 Hello and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So we are at about the third week of July here, 2023. And this is really kind of the time of summer where everything is really at its best. I think flower pots are blooming, everything is thriving. We've got all sorts of vegetables coming in the garden. And I'm just heading out there today to do some watering and I thought this is a good day to do a garden tour. So we have been suffering through another drought again this season and we did get some rain about a week ago. We got a half inch of rain, which was great. But as you can see, most of my lawn here is pretty brown. I don't think I have cut the grass since early June. But so everything that is thriving relies on me watering it and keeping it going. This is my sweet potato that I'm hoping to harvest by the end of July maybe or we'll wait until August. We'll see. I brought this succulent plant from my basement grow lights outside this spring and brought it out in June, I guess it was. And it is just thriving out here. It just loves it. I planted it up in my great grandfather's dish that is over 130 years old. And I'm just really happy that it's being put to good use and it's enjoying a beautiful prairie summer. So this is where I love to spend my mornings drinking coffee, sitting on my deck. It's a nice shady cool spot in the mornings. Get to look at my garden from here. Get to hear the cattle out in the pasture, enjoying some grass. So let's head out to the garden and have a look and see what's growing on. My lasagna garden bed is really doing well. I'm starting to see some sunflowers come here at the end. I've had some good harvest of chamomile, enjoying some sweet peas, got tons of mint, different flowers. As you can see, everything has got a lot of quack grass in it, but that's just the way it is. The color out does the weeds, I think. We have tons of choke cherries coming here, probably be harvesting some here in the next few weeks. I wanted to show you my nasturtium plants that I planted just in the front of these two areas here, along with some merry golds, just to help keep the pests down. They are thriving here really well, almost a little bit too big and overshadowing my peppers. So you can see here, I'll just kinda push them down. We've got a whole pile of banana peppers. These are sweet banana peppers. I'm going to harvest them today and maybe try make some sweet and spicy pickles. So watch for that video coming. Got some pretty rainbow ones. We had some of these purple peppers yesterday, just ate them fresh. They're nice and crunchy and sweet. And some king of the north peppers are coming here. Those are looking really good. Over here are my sweet Italian frying peppers and they are just starting to turn red. So the best part about my garden this year is my irrigation system that I have set up to water, probably about 75% of my garden. This has just saved me so much time. I used to spend over an hour every evening watering my garden and didn't have much time left to do much else. So now I have this set up to do my potatoes. It waters all these containers here. This used to be my lettuce area that I have pulled out because they were bolting and going to seed. I've replanted some arugula. I think I got carrots. Another batch of carrots coming here. And then as you can see, I got lots of beets and carrots. I had a tomato plant just voluntarily show up in this container here. Found another poor little tomato at the greenhouse that was kind of the last of the tomatoes there. So I brought it home. So I got some new tomatoes coming here. We'll see if they make it through the season, if we can get a harvest or not. And the tomatoes are going crazy. I should be probably pruning them but kind of seem to lose control once they get this big. But as you can see, I got my drip irrigation going here. So while I take you on a tour, everything is getting watered as far as tomatoes, peppers. So I have these drip irrigation set up so that there is an emitter right at the stock of each tomato and it waters it for about 10 to 15 minutes depending on how I set the timer. And in my pepper containers here, I have the bubbler type system going. So this spreads out a little spray, set it up in the middle of the container and it's watering my peppers and I got a bunch of green onions going here as well. So as you can see, both my carrots and beets are pretty thick in these containers. I've been trying to thin them out as much as I can just by picking the odd one here and there and then hopefully get some good-sized beets. The baby mochums are a nice size for picking and eating fresh right now. And then I've got the Danvers and the Nantes in these two containers, which aren't too big yet. They probably still need some more thinning. So this is another area of the garden that I have to water by hand and this is my squashes and they haven't been doing great. I'm not sure if maybe growing in containers is just not working well for them. I'm going to give them some fertilizer today, some fish fertilizer. I have some spaghetti squash coming. You can see there's a couple there. This is my pumpkin, which is blooming and I am not seeing any fruit, so I don't know why, but I can't seem to get any pollination or any fruit showing here with my pumpkins. The zucchini produced a couple right off the bat and then just stopped producing. I think I see a couple coming here, but again, definitely not getting a crazy amount of zucchini like most people do. This is my sunburst. As you can see, I have a nice, pretty sunburst squash coming here. I will probably harvest this pretty soon. Those are a soft summer-type squash that you can just cut up and fry or roast and my butternut is a little bit behind. I can see lots of blooming coming, but nothing much yet. I got three containers of potatoes that my grandson Henderson and I planted and one of the varieties here has died right off. I'm pretty sure there's a harvest of potatoes in there. I'm waiting for him to come back for a visit so he can help me with the harvest since he was a big help at planting these. I think harvesting potatoes is one of the funnest things to do in the garden because you just never know what you're gonna get until you start digging down and pulling out those plants. My cucumbers are looking a little yellowish and I'm not seeing a whole bunch of fruit on them yet so today I'm going to give them some fertilizer today. I'm going to use some fishy mulch diluted in some of this rainwater and give them a feeding before we give them a good watering. Just using this seaweed concentrated fishy mulch in here or just a little pour. So this vegetable bed area here never did get set up with drip irrigation. As you can see here, I did have the lines running right to it. I got the on tap switch. I just never got it set up. Got late in the season. I got doing other things. I could still probably set one up here similar to what I've got over here on this one. Just a bit more challenging once the plants are all growing. So up until now I've just been hand watering this. Got lots of tomatoes. Got some parsley and basil. Another Italian parsley just growing in here just to help with pest control. And then over here are my cucumbers which are loaded up with lots of blooms. We had our first cucumber yesterday and it was kind of bitter. So I was really disappointed. If anybody knows why a fresh garden cucumber would be bitter, please let me know. I'm trying to keep these well watered every day. And as you can see, like I see the leaves are looking a little yellow. Some of the cucumbers here, you can see this one died after it bloomed. So I'm not sure what's going on. Cucumbers are my husband's favorite garden thing and he's really anxious to get more and I'm just not seeing some really good production here so far. So if you have any cucumber tips, please leave them in the comments for me. The sun gold cherry tomato is probably my favorite one to grow and eat in the garden. I think I've got two of them planted here. Start to see lots of fruit coming. It's really taken off. It's an indeterminate variety so it'll just keep growing and growing. So I'm trying to just kind of keep it a bit pruned and kind of guiding it up on this trellis here. Over here is the Tomasel tomato and these are a white variety which they don't really look that great but last year when I grew them they were really sweet and delicious. I like them. So I got another plant going here. I can see a tomato got rammed into the fence here so I need to see if I can try to save it. It's just kind of stuck there now. Not sure if I can save it. Over here is a Mamma Mia Roma. Got lots of Roma tomatoes coming. I think this is another sun gold over here. Over on this side I have planted three more tomatoes. These are ones that I purchased at the nursery or one of the big box stores I got a sweet 100 cherry. I got one called a celebrity. I think it should be larger size tomatoes they're not super big. And this one is another sun sugar gold but it's kind of sprawling out. I didn't trellis it very well and now it's kind of sprawling out but it is getting me some of these sun gold tomatoes. I love these. These are super sweet and they're so good. So after I finished videoing my walk through in the garden here I was editing my video getting it ready to upload and I said to myself Tracy you need to do some pruning to some of these plants. Like they really need to get some more airflow. They're getting a little bit out of control same with my squash. So I'm gonna do some pruning and then I'll show you what it looks like after I'm done. Okay so I am done pruning the cucumbers and look at this pile I have here. I got rid of so much foliage, lots of diseased leaves that were yellowing and dying sacrificed a few that had some blooms on it but just it really needed to be pruned. And you can see now there is lots of room down around the base. There's airflow, there's no leaves touching the ground which is where you can usually get disease starting insects prey on the weak leaves. So I'm hoping that this is going to help my cucumber production. I've trained a bunch to come up the trellis here and then I got some trained to kind of just flow onto the ground. There is a cucumber there. I think this is my, that will be the next one to harvest probably. Then over on this side I had some more plants probably planted too many but I trained them to kind of flow out of the container going this way onto the ground. I also went through my tomatoes and pruned and pruned and pruned. Once you get cut in with scissors you get a little scissor happy and it's hard to stop but I did prune tons of branches off of my tomatoes. Again just trying to keep the base of the stem clear so that there's lots of airflow. I had so many tomatoes jammed in here and there was so much foliage I couldn't even see them. So really cleaned it out. I think they should be much happier. Hopefully they'll grow bigger. Again, a few tomatoes were sacrificed. Had to pick some. This one should ripen indoors but it was a job that needed to be done and I'm glad I was able to share it with you today. I almost feel like I can breathe better myself just looking at all the space that I've created and all the airflow that is amongst all these plants. They should be much happier. I'm gonna harvest some of these sweet banana peppers and I found a one jar recipe I wanna try out to make a sweet and spicy pickled pepper. So stay tuned for that video coming. Hopefully it's successful. So I hope you enjoyed walking around with me in the garden, giving everything a water, checking everything out. Should be enjoying lots of tomatoes, hopefully cucumbers over the next few weeks. So I always enjoy reading comments if you wanna leave me some. Hit that like button. You haven't already done so. Hit that subscribe button so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching.