 Hi there and welcome to Little Garden on the Prairies. If this is your first time joining me on my channel, my name is Tracy and I am a small scale gardener living on the prairies here in Saskatchewan, Canada. So here on the prairies all across the western provinces here, Saskatchewan and Alberta, BC, Manitoba and probably down into the states we have been going through a real bad drought, very little rain, really high temperatures, not normal for our summers here in the 30s, mid 30s Celsius for weeks and weeks. So it's been pretty tough on our crops and our pastures. The cattle are always trying to find some green grass and it's a bit of a concern for us here on the farm. So I've been doing a lot of watering and a lot of mulching and I just want to take you on a walk through my garden and show you what's happening here at the end of July. So this here is my lasagna garden bed. I started it two years ago, so this is my second season, growing flowers and perennials here and I'm really happy with the way it's been going. I give it a good mulching in the fall and then a good layer of mulch again in the spring. I've been using straw, leaves, grass clippings to kind of keep the weeds down throughout the season. Now unfortunately because of our drought there's not a lot of grass to cut, so that hasn't been an option that I've been able to use. But I do have a lot of pea straw and some dried leaves still from last fall that I try to keep everything mulched, have no exposed soil so that these plants are retaining as much moisture as possible. So a lot of these plants here in my lasagna garden bed are from winter sowing. I did some sunflowers, my calendula, some sweet peas which for some reason are not looking healthy and not really looking like they are going to bloom, so hopefully they turn around here soon but maybe they just can't withstand this heat. A lot of these petunias are ones that I started indoors from seed last winter and was really happy how they took off and I was able to bring them out to my flower beds. They suffered frost damage in the end of May and middle of June but they have bounced back. I got my ornamental grasses here that I planted indoors that still have not shot up any blooms or blooms of any kind. I really do like the look of the ornamental grasses so I think I will do some more research on which ones grow best here in my growing zone and plan for some more. These are lupins that I started in the winter sowing method that seem to be hanging in there. So the real test on these perennials will be whether they make it through our cold winters and hopefully come back next spring. I also got some butterfly weed here that I started using the winter sowing method and also just started them indoors from seed. So it turned out that both methods worked out good and the plants are doing okay. So again I hope these will survive our winter and next year I can expand my butterfly weed crop. So this area here is where I have all my herbs planted and most of these also were started using the winter sowing method. I have thyme, oregano, sage, basil, parsley, and Thai basil. And on the other side of the fence here is where I grew garlic for the first time and was very excited to have a pretty good harvest here a couple days ago. So I just want to take you into my garden shed to show you how I harvested my garlic and my herbs and how I'm drying them out right now. Okay so we're just inside my garden shed now here and I just wanted to show you this super cool herb dryer that I purchased off of Amazon. I've been using this for a couple years and I found that the best place to keep it is in my garden shed. And I just open up the doors. I have two doors to my shed here. Let the air flow go through and it works great for drying all my herbs, my weeds, my garlic. So down in the bottom here is my first ever garlic harvest. So I'm pretty excited about that. I believe I planted a dozen or so cloves last fall and I have 10 nice little cloves of garlic here that I harvested and I even got a bonus two for one where there's a bulb here at the end and a couple more coming out on the stem. So I'm pretty excited about that. So I just put these in the bottom of this mesh here, let them dry out for a couple weeks. I also have been collecting calendula flowers off my plants and some plantain weed out of my yard. I just set them in here using coffee filters just to kind of keep them contained. Let them dry out and this will be going into an oil infusion that I use to make my coyote healing salve. So maybe another video coming. And up here is where I harvest and kept my herbs. So after clipping them, I took them in the house and gave them a wash just because I'm going to be eating these and I'm not sure what kind of bugs or birds have been all over them. And I got these little mesh trays here from the dollar store. So after I've washed and spun them in the salad spinner, I just bring them out here. Let them dry naturally. You can zipper this shut so that no bugs or moths get in there. So I have six different kinds of herbs just dehydrating naturally here and I will jar them up and put them in my spice cupboard for the winter. So this here is my two raised garden beds. And I use the square foot gardening method for planting into these two spaces. And I highly recommend it for anybody who just has a small space to garden in because you can jam a lot of different plants into a very small space using this method. So I have planted up probably 10 or so different types of plants here. In these two, four by eight square foot gardens. So in this corner of my square foot garden, I have five different pepper plants going. I lost the first round of peppers that I had planted out here because of frost that came late May and then another one in mid-June. So I luckily had still some seedlings indoors that I transplanted in. And these peppers are loving this heat. This one here is called the Aurora pepper. And it's an heirloom Saskatchewan seed that I purchased locally. It has these beautiful purple, yellow, I think maybe orange or red little peppers that grow on it. They're a medium hot pepper and very pretty. So I'm looking forward to seeing those grow and ripen into some different colors. I have two Portugal pepper plants here. They're loaded up with little green hot peppers. These ones will be used in pickling and maybe drying and grinding up into some pepper flakes for my spice cupboard. This is called the LASA pepper. It's a sweet pepper. It kind of produces a tomato or kind of an apple shaped type pepper. These will turn red and they'll be sweet and nice for salads. And these are also a sweet pepper called the sweet Italian frying pepper. I got these seeds on a seed exchange from Hickory Croft Farms in Ontario. Thank you. These are doing great. I'm looking forward to seeing them ripen into a red pepper. You can also use your raised garden beds to create some great cages for your tomatoes to grow up here which I've done on either side so that I can get to them from all angles. My indeterminate 100 here is looking like it needs to get some pruning done on it. The tomatoes are also really loving the heat and getting lots of fruit going now. I think for me I'm a little bit behind because of the frost I had on the first day of summer, third week of June. Kind of set a lot of my plants back but they're really coming along nicely now. And here is my other square foot garden from another angle. I've got it loaded up with pole beans and some bush beans. And I've got three kinds of cucumbers coming here. So my husband loves cucumbers fresh out of the garden. I don't get into pickles or anything with them, not so far anyway. So we just enjoy eating them fresh as they ripen and come off the vine. So this here is my container garden area and this is another method that I love doing. There's a small scale gardener. You can use pretty much any container to grow something. I'm lucky to have access to a lot of these red tubs. They're mineral tubs that we get for our cattle. So once they lick them clean I can wash them out and poke a few holes in the bottom. Put some filler material in them and soil and I've got a great container for growing. I do a lot of secession planning. These were all lettuces and beets. I've harvested the beets. The lettuces started to bolt so I pulled everything out and I've got another round of beets, spinach, romaine, and some kohlrabi growing now. I'm going to let this arugula go to seed and collect the seeds off of it so I can use to plant my indoor lettuces this winter. This is the first time trying to grow carrots in containers and I think it's going really well. They are still pretty small yet but my husband and I have been snacking on them. And this is where I do a lot more gardening under straw following the Ruth Stout type method. This has been the way I've been growing potatoes for years and it works great for me. I don't have to worry about weeding. I don't have to worry about too much watering. The straw retains moisture really well and it just is a good environment for potatoes. My corn is looking pretty small yet so I'm not sure. I started these in egg cartons as seedlings. Put them directly under straw without digging them in and they have taken off but they're really not I think the size that they should be by this time of the year. It could be that they aren't getting enough sunlight. My garden shed here does cast a bit of a shade for a couple hours in the morning before the sun comes around and hits this corn so it could be that that's the problem. And if you see my previous video in the spring I planted up three types of potatoes in containers under straw and they're looking like they're dying down here a bit so stay tuned for the harvesting of these potatoes in containers. I also did a real late planting of potatoes. I'm calling these baby potatoes that I planted on July 4th which is pretty late for our season here but I'm hoping that maybe I'll get some baby potatoes if our frost doesn't come too early and it stays warm into September. We might be able to get a harvest off of these. I use these seedling potatoes to fill up a bunch of empty space in my straw here because I had a lot of unused space and they are really starting to pop through into the garden now. I also took those seedling red potatoes on July 4th and put them into these three tubs and they are going crazy. They just took off so I'm hoping that again I'll be harvesting some lovely baby potatoes if not bigger out of these three tubs come end of August, early September. I also have squashes growing in containers. These are 15 gallon size fabric containers that I'm trying to grow squash in. I got two plants in here, two plants in here and they're just starting to really bloom. I can see a spaghetti squash coming there. I'm really excited because I have a grandson who is just starting to eat baby food and I'm hoping that I can maybe harvest some squash this fall and make some baby food for Henderson. So in this area here I recently just brought in a whole bunch more cardboard and straw. I'm trying to create another kind of permaculture gardening space that I can grow more garlic and expand my asparagus perennials here hopefully next spring and add in some strawberry plants. What I have envisioned for this area here so hopefully the cardboard will keep the weeds down and the straw will help retain moisture and this will be a new gardening space for next year. So another vision I have for next year's garden is to create a boundary along the edge of this forest and of trees and choke cherry bushes so that I can stop the grasses and the suckers from coming into the garden. So I've been doing some research on comfrey plants because they not only are good for your compost and for mulching around plants and making liquid fertilizer, they also are good for creating a barrier. They have strong deep roots that go deep down into the ground and are supposed to stop you know other grasses and seedlings from creeping into your garden. So I'm going to attempt to dig these up, break them apart and replant them along the edge of the forest here. So could be a making of another video so stay tuned for that. So that concludes the tour of my garden. I'm not sure why I decided to do it at the hottest time of the day but I am so hot it's time to go inside and cool off and wait till this evening to come back. So I hope you enjoyed my tour. Please leave some comments below, let me know how your garden is doing and if you haven't already done so please subscribe, hit that notification bell so that you don't miss out on my next garden video. Thanks for watching.