A Big Decision Was Made!

We have a very, very busy day today. I want to try to get all or at least most of these snapdragons in the ground and I also want to put these tomato plants in pots. I'm a little worried about them. To be completely transparent, they don't look very healthy, the leaves are a little yellowed, they are not thriving as I have seen in the past when I started tomatoes and I was worried if you would be with me when we transplanted them. they were a little wilted and I transplanted them I took off the tops and look at them now these are all dalas they look phenomenal these three here are dalas and they have exploded since I potted them if you were with me the day we I removed these dalas we also put in I potted my patunas and they looked purple, the leaves were almost purple and look how green they look now, it's amazing how these plants look after planting them in pots and giving them a little more space, so the same with my pepper.

The plants definitely need to be in pots too Upp, but before I can start potting things up I need to get them out of the grow room because as you can see I'm running out of shelves under my grow light so I need to put things in the grow room. soil so when I scoop up the poop I can get those tomatoes in pots that won't be ready to be buried for probably 4 weeks under the grow lights last time you were here with me we planted zenas and they all started to sprout you can see a lot of green in these zenas and something really fun, the peanuts are starting to sprout, so they started sprouting yesterday.

I'll leave them on the heat mat today and tonight I'll probably put them under the crop. light space because again I have a space right here where I have space under the grow lights and maybe I could put one right there, but other than that, I'm completely out of grow light space. I hope that by planting these tomatoes in pots, we will start to thrive, but if they don't recover, I'm worried that I will be able to buy my tomatoes this year and if that ends up being the case, well, we were able to start enough things ourselves, so if we finish having to buy tomatoes, it is what it is, so let's take all the Snap Dragons, we have so many Snap Dragons, this will require multiple trips to the garden, that's not going to work, okay, I think I'll do it.

What I need to do is take this to the garden, drop off my fertilizers, and then come back for more snapdragons. I think I can put this tray in there because it's a small tray. Yes, that will work. I think I can get one more. I know where we're going to plant these Snap Dragons and I'm really excited about it, but before we actually get our hands in the dirt, I want to take a second to thank best help for sponsoring today's video. Better help is online therapy. platform I've mentioned many times over the years that one of the main reasons I garden is for my mental health.

I have struggled with anxiety and feeling overwhelmed for quite some time and gardening has always helped me get out of that because it gives me fresh air, makes me move my body and just gets me out of my head, but what I have learned is that It is not a substitute for professional help therapy, it is something I had never done until recently, it always seemed overwhelming to me. I have to go through the process of getting a referral from my doctor and finding someone who is a good fit and then having to drive to that appointment.

I always feel like there are so many more things on my list than the time I have in a day to do and the idea of ​​taking the time to go to an appointment and find a therapist that works always seemed overwhelming to me. The good thing about better help is that they work very hard to find a good match between you and your therapist. I was very nervous about finding someone. that would be a good option because it is a very personal therapy and I completed a 10 minute questionnaire, it was pretty simple and within 24 hours I was matched with my therapist, sometimes it can take up to 72, but usually you are matched quite a bit. quickly, so if you need someone to talk to quickly, that's something they work very hard on and I've been meeting with my therapist for the last month and I've never experienced the ability to just take my heart to someone who can look. do it objectively and give me the tools and the feedback that I need to help me with my life and it's been very empowering for me if you get matched with someone and it doesn't seem like a good fit, it's super easy because you can just click and you can find a new therapist.

The good thing about better help that works for me is that I don't have to take the time to travel to someone's office. I can do it from the comfort of my home, which has been one of the reasons. why has it taken me this far to find a therapist and that's why I meet with my therapist via video call because that's what works best for me but if that's something that doesn't work for you they also offer messages and just traditional phone calls . I'm going to link better help in the description box, it's going to be the first link, it's going to be Betterhelp.com Acer Homestead and they're going to offer you a discount for the first month that you're signed up and I've had people in my life that have done therapy for years and They highly recommended her, but now I can personally say that she has been a huge blessing in my life and I encourage all of us to seek help in the areas of our lives that just help. so that that person can be a support person who is not emotionally involved in the day-to-day life.

I'm really grateful for better help to sponsor today's video. They will be the first link in the description box. What I'm thinking is that I'm going to have two full snapdragon beds just for Fier's photo just for the simple fact that she's beautiful and I think I want this bed to be one of those beds because when I come down the garden it's one of the first beds. I see, I think it will be beautiful and I think I'm going to make this bed and the bed far, far, far away in the same row with snapdragons and I think I've decided that in this bed with snapdragons I'm not going to have one landscape fabric because I'm going to plant them so close together that they're going to bush up and I hope they drive out any weed competition so I'm just going to put them here I have to organize them by variety and then we'll decide which variety we're going to put in each bed that I have I think There are five varieties I'm going to take out this fertilizer so I can have more space in my wheelbarrow to fill it with snapdragons I'm going to try to put these like with like so these are my purple prints these are my pink butterfly maiden I think I only have one tray of those these are my snapdragons Snow White I have a lot of those and I have a lot of purple prints.

I also grabbed my garden journal and my garden plan because I was thinking this might not be the bed I was planning on putting these snapdragons in so I thought I should probably check the garden journal so I have it oh it's not so these two beds, the two I was talking about were going to be Zenia beds and I was going to do my Snap Dragons on that bed, so for perspective, that was going to be snaps and then that second from the end was going to be be Snap Dragons and then in that far bed there was going to be zenyas and this was going to be zenyas according to my original Garden plan, but now I might change my mind because right here I am.

I just planted sweet peas about a week and a half ago and they are starting to break their seal which is exciting. I just found out this morning so they should be green they should appear soon and hopefully they will all be sweet pea flowers and then maybe Snap Dragons and then right there I have some eonia but maybe I'll get back to my plan original. I need to give this idea some thought before fully deciding whether I want snaps in this bed or zenas in this bed. I also took coriander seeds and lettuce seeds because today we can get them in the ground and while we plant my celery and celeriac they desperately tell me that they want us to plant them.

I'm starting to get some yellowing leaves and they like them a little. A little bit cold so we can put them in the ground today too so today I could be 100% planting and then tomorrow I could be planting peppers and tomatoes so let me organize them in pink. I have the snapdragons organized by variety and I'm very proud. of myself because I'm pretty 90% sure I know what each variety is, which is a huge accomplishment for me, but first could I show you that this is the green eonia that we started together from seed last year and that is about arrive.

So perennials are fun because they grow year after year, you only have to do it once and then you can enjoy them year after year, so here we have celery and celer AC. This here I lost the label, but I know these snapdragons. They are called ponac mix pomac Berry mix and they are supposed to be a great cutting flow according to the flower farmers I follow online, this is Maiden butterfly rose. I also got this one from Johnny Seeds, so they are both from Johnny Seeds and me. I didn't get many seeds per seed packet so I only have a few here, a few here and then this one here is the pink maiden butterfly, this little row here now from there about the ones I bought at M my Garder, those are Snapdragons of roses, I bought these from M, my gardener, they are Snow White's snapdragons.

I planted both last year and grew them here. They are Emi Garder rose dragons from here and then from here, those are Orang Wonder from RAR seeds. .com and these three seeds or No seeds, but the packets are from rare seeds.com and those are the orange Wonder ones as well and then those three trays are black prints from RAR seeds.com as well and then I wanted to show them to you. here I was just taking a look maybe it's not in this one here this hadn't sprouted yet but I just took a look and right there I thought I saw another place maybe not, that's one of our sweet peas starting to sprout which is pretty exciting, it wasn't there this morning, we were just looking over there and I found what I was looking at before right there that wasn't there this morning, oh that's awesome so I hope we start to see this full Arch.

With sweet peas, the first thing I'm going to plant is the celery and celeriac because I know exactly where I want to put them and the bed is already prepared so I don't need to do any preparation for that. The first things we started this year and are very excited to go to land, so this is the bed. I want to put my celery and the celery in this front is the Patterson onions and then back here, oh, I see a sprout that wasn't there. this morning, so back in the back row here on this back trellis I have oh, there's another one right there.

I have sweet peas planted, so I thought I would take my celery and celeriac and plant them between the onions and the sweet peas, so that's what we're going to do. I've never grown celery before Josh and I really enjoy eating it, but it's not something you've grown before. I have grown celery every year. I have grown in the garden and it has always been very good. It's called Utah tall celery and I have 2 4 68 celery plants and they're pretty ready to plant in the ground so you can plant celery relatively close together so I'm just going to take my blocks of soil and space them apart look how healthy those are estate. look and I'm going to start spacing them out leaving some space between the onions and the celery and these peas this is celeriac celeriac is a root crop it's probably one of the ugliest vegetables but it tastes amazing the first time that I ate celeriac.

When Josh and I were members of an agriculture-supported farming community, we had it in our weekly box and thought it looked terrible. I'll put a picture here of what it looks like and you can see the only thing that looks like, but let me tell you. It has a great flavor, my favorite thing to do with celeriac, but I need to experiment more is to make a gretan with half celery root and half potato. It's absolutely delicious, so I've got some more onions planted in this border, so I'm just going to put a row of celeriac back there, so now that I've got them spaced out I'm going to go ahead and just plant them.

I'm going to put some flowers right here, I don't know what yet now that I have the celery and celeriac in the bed I can go ahead and put the watering back on oh my parents hung it up let's see if I can get this off here we go, not yet I have the watering turned on for the year because 'It's rained enough, but at least I can leave him lying in bed. It looks so cute. I love it. These are my sage plants. I'm going to transplant them. I think, but man, do they smell good?

They cheered up. They were looking. a little sad about a month ago and there's our celery and then our celery and it looks so pretty, so what I'm going to do on a different day is put carrots in between all these onions that I

made

. that last year and it worked very well. One thing I love about soil blocking is that the only thing I have to worry about carrying into the house from the garden is the tray and not a bunch of cells, it's so convenient that the snapdragons have no smell. I was wondering if they smell, but they haven't bloomed yet.

These are my Snap Dragons ponac berry mix and I want to put them in a very special place because I am so excited about these that I don't have. a lot of them and I'm still trying to decide if I want to put them in, you know, I really want tomy snapdragons on both ends, but these snapdragons are not going to be as tall as my zenas, I don't think so and I think that bed right there I'm pointing it out to you I can't see that bed that I was going to put Snap on Dragons today, but I think I'm going to put zenyas because there's no trellis behind it and this one has a trellis behind it and eventually I'm going to put beans like drying beans on top, I don't think, or tomatillos.

I would have to look at my garden plan, so I think what I'm going to do is put my snapdragons in these beds where I have a tall trellis and some of it is going to grow behind it, I don't want the zenas to get in the way of the trellis behind him, so we're going to put snapdragons in that bed that we just planted with cabbages and cauliflower and then we're going to put Snap Dragons in this bed because this bed will also have tomatillos or dried beans of some kind, it feels good to take a

decision

on that, so on this bed what I'm going to do is remove the landscape fabric and not put landscape fabric on this bed.

I'm only going to put landscape fabric on a few beds this year and I'm going to experiment with making a combination of These were both snapdragons last year I'm going to go ahead and pick them up oh man this soil smells so good this bed is already prepared it has compost and manure from the fall so I don't need to do that but I'll take the time to get all these basic foods out. What I'm thinking is that maybe During the growing season I don't use the landscape fabric in the beds for most of the beds, just the beds where there will only be a few plants, but they will take over, but the beds where I am planting a lot.

They don't use the landscape fabric, but at the end of the season they cover the beds with landscape fabric to protect them during the winter, at least that's what I'm thinking now, but time may change that plan. Now I need to decide which variety to use. I want to plant in this bed h it's a good question I think this is what I'm going to do I don't know how long this will last but I'm going to go see if they

made

en pink butterfly so these are a double click so they have pedals like fluffy . I don't know I'll show you the picture right here so you can see it again so it's done in butterfly pink and then I have a few more of those that first Fila there that's the same thing well you know what not I mean I guess which technically what it says is where you come from.

I don't think that's right because I've made a pink butterfly here and then I have a pink maiden butterfly here and these are clearly not the same snapdragons. If you look you can tell what color the Snapdragon will be by the UND appearance or at least you can tell it will be a different variety or at least a different color in that same variety so look at the petal difference between them too so I think that I accidentally mislabeled them. I wonder if these are, let me take this and see, anyway, what I'm going to do is my pink butterfly maen here and then I'm going to do my Rose de em Garder here my orange marigolds next Rose Snapdragon I'm actually going to do the rose here and then I'm going to do Snow White at the end and then probably something else because I'll probably have more space, let's take this one down here.

I'm wondering, huh, this is a mix, I'm not sure which one it is, so I'm not sure how many snapdragons I can plant per square foot, so I'll go ahead and Google it. okay then I can plant it, it says every 6 inches or so for the space between these Snap Dragons. I am planting them every 6 inches or so when I was looking at how far apart I could plant these Snapdragon seedlings. I just googled square foot. snapdragon gardening method and then followed that recommendation. I really like the square foot gardening method of spacing when it comes to my raised beds because it's so easy to Google that and then follow along and I'm looking at it, so what?

What I did was run five snapdragons from me to the back of the bed and then I just calculated the spacing, an even spacing from Snapdragon to Snapdragon. I'm not measuring or anything, this is just an estimate, but it ends up working out fine. In the end, we were able to have many fast dragons in this raised bed. It probably took me about half an hour total to plant one of these beds with the snapdragons and it was a wonderful half hour. Plant them now. One thing I did earlier in the day to make my night less stressful was I took a meal out of the freezer because I knew after spending a few hours in the garden it was going to be dirty and I probably wouldn't want to cook. an elaborate dinner, so I took out some of the aresa honey chicken that we made not on the last day of cooking in the freezer but the day before and had it thawed in the refrigerator while I was working here at a time when I come in to take a break and drink some water, I put some rice in the instant pot so it can cook and then sit and be ready for me and then I have a bag of salad that I end up making and we have it for dinner and so on.

The way I love to use my frozen meals is to rely on them on days like this, when I know I'm going to be tired and not want to use a lot of brain power. I'm just going to want to be able to focus on my family after difficult days in the garden, it's not a difficult day, but it is a physically demanding day. I'm going to want to just be able to relax, enjoy my family and not have to really think about dinner, but we can still eat a very delicious dinner that I was able to prepare most of it the day before, so that's just one way that I like to rely on my frozen meals so I can still have a home-cooked meal without all the effort it can take.

In that there is a bed where the front half is completely planted. I have five wide, five deep and 30 wide. I have five this way and 30 this way, so I was going to do some math real quick to see how many plants we have. We have 50 plants in that root bed, which is pretty incredible, so I didn't get any of mine. I have a lot more snapdragons here and then we fit in the second bed, but that's okay because I'll find places to put them all. Everywhere I'm trying to decide if I want my two varieties of snapdragons to be one variety in the middle and then split into the second variety or like I did in that first bed or if I want the front half to be one variety and color and then the second half will be a second variety and a second color.

I think it could be quite nice. Now I have to make a

decision

. While I'm making that decision I'm going to fold this landscape fabric and put it in my wheelbarrow, these growing containers are my least favorite to plant in because it's a little difficult to get the plants out without disturbing the plant too much. I really like the Epic gardening ones because they have a big hole and you can just push the bottom and your finger through it and pull the plant out. I like dirt blocks because they break very easily. These are my least favorite, but I use them because when I was potting up these Snap Dragons, the Snap Dragons were very close together and I had to separate the snap dragons because when I put them in the little blocks of soil and watered them, I think What happened is that the seeds spread everywhere, so you know, there would be like three or four. snapdragons per block of soil with these varieties so I couldn't just take a small block of soil and put it in a big one and that's why I ended up using them so I'm glad I had them.

I'm very glad I had them. them, but I would just like to, but they are not my favorite to transplant, that's the word I think I was looking for. They are my least favorite to transplant into the garden. I have an idea, these are my berry ponac mix. I think the first row in this bed will be the berry ponac mix. I only have 25 of these plants so I won't be able to cross them completely, but I'm going to make my berry ponac mix and then my orange. and then my black prints at the end, so it's going to be kind of a color gradient and that's what I'm going to try to do this time, so I'm going to start at this end and work that way.

I'm very happy with that plan because I can, since I'm going five deep, it's going to be a Berry ponac in this corner. I just have to work the land a little to get a slightly more viable type of work. of those soil amendments in the soil makes it much easier to plant when I worked it a little or worked it. I'm just double checking yeah I made five on that side so I'm going to do a Berry ponac mix and then two oranges yeah I don't like taking them out of those containers and two black prints I think what I'm going to do is to take out a few at a time, they are very easy to distinguish from the orange and the ponac, yes.

A couple things to note, you can see how the roots tend to twist with these, the ones in those containers, versus the soil blocks, they stay nice and loose and that's because of the air pruning. I mean, these plants still look very, very healthy, that's something to keep in mind if you're deciding how you want to do it, they both have pros and cons and here you can see obviously these are the black prints, they're very easy to distinguish between orange and pmac so I'm just going To keep planting until I have 150 snapdragons planted in this bed it will be so fun we were able to make a raised bed with the snapdragons with different varieties oriented down the bed elevated from color to color, compared to this.

In one we are mixing the colors, but it will be a gradient from the front to the back. It will be so fun to see throughout the growing season which design we like best. I had to go in and get some. water because I'm really thirsty, I completely planted the second bed and I was showing Josh the girls' room and those tomatoes that I'm worried about and I found another floor of snapdragons, but I think I'm going to put a lot of water. snapdragons on some of my green stock and some of my pots that are on my patio so let me show you how many snapdragons I have left and what the second bed looks like because I'm super happy with the result.

I've got four. snapdragon there we were able to finish all of these in this bed and then I need to water these this is the second bed. I think it's going to be really nice to have the three different varieties going back into the flower bed in my garden. It's always been an afterthought, when I started gardening my goal was to grow as much food as possible and that is still my goal, but I also want it to be incredibly beautiful because that brings me joy and that's why I'm experimenting with really expanding the flower garden this year, so there are all the snapdragons I still have left.

I probably have about 70 snapdragons left, which is great because I still have my green stock to plant. I just ordered a bunch of root strawberries and they are supposed to be here this week and I am going to plant two of my green varieties with the bar root strawberries. I bought them at Mi Gardener and I have a discount code for it if you are interested so you can link that below because there is still time to plant strawberries. I think I do not know. I just ordered them because he had them in stock and that's my plan so I'm going to water this and then I have To figure out where I'm going to put the cilantro and lettuce, let me grab my garden planner.

It's been really helpful to have this garden planner because even though I don't follow it completely, I can at least reference what my initial thought was. I change it, okay, at least I only have an initial plan to reference, so my goal is to have two beds that are snapdragons, two beds that are zenyas and two beds that are dalas, so that's six beds in total dedicated to flowers, plus we have two arch trellises that will be dedicated to flowers and then the rest of the garden is food production, so we are going to have a bed of potatoes, a bed of sweet potatoes, four beds of peppers, a lot of the trellises will be for tomatoes and tomatillos squash and zucchini carrots and onions and peas and dried beans so let's see here oh and garlic I think I forgot to say garlic so last year I had fantastic success in this bed right here this bed was zucchini Now I don't need a whole bed of zucchini, but the zucchini was in the front and the cilantro in the back here this one in the front of the bed is to the south and that is to the north, so by having the cilantro on the north side of the plants zucchini, they were in the shade all summer, so even though I planted my cilantro in the spring and was able to harvest it all summer, even when we had 90 and 100° days where normally cilantro would fall off because it doesn't like to grow in the heat.

I was able to harvest it because it was growing in the shade all the time, so this bed here is going to be my pumpkin bed, so I think what I'm going to do is try to do the same experiment or it's not an experiment. I'll see if I can get it. the same result is that I'm going to plant my cilantro in the back of that bed, plant my pumpkins in the front, oh, but that might not work because my pumpkins are going to be vining plants, so I'm going to grow some of them. I'm going to try growing them on the trellis, so that won't work.because pumpkins will grow on cilantro and zucchini are just bush plants.

I'm probably only going to grow two zucchini plants this year instead of I think I had 10 or 11, which was too many, so now I have to think about where I'm going to put that when it comes to things like lettuce, radishes and cilantro. I don't plan on dedicating an entire bed. because we can't go through that much so I just want you to know like little pockets of those items here and there so we can harvest them while they're fresh and I can plant in succession and I can find little spots and put those things in those areas so this bed It will be the r for tomatoes.

I'm going to have two beds of Roma tomatoes because I want 20 Roma tomato plants and I'm going to leave the landscape fabric here because I'm not going to plant around my Roma tomatoes. I want the landscape fabric to keep the weeds down because I won't be heavy. When planted, there will only be 11 plants in the entire bed, so I'm just going to place this landscape fabric on the edge. This was a corn bed last year. I'm not going to grow corn this year because I have. It's four years and I never got a good crop and I know a local farmer who can grow good corn so I gave up corn so I like to plant my cilantro very densely so I have just some different cilantro from two different companies .

I also have some of my own seeds, but this is what I took, so I'll start with this. I choose to plant my cilantro seeds on the north side of this bed because I am putting Roma tomatoes in this bed, so I am thinking that the cilantro will have a chance to grow for the next 4 weeks or so before I put my Roma tomato plants in here and then be able to harvest them a couple of times. once I have my Roma tomatoes there they will get well established and established and then when the Roma tomatoes are large enough to shade these plants they will be able to continue growing all summer under the shade protection of the plants of tomato I'm just experimenting with this in hopes it works, so I'm going to do the same with the cilantro on the edge of my other bed, where I also plan to have Roma tomatoes so we can have two areas where the cilantro grows, so that I'm not going to bring all those snapdragons inside because they'll eventually end up here and I don't have room under my grow lights for them once I get my tomatoes out, they'll be fine out here, they can. handle the cold we're going to get, it's not even cold, it's in the mid 40's at night which is totally doable for snapdragons.

I just watered them so they get some water now let's go get the cilantro made in the other bed now unfortunately this landscape fabric took a real hit over the winter it's completely frayed on that back side and I want landscape fabric on this bed when it's the growing season because again it's going to be an Aroma tomato bed, so I'm going to lift this up. I'm going to clean the edge with the blowtorch, not right now, but for now I'm just going to lift this up so I can plant my cilantro, no need to get it underneath because that end.

It obviously needs some attention. I think I can save this landscape fabric if I burn the edge and melt it, but that's a project for another day. Oh, what a disaster. I learned a lot about how to use this during the winter. I need to use a lot more fillets. Because it's so windy here, it's sad that the beds I want with landscape fabric are the ones that blew away in the wind and the beds I don't want with landscape fabric are the ones where the landscape fabric stayed perfect, but that's how crumbled cookies sometimes we were able to recover five No 2 four six trays two of them are these little ones, but okay, that means tomorrow I can get those tomatoes out and hopefully save them.

I have little faith that they are. They can be saved, I mean, this one looks, I mean, this is embarrassing, but it looks like he has a disease. You may have overwatered them. I'm not sure. I have two fans on here. I keep the exhaust fan here, but it might be too much. wet here I'm not sure, I don't know, those are the only things I see signs of disease, if it is a disease, that leaf over there is Browning. I'm not sure if you can see this one that just sprouted and it's really green right there and it looks really nice, but once they stay in the ground for a while, they look really pitiful and yellow and here's another tray, so He had only eaten a Sprout Tome at one point, but on the last day.

I have two more Little Sprouts, one there and one there, and this tomato plant that I don't want to touch looks like it's called fungal rot or something, it's where I think I watered them too much, so, even a tomato just sprung up there same, so I think I'll try to save them tomorrow, but I need to cancel it for today because we're hungry, although I'm very encouraged because these plants looked horrible, these are the patunas, if you remember. They were purple and I was like, well, maybe the leaves are supposed to be purple, maybe that's the variety of petunia and no, they're supposed to be green and they turned green and they survived and they look fantastic, so we'll see if we can save them.

Those, but I keep telling myself that if they don't survive, it's okay. I can buy them at the local greenhouse if necessary. Now what I'm going to do is turn on the grill so we can clean it, I thought. I pulled out some hare and honey chicken that I had marinated in the freezer not since the last day of freezer cooking we did, but it's so good the previous two times. I have some rice in the instant pot that I started when I got the water and I have a bag. salad from Costco, so that's what we're having for dinner tonight.

I'm going to go clean, fire up the grill with chicken, and I'll see you tomorrow when we try to save those tomatoes. I also want to thank you for better help. for sponsoring today's video because you are here. I was able to have an opportunity like this and I am excited to be able to share better help with you because what I have been able to learn over the last month has been such a blessing. for me and I hope it can be a big blessing for you so it will be the first link in the description box of Betterhelp.com slakr Homestead and you will get a discount for your first month so thank you for being here if you enjoyed this.

I will post a couple more videos here, you can go and enjoy my next upload from now on. I hope you're having a fantastic day. I'm excited to get clean and eat a really good dinner.