Let These 5 Veggies Go To Seed And Something AMAZING Happens!

In this video, I share 5 crops that I always let go to seed in my vegetable garden. When most crops bolt and go to seed, it makes them inedible, and there is little benefit to doing so unless you want to save seed. However, some crops provide tremendous benefits to your garden by bolting. Let these 5 veggies to go seed and something amazing happens!

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
0:00 What Happens When Crops Bolt?
2:15 Veggie #1
4:00 Veggie #2
5:42 Veggie #3
7:03 Veggie #4
8:53 The Benefits Of Growing Dill
9:49 Veggie #5
12:45 Adventures With Dale

If you have any questions about how to grow a vegetable garden or grow fruit trees, want to know about the things I grow in my raised bed vegetable garden and edible landscaping food forest, are looking for more gardening tips and tricks and garden hacks, have questions about vegetable gardening and organic gardening in general, or want to share some DIY and “how to” garden tips and gardening hacks of your own, please ask in the Comments below!

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ABOUT MY GARDEN
Location: Southeastern NC, Brunswick County (Wilmington area)
34.1°N Latitude
Zone 8B

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#gardening #garden #gardeningtips #bolting #sustainablegarden

what’s growing on gardeners it is May and things are starting to heat up here on the Southeastern coast of North Carolina and that means that some of our plants are starting to flower and go to seed because the warm weather is here a lot of gardeners will remove these plants but in today’s video I’m going to share with you five different veggies that I never remove and I always let them flour and go to seed in my garden because when you do something amazing happens if you’re new to the Channel Please Subscribe and hit the Bell to receive new video notifications and check out our Amazon store and spread shop links in the video description for everything I use in my garden an awesome Custom Design to powerl another gear your support is greatly appreciated now when I say flour and go to seed I’m referring to the process of bolting when annual vegetables are past their Prime and the Harvest is pretty much done and they’re at the end of their life cycle they will send out these flowers which will then turn into seed tops and they will Reed the ground for the next generation of the plant and perpetuate the Beed species so in this video we are not talking about species of plants where we actually harvest the seeds for our food like peas beans or grains obviously we want all of those plants to go to seed because that is what we actually Harvest and eat for most vegetables when they begin to bolt flour and go to seed they are well past their Prime for example lettuce and spinach if I were to eat this they would be terribly bitter I would not want to ingest this and if you’ve ever seen say root crops like carrots or beets once they flour and go to seed that actual root is so woodlike and it contains no sugars it’s basically inedible you would not want to eat that so on most of your annual crops when you start to see these seed tops form they are beyond the point that any human would want to eat them so in most cases the only time you want your plants to bolt on you is if you want to save and collect the seed or you want them to Reed the ground so they automatically reced themselves for the next season but if that is your agenda really you only need to allow one of your plants to bolt on you there’s no reason to have multiple plants because one will produce pretty much all the seed that one person would need and that is what makes these five plants so special I let most of them go to seed every single season because there are so many benefits to doing so the first plant I always allow to flower and go to seed is cilantro also known as coriander and the reason why is this is actually a pretty difficult plant to grow because it is so sensitive to warm temperatures multiple warm days will automatically send this thing to flow and bolt so because it’s so heat sensitive I’ve actually been not so successful at sewing it myself because I mtime it all the time what I found is that if I just let nature do this for me it never misses in fact I didn’t plant these cilantro plants they came up from last year so what happens is cilantro germinates when the soil temperature is very cool so when it’s really hot in the spring and summer they’re not going to germinate so I just allow these plants to go to seed every single spring and summer and then they will automatically germinate as soon as things start cooling down in the fall again and then they grow all throughout the winter and into the spring here in zone 8 these are cold hardy all season long you should be able to grow these out in the open all the way down to Zone 7 without any problems maybe even zone six with a little bit of light protection these can take 0 Dee temperatures no problem so by allowing them to sell seed and just regenerate on their own in this area I’ve had cilantro crop pretty much 6 months of the year so it’s been really successful for me and as a bonus all these beautiful white flowers the bees absolutely love them when the pollinators are out they flourish and Surround themselves on this plant so it not only will help you be more successful at growing cilantro but also the pollinators will love you for it check that out everybody that is coriander seed right here they are self-perpetuated the second crop that I always want to allow to flour and go to seed at least a small portion of them are carrots and while I love carrots and I want to harvest as many of them as possible I always want to leave a few stragglers behind that’s because when carrots flour and go to seed something amazing happens now when a carrot does flour and go to seed the root is going to be woodlike and completely inedible so any of them that do bolt on you you’re not going to be able to eat however if you search around the base of the carrots you you will find that numerous carrots every single year either fail to form a decent edible root or sometimes they even form doubles or they split so they’re not really of any significant edible value so you always want to leave those handful of stragglers behind I harvest 95% of the good ones and I leave the 5% that aren’t great and not very edible behind that’s because when the carrots flow and go to seed the flowers attract enormous numbers of black swallow tail butterfly larae last year I took you my garden and I allowed several of my carrots to flour and go to seed and they were covered with caterpillars from the black swallowtail butterfly these are not bad caterpillars they are not going to they’re not going to hatch into some kind of moths that are going to harm your garden but they need something to eat too so that’s why I always like to leave a small portion of my carrots behind provide those flowers for them let them be decoys and if you find those beautiful caterpillars around other things in your garden that you do want like say parsley just take them off and then move them onto your flour and carrots they will really appreciate it you will help perpetuate the species of the black swallowtail butterfly it’s just a wonderful beautiful thing to see the third crop that I always allow to flower and go to seed in my garden are radishes now truth be told I’m not a big fan of radishes I probably only Harvest about 25% of the crop I allow the other 75% to flour and go to seed and that’s because I mostly grow them as a support species because just look at these things because radishes are so cold hearty and they survive the whole winter here I allow them to bolt because they are one of the first things to flower in my garden and the bees go absolutely bananas for them remember early in the year there’s not a lot of stuff out there blooming to help support the pollinators because gardening is a partnership with nature and all of these pollinators come in and do so much of the work for me I like to give Back To Nature and I like to feed the pollinators when there’s not much else growing on for them so I allow these to flower and go to seed and they will stay like this in my garden for as long as feasible they starting to develop really cool looking seed pods they almost look like peas it’s pretty neat but these are pretty much at the end of their life cycle however every morning when I come out these are swarmed with bees so I know I’m doing a really good thing for the bee population these are one of those things that go to flow and Seed pretty early in the spring when not much else is blooming so consider allowing some of your r es to flower and go to seed to support the pollinator population the fourth plant that I always allow to flower and go to seed in my garden every year is Dill and that is because Dill is the ultimate self seeder and because I allowed my original Dill to flower and go to seed I’ve never had to really plant that many Dill plants around my garden and I’m pretty much at the point now where I don’t have to plant any in fact this Dill plant right here is a volunteer it chose to grow here I did not plant this it germinated last fall it survived the entire winter here in zone 8 without any protection we got down to 17° F and it is a that is how cold hearty Dill is and if I take you around my garden I can show you something absolutely incredible this is not the only self-seeded Dill this Dill plant self-seeded over the fall as well and survived the whole winter look at this it is literally growing in the crack of my raised bed in between the raised bed and the weed barrier it found a way just like nature often does so that is a completely free dill plant and again that is not all look at all the dill that is just randomly germinating in the cracks between my raised bed and the weed barrier that is all Dill that has overwintered again we got down to 17° farenheit and all of this stuff survived there is another Dill plant that seated itself in the fall survived the whole winter and it’s doing great and the life cycle just keeps growing I mean here is another Dill plant that just randomly germinated I didn’t plant that seed obviously that is just from wash out so the only Dill that I grew in my garden that I actually planted is this Dill right here and honestly it’s probably the least healthy Dill that’s the dill I planted and those giant Mammoth Dill plants right there are actually just nature sewn dill and it’s doing even better these things grow better as volunteers than they do when you plant them now if you’ve ever smelled Dill before you know that it has a very strong scent and I’m pretty convinced that this scent helps mask your garden from pests remember insects rely on their sense of smell as well in order to find plants so when you have these very smelly herbs that are strategically coming up all over the place they can mask the odor of other plants Now is it going to be 100% no but it can distract or keep away or hide your crops from some pests and we’ll take any help we can get in our Gardens and since I’m a massive picklehead I will take all the fresh dill that nature will give me and the fifth plant that I always allow to flower and go to seed in my garden is kale but it’s for a completely different reason than any of the other crops I mentioned that is because kale is a bial it is not an annual it has a lifespan of 2 years so if you are pulling your kale plants before they flower and go to seed on you you’re ripping yourself off for half the Harvest these will keep growing in fact I planted these kale plants 2 years ago they were planted I think the winter before last so they’re at that 2-year age Mark and I’ve been eating off them for quite a while now what makes kale special is when they flower and go to seed they don’t lose their quality on the existing leaves like something like spinach and lettuce will do when your spinach and lettuce goes to seed the existing leaves turn bitter and you’re not going to want to eat them however while the plant is flowering and going to seed the new leaves may be small and inferior but the existing leaves that are already on the plant still stay perfectly edible they’re just as good as they were before the plants bolted on you so when you grow your kale never pull them out of the ground until they have truly exhausted their 2-year life cycle for many of you you may not even realize how cold hearty kale is these things can survive 0 degree weather if you cover them the sky is the limit so don’t pull your kale plants at the end of the year if they’re still growing wait until nature kills them off to maximize your harvests and by the way you may be surprised just how cold hearty the stems of these kale plants are even if the kale is completely defoliated in the winter and you think it’s dead leave these stems because I have seen them resprout in the spring in fact one of the things I love doing with these plants we get swarmed with a Cabbage White butterfly in the middle of summer and it destroys all of the leaves so what I actually do is I take all of the leaves and I remove them all and I just leave the stems because then the Cabbage White butterfly will leave them alone and then in the fall when the moth population goes away they will all resprout and I will have kale all throughout the winter and that right there are five veggies that I always allow to go to seed in my garden by doing this you will spend less money on seed you will spend less time sewing SE seeds you will better support the pollinator population and you will get bigger Harvest with less work this is the ultimate definition of working smarter and not harder so everybody I sure hope you found this video helpful if you did please make sure to hit that like button subscribe to the channel and please ring that notification Bell so you’re notified when I release more videos like these if you have crops that you love to allow to go to seed in your garden every single year please mention them down in the comments below and share exactly why if you’re curious about any of the products that I use in real life in my garden they are all linked Down Below in my Amazon storefront Link in the video description so expand the video description click on the Amazon link and you’ll see everything I use in real life and while you’re down there check out my spread shop if you want to support the channel thank you all so much for watching and I hope to see all of you again on the next video Dale and I are outside on this beautiful day but it’s a little bit hot so I need to turn on the daily water fountain you need a drink buddy daily loves drinking from the garden hose we’ve been running the garden hose for quite a while so all the water that’s coming out of there is nice and clean and fresh so no big worries there but Dale likes his little water fountain right buddy we enjoying our day we having a good day yeah it’s really nice out we have beautiful weather here in April in North Carolina