 Hi there and welcome to my channel. So today is the first of July here on the Saskatchewan Prairies and it is Canada's 153rd birthday. So happy birthday Canada. I want to take you on a tour today and show you how things are doing in my garden. So we are about 40 days into the growing season here on zone 3 Saskatchewan which is you know getting close to halfway. So there's a lot of good things happening in the garden. A few things aren't doing so good but you know I'll take you on a tour and show you everything that's going on. Also I want to do a little measuring with my corn. One of my followers Michael had commented when I was planting my corn this spring that there was the saying of the corn should be knee high by the 4th of July. I thought it would be kind of fun today. Being Canada's birthdays on the 1st of July we will do the measuring today and we'll check out the corn to see if it's knee high by the 1st of July. Oh and by the way Michael if you are watching this video you still owe me some pictures of your garden and I will leave my email address in the description box below if you or anybody else would like to share some pictures of your garden. Let me know what zone you're growing in and what you're growing and you know if you'd like I will share some pics on future videos on my channel. So I'm just going to finish up my coffee and then we'll take a walk through my garden. So it has been a very kind of weird weather kind of season here so far. We haven't really had a hot hot spell yet and the rain has kind of come in just small scattered showers. We've had a lot of really crazy storms in Saskatchewan, tornadoes, flash floods. So around here we've managed to you know get enough rain to keep everything green and lush. So that has been good. So this here is my lasagna garden bed with all my flowers. I got a lot of different pollinator type flowers coming along nicely. So my two redneck raised garden beds are really coming along good. Everything that I planted seems to be doing well. I got some peppers here. I got five kinds of peppers or four kinds I believe that are just all sweet peppers. And then I also am trying out the eggplants. So those are something that I have never grown. I don't even know if I've eaten an eggplant before. So we are just starting to see some little blooms coming on the peppers. And I think that's what that is here on this egg plant. And in the front of my beds here I got my nasturtiums and marigolds working here as companion plants. Helping to keep pests away the nasturtiums are starting to bloom. Got pretty flowers here. Tomatoes are looking great. I've done a bit of pruning on them. I've been trying to keep the bottoms clear of branches. Keep that airflow going. Removing suckers. So I had a bit of an emergency situation early June with late frost coming and I created some cozies for all these tomatoes using tomato cages and some large freezer bags that are made for turkeys. And they worked great making cozies over the tomatoes but the only thing was my one favorite tomato the Sun Gold Cherry for some reason suffered a lot of damaged even though I had it covered. But you know it's come back as you can see here. Some of those branches that were frozen are slowly dying off. It's got a lot of new growth coming. I've been just tying it up to the cage here to keep it going upwards and it seems to be doing great. So these ones in the middle are my determinant tomatoes. I got a couple dwarfs here. These are also yellow cherry tomatoes. And some companions that I have going with my tomatoes here is parsley and basil. And I believe I threw in some carrots here too that might be coming along. And in this bed we got lots of beans coming. Cucumbers are doing great. I've been putting onions amongst a lot of these in my containers kind of as a good companion that hopefully will help deter some pests from the cucumbers and the beans. The ones that I got closest to the trellising here are the pole beans. And then these ones here are bush beans. So hopefully they will start climbing up here catching on to the cage here and working their way up. And as far as the cucumbers here I'm hoping that they will start working their way towards this trellising here and I will try to train them to climb upwards. The majority of my onions that I planted that are the Walla Wallas and the Cabernets which are supposed to be the large balving onions. I planted in here maybe a little too thick but I can thin them out and use them throughout the summer. And I had these two baby romas which are indeterminate tomato variety that I had forgotten and I had started from seed so I just stuck them in the middle here and hopefully they will do well here in these containers. So this row here is my beets, carrots, and turnips. And one thing that I'm a little disappointed in is my carrots. So I had planted three different varieties of carrots here in my containers and for some reason they only seem to kind of germinate around the edges. I had used my pea straw as kind of an insulator mulch while they were germinating and I'm not sure if that kind of choked them out. I did try a second planting here and not having very good germination even on the second round so I don't really think it would be the seeds of those three different varieties but we will see. So it's not looking like I'm going to have a real great carrot harvest this year. This here is my row of lettuce, spinach, arugula, and kale. As you can see the leaf leafy lettuce is coming along good. I've been harvesting tons from here and then I've done some succession planting and got some a second batch of everything coming along. The first round of arugula here has started shooting out flowers and I will be waiting till these are ready and taking as many seeds as I can. I really like to try and grow arugula indoors in the winter so I will be collecting seeds from this hopefully in the next week or two. So you can see my potatoes under straw are coming really good in some areas and some spots. I have hardly any germination at all. This first couple rows were my red norlins. I'm not sure what the second two were. It was either a russet or a Yukon gold. I wish I would have made better notes of which ones I planted because obviously some strands do better than others under straw here. As you can see I got two rows where hardly anything has come up. This row here is doing good and I got another row where very little came up and then a bunch more here are doing all right. So I kind of fluffed up the straw to try to find the potatoes. They seemed to have sprouts on them but they were just sitting there doing nothing. So I'm just not sure if my straw was kind of smothering them or it was too compacted. But anyways we will keep watching over the summer and see if more work their way through. There's a corn in the background so we'll be heading over there to measure it up and see how it's doing. As you can see it's looking pretty good. Okay so we're just going to head to the back of my garden here. This is where we have our dwarf sour cherry trees growing and these are my container potatoes which are just growing like crazy. These are French fingerling potatoes that we planted mid-May. They were all planted under straw. These ones here in the bucket were planted in dirt. I don't know these they're super huge. I hope they're just not all tops and no bottoms. I haven't seen any signs yet of blooms coming yet. So we will keep an eye on them. I'm hoping that we're going to have a good harvest of potatoes here hopefully in the next month or so. Something that I'm very excited about here is my squashes. As you can see they are all taking off. They're starting to bloom. They've got lots of room here in this area to spread out on the ground and I'm just keeping an eye on the blooms here. So this is my spaghetti squash and I've been looking at the blooms here and most of them that you can see are the females because they got the fruit there under the bloom. There's lots of them coming along here that have bloomed but I haven't seen any male blooms yet which could be these ones here. They seem to be a little slow so I'm not sure if any of these females are actually going to grow if they're just going to shrivel up. So I'm going to keep an eye on it. I do hear and see lots of bees in my garden so hopefully they'll be able to come help pollinate these but yeah we've got to have some of those male flowers blooming here pretty soon to get this fruit going. The first round of peas are sending out lots of blooms now so we should be picking peas in no time here. Over on the other side of this cage I found a little grow box that I wasn't using so I have started a second round of peas in here. So these are my two cucumbers that I had started indoors early in the I guess late in the winter early spring. I was trying kind of some exotic chimes that I have never grown before. This is a cucumber melon and this is a lemon cucumber and as you can see we got some lemon cucumbers coming here. They're kind of ugly looking things but I think they would be really nice to make like an infused water with some lemon cucumbers. I think that would be really good and as far as the cucumber melons here they have tiny tiny little fruits. Try to find one here so I can show you up close but yeah there it's a very viney cucumber seems to be taking off and growing here so again hopefully the bees can come and help me out with pollination. See there there's one little tiny cucumber melon coming very anxious to see what they taste like. So also in this area I got a lot of other things growing in containers. I got a whole bunch of spring onions. These were all started using the winter sewing method in milk jugs. I just transferred them to this grow bag. I've been chopping and harvesting these quite a bit already. I got two beefsteak tomatoes that I started indoors very early and I've already taken some tomatoes off of them. This is a ground cherry. This is another thing that I have never planted or tasted before so I'm hoping that it produces some fruits that I can try out. My strawberry collection is doing great despite the fact though every time a strawberry is almost fully ripened and I'm ready to pick it. I come out here and some little varmint has already gotten to it. So I have pretty much lost every ripe strawberry so far to what I think was probably some little stripey gophers that are hanging out in my garden here. So I think I'm going to get some bird netting that I have and try to build some kind of a cover over top of these strawberries because I'd like to have some for myself. As you can see these strawberries are starting to shoot out runners which I'm just trying to leave here in the soil and I'm hoping that they catch and root into the ground because I do want to make this area you know strawberries that will come back every year. I have asparagus in here which apparently is a good companion with strawberries. So my goal is to try and get a few strawberries started and hopefully they will make it over the winter and come back next spring. Also in this area I got garlic planted and I'm just so sorry that I didn't plant way more. I'm not sure why. I think I was kind of late in the fall when I threw these in and I definitely could have planted way more. They have not started shooting out garlic scapes yet which is usually a sign that they're getting ready to be picked. Okay so it's time to check out the corn to see how high it is by the 1st of July. So this sweet corn I started from seed indoors first of all and then transplanted out to these three containers in early June and I invited a few members of the family out here today to measure up themselves against the corn to see how it's doing. Sadly my microphone was not turned on so I didn't capture any of the sound while we were checking out the corn but little Henderson here was the first one to stand up beside the corn. You can see it's probably even taller than he is right now. Then I got Brady up there to see how it measures up against her. She's probably got a little bit shorter legs than I do but definitely the corn is way past knee high for her as well. Then it was my turn to get up there on the bench and do a measurement. Again corn is looking great. The little bench that I had going there wasn't quite as sturdy as I thought it was and it started to break under my weight so I had to get off there before I hurt myself but it was a lot of fun measuring up each of our legs against the corn but then my husband came along and we got him up there as well. He's probably got the longest legs of all of us but definitely the corn is way past everybody's knees right now so corn is looking good and we're hoping that we can get a good harvest here in August. So that concludes the tour of my garden here as we reach the midway point of the gardening season of 2022. If you enjoyed this video I hope that you will give it a like, leave me a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future videos coming to the channel. Happy gardening and thanks for watching.