April Garden Update | Here's What's Thriving

Añadido: 2026-05-08

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, welcome and welcome to my classroom. I hope all is well. Today I want to kind of give you guys a little garden tour, show you how all the plants are doing. Some are doing amazing, some not so great. So, uh oh, for those that don't know, I'm in the Phoenix, Arizona area. It's zone like 9B, 10A, I think, depending exactly where you're at in the Phoenix area. Anyways, let's go ahead get into it and show you everything so we can have a good time. So, here are two of my garden beds. And before I go any further, I do want to show you right here. Look. So, if you see the little outline right here, I had an old garden bed for the people that didn't know. And I installed these two a couple months ago. You can see they're doing amazing.

[00:00:50]So, let's go ahead go over to these pepper plants. These pepper plants, these four right here were actually in this old garden bed that was right here.

[00:01:00]I took them out, transplanted them into these containers. I wasn't sure how they were going to do, but they're actually not doing that bad. You can see this um pepper plant. What is this? This is um a jalapeno. It actually has a jalapeno right there. Rock on. Right. And then this is my cayenne pepper. You can see it actually has a little baby cayenne right there. Next to those peppers, I have these two sweet peppers. One of them is a yellow pepper. The other one I I honestly I can't remember. But you can see there's actually peppers growing on here.

[00:01:38]And then in this one as well.

[00:01:42]Now, I did forget to water these for like a week, so they did dry out a little bit, but they're doing all right.

[00:01:52]So, here are all my tomatoes. I decided to put all my tomatoes in here and all my peppers in here. So, let's come over on this side. I'll show you here. You can see my tomatoes are doing freaking awesome. And I also planted some lettuce.

[00:02:09]So, you can see like a ton of There are flowers coming.

[00:02:16]And these right here are cherry peppers. And I got a slicer over here on this side.

[00:02:26]Man, I got to do some uh grooming. Get these back in uh these cages.

[00:02:33]So, as I kind of wedge in here, you can see I actually do have some I also planted some lettuce in here, which I have been harvesting.

[00:02:42]Let's see. I did have some parsley in the middle, which I'm pretty sure is done and gone.

[00:02:50]Let's Let's see if I can find uh the parsley. Oh, and you can see I do have some lettuce right here as well. Ooh, there there is. Look, check it out. So, the parsley is right here. I planted a little bit of parsley in here. Now, I planted these in I planted all my stuff. Let's see. We are at the end of April, so kind of the beginningish of March, I believe. I planted all this, middle of March, and we had like a massive heat wave in the hundreds and everything. So, I was really worried how everything was going to do. I'm actually surprised the lettuce did as well as it did. But if you do take a look, you can kind of see little burnt marks cuz it just got so hot. So that's that garden bed. Now on to the peppers. So here is my pepper bed. Not as crazy as the tomatoes, but those are vines.

[00:03:49]So my peppers are doing really good. And here is even a better view of what happened. You can see all the burn marks cuz it's just getting too hot.

[00:03:59]These are the last little bit of lettuce. And I did leave this because I kind of wanted to show um this is a This is called the Hernandez lettuce.

[00:04:09]Hernandez, something like that. And I think this is called Landon. Landis.

[00:04:16]And I forget what those are, what those are called. But anyways, I digress.

[00:04:22]I wanted to leave this one in just to grow and show like kind of how tall it would get and when it was going to flower. And if you look, it's actually starting to bolt. So, the leaves aren't going to be good anymore, but it's going to start flowering. So, I think I'm going to let it flower just to see just to see. Yeah.

[00:04:44]So, my peppers, they're doing really, really good. You can see some of them do have the cages. I do need to get um five more for these suckers right here, which I will do soon enough. Oh, look. There's a weed right here. Let me get this sucker.

[00:05:02]These are my sweet peppers.

[00:05:05]Looking real good. Oh, man. I just saw Look, there are some flowers right there.

[00:05:11]So, it looks like it's getting ready.

[00:05:14]So, I forgot what varieties. Sweet pepper. Sweet pepper. Sweet pepper.

[00:05:18]Three rows. three different kinds. And then over here I have my jalapenos and my cayenne. So my question real quick, I guess my first question is about my cayenne. So if you take a look, you see how it's kind of like turned like that and then this one kind of came in like that.

[00:05:44]This one as well, like if you look, it did the same thing. this cayenne like right here. You can see it kind of bent and then went started climbing up. Is that normal for cayenne peppers? Because I found that odd. At first I thought, oh, this one it's extending towards the sun because the sun is that way and it comes up like that and it's over there.

[00:06:10]Pretty soon it'll be above us uh during the summer. But anyways, that's what I thought. But then I was like, well, wait a minute. Why is this one going inwards like that? So confusing. If anyone has any uh I don't know, thoughts, ideas, suggestions, or why I might be doing that, greatly appreciated. Oh, and I do have some parsley in here. This parsley is a curled parsley. That one is just big leaf um I guess regular parsley.

[00:06:42]Okay. So, I want to talk about something I'm not happy about, but I want to try to figure out. So, I'm going to explain what I did and then hopefully someone might have some ideas or suggestions of what might have happened.

[00:07:00]Okay.

[00:07:02]So, I want to talk about this tree right here. This dead tree right here.

[00:07:08]This is a blood orange tree.

[00:07:12]It's been doing fine, great, but it just died on me. So, here's the story.

[00:07:19]This old garden bed right here.

[00:07:23]Some roots from this uh tree came into this and I went ahead, you know, when I demolished this, I pulled all the roots and took care of that.

[00:07:34]Nothing happened to the tree. It was fine.

[00:07:37]This ring you see right here, the stone rings, it wasn't here. It those rings were actually making this garden bed.

[00:07:46]When I demolished this, I put all the rings around the trees.

[00:07:51]Now, I did run into some roots and had to mess around with them a little bit, and so I thought that might have been a problem.

[00:08:01]Next thing, I put manure and mushroom compost in all of my trees. And this one. Now, something I found out uh after the fact is that mushroom compost, you got to be really careful with it because it might have gray on in it and that pretty much will kill your plants.

[00:08:24]Didn't know that. Kind of sucks, but again, all my trees got it. So it's like could it have been that not sure and though and so those were the steps that I actually did it. So demolished the garden bed took out or and took out pulled all the roots out and then I went ahead and did the stone lining and then I added the manure compost and even um the mulch.

[00:08:52]So it wasn't until after that. So I had no problems when I pulled the roots cuz it was a hibernating. I had no problems when I was putting the stone around the the tree. The problems occurred when I put the mushroom compost and manure mixture and fertilizer as well there.

[00:09:12]That's when it started to die and pretty much fully died. And something I found out to know if a tree is fully dead or like I was hoping it was like, okay, it's just going to hibernate this year, build up the roots again, and then come back next year. But something I found out is that if the bark down here on the trunk is breaking just like that, your tree is pretty much dead.

[00:09:40]And so, O yeah, look, that's not good.

[00:09:45]So, yeah, I will be taking this tree down and replacing it. Not now. Maybe end of fall, winterish time, I will plant a new tree here, which I've been thinking about doing like the mandarin oranges right here. Let me know what you think I should do. All right, on to the other stuff. So, right here, I've actually seated a couple watermelon seeds. I'll get into that in a second. And then right here are my mints that I actually propagated.

[00:10:19]I had to put this netting, this bird netting on here because the birds were actually attacking.

[00:10:25]So, let's see this one right here. It's crazy. Before I had the netting, the birds came and there was only one um I don't I don't know what we call this stock and they took it. I was like, "Oh man." Luckily, there was enough root and it was growing so much that it regrrew back. And now for this one. So, this one that I planted, I actually planted two.

[00:10:50]I put one right here and I put one right next to it, a bird came and took the one that was right next to it. And when that happened, I was like, "All right, I need to protect these." So, I went ahead and put the bird netting to protect them.

[00:11:04]Here are my uh fig propagations that were an epic failure.

[00:11:10]So be it.

[00:11:12]We got and they're uh right next to uh my lemon tree.

[00:11:18]I wonder if we can see any baby uh lemons yet. Oh, here you go. It's hard to tell at this stage just cuz they're so small and they blend in really good, but yeah, there are some lemons in there. And so, check this out. Here we go. These are my rosemary cutings that I'm trying to propagate. So, an interesting thing about the these rosemarries. So, they actually when I propagated them, they ended up dying because I had them soaking in water. I didn't put them in the soil right away.

[00:11:52]So, I actually went back to my family friends and got some more and planted them. So, if you take a look, I actually planted five. There was one here that's dead. One right here dead. One right here died. But this one seems to be doing good. And this one seems to be doing good. So, we shall see.

[00:12:13]Another thing I also learned after the fact, but after planting these, is that when you do cutings like these, you kind of want to put it'd be helpful maybe to put a humidity dome and keep the humidity since it doesn't have any roots. The leaves can help uptake the moisture and nutrition to keep it alive while it grows roots. Well, I'm going to still see. I'm going to keep it like that and see what happens. Now to my epic failure for the figs dying.

[00:12:41]Let's go to this fig. Show you all these figs. This is my white figs. Now I don't know the actual name varieties. I didn't plant these. They were just um that's what I was told they were called. So you can see I have a ton of figs everywhere.

[00:12:58]So this is going to be real cool. Let's wander within the tree. Like look at all those suckers.

[00:13:04]Okay. So, what I think I'm going to do, if you take a look down here, let's venture down into the tree. You will see Oh, that's a that's a weed. You will see these sprouting.

[00:13:18]These are called suckers.

[00:13:21]They are growing from the tree. Just a sucker growing like another plant. So, I think I'm going to wait for them to get a little bit bigger and I'm going to try to transplant them in those pots and see if they will grow.

[00:13:39]And this this is uh my pomegranate. I did kind of hack away a little bit. It was getting a little crazy, so I trimmed it up. Don't know if that was a great idea or not. Really don't care cuz it was getting in the way. It was like literally it grew. It was overcrowding right here. All right. Like it was terrible to walk through this sucker right here. This is my other fig tree. This is a black fig tree. And you can see There are figs.

[00:14:07]There are figs everywhere.

[00:14:12]Getting some figs, y'all. Look right here.

[00:14:17]Right here.

[00:14:20]Oo. Bunch right here.

[00:14:24]So, it's looking nice.

[00:14:27]This tree is my uh orange tree. There we go. And I've gotten Oh, you know what? I'm going to actually take that one off.

[00:14:36]Got some nice oranges coming.

[00:14:40]Let's see. Right here. Yeah, right here.

[00:14:44]Bunch of oranges.

[00:14:47]So, this tree actually isn't doing that bad. So, this tree right here looks a kind of a little weird. See, it's a little odd shaped. Not as circular as the other ones. But this tree as well, it was uh it was caught up in a um What am I trying to say, man?

[00:15:08]What am I trying to say? Okay, so it was as well caught up in a garden bed. So, I had an old garden bed right here. It was kind of like that, a 2 by8.

[00:15:24]I demolished it to put this garden bed and the one over there.

[00:15:29]And this one was really bad. And when I tell you really bad, I mean really bad.

[00:15:36]Root bound to the point where I got a pitchfork and I was just picking away at the roots, just tearing it up so I could get the soil out. And this tree and that tree were both in it.

[00:15:50]And so part of me feels that's why this tree is kind of looking the way it is and not as, you know, great as it should be. Now, I do want to kind of come in here and show you some of the leaves. If anyone knows why it's um not as vibrant green as like some of the other leaves like here, I would really love to know because I did think it was a nitrogen issue, but I also think because of like the root disturbance and you know even putting these stone outlays cuz I did bother the roots of all of these when I was doing them. Not badly but a little bit.

[00:16:32]And so don't know exactly how to remedy this pro problem. Been thinking about it, but we shall see. If anyone has any ideas, I'd appreciate it. And before I move on to talk about what's happening in these garden beds, I want to show you this.

[00:16:50]So you guys see how the mulch is all tore up. That is the birds. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions to keep the birds from doing this?

[00:17:02]I'd greatly appreciate it.

[00:17:07]I would really appreciate any ideas or suggestions to mitigate the birds coming here and just like tearing through everything. Now, let's come over here.

[00:17:17]I'll show you how all these are doing.

[00:17:24]All right.

[00:17:27]So, here are my Oh my god.

[00:17:30]So, I really haven't checked on the like I check on them, but you know, it's kind of I just let them be, let them grow, and really haven't been paying attention. And standing here looking, I just realized I completely forgot I have two lettucees right here. Look at these beauties.

[00:17:49]Man, these are some beautiful lettuce heads. That's awesome.

[00:17:55]And these eggplants are looking really, really good. You can see we've got flowers. Hopefully I'll get some eggplants.

[00:18:05]And then I did have some spinach. Like I had spinach right here, here, over here, and here. They didn't do all that great because of the heat. This is my oregano.

[00:18:16]And you can see like the sun. It it it got to them. You can see some burnt marks, but it's it's growing. It's looking really good.

[00:18:25]And then my basil. My basil are freaking taking off.

[00:18:31]I really I'm going to trim them down a little bit, start drying them. So, that is actually one of the things I want to do is I want herbs. I want to take the herbs. I want to dry the herbs so I don't have to buy them and use them when I need them when I'm cooking. And then I want to show you this garden bed real quick.

[00:18:50]Here's a So, there are two different kinds of basil. Which one is this? This is um the pesto party basil. You can see it's looking really good, too. Be taking some leaves and drying those off. Which one? See if we can remember. Ah, there you go. Super sweet genevese.

[00:19:09]That's what these basil are.

[00:19:14]And here is So, I planted two different kinds of spinach. I forget. I think this one was um either American or I forget what the other what the other name was. And then I planted in another another one here.

[00:19:31]You can see this one freaking bolted because of the heat. Not surprised, but still whatever. And then my zucchinis, which you can see actually this plant, I'm going to be getting two zucchinis.

[00:19:45]Rock on. Right. So, what I ended up doing, you can see I cut off the male head and I uh pollinated both these just to make sure I would actually get two zucchinis.

[00:19:56]And then in the mix of all of this, I do have some lettuce right here and kind of hidden right there. And oh, let's get over here. Right there, too.

[00:20:12]Oh, man. Everything is looking really good and I'm liking it. Okay, so I am not expecting a huge harvest from all of these plants. Mainly because these are new garden beds and the soil is due in there. So, it needs time to settle, get established, and the microbes and all that stuff get in there and situated.

[00:20:35]So, when you do plant, you can get awesome harvestes. And uh the best way to show this is when I planted this here. Let me come actually on this side.

[00:20:48]Here we go. So when I planted this, the soil I put up to about right here, you can see like do you see this um metal bar right here? This metal bar goes all the way across here holding both these sides together. And so that is a great um representation of how much it settled. The soil settled about I would say a good 2 in. But the plants are still doing great for for all of that. So rock on for that.

[00:21:24]Oh, hold on. Before we wander, let's go.

[00:21:27]Let's let's show you this. This is my lemon lime tree. That's what I was told.

[00:21:31]I I was told it was a lemon tree, but if you let the stuff ripen, it'll turn into limes. And I've had them both ways. So, if you pick them early, it'll taste like a lime, but if you wait and pick it late, it'll taste like a lemon. Kind of weird, but whatever. And I actually see one right here. Bam. Right there. It's doing great. And let me come this way cuz there's one thing about this tree that really annoys me. And I didn't plant any of these. None none of the trees. All right. So, if you take a look at this tree, this tree is not centered to the wall and that post. It's It's really like the trunk is right there. It really needs to be like one more foot that way so it's all centered and looks even.

[00:22:14]Bugs me, but it does such a great job of producing. I don't want to get rid of it. And the one thing why I would love for it to be one foot over more is not so it' be centered and aesthetically pleasing, but when you walk this way, you won't be running into these suckers right here just to get over on this side where I planted my cucumbers and watermelon.

[00:22:37]So, these plants are doing great. You can see cucumbers. These two right here are my pickling cucumbers.

[00:22:46]This one I'm kind of using for my slicer. So, looking great. And so, here is my watermelon. So, the reason I started some seeds in that pot was because when I had some sprout here, I noticed bugs eating the little sprouts and the little seedlings. So, I was like, "Dang it." So, I went ahead and put I put some more in here. But, I was like, "Just to be safe, let me go ahead start some." Ooh.

[00:23:17]Oh, man. And that breeze felt so good.

[00:23:19]The weather right now is beautiful. I'm loving this.

[00:23:25]Oh, that breeze. Okay, where was I at? I got sidetracked. Um, watermelon. So, yeah, I planted some in that container just in case the bugs came back and ate the sprouts that came.

[00:23:39]Now, this spot right here, I mentioned in a previous video, my friend, he got a watermelon he loved. I think it was called black diamond diamond diamond something I I I want to say black diamond don't really remember anyways he only brought one seed from it and so I was like all right I'll try to plant this hopefully something will grow and we'll we shall see nothing happened so I took the seeds that I watermelon seeds that I had and I went ahead and planted them and that was my fiasco that ensued but now that these have come up and it doesn't look like any bugs are attacking them I am just going to leave these And then I will find out if anybody wants any watermelon seedlings.

[00:24:21]So there you go. That's my garden.

[00:24:23]That's every Oh, wait a sec. I forgot to show you one thing.

[00:24:29]So this garden bed, cuz I was jumping so fast. Something I did. So this oregano plant right here, it was actually pretty big in the pot that it came with. So, what I did is I ended up splitting it and I put the other one right here. I had a little struggle getting established, but it seems to be doing all right.

[00:24:54]Can't forget about that. All right. Now, I got everything.

[00:24:58]All right, everyone. That is my garden.

[00:25:01]That is everything. I appreciate you guys hanging out with me. I hope you come along with me on my journey to going to live off-rid and in the mountains.

[00:25:10]All right, hopefully I'll see you all next time. Take care. I appreciate y'all.