 Hello and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. So I'm just heading out to do some watering and checking out things in the garden. We are nearing the end of August and nearing the end of the outdoor gardening season here for us on the Saskatchewan Prairies. If you've been following me on my channel, you'll know that I'm just a small-scale gardener. I don't grow huge amounts of any type of vegetables. I'd like to try a lot of different things. So I thought it would be kind of fun just to walk around and show you some of the things that I've tried growing this year that I haven't done before. Let you know how it went. Give you my opinion on whether I will grow them again or whether I will scratch them off my list for next year. So let's take a walk around the garden. So let's head over here to my corn crop. So this is corn that I had grown in containers. I started this corn from seed indoors and got it to, you know, about three or four inches high, the little seedlings, and then I planted them up into these containers. So you can see the corn is finished for the year. I probably got only about a dozen cobs of corn out of all these plants. They were absolutely delicious, but basically only fetus for one meal. They were quite small. And so I'm thinking that maybe I planted too many of these corn plants in one container. They might have produced better if I didn't have so many plants kind of fighting for nutrients in these small containers. But, you know, it was it was a good experiment. I have never grown corn successfully before in the ground or in containers. So I'm not sure if I'm going to do it again though. It was a lot of time and effort for one meal of corn. So that one's kind of on the table. Not quite sure if I'll grow corn again next year. So this year I tried five different types of squash and again I started them from seed a few weeks prior to moving them outside and I grew them all in containers. So the first one here I did was spaghetti squash and as you can see I have two and possibly a third one coming here. Spaghetti squash is something that I will always continue to grow. So this is a sweet dumpling which has not produced anything for me so far and I'm not expecting to get much. I see I have one squash coming here, but I'm not sure if it's going to amount to anything before we get our first frost. So this is one that, you know, I tried it probably won't grow it again. This was my sunburst which also known as the patty pan squash. One thing I didn't realize was how small these are. I thought they grew into a bigger melon or a bigger squash just from what I've seen on YouTube and pictures, but these, whatever, maybe it was just this particular kind that I grew, were they only got to about, you know, that big. They were not super huge. I would say I only got maybe about five or six of these little patty pans. Yeah, they fall off right away, so they're not going to get much bigger. So as far as the sunburst I'm thinking probably will not grow them again. This here is the Burgess Squash. It took a long time for me to get any of the female flowers to show up, so I was thinking I wasn't going to get any kind of fruit off of here. I do finally have one, two squashes coming here. But again, not very big, but we'll see. They don't seem to be really growing in this past week. I've been watching them. They don't seem to be getting too big. So I'm not sure how much bigger they will get before I harvest them. And then I have my zucchini, which of course is always going to be a staple in my garden. I think zucchini squash and the spaghetti squash are my two favorite. My only regrets are that I did not plant more plants. So I think probably next year I will just go with spaghetti. And zucchini, those are two squashes I'm familiar with. They seem to always do well here. You've seen some of my previous videos. I always plant potatoes in containers and under straw on the ground. Potatoes will always be on my list to be growing in the garden. That is something that if I can find somewhere to plant some potatoes, whether it's in a container or in the ground or you know, under straw I will be planting more potatoes. The majority of my potatoes this year I planted under straw here. So this is pea straw that I pack on the ground in the fall and then again, you know, in the spring when I plant the potatoes I put some more straw on top. So these are starting to die off and look like, you know, they're ready to harvest. So in the next couple weeks we will start digging these up and we should have enough to, you know, last us a month or two into the winter, hopefully. So again, potatoes are always on the list. The Russets, the Red Norland and Yukon Gold are probably the best ones that grow good for me here on the prairies. So for the most part I did container gardening this year. I had a whole row of lettuces and including spinach and arugula. Those always do well for me in the spring. So these containers are ready to be cleaned out and kind of cleaned up before the winter and then beets and carrots were in these other containers. And these what I call are my raised garden beds, kind of the redneck version because I use tubs in here as well. Beans did not do well for me this year and I'm not sure why because I had good luck with them last year. We had a very hot dry summer with, you know, the occasional rain shower or rainstorm that kind of saved things wasn't quite as dry as last year, but it was it was fairly hot and it's still hot here and the end of August we still are getting up into the 30 degrees Celsius. So I don't know if that's, you know, played a factor in my garden this year. We're not used to having such long periods of heat. For some reason, cucumbers is not working well for me. My husband loves cucumbers. That's his favorite and I've just been barely getting, you know, one or two every couple days. So I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I've been used a lot of the self-pollinating, not self-pollinating, but the female only flowers, varieties, so they don't need to be pollinated. Again, I don't know if it's the kinds I grew or if I just had too many in these tubs, but I need to look at some different methods for my cucumbers next year because we've got to have, we've got to have cucumbers. They're definitely always going to be something I'll grow in my garden. So this is my tomato patch. I have, I think, one, two, three, four, five, six, six or seven varieties of tomatoes this year. My favorite is from the past is sun gold cherries. This is my sun gold cherry plant and it has yet to produce any or have any ripened tomatoes on it yet, which seems to me, it's a little bit slow. Like I feel like I should be having a lot more ripe, ready-to-eat tomatoes by this time. These dwarf yellow tomatoes, I grew indoors in my arrow garden and they are great. They're a great indoor tomato to grow indoors, so you'll be seeing that this winter in my basement garden, but I've been getting lots of cherry tomatoes off of here. They are really tasty, but they just, I just, from what I recall, the sun gold cherries are the best tasting ones in my mind, so I'm hoping that these are going to ripen up here pretty soon. So some of the varieties that I grew this year that I may not grow in the future, this one is called a Palestinian tomato. I got these seeds in a seed exchange and I don't know, they are really ugly, deformed looking tomatoes. So, so far I've gotten one off of here that was split and, you know, pretty deformed. I didn't even actually end up eating it, so I don't know and there's hardly any fruit coming on this plant at all, so I will not plant those again. Beef steak and the roadster are determinate ones that I plant usually every year and I will keep planting those. My roadster here got a bit of a blossom enrot happening with it, so I think I need to just look at my soil here in my tubs, make sure they're properly amended and set up in the spring for tomatoes. This variety of tomato over here was called the ping pong cherry, so the the fruit on it is, you know, about the size of ping pong balls a little bigger than a cherry and not as big as a beef steak or anything, but these ones have been doing really well. I've been eating a lot of ripened ones off of here. They're really sweet. I really like them, so ping pong tomatoes are probably going to be on the list for next year. So before we get looking at my peppers and egg plants, I just wanted to show you my nasturtiums because I had them growing in the front of both of my garden beds here. They've been great and then all of a sudden they just started to die and I'll show you a close-up picture, but they are covered in these little black bugs that seem to have just eaten the leaves and killed the plant. So I usually collect the seeds off my nasturtium, so I'm hoping that I'm still going to be able to to find some, but I'm not sure what kind of a bug got these this year. If anybody can identify them for me, please leave me a comment and let me know. So I had lots of nice peppers coming here. These are my Italian frying peppers. This plant here is produced a whole bunch of really nice. I'm letting them ripen on the vine as long as they can. I have pulled off a few and done some cooking with them. These were a paprika pepper. So I'm letting those ripen up and I will dry them and make some paprika powder. And then I had some king of the north green peppers, I think they were called. I've harvested some already off of this one. So peppers, you know, they take a long time here in Saskatchewan. If you don't have a long, warm growing season, they don't always do that well. But peppers grow really well indoors, so I will definitely be doing some peppers in my basement. So keep watching for those videos coming in the fall and winter. So the eggplant is something I've never grown and actually have never eaten. I don't remember ever eating eggplant and so I'm assuming these are ready to pick. They don't seem as big as ones I see in the store, but I think I should be harvesting them soon. If anybody wants to, if anybody's an expert on eggplant, let me know. Should I be pulling these off? I don't really know, even know what to cook with them. I've, you know, researched a few recipes. So if anybody has a recipe to share in the comments, that'd be great. They were kind of fun. I started them indoors and moved them out here, just like the peppers. Probably won't grow them again. I guess I should taste them first before I decide, but I don't see that I will grow eggplant again. So over here is where I have asparagus growing wild. So it comes up every year. I hope that while it's gone to seed here that it's going to shoot up more plants in the spring. I kind of want this whole area here to be asparagus and I was trying to incorporate strawberries in with the asparagus. So I picked up these strawberries from a local greenhouse and I recommend if you like to, you know, grow strawberries of your own that without having to go and buy them, you know, when they're more expensive in the pots. I bought them at the Beirut stage from the greenhouse. I got in contact with them before they had potted them all up and they sold me a bundle of 25 Beirut strawberries and then I was able to bring them home and plant them up myself. And it's been a good summer of strawberries. I've had to share my strawberries with chipmunks or gophers this year. They've really gotten into them, but I had them covered with bird netting and it seemed to help. So I was able to enjoy strawberries myself. I will always have strawberries growing in my garden and they've been shooting out a lot of these little suckers and I'm just letting them kind of attach into the ground and I should be cutting them off here now. So hopefully in the spring some of these will come back and I can have a good kind of patch of asparagus and strawberries going here. So the ground cherries were something that was really, I found interesting. I've seen a lot of, you know, different videos of people growing ground cherries and making all sorts of interesting things out of them, you know, jams and jellies. So I started a couple indoors. I only ended up with one plant which I just kept in this pot out here and it has been producing the ground cherries and we have just been eating them as we find them. They usually fall off when they're dried and ready. But the funnest part about this was bringing my grandson out here. We've probably seen in videos, if you've been watching my channel, he's 18 months old. He loved to just come out here with me and pick them and then he gets to eat them. So I didn't really plan on making any jams or jellies or getting anything out of this long term but I found it was just a fun plant to grow and I think if you have, you know, grandchildren or little people that might enjoy picking them and just kind of cracking them open and finding a little sweet berry in them is lots of fun. So I'm going to keep it on my list. I think it's a good thing for a for a grandma garden. The cucumber melon that I grew is pretty much done. I see that I missed picking one here. So I just put out a video last week on kind of the seed to harvest to pickles of the cucumber melon. I get a lot of people asking me about cucumber melons and I am by no means an expert but I did try it. I grew them from seed indoors. I planted them out here. They grew all summer. I managed to get enough to make one jar of dill cucumber melon pickles which we've been enjoying. I don't think I'll grow this plant again though. It was kind of just something I tried for fun but I think as far as taking up space in my garden it probably will get scratched off next year's list. But if you want to grow cucumber melons please check out my video. I'll leave the link to it below in the description. So over here beside my asparagus is where I planted my garlic in the fall and I was able to get not a bad harvest here of garlic about three weeks ago. I'm just letting it all dry out. I can't remember what I grew. I think I had two different kinds of hard nick type garlic and again my only regret is that I didn't plant more. But this year I will definitely be planting more and hopefully get a bigger harvest of garlic for next year. So garlic is definitely still on the list for my garden. So if you've been part of my channel for the past year or two you'll know that I do a lot of indoor growing here in zone three Canada. The first frost usually comes early September and once that happens then it's you're done. There's no more outdoor gardening here on the prairie. So I have taken up indoor gardening and I use the hydroponic method specifically Kratki and I would love people to keep following me through the winter to see how easy it is to keep growing vegetables indoors all winter long no matter where you live. And so those videos are going to be starting up. I'm ramping down the outdoor garden and getting plans and things set up for my indoor gardening. So keep watching for those videos in the future. So I hope you enjoyed my garden tour here on the Saskatchewan prairies. It is near the end of August like I said and frost can come pretty much any day now. So thank you for joining me. I hope you had fun with me in the garden today. I would love to hear your comments below. Please hit that like button and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos coming to the channel. Thanks for watching.