Welcome to the California Garden in the month of November 2020. In today?s episode we will show you the harvests we made, followed by a tour of our raised beds, and containers in our garden. We will show you our walk-in greenhouse and go through gardening tips like composting, spacing out onions. Finally, we will review two gardening products – Gorton’s Solution with humic and fulvic acids and ViparSpectra XS1500 grow light unboxing.
Harvests
We harvested a lot of vegetables this month from our home garden. We harvested cilantro that was growing indoors in the hydroponics system. Growing cilantro indoors helped us get a constant supply throughout the cooler months. We harvested some black beauty eggplants from our whiskey barrel container, Indian eggplants, Japanese eggplants that was growing in our green stalk planter, and millionaire eggplants which was very productive and also the best tasting and flavorful of all the eggplant varieties we are growing this year. We also harvested fenugreek greens, jalapenos, ivy gourds that is growing on a trellis along the edge on our last bed, curly kale, lots of luffa or sponge gourds, mustard greens, okras ? baby bubba, peanuts something new we tried this year, cayenne peppers, pineapple, ?Minowase radish that was growing in the whiskey barrel container, green onions from our green stalk planter, and spinach. And, finally some tomatoes ? cherry, chocolate sprinkle, beef steak though the plants have considerably slowed down in production as cooler temps have set in.
Cilantro growing indoors in hydroponics system
Harvests
Peanuts
Onion greens
Garden Tour
In our raised beds we have carrots, spinach, some brassicas like cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, some radish, bunching green onions and some beef steak tomatoes growing. On the next bed we have onions, elephant garlic, beets, garlic and potatoes. On the next bed we have all our brassicas -cauliflower, cabbage, Romanesco, mustard greens and pepper plants growing. Next bed has the tomato plants which have considerably slowed down now, and white kohlrabi growing. In our last bed we have some more brassicas- broccoli, cabbage, shallots, ivy gourds growing towards the back, purple kohlrabi and some sunchoke plants which will be ready for harvest in December.
Raised beds
We have a lot of seedlings growing in our walk-in greenhouse which also has a thermometer to monitor the temperature inside.
Walk-in Greenhouse
In containers, we have cauliflowers, okra, millionaire eggplant that we are planning to overwinter, garlic, carrots, pea plant, shallots, hyacinth bean plants, mint, bok-choy, kohlrabi, Malabar spinach that has more seeds than leaves, lablab beans , cherry tomato plant, and black beauty eggplants.
Things to do in your garden
- Composting- With the winds and fall season upon us we collected lot of brown leaves which we combined with kitchen scraps and added it to our tumbling composter to turn them into compost.
- We added some worm castings from Vermisterra to our raised beds to fortify the soil. It will help the plant uptake all the nutrients from the soil.
- Space out your onions at least a foot apart to get big bulbs. Keep trimming the greens from your onion plants so the plant uses the energy in producing big bulbs than leaves. Also remove some soil from the top as the bulbs begin to emerge. ?
Space out onions
Gardening Product Review
We will be reviewing the Gorton’s Solution with humic and fulvic acids. It?s a liquid plant growth enhancer that amends soil while maximizing the growth and health of the plant. It?s not a fertilizer but helps plants uptake the nutrients from the fertilizer, fixes the pH of the soil and since most soils typically have higher pH than what plants prefer, this solution lower the level in the soil. It also contains essential nutrients that are vital building blocks for the plant chlorophyll production. It has no effect on beneficial insects and will not affect the plants in any way. We mixed in one capful to a gallon of water and drenched our plants with this solution. We tried the solution on our Arabian jasmine plant which was not doing great and within a few weeks we noticed considerable improvement in the health of the plant. The leaves grew bigger and the plant filled out completely.
Gorton’s solution
We also conducted an experiment with the Gorton?s solution. We used the solution to drench two bush beans plant growing in two identical containers with the same potting mix medium. Watch the monthly episode video to find out which plant fared well and produced more pods.
Gorton’s Solution: https://www.gortonsolution.com/
We unboxed ViparSpectra XS1500 grow light which covers an area of 2 feet by 2 feet for growing plants indoors. The grow light was packaged very well, the full spectrum LED?s were of a superior quality and the grow light looked sturdy. ?The product came with harness/suspenders and clips to suspend them for your growing needs. It also has a dimmer that can be used to control the intensity of the light which I found very helpful. I will be providing a full update on the grow light and how our indoor plants grew under this grow light in a few weeks.
ViparSpectra growlights
Growlights installed
Product links for https://www.viparspectra.com
Discount Code:
XS1500 20% OFF: XS15CaGarden
XS2000 15% OFF: XS20CaGarden
XS4000 15% OFF: XS40CaGarden
Amazon US:
XS1500
XS2000
XS4000
Amazon CA:
XS1500
XS2000
XS4000
Watch the full episode at California Gardening Nov 2020 Garden Tour – Gardening Tips, Harvests & More!
All your videos and blog posts are super inspiring. Keep up the good work!