Veggie Garden DISASTER | I Can’t Keep Growing Like This!

In this video, I give you a vegetable garden tour of our veggie disaster zone and explain how we refurbished the weeds and salvaged the good crops. Then, I sow seeds for several winter crops.

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Self Sufficient Me is based on our small 3-acre property/homestead in SE Queensland, Australia, about 45kms north of Brisbane – the climate is subtropical (similar to Florida). I started Self Sufficient Me in 2011 as a blog website project where I document and write about backyard food growing, self-sufficiency, and urban farming in general. I love sharing my foodie and DIY adventures online, so come along with me and let’s get into it! Cheers, Mark 🙂

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do these gum boots make my bum look big I know what you thinking you’re thinking Mark why are you wearing gum boots hey get out of there Bella you can’t drink muddy water this stuff stinks goodness knows how our dog can drink out of this awful stuff good day I’m Mark from self-sufficient me and welcome back to a disaster it hasn’t rained for 3 weeks and it’s still a bog hole it looks like a billabong that’s been overrun by Buffalo in this video I’m going to show you our refurbishment then we’ll take a walk through and see what survived this Mega cluster of weeds surprisingly there are a number of plants that did survive and then lastly we’re going to sew some special crops for this start of winter season let’s get into [Music] H first of all I need to pay tribute to my son Luke because if it wasn’t for him coming in here and Tiding this place up you wouldn’t be able to see me right now you couldn’t see his shoes from the mud he’s mosed a lot of it up there’s still a little bit more to go but he’s done a fantastic job at getting it to this stage I think you would agree let’s just start with this front row here you’ve got this plastic container that’s got our water chestnuts in it and it’s at the end of season for that so that’s why there’s no reads in there they’ve been pulled out anyway by the young fow along here are all the raised garden beds from plastic forests these are recycled materials made from recycled Plastics and in this first one here this one actually did have something in it and that was the elephant yam big leaves coming off it’s quite a large Plant and here we go look at that oh my goodness we’ll Harvest this one yeah check it out cool hey elephant yam haven’t eaten it before it’s heavy it’s dense it’s like a sweet potato feel more knobbly obviously I’m not sure how it tastes but I’m Keen to give it a go so there wasn’t a lot in this bed some eggplant in here some chilies from memory and the same with this one here it’s an old bed this is one of our first birdies beds it’s about 15 16 years old it’s a lovely big garden bed I don’t think birdie sells them like this anymore and then up here is our sweet potato bed but it won’t be for the next season unlike sweet potato which is still a pretty good long live crop asparagus in this next bed up here it can withstand year after year decade after decade after 25 years in the one bed this one here is sprouting we’ve pulled out most of it because it’s dyed off but if you pull it out too early you can hurt the crown and next to me here in this third row the first lot is the blueberries the idea to grow them in the raised garden bed was because our soil isn’t particularly good for them and I wanted to custom make the soil for them and look after them with without any interference from the local soil we have this frame on them I was getting away and I even said it in my videos that this actually works for birds and it worked for about two seasons but now I actually can report and say that this last season I did see the birds not all but some birds come back and start getting used to the tape the reflective tape and they’re starting to eat the berries again so I’m glad I left the frame in place because that will just help with netting and to stop those birds from gobbling down all our blueberries moving down this bed here is a dwarf coconut yes small coconuts as well so not just a small coconut tree or Palm I planted it in a raised bed again so I could curate the soil and in here I’ve put a really loose sandy soil trying to mimic the beach and next one down is another kind of weird crop that I wanted to put in a raised bed to see how it goes this is a mini Royale Cherry yes a cherry in a subtropical climate cherries typically need a substantial amount of chill hours this one doesn’t need as much I’m not sure how cherries go in the clay so that’s why I didn’t want to plant it in ground and I wanted to baby it a bit as well and that’s why I decided to grow it in a raised garden bed like this cuz let’s face it if I can get fruit off this in a subtropical climate that will be almost a miracle and the next one down here is actually a raspberry it’s just a Heritage Raspberry I think I planted this too late in the season and the summer just killed it off it hadn’t had a chance to really establish itself so maybe I’ll try again with that one and speaking of raspberries this here is a giant raspberry this is a native to Australia it’s called an aeton raspberry and I I’ve only just started growing it the other thing you might notice is that it has got quite a bit lighter all of a sudden well look I’m not going to lie to you it’s the next day I ran out of light last night and so I decided that we’d cut it and we’d start again the next morning and yes I did I stayed here all night waiting for the sun to come up again well you know what they say about old army guys you can take the old Soldier out of the army but you can’t take the Army out of the old Soldier so yes I was on picket all night just waiting for this moment so I could show you this is starting to fruit now there’s there’s all these little green Bunches of raspberries starting to grow and you know I’ve never tasted one from our own garden so I’m going to give it a shot let me get a couple these are massive check them out check the size of them out like I’ve got big hands these are massive things and they’re plump and juicy looking I’m going to tell you why there’s no pests attacking these beautiful juice ripening raspberries in a second but let me have a taste test for the very first time m h you know I was expecting a more tartter um not a very sweet taste M yum that’s really nice I actually got surprised and that’s a a pleasant thing to happen live on camera like this but I don’t know if I can show you I’ve no I can’t I’ve got to be careful with this arm because that I don’t feel much in my right arm that raspberry bush there it has got these very fine very hard Thorns that are hooked and it’s almost like the old Gile tree I don’t know if people likely would would know especially the older days on the farms and that there was a jail Bush I don’t know what the proper name for it is and you’d muck around as kids and dare each other to stick our hand in which would go in Easy cuz the hooks were hooked like that but then when you went to pull it out that’s when all the hook the Thorns would grab you and you couldn’t get it out so hence it was called the Gile Bush very nasty thing but lots of fun as kids that reminds me of that except that’s better it actually grows something to eat the beauty of it is though even though it’s like a little bit dangerous and and a bit of a mongrel to grow the birds and the pests and the possums they don’t touch it because it’s just too much of a bugger for them to try to get the fruit moving down this bed here we grew some potatoes in it was a cono potato that we tried a purple one quite nice I’m going to grow them again this year and this one here you can see this straggly plant this is a yakon and it produces a sweet tuba that I might try and dig some out now it has grown really well in that race bed there it is there what I’ll do is I’ll duck off real quick and I’ll grab a knife and we’ll cut a little chunk out clean it up and I’ll have a taste of it here we are I I think another name for this is ground Apple I forget but I think it is and let me have a taste it’s got the texture of an apple it looks like a sweet potato it’s very juicy and it tastes like probably not as sweet as an apple but still it’s got a sweetness about it it’s very pleasant I could imagine this would be a good substitute for sugar yeah totally worth growing and now this last bed I didn’t have much growing in that there was just a few weeds and some pumpkin that had taken over that bed that’s a fairly new bed as well and then on this right hand side you might remember that video I did about surface laying potatoes well I’m growing potatoes again in this bed and that one this big long one but this time I buried them and so that’s what that video is going to be about the interesting thing is that in that big long bed they’re not just new potatoes they’re potatoes that I kept all that time from the last crop that I surface laid them so I’m replanting the smaller ones that I saved and we’re going to see if I can get a better crop out of that subsequent crop by burying them I think I can and in that other little one I’ve just put some storeo potatoes in there that had gone green and we’ll see how they go and finally let’s get to sewing some seed down the back here I’m just going to sew them in probably the first three middle beds there I’ll give it a bit of a preparation first and put some mulsh on top but what I’m going to sew is onions broccoli and beetro so I’ll give you the the names of them it’s going to be an early white Spanish midseason onion an early Australian Brown Onion I’ve had good success with them in the past and this Gladiator onion two packets of them bondy seeds I got them from is it yeah they’re pretty good and I like the brown Australian type onions they do well in our climate and then this Detroit dark red beetro and the F1 winter broccoli so it’s a it’s a hybrid early winter broccoli it is a hybrid I don’t mind growing hybrids occasionally the problem with hybrids is you can’t resave the seed and keep growing it subsequently down the track so they’re not Heritage but often hybrids are bread better and uh better growing better disease resistance better tasting even sometimes so I’m going to give that one a go and see if we can get a good crop out of it I’m going to be going with this veggie made again I’ve used a before it’s not something that I’m trying to Spook or anything it’s something I’m triing I’ve heard a lot of good about veggie mate and you can buy it online I get mine from Australian landscaping supplies I’m not going to use too much just going to sort of use it liberally but not like you’re trying to top the bed up this is just rock dust Rock minerals it also has fertilizer in it but not a heap they have a fruit blend as well the fruit blend is a little more potent now I’m just using a local fertilizer this is from Queensland Organics this is an organic fertilizer it’s a pelletized fertilizer probably mostly chicken poo it’s called The Organic booster probably a bit like rooster booster and those other ones you can get from other stores this is sugarcane MOS I bought it in bulk if you want to know more about it you can watch a couple of my other videos I did especially my last one what the mulch does is it just stops the extra weeds from coming up especially where the onions aren’t I find that onions are a sparse crop and you can take forever weeding them and continuing to weed them if you got mulch down it it also protects the crop and protects the root Zone and keeps them nice and warm especially through our winter and cooler as we get into summer as the onions are maturing but at the same time it stops those weeds and grasses from germinating and coming through nice and thick about 3 in at least what I’m going to do now is part the mulsh like Moses and I think I will do it in a kind of oval fashion and this will give me some space to sew the onion seed leaving a little Trench plenty of onion seeds in here now I’m just going to randomly throw them in better to oversay than unders say and I’ll put this other packet on this side and those two r and now I’ve got a commercial seed raising mix and all I’m going to do is scatter that on top of these rows on top of the seeds that I’ve just sewed rather than digging those seeds in this is a nice fine mix and I find that by just doing a a top cover it’s more effective than if I tried to dig it in with the existing soil that perhaps could have larger pieces in there that might stop that seed from germinating or impede that seed from coming up okay now that I’ve laid that seed Rising mix on top of those seeds I just go through and I’m going to Pat them down just Pat it down now I could have watered this in and that other bed before I started putting the mulsh on and before I started putting the seeds down because sometimes it’s good to water that say rock minerals and the fertilizer in before you start putting the seeds on because they can the fertilizer especially can burn the seeds and you don’t want that but if you do it the other way around like I’m doing now it it’s probably not going to hurt because the water settles everything and washes everything and it shouldn’t be much of an effect but yeah good watering in and you want to keep this moist of course for for the next few weeks and until you start seeing them germinate and coming through well I ended up doing five beds all up these three long ones and big ones one two three and these two small round ones the ones from plastic forests made from recycled plastic I love these things I mean aesthetically maybe they don’t look fantastic but I’m not someone that’s in the gardening industry to look good I don’t care what I grow in as long as it works and for me I love using recycled materials and this works for me so you know what’s in that one the Gladiator Tomatoes I was going to say the g the glad cuz I’ve grown Gladiator tomatoes have a look at that video I think you’ll enjoy it but I I I’m growing or sewed Gladiator onions if I could just spit it out and then in this bed here I sewed those brown onions that I talked about around the outside here and you can see this is like one long racing track isn’t it and I’m thinking that that’s enough area to grow a ton of brown onions so then I sewed in the middle those white Spanish onions in this track and then that Central track and then in this bed up here I’ve got you on the reverse angle but I’ve done a similar thing to that bed but there is one difference it’s got the racing course around the oval but I don’t have that Center Island now for most of you you would be bored to tears hearing that but for an aid Gardener having an island or no Island might be a uh an interesting point for you but I’m growing those Detroit beatroot in here hey Bella how you going have you had a good day it’s been a beautiful day here I’ve loved being out just about all day in the garden this is my zen Zone anyway keep going so the beetro what I wanted to talk about was when you’re sewing beetro it’s a funny thing because each seed contains several plants and you can’t divide them up you have to wait till they come up before you divide them up so what I can do when all these beetro come up I can leave them and they’ll grow together in bunches and be fairly crowded and I’ve done a lot of videos about crowd growing before then you can Harvest them as you go Harvest them as Baby Beats and then let the other ones grow on and get bigger that’s the way I probably will do it the other way you can do it is once they all come up then you can divide those you can pull up those gently pull up those seedlings divide them up and you can then spread them out to about 25 cm so you got a good space for each plant in this bed and then you can use the other seedlings and put them in other beds and then let them grow all to full size in these two round beds here I was going to sew early winter broccoli but when I opened up the packet of seed I realized that there wasn’t a lot of broccoli seed in that packet so I decided just to sew them in this one bed here I like to make sure that I got seedlings coming up I always over so and then I went in the shed and I found a packet of old fennel and I’m not sure if that’s going to work how old it is but I sewed the fennel in this on the left hand side here this round bed pretty liberally like I mean heaps of it because if the seed is kaputs well maybe hopefully one or two will still come up maybe 10 that would be nice and if they all come up well we’ll have baby fennel with potatoes and fish and whatever so that won’t matter or we can transplant them out all good yeah all in all a pretty satisfying day even if it was in the mud and this is going to be one of the last times I walk through this for quite a while oh check this out oh there’s that blooming raspberry probably just ripped my arm open there you go sitting in the mud for probably months and it’s still good I forgot to tell you when we did well when Luke did the big cleanup here he found probably 15 pumpkins so just goes to show they’ll grow through a weedy Forest as well looks like a few rodents have had a g into it but we’ll be able to salvage some of that anyway there’s plenty of bigger ones where that came from oh well I hope you enjoyed the video if you did make sure you give it a big swampy thumbs up and remember even in a disaster Zone you can still grow veggies and garden just just got to get into it thanks a lot for watching make sure you subscribe if you haven’t already and share the video around because that helps my channel out heaps bye for now cheers sh