Epic Gardening

We decided to try something different with our dragon fruit: grafting four varieties onto one plant. The result? A Frankenstein dragon fruit that’s as fun to grow as it is to look at. 🧟🌱

Winter harvesting at its best ❄️ Fresh broccoli, cauliflower, bananas, and even some eggs straight from the backyard. Nature’s pantry is open all year round—join me! 🧑🏻‍🌾

Luffa is one of the most fun and useful plants to grow. You can eat it when it’s small, let it climb to make your garden look beautiful, and when it’s fully grown, use it as a scrub brush or shower sponge. The key to growing luffa is starting the seeds indoors early. The seeds are big and tough, so gently scrape or clip a tiny bit of the edge to help water get inside and make them sprout faster. Once they sprout, plant them outside only when it’s warm, and there’s no chance of cold weather. Luffa loves a long, hot season. If you want to use luffa as a sponge, let the fruit fully mature. It should turn brown and feel dry and papery. Peel off the skin, cut the luffa into pieces, and it’s ready to use. For extra creativity, you can put the luffa pieces into homemade soap for a cool exfoliating soap bar.

Garlic - one of the most-used crops in the kitchen and surprisingly not THAT hard to grow... if you plant it right. There are two types - soft neck and hard neck. Hard neck requires vernalization, or a period of cold to grow best. In San Diego Zone 10b where the Epic Gardening headquarters is, we don't get temperatures that cold... so we put it in the fridge for a few months!

When the bounty bites back...

Want to grow giant onions? 🧅✨ Here’s how: 🌱 Gather your tools: onion starts, a trowel, gloves, and a slow-release organic fertilizer high in nitrogen (for leaves) and phosphorus (for bulbs). 📏 Measure 8" from the side of your raised bed and dig a 4" wide trench. Fertilize the trench, cover with soil, and plant onions 6" apart, 1" deep, 3" from the trench. 💧 Keep the soil moist, fertilize only in the trench, and watch those layers build into massive bulbs! P.S. This method works for other allium crops too—like leeks, shallots, and garlic! 🧄

Just harvested a huge banana yield, so it’s time for some chopping. Here’s the thing: once a banana plant produces fruit, it’s done for good — like a grandmother who’s passed down her wisdom. We chop down the old part (the “grandmother”), leaving the stump to support the “mother” plant. Underneath, new shoots, or “granddaughters,” are already growing strong and ready to take their place. It’s the circle of life. 🍌✨

Did we miss one? Most liked comment gets a free bundle of @Botanical Interests seeds 👀

Will these carrots surprise us, or are we in for a laugh? Either way, they’re going to taste amazing. Plus, stick around for a quick tip on using carrot tops. 🥕

I've tried to grow peanuts for years without much success. I even hid an old YouTube video called “My Pathetic Peanut Harvest,” where I grew just five peanuts and roasted them in a tiny kid-sized cast iron pan. It wasn’t a great day for me. BUT—@jacquesinthegarden had a big harvest, so at least someone on the team figured it out! Peanuts aren’t actually nuts—they’re legumes. Their flowers shrink, turn into “pegs,” and push into the soil, where the peanuts grow. It’s one of the strangest ways a plant grows, at least for something we eat often. For a good peanut harvest, you need a long, hot growing season. Who knew peanuts had such a wild way of growing? 🥜

Learn how bananas thrive on a literal family tree and meet the unique characters in their circle of life. 🍌

We’ve never grown broccoli this big—over 1.5 feet in diameter! Normally, when you harvest broccoli, you let the plant continue to grow so you can get a few side shoots of “mini-broccoli,” but in this plant’s case, even the side shoots are massive!

If this is the end…good luck in the garden, and keep on growing 💚 - Kevin #tiktokban