Hey everybody I'm the Gulf Coast Granny and welcome back to my garden. Today my garden is taking a new direction and I'm gonna call it gardening on the edge and I'll tell you why because rules. I've always thought that there were rules to gardening. You read the back of the package it tells you when to plant it it tells you how many days it's gonna take to mature and give you fruit. Well it has become very apparent to me that my garden doesn't like the rules. Two things spurred this new direction for my garden and I'm gonna insert a couple of clips here so you can kind of get an idea of what's going on. Okay y'all see this seed packet. It's burgundy okra and right the first thing it says is 49 days. That means that it takes 49 days from planting to maturity so I should already have some okra. So let's go see what this burgundy okra is doing. And all there it is. That okra is just over Niha on me. I just harvested my first okra off of that plant two days ago. I don't see any flowers though I do see blooms. There are some blooms right there and there's a couple of little blooms right there. Now I'm planted that okra at the beginning of April. It is now the beginning of July. That's three months ago. So this package is either wrong or okra doesn't like my yard. And here's another anomaly in my garden. These bright green leaves are cajori melons. I planted those two months ago or so. These smaller leaves down here is a cantaloupe and I planted that a few months ago. Well I've gotten one cajori melon and one cantaloupe. That's it. But the other day I was out here and I saw this when it was much smaller and I wondered what in the world is that it looks like another cajori melon. Well I was out here two days ago and I saw that. Now big old flower right there and that squash. That is a butternut squash. I planted this butternut squash two weeks before I planted the cajori melons and the cantaloupes. It has taken at least two to two and a half months for this to come up and start producing fruit. So that's what started me thinking. My garden does not follow the rules. My garden is telling the rules to take a hike. My yard has its own little microclimate. I get maybe seven hours of sunlight a day. My garden is new and the soil has not been improved and I know I've said all this before. The thing I haven't said is for instance today the hike was 92 degrees which doesn't seem too awfully hot but the humidity was 82% which made the heat index 104 degrees and it's only the first week of July. It's going to get worse. Next month is going to be unbearable and September it might start to cool off and it might not. Usually it doesn't start to cool off until October. I also have an extremely small garden so I can't rotate the things that I need to rotate. I have to grow squash next to squash where it was grown before last year or the next year. I'll have to grow squash in close proximity which increases pest pressure and disease pressure. Nothing in my garden is going to be even close to organic because I do have to use pyrethrin and I do have to use spinosat and I do have to use liquid copper for diseases. Basically what I'm saying is gardening in my yard in zone 9 especially during this summer is very, very hard. The upside to that is I have 12 months a year to grow. I can grow all year round even in the cold and honestly the fall is the best season to grow and all gardens have challenges not just mine so I'm going to be taking on the challenges. I'm going to try everything. Everything I can think of in this garden, this itty bitty little garden and I'm going to see what what likes to grow here and what doesn't. I'm going to be throwing out all the rules and I'm going to grow and I'd like to take you guys on this ride with me and I started just about a week ago with some well I'll insert the video and I'll show you guys what I've done so far to start this new direction. These four pots are the beginning of my new direction and gardening. This first pot has three pettipansquashin. This one I planted three zucchini in here but only one came up. So about three days ago I planted that little guy as a seed and he is up and will catch up to his partner there quickly. And yesterday me and the grandmilly came out here and planted pole beans in this pot and we planted small wonders baguette squash in this pot. Now when this comes up and starts binding I'm going to have to move it over here because the binds are going to need a lot of room. I think I put five seeds in that bucket or mille did. So I'm kind of excited for her to come over next week and see that her stuff is starting to grow. She'll be really excited about that. My next plan since I don't have a lot of gardening space is to put watermelons in that blue pool right there and also to put in that bed some blue bayou pumpkins. Now if you'll notice right now it is four o'clock, 4.30, 4.30 and my yard is shaded. There's patchy patchy sunlight across my whole garden. The sun does not hit that bed until 8.30 in the morning. So again we're challenged here but I'm going to see what's going to work and what's not going to work. You know I've been watching a lot of gardening channels and sometimes some of the preprochancell get thrown in there and I click on those and sometimes it's the the alarmists that are talking gloom and doom all the time and there's two things that they keep saying is that we're having a food shortage. Well you know since the COVID thing we've all been seeing that to some degree I think the food is there for people to buy is what I'm saying. It might not be exactly what you want but there's food to buy at the stores. Also there's something called the Grand Solar Minimum which has to do with the cycle of the sun and sunspots and right now there aren't a lot of sunspots or solar activity so the premise is that there's it's been 400 years since there was a Grand Solar Minimum and we're coming up on one and that the climate is going to change drastically and that things are going to get colder and storms and volcanoes and all this stuff. Well I don't know if all of that's true or not but if it is we're going to have to learn to grow food where we live. We're going to have to find out what likes to grow where we live so that we can eat and whether there's challenges or not. So if you like this new direction that my channel is going to take please hit the like button below and if there's a challenge that you're having maybe in a similar climate or or not leave me a comment below and tell me what you'd like to see me grow and see if I have a challenge with it and if I do how how I can overcome it or how I can decide not to grow it ever again because sometimes that happens in a garden sometimes you just have to say okay enough is enough I've tried this so much it's just not working here and that's okay pick something else. So y'all here's to garden in on the edge and break in all the rules y'all have a great day and I'll talk to you again real sing all right.