it, but Paul and the team did a very serious cutback of our ice cream bean, inga edgulus, that has, I would say, done. It was a great call on his part. It was just getting so so tall and this is such a vigorous grower that you can do a hard cut and it looks pretty good. So, take a look. You can see the structure of it.

[00:07:49]It's way more balanced now. So, I if you can grow ice cream bean in your climate, it's like surprisingly delicious. I highly recommend it. And right here, I I don't know how I feel about the juju bees. This one got pruned in a sort of a weird way. You can see the main stem got chopped right here and an offshoot is kind of going out this way. It just looks a little bit awkward. Obviously, we're going to have to prune out the bottom here as well. But the lang variety over here, I'd say that's decent structure. Decent structure, but we just don't use these all that much. So, who knows? Maybe a replacement's in order.

[00:08:21]The thing that is looking good though is the passion fruit. This is round two.

[00:08:25]It's been quite some time since we put this in, and I would say it's growing in very nicely. And of course, we brought the pond back in a recent episode, and I'm happy to report that the pond is still back in working order. And not only that, it's I would say it's beyond working order. Take a look at this. Look at the lily pads. They are absolutely cranking right now. And we do have a little bit of an algae buildup still, but overall I'm pretty pleased with the rejuvenation project. Okay, backyard orchard updates. Somehow we pulled another round of bananas out of our booties here at Epic. I don't know how we got this. It's just maybe a sped up timeline. I don't know if these are going to get ripe, though. They've been kind of sitting at this state for a while now. Like so much so that you can tell there's literal cobwebs on them. If you give them a feel, they still feel solid, but they feel too solid. And they've been sitting in this hyper green state for a little longer than I would like. So, we'll see. But we definitely have enough bananas for next season if we don't get one. So, it's not the end of the world. We still have some frozen bananas from the first batch. Now, what I'm pretty pleased about here is the grape. Grape in production just needs a crazy amount of TLC. Look at how this thing wants to go. Like, take a look at this. So you've got, you can see the white stem is kind of the main stem here. It just wants to kind of go all over the place no matter what you do. So every week I need to come in and train and prune these vines so that I basically have coming up, going left and right, coming up, going left and right, and I don't have a scenario like this where it's kind of sprawling all over the place. You know, you've got some some tendrils and vines coming out this way and this way. That's not going to do much for the plant. Let's see if we've got any actual clusters on the vine, though. I should have something in here.

[00:10:10]Oh yeah, there we go. Look at that. The first cluster of the season. These aren't even close to ready yet, but man, they're going to be tasty. So, if you're a real follower of the Epic Homesteading channel, you remember Jacques and I's trial and tribulations of getting avocados in the ground. We've had these in the ground for a couple years now.

[00:10:26]They've survived. They've thrived, but they have yet to produce. Hopefully next season I can get a couple avocados, but worst comes to worst, my neighbor's avocado tree still producing for me. So, I'm not that mad about it. Now, in the back wall orchard, I've had a few more failures. This is my mango. I don't know about you, but that does not look like the best structure for a mango.

[00:10:46]Randomly, one branch there, and then a whole thing here. Might have to retie this up. The pimmens kind of odd. We've got one popping and one not at all. Need to make sure this one isn't dead, but I don't think it is. But what is dead, I'm pretty sure, is the cherry tree. Pretty sure the cherry tree is gone. You can tell you've got these kind of desiccated branches here. If you scrape away at it, it is very brittle. And of course, the fact that it's not throwing any buds or leaf out, not a very good sign. Pears, on the other hand, looking pretty good.

[00:11:16]I should get some decent pears this season. And as we move into the backyard garden, I don't know about you guys, but the asparagus patch is popping. It's almost difficult to harvest it though because we're about 4 years in on the asparagus patch. It's very vigorous. And so by the time the spears are coming up, you need to be there that week to constantly harvest off these spears.

[00:11:37]Otherwise, they're just going to do this and then you can't eat them anymore. And so I love asparagus. I just sometimes miss the window and then I get sad. But the good thing about asparagus is it's a 20 plus year crop. So miss this season a little bit. There's always next season.

[00:11:50]Now the back wall trellis, which we're not using right now, is going crazy with wheat. We replanted it in a little bit more professional of a fashion. And we did sort of bunch method. You can see it's kind of coming up in different clumps. I'm excited to see what we get.

[00:12:04]I'm really hoping we get a good conversion of wheat here. I I don't know. I'm not crazy optimistic, but Jacques's got enough so I can steal it from him if I want to. Now, this is the kale I was talking about. Look at this kale. It's been in the garden for months now, and it just keeps getting taller and taller and taller. To me, I think that's really speaking to [music] four or 5 years of soil building here. We have so much more organic matter, so much more life in the soil compared to five years ago when [music] you guys saw me tilling into basically light brown hard clay and really trying to get compost in there, building and rebuilding the gardens. [music] It's just I mean look at look at the backyard garden. You almost can't even tell where the ground is anymore. It's so full of growth and a lot of this stuff has been selfsewn. The chamomile jam is back in in strong fashion. And then the garlic crop. I need to show you that. So, it wasn't even a couple months back when we put the garlic and the onions in. Look at these onions, guys. These onions are absolutely nutty. Absolutely nutty. And honestly, got some good bulbing on them as well. The garlic. I may have missed my window on harvesting the scapes, but it's not the end of the world. It probably will just make the bulbs a touch smaller. And then right here, one of the biggest experiments we're running, at least at the moment, is growing all sorts of different potatoes.

[00:13:22]We got them from our friends over at Wood Prairie Farm. We've grown the Sarpo Mira from them before, but now they have a bunch of different Sarpo varieties like Saro Shona. I think there's more like Sarpo Gold or something like that.

[00:13:33]So, we're growing a Ruth Stout Method potato in this front row right here where we just drop the potatoes on the ground, put straw on top, and that's about it. And then the ones in the back, we planted in a more traditional fashion, like four or 5 in deep in the soil, eyes facing up. We'll see how the yield is. We know for sure that we should get crazy yield off of the Ruth Stout ones cuz we did the red Norland potato variety, which grows well in our climate. And in our last potato experiment on the main epic gardening channel, it produced over twice the yield of any other method we tried. So overall, there's a crazy amount of growth in the garden. But we're just at that point where we're going to get into summer planting. So that means tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, peppers. You're going to start seeing all of that show up here on this channel with some chores days with Jacques and Paul as well as on the main channel. I always like the change over from spring to summer, but I'm a little reticent to let [music] spring go because I love the crops of spring. I love having that garlic in the ground. I love that wafting of the chamomile. I love some of these leafy greens and some of that like deep red and green color that it brings to the garden. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited about tomatoes specifically this season and peppers [music] coming up. I want to do a lot of post-processing. I've been cooking more.

[00:14:44]I am currently down almost 30 lb from my peak weight of last year. I won't even say the number. It's crazy high number.

[00:14:52]But I'm feeling a lot better. And part of that is what's going in my mouth and in my body. So you'll see some more cooking episodes soon. And I appreciate [music] you guys watching on this channel, sticking with us. Good luck in the garden. Then keep on growing.