Urban Gardening Week Two

It is all about the fails

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hi, I am Angeli Clemens. I am the host of the Can I Borrow Your Skin podcast? Welcome. We are here in August and we are talking about urban gardening. And the reason why I decided to start on something that looks kind of bleak and kind of funny is because it's very important. As someone of indigenous background, you may have heard of the Three Sisters, which is generally being corn and squash, and they're called the Three Sisters because they are designed to commingle. The corn is a tall stalk, it is very hardy, it allows the beings to wrap around it and grow while squash provides actual nutrients to the soil itself, and they sprawl out, so they won't compete for nutrients of the things growing up, they won't compete for space. Now, you may be able to tell there are two different plants sitting here, and these two different plants are watermelon and squash, they are both sprawlers. You can see now I have a watermelon here, but you can actually see if you look, this is also a squash plant here. That's a different species. They're both sprawling out. You can see here from the squash, they have feelers going out, and so does the watermelon. And you can see here from the watermelon, this plant also has feelers going out. You can see the little curly cues. Both of them have curly cues. And the thing that's interesting about the different curly cues is here you have the squash choking out the watermelon plant. It curled around it and it is killing it. And then you can also see that the watermelon has done the same here with the squash, and you can see it's choking it out with one of its sprawlers. So it's very important when you are planting a garden to keep in mind that certain things will co-mingle, and co-mingling is good for some things, co-mingling is bad for others. Here's another example of the watermelon actively choking out the squash, and vice versa. Here, you can see some. But in my naivete, I said, you know, the squash and the watermelon, they'll both climb off in their own separate little areas and they'll be happy. Well, no, that didn't happen. But I also planted peppers in this bed, and you can see right there in the middle, choking out my cabbage, not my cabbage, my brussels sprouts, excuse me, and also wrapping around some of my peppers there is the watermelon, and you can actually see a watermelon there. It was actually growing to squish out my tomato plant, so I had to relocate it. And some other things that you can see is there's actually space here in the middle, and there's a lot of things growing out of it. You can see individual stalks there. That's actually where I planted my squash, and I actually did some cleanup earlier. You can see a long Brussels sprout there in the middle. I don't I don't think my Brussels sprouts gonna make it, y'all. But like I said, I do start from seed. You can see a seed pod there from where I did start my squash from seed, and it's just been either done producing fruit or being squashed out by the watermelon, and so I had to go, huh? Alright, plan F because I've moved way past plan B, guys. So it's really important when you start a garden to see what will commingle well. I now know that my squash and my watermelon they are both doing really well. I think I have six or seven watermelon plants going right now with even more flowers, so I could definitely get more. And I showed you my zucchini doing well. There is some yellow squash there. There's so many flowers and plants. Let's go deep dive. So many flowers and plants all over the place, and even more there. I have squash coming in. I can't not even begin to tell you how many squash I get out of an average garden every year. There are tens and tens of them. I think last year I got almost 70 squash, so my setup is pretty good. Normally, I don't get watermelon this big, so I'm excited. I actually have my nibblings name my watermelons. There's one there, and there's a few over here. There's a really big one right there. They're all doing pretty good. So there's a few back there mixed up with my squash, so I'm doing pretty good, but not everyone grows squash, not everyone grows watermelon. So going back to the basics, you actually see my tomatoes are on one end of my flower bed, and my cukes are on the other. I do need to say, when I made this video, I was probably about a month from full garden. So this is a month from full harvest, and as you can see from all of the flowers and small plants that I have going everywhere, and how I don't have full curling heads with my broccoli or my cauliflower or my cabbage. My you can see right here, my eggplant has flowered and it's starting to turn into see here, starting to turn into actual fruit. So I am about a month or so from having a full grown, full productive garden, though, as you can see over in the far corner. I do have let's see if I can zoom. I'm not great at this guys. This is why I have an engineer. I do have some peppers coming in there, and if I can get my jalapenos in the shot, so I do have some things that are coming in and doing pretty well. It this is definitely not peak garden time for me, and my early risers, my sweet peas, they're pretty much gone and dead. Why do I have my tomatoes at one end of my garden bed and my cukes at the other? Short answer is they do not commingle well. I tend to put things that grow in the ground or don't come up very far in between them, so that's why my beets and my carrots are in between them. I added some lettuce because you know lettuce was trying to kill us not too long ago, so I wanted to make sure I had some good lettuce, and it's important to make sure you don't have a lot of things that grow up and try to grab with things that are sturdy enough for them to grab too, which is why I did carrots and the greens of beets. Because carrot greens and beet greens, though they are edible, if they get choked out, one all of them won't get choked out to one plant, and since you eat the roots of those, those will still grow, and two, they don't they're not hardy enough for your plants like your tomatoes or your cucumbers that have to have things to grab and grow to grab a hold of. You will notice I do have spikes here for my cutes as well as tomato cages and spikes for my tomatoes, those are things that are gonna need support, so you want to make sure you have supports there for them so they have things to grow on to and to grow up, as you can see here. My cucumbers, they also send out feelers to grab hold to and to pull themselves up. So here's some some good feelers, and like I said, the lettuce isn't great to fill upon. The cucumber is trying, but it does not have a great hold, and so you can see it's curling back onto itself. Same thing with the tomatoes here. I just saw a cabbage white girl uh fly away. It doesn't actually put out feelers, but it will wrap and grow around things. You can, I don't know if you can see there is a tomato cage in there that's holding it, and even here with my tomato vines, you can see the leaves are growing in between the vine and onto the vine, and they grow up. So you have to continually give these things something to support themselves or they will fall over. Like you can see, one of my heirloom pods over there, it is actually growing sideways because it wasn't close enough to the tomato cage or the tomato line. So let's talk about my sweet peas. It's actually one of my favorite plants. They also need things to grab hold to and grow up. As you can see here, it is actually wrapping itself around and growing up, but you can also see that it is browning, though there are still green parts, and that is because sweet peas are very, very, very sensitive to the sun, and it is still in the line sight of my pest deterrent. And so, if they get wet, and because my yard gets so much sun, it will actually bake them and become like a magnifying glass with raindrops or dew drops, and so it's very important when you're planning your garden to think about things like that. What can I grow together? What can't I grow with it? Where can I put my rain source, my deterrent sources? How can I do these things? Discuss when to water, discuss when you don't want to water. It's it's very important that if it's going to be hot out here in Michigan, uh, hot is 90 to 100 degrees in full sun. That's actually magnified to like 100-110. You don't want to water early, you want to water early in the morning or very late at night. You want to don't want to water when it's like 90 degrees outside because all that's gonna do is magnify heat. If you have no choice, water around, excuse me, sorry about that, water around the bed itself. So, for example, with this fruit, instead of pouring water on top, you would actually pour the water along the bottom here, like that, and then you want to talk about well, what is harvested when, because you can actually rotate your gardens. See the little cabbage white flying around, they they have a bounty during this time of day because the bees are starting to go in and starting to do bee stuff, is what I call it, so you won't see as many bees, but you will see cabbage whites all the way until the sun goes down. There are some things that will only harvest once, you get an early spring harvest, and that's it. That's kind of like my sweet peas, they will give one harvest, it's usually early spring. Uh, your beets, like my Detroit reds, there, they can actually give you two harvests a year. If you plant right near the end of fall, they will stay wet through the winter, and then you'll get an early spring harvest, and then you get an early fall harvest. If you actually I'm gonna zoom in there, you can actually see the beets there starting to poke out from the ground. So I may be able to harvest soon and then still get a fall harvest. So those are things that you have to pay attention to and know about when you are planting. My Brussels, which are over here, um they take a hundred. Let's see if I can get a good one in the picture because I have had a lot of overgrowth this year, and there you can see one little baby Brussels sprout, it hasn't even started to stalk yet, and those take a really long time to get ready. So, those you will probably get one harvest out of them. You plant them early spring, and you won't be able to harvest until uh fall. So, those things are very, very important. There are certain things that only grow once a year, and then there's things that only grow once every three years, and that's when you start looking at things like asparagus and which it takes three years to propagate. Asparagus, my asparagus is actually up on my deck. I use raised beds for a lot of my stuff, but I put my herbs, most of my lettuce, and my asparagus in a raised bed up on my deck, so they're up there. I'll try to get you a shot of those, not today, but in another photo. I'm planning to do a garden interview, which will be on my deck, not quite my garden, but we'll do that and I'll show you my asparagus at that point. There are some things that take a lot of patience, I'll be honest. Um, I'm one of those people who will tell you when they're bad at something. I suck at growing potatoes. There are a lot of people that can grow potatoes here in Michigan very well. I am not one of them. I do cukes, I do tomatoes. My family has a few uh heirloom tomatoes, which I am very good at. Same thing with heirloom cucumbers. I actually planted some heirloom white zucchini this year, and not the bad zucchini that isn't ripe and has a mutation and tastes too bitter, but actually heirloom white zucchini. I have those coming in this year, so I do pretty good with some of my family's native plants, but I am not very good with potatoes at all, and honestly, I'm not that great with Brussels sprouts either. I've grown them a few times, and this is the first year where I actually won't get a crop, I don't think. But whatever. What do you grow in your garden, urban or suburban, um, out in farmland? I would love to hear some tips. Help me out, you guys. Jump in those comments. Thanks so much. Bye.