 Hello everyone, welcome to the demonstration garden. I'm really excited to show you how a lot of the plants are growing and help you to get a little bit more familiar with the seeds that you got in your pack. People often ask like how much time does it take to garden and it really depends on what kind of experience you're wanting to get out of it. It varies greatly. But what I really recommend is making gardening an everyday thing, spending a little bit of time in the garden everyday. And generally what I do a little bit everyday is watering, weeding, some insect control, pruning and harvesting. So today I'm going to take you through the demonstration garden and I'm going to do a little bit of each of those things, except watering because I already watered this morning. First I'm going to show you, this is a little patch here of the beneficial insect attractant mix. And one of the things you see here is some cilantro. There's cilantro in the beneficial insect attractant mix. That mix includes some plants that are wonderful as food both for us humans and for bees and butterflies and our pollinator friends. Here is some cosmos that are just starting to pop up. These attract parasites or sorry, they attract wasps that actually eat caterpillars that are eating your food. So you want to bring insects into the garden, beneficial insects. Now within this mix there's actually a few weeds popping up. So one of the things you do a little bit of everyday is weeding. But some weeds are wonderful to eat. So this is one of my favorite weeds, weeds right here. There is no such thing as a weed. That's the concept that we've created. They all are plants with their own purpose. And this is purslane, it is a wonderfully nutritious green, I eat a lot of it. And so I'm letting this free food grow right in the garden rather than weeding it. Here I have my onions growing, the green onions are coming up. And there are some chives in here but these chives are getting a little bit shaded out. I'm actually seeing the garlic chives with the flat leaves and then the standard chives with the round leaves. So I'm seeing both varieties popping up here. So we've got the beneficial insect attractant mix. We've got the green onions and we've got some of the chives here. So here we have a few different things growing. We have radishes and you can see these radishes are actually starting to bolt which means they're going to produce a seed pod which I'll show you some seeds. And that means you can make your own radish seeds for next year. So this is in the bolting stage, you can see how it's shooting up. We've got some carrots growing in here. We've got our mustard greens, this is the green wave. And then we've got some of the dill growing right here in front. So I mentioned another one of the daily things to be doing is some insect control and also some pruning. So I'm going to do that at the same time. The issue I have on my mustard is actually white fly. And so what I've found that really helps with that is continuous harvesting. So I'm going to go ahead and take all of the big leaves of the mustard. And what this does is it provides a harvest of food and then it prunes the plant back so it'll start putting this energy into all these smaller leaves which will turn into big leaves to eat. But at the same time on these some of them have these white fly larvae or white fly let's just call it white fly, it's eggs or larvae depending on the stage. And so this is still edible. If I left this here a long time it would start to get bad. So I'm actually still going to eat this and I'm reducing the issue with the insects at the same time. So what I'm doing is I'm going through here, I'm pruning out all the ones that have the insect issue on them. I'm actually going to prune a couple of these radish leaves at the same time, harvest a few of those off. Here's a big mustard here that I see has some white fly damage. And then I'll probably come back through and harvest this mustard again in probably about a week. This will be back to about this size if I had to guess. Now what I'm also going to do is I don't want this to seed yet. I don't want this to bolt. When it bolts it starts to get really strong flavor like the mustardy strength and it starts to shoot up instead of producing leaves. So also where it's bolting I'm going to go ahead and take those off so that it keeps producing leaves. And so I just, you can see this one how it was starting to shoot up. So I went ahead and harvested that to try to give myself more time. But these mustards, I don't know how much longer they're going to last, but they're getting into their stage of being, they probably put out the majority of their production. So at this stage I could probably harvest a little bit of this dill, but I'm going to go ahead and just let that continue growing. Here I have the basil mix, one of the ones that I'm the most excited about. And there's four different basils popping up in here. You have your standard Italian basil. This is holy basil, which is just an incredibly healing plant. We have a Thai basil coming up over here, and then we have some lemon basils coming up over here. Let me just make sure. Yes, very lemony basil. So I mentioned when plants are bolting you want to prune the top off. So how that works on basil is when you cut the top, what happens is it will branch out and it'll actually send up two new shoots. And so when you harvest, you're not taking, you can actually be producing more food by harvesting. So consistent harvesting is key. So I'm going to go ahead and just prune the tops off of a few of these. So there's a honeybee that seems a little angry with me right now. You can tell when a honeybee is angry because it does have a different pitch. And this one's got a bit of the angry pitch going on. Now I don't know if you can see right behind me, but we just rescued a swarm of bees. So there's a few thousand bees pretty busy right now, but that one seems to have moved on. So continuing to harvest the basil a little bit here, you can see the holy basil. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and prune a few of these off. Holy basil tends to be able to have seeds and continue producing. Hello bee, you are back. But I'm going to go ahead and harvest some of those wonderful medicines. So more harvesting can be done here, but that's what I'm going to show you for now. Hello bee and arugula. So I'm going to go ahead, actually not on this one, but on the next one over I'm going to cut a few of these arugula back. So you can see the arugula has gone to seed here. And I let that get away from me. It's just one that kind of got away from me. So this bolted, which means the flavor is going to be much stronger. Personally I love it, but once it gets to this point it may be a bit too spicy for you. So you want to keep it from bolting by pruning it back. So I am going to go ahead and prune some of these back and try to encourage it to keep on putting out more greens. But I'm also going to leave some of these because these are going to go to seed. I'm going to harvest those seeds and that way the free seed pack can keep delivering year after year without having to get another one. I'll be self-sufficient and arugula no problem. You can actually see some seed pods on here already. You've got your flowers and your seed pods. This little seed pod here with the yellow flowers, that's the Asian greens popping up here. So this is one of the Asian green plants and there's probably four, five, six times more seeds coming off this one plant than you got in the pack. So definitely letting some go to seed is a key to having seeds for next year. I'm going to harvest more of this mustard that is getting pretty big and you can see how I'm working with the pruners. I like to use pruners actually more than my hands. I do recommend a pair of pruners. They go a very long way. So I'm pruning at the same time as I'm harvesting at the same time as I'm doing a little insect control, taking care of three things at once. Oh, and of course, eating, always nibbling in the garden. And do you have to wash the greens? It depends on what you put on the greens. If you don't cover them with pesticides, then no, you do not have to wash the greens. In fact, I rarely ever do. And as you can see, I'm still here. So there's a nice little bunch. Now this leaf, for example, is pretty old. You totally could eat that, but this is not going into the salad bowl. This is going into the salad bowl, including the arugula flowers. So a couple of the Russian Kales. You've got the White Russian Kale, the Red Russian Kale, and the La Sonato. What came up here, or what I transplanted here, are the White Russian Kales. These are coming up beautifully. Now when you harvest these, what you do is you harvest the bottom ones. So there you go. I harvest the bottom ones, and I'm consistently coming out here and harvesting these. This has a lot of aphids on it, and a lot of people would toss this out because they're aphids. Aphids are made of kale. So all you're eating when you eat a bunch of aphids is a manifestation of sunshine, of kale. They're nutritious. I would say they're delicious, but you don't taste them even. You don't even notice that they're there. Good, soft kale. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and harvest a turnip. This is the first turnip of the year. This is the purple top globe turnip. There you have it. A beautiful little turnip, and a lot of people don't do this, but the turnip greens are delicious and nutritious too. Those cook right up, so you don't just get the turnip, you get all of the turnip greens as well. So that's the harvest from today. Just doing a little weeding, a little bit of pruning, a little bit of harvesting at the same time. And that's a pretty nice little harvest. Now one thing that I do want to show you is that I've got some carrots right here. I've got some turnips right here. This is planted way too close together. I still got some good turnips, but look how much space this one turnip took. You can imagine you can only fit so many of them in there, which is why it's so important to watch the videos on spacing. So you give things the desired spacing that they need to be really productive. So lastly I want to just show you a couple of the pots that I just recently planted where things are in a younger stage. So I have 12 pots here for the 12 different seeds that you receive in the pack, and I'm just going to share what they are. They're still in a pretty small stage. I just planted most of these from seeds a few weeks ago, and then I transplanted some as well. So we've got our dill, we've got our basil, we've got mustard, flower mix, kale. These were transplanted. We've got mustard here, I believe. Let me give this a little nibble. Oh, this is actually turnips. And then we've got our herb mix here with our lemon balm and with our chamomile. We've got our radishes. Here we have arugula. Then we have carrots. And then we've got our chives and, or sorry, our onions and our chives. So now we're here at the garden in the back, and I'm excited to show you what's going on here. Here I'm actually going to focus on sharing some of the challenges, the issues that I've been having over the last couple months in the garden. Before diving into that, I want to share one of the joys, and that is the beneficial insect attractant mix is popping out some flowers. This is the cosmos, and not only do they bring joy, but they also bring in beneficial insects like wasps that will eat the caterpillars that are eating your food. So these have been bringing in a lot of joy to have these, and there's more buds, so they'll be continuing to come. In gardening, there's always going to be challenges. No matter what your garden is, you're going to have challenges. It's just a question of which. I've actually had six main challenges that I've been working with. First big one, cutworms. Cutworms have been a big struggle, and the reason is they don't come in and just nibble on one leaf. What they do is they come in and they go to a plant, and they just cut it right at the bottom and topple the thing right over. Like they'll take a plant, topple it right over, whole plant is dead. So over half of this garden has been cut down by cutworms. My solution for that that has really worked is you take a pot, you cut the bottom, and then you put that over the plant, bury it down some, and that creates a guard. And you can also use tin foil as well as a guard. So cutworms have definitely been one of my biggest challenges, but since I've put these in, which is work, but in a small garden, manageable, the cutworm problem has been more or less taken care of. Right here, my biggest challenge is that this garden is, it doesn't get enough sun. So this garden, Oldney is getting about two and a half or three hours of full sun right now, and you generally want a minimum of five hours and more like up to seven hours of direct sun. So these plants are all growing really slowly because they're not getting enough sun. With enough sun, these plants would be way further along. They'd almost be, most of them would be fully mature, and a lot of them would actually be harvested at this point. The great thing about this garden is it's got really, really beautiful soil. This soil was built right here on site by Albert, who's beautiful property this is. And so that's been one of the beautiful things to work with here, is this nutritious, rich soil. However, I bought soil for the plants, for the pots, and that soil turned out to be super carbon heavy, very low on nitrogen. So all of my plants have been stunted because there hasn't been the nutrients they've needed or the nutrients have been locked up in the carbon. So with all of my pots, I've been having to add nitrogen to them, fish emulsion being the main source. And so that's been a challenge, and it's definitely a challenge that, you know, some of you will come across with your soil. The two other insects or diseases that I've been dealing with have been whitefly, and they've been a big struggle on the mustard out in the front beds. And the other one is the Downey mildew that's been on the basil. That has been a substantial struggle. I'm just here in Florida for a few months, so I'm really gardening in a place where I'm in a challenging middle zone and kind of like, yeah, I'm just here for a short period of time, so I haven't gotten used to everything here, but I'm learning these things as I go and figuring out how to work with them. And with all of these, I'm not using a single pesticide. I definitely was kind of tempted to use pesticides, but I never have used one and still have not used one. Lastly, I mentioned here there's not enough sun, the shade. The other challenge here in Florida is we're getting into the period where summer is actually so hot that the plants are bolting, and so I'm kind of struggling with some of the annuals into the sun, into the summer months where it's really hot. So those have been the challenges that I've been dealing with here in the garden, and I wanted to just share some of those with you because many of those are challenges that you're going to be dealing with as well. So every day I do a little bit of watering, a little bit of weeding, a little bit of insect control. Remember, your hands are the best pesticide, your hands and your minds. No need for those toxic chemicals that are going on to our food and into our body if we're using them. And then, of course, a little bit of pruning and a little bit of harvesting. I've got my harvest for the day, which I'm excited about. Really excited about this lemon basil. And a last little thing that I want to share. I have plants that could be considered a failure. This pot didn't have enough nutrients. It was the soil that I'm struggling with. And I planted some of the Asian greens from the mustard mix. And as you can see, they're tiny little plants. They bolted right away. I could pull these out or I'm just going to let these go to seed. That way I'll have more of these to plant next year. So all throughout the garden, you can see many things that are in different stages. There is no exact one way to do anything. It's about getting in tune with the garden and working with it in all of its different stages. I'm so excited and happy to have shared this time in the garden with you and hope that you're becoming more confident and learning a lot more to become liberated from the global industrial food system and just enjoy the time in your garden growing your own healthy food.