3 Veggies You Can Grow in a Small Space- Container Gardening Carrots, Onions, And Radishes

well good morning everybody if you wonder back from uh Deep South Homestead we're over at Pecan Grove and as promised we're going to show you what we're doing with our tubs now I have different size tubs we showed you the mineral tubs but now we're going to be planting some carrots in one and this is a 65g tub here and I have several of these they come from landscape companies if you know a guy who plants trees for landscape companies lots of times they just give you these pots and and the the guy that I get mine from he don't want them so he just gives them to me and this thing has a series of holes in the bottom of it that's used on a nursery but when you're growing your vegetables in it you don't want your water going out the bottom you want to be able to create it so I've cut a piece of greenhouse plastic I have here and I'll take this I'm going to fold it down in here like so I try to even it out around it where I've got about the same amount of distance on the sides cuz these landscape tubs they slap these hooks into the side of them they're full of holes all the way around them so I don't worry too much about them holding too much water because the water will get out of it and I'll take my plastic and I kind of just like make sure it's up you know I don't get too fancy with it I leave it kind of like that right there then I'll take and uh I've got some red sand here our property here we found a place has a lot of red sand on it I went and scooped up some and I'll take this red sand and I'll kind of throw it around the edges that'll that'll hold that plastic in place we've done this for for years over at Deep South Homestead and our pots over there cuz we have a lot of sand over there and we were kind of hoping we could find a place over here and we did it had some sand and we're going to just take and we're going to work our way around the pot and as you do fold the plastic up okay once you get your dirt kind of you know around here like this you can trim your plastic I mean I we don't have any scissors here and my knife is really dull right now so we're going to try to uh I've been cutting I've been cutting some uh tar stuff with this it's not really that sharp anymore but you can cut it around and get it out now this will this will give us about uh I'll say 6 in of uh of water retention in the bottom here this is a really big tub now I normally wouldn't go quite this high on a small small tub I wouldn't but this tub is really large for growing carrots you really do want as big a tub as you can get because you don't want your carrots just all bunched right together okay guys these are corn cobs from the Danny corn that has been in the chicken pan we're going to take them and we're going to along with a few feathers and stuff like that we're going to put a few of them in the bottom here now these are our nitrogen sticks because they've been rolling around in chicken manure and all that kind of stuff and plus they're going to become an actual sponge to help retain water that's what it kind of look going to look like there okay as y'all know we have several other pots we're putting here to raise a few vegetables in and we're these we don't have to have the plastic in cuz these are solid in the bottom matter of fact we actually uh we actually drill holes in them like this the qu in holes 4 in up from the bottom three or four of them around it so that the water can drain out of them so we're going to use basically the same exact process that we used on the big one we're going to do this one the same way we got the Red Sand we're just going to come in here we're going to put it in the bottom of all of these because the sand will not get hard it'll just it'll just hold water and it stays damp a long long time so that's what we're going to do to each one of these pots we're just going going to go along now and we're going to fill them up with the red sand all right now we have all of the uh mineral tubs with our red sand in the bottom of them you know we're going to do just like we started on the Big Tub we're going to put a few corn cobs we going to even out what we've got here and all of them doesn't take a lot of them cuz they decompose over a year I'll kind of like divide this up amongst all of them I'm trying to make sure I get some and all of them one morning glory has about took that whole Mound over get that off of there okay guys as I've been clearing on the property I piled my top soil in certain places when I'm building roads and stuff like that uh and we use it just for this purpose and some of the grass has rotted in it but then we have some of it that's still you know still green we get that out of there uh we we took all the old morning glories off of it when we got ready to uh take it up but a lot of it has done rotted the grass has rotted like that there that's just rotten grass and it's been so dry here now this is not any moisture in it at all it's it's just dry you know and it's just Grassroots and we're going to take that and I'm going to spread it down in there we're trying to get some good top soil mixed in with this we can't I mean we prove that we could plant in pure manure but we want to try to get some some microbes and all that kind of stuff in here so I've got some uh vermiculite uh we're going to add some vermiculite into this big tub here because this one will be carrots vermicular light doesn't actually keep the soil from getting hard and Packy it helps it to remain retain moisture uh if you want to keep it from getting hard and Packy you have to have paralite now this is vermiculite and I'm going to turn it in to this just a little bit here so that we have some moisture retaining ability in this top soil so that it doesn't dry out as much now the top soil is very dry right now so there's uh no moisture in it whatsoever but when we do add the moisture and I will say this it's going to take a lot of moisture to do this [Applause] [Music] all right this is our 30y old cow manure I scoop sty the old barn no tellings what we going to find in it yes it'll have some hard clumps in it because cuz see like that's a looks like a piece of old tar paper or shingle or something other that was under the old barn in there and there is a piece of blue glass I definitely don't want that in there cuz I'll be running my hands down through that I'm going to have to take time there's another piece of something I have to take my time and look through it now there's going to be some soil mixed in with this uh Cal manure because when I scooped out one of the barn I'm uh took out some of the soil with it so there will be a mixture also we dug through some layers of uh with the tractor of lime the elderly man had limed every so often he would cover the barn floor with lme to uh to keep down some sort of problems I'm guessing we found that quite often as we were digging out the uh no I heard it hit I don't know what it is okay guys we're going to put some organic uh this is natural blood meal it's an organic source of nitrogen it's called Earth sign eco-friendly and y'all know I've told you up front that when you use organic material like this you're only going to get about 8% of it up front it's not made for planting your plants in for immediate uh use I'm going to be adding it to all these pots because down the road they're going to need some nitrogen now we put the uh corn cobs in the bottom with the chicken nor on which is nitrogen but the roots won't reach that deep for quite some time it will live on this 8% that this is going to produce plus as it breaks down over the next four months because it'll take it about four months to break down in the soil where the plant can actually use it by then these carrots will really need it to get the root system going to get the big carrots and stuff so we're going to put the bone meal in this I mean blood meal in this and all of our pots down through I'm going to add some just as a extra nutrition for our plants to help them kind of get a little bit going there not you don't have to have the earth science you know variety that's just something that I bought this past year cuz I got a good deal on it and uh and another thing the reason we're doing it like this is because this it'll take four months for this stuff to break down where it's really usable and uh that'll put us into next spring and when we go to plant our crops in this next spring we'll already have some good sources of organic nitrogen in here uh to be using that's another reason we're doing now as oppos you want to amend your soil in the fall you don't want to really be doing this right at the time of planting in the spring even though our plants will get some benefit from it this fall we also have these tubs of rabbit manure that we've had in our barn for the last 6 months we save it from our rabbits uh now this is a cold fertilize it's not going to hurt anything we're going to take it and we're going to sprinkle a little bit around on top of our pots okay guys we've got the rabbit manure now in all of our pots down through here and if I have a question about anything it's the rabbit manure because there I do occasionally buy about every 3 months I'll buy a bag of rabbit feed to feed my rabbits and uh to supplement them and you know I don't know if there's anything in that feed or not so I guess this will be the ultimate test to find out whether it is or not but what we're going to go do now we're going to go back and we're going to put the shortz potting mix now this is the uh 9 Monon feeding uh type it has time release fertilizer in it uh it's for indoor outdoor plants I've used this for years I have never had any problem with it uh now you don't have to use this brand if you have a brand that you prefer it's just that this is our way of doing things we've had very good success with this and we're going to fill the tops of all the pots now with the Schultz and then we will actually turn it all together in the pot now there is some vermiculite in with the shorts for those of you who saw me uh mix the vermiculite in earlier there's a little bit in the shorts but there's also a lot of paralite in here and the paralite that's reason I didn't mix any in with the tubs when I was going because I'm going to have it in the Schultz potting mix so there's no need in doing it twice it's just that because our climate is so hot and so dry here I added some extra vermiculite so that when we water it it retains moisture a little bit better you can notice when I hold it up you see these little green things like this right here that is the uh time relase fertilizer that's in it so it's it is in there with it all right we've got the uh shorts on the top now comes the point of we've got to actually flip all this stuff and mix it all together the cow manure the rabbit manure the vermiculite the paralite the Schulz potting mix all this stuff is to be amended together except the bottom don't dig down into the Red Sand that you put down there leave that as it is uh there's a way you can dig this and that Schulz will it'll just fall down in around the edges and then it's going to take some doing so you can't get in a big hurry with it because these pots and this soil is so dry the watering process will probably take an hour or so uh you can't just sit here and flood it with water because what it'll do is it'll just run out the holes in the pot you have to water it let the soil absorb some water water it let the soil absorb some water you got to do it like five times before you actually get it enough that it's saturated because the water up here is going to gradually drain to the bottom and the bottom will hold a lot of water so you don't have to worry about overwatering them and the tubs look like they're really full right now but in about a week they'll be down considerably all right we've got the uh it's been been a while now but we've got the pots all uh watered in I dug deep down in here the water has made it to the bottom cuz when you plant carrots you're not going to come back and be watering them until they actually begin to grow so you have to water it deep enough that it stays wet now we're going to be planting the Koda carrots uh these actually are native to Hawaii uh these called the new corota now uh this come from kazawa Seed Company because that's the only place we can buy them in large quantities like this and we love carrots and we eat a lot of carrots or I do anyway I eat a lot of carrots now what I'm going to do is uh I'm going to I'm not going to put a lot of seeds in this because it doesn't take a lot now the wind has started blowing and I'm going to have to be really careful but I do want enough of these that I can thin them out a little bit and uh and be able to uh have some to go in some salads or whatever or just to stir fry we like the little bitty ones in stir fry carrots need to be thinned now carrot seeds are not viable for many many years like other seeds are so we do have some older ones we're going to plant in other places but right now I'm just trying to get a fairly decent stand of these okay we've got these planted now uh you know there's a lot of ways to do this guys I've got tons of videos online at Deep South Homestead you can just type in Deep South Homestead carrots and carrot planting and I have I show where planting them in rows and taking a little round thing with a seed dispenser and putting them out evenly and I show broadcasting them and different ways of planting them I also have a carrot manual ual that I have wrote that's on our Etsy store at deeps South homestead. etsy.com that shows every step of the process of growing carrots and how you can do it successfully because a lot of people have a lot of trouble raising carrots and it really it's really simple it's not hard at all if you follow the rules for growing carrots now now that I have the seeds in here what I'm going to do is take some shes potting soil and I'm going to lightly sprinkle it over the top of it now you don't want it heavy I'm going to just lightly do it maybe an eighth of an inch deep and you want it to stay loose you do not want it to be Packy because if it gets Packy the little carrot seeds cannot push their way through the uh the crust that's one where a lot of people make their mistakes with carrot seeds is that they they try to come back and they try to water them real heavy afterwards and I don't uh Advocate watering real heavy afterwards it's okay to water don't get me wrong now it's okay to water cuz water is going to be your friend before this is over with but what I'm sh you here is a container technique that usually does fairly well I use the back of a rake because the secret to seed germination is soil seed contact and I'll take the back of this rake and I just kind of lightly Tamp it like this to make good soil contact okay we've got good seed soil contact now and I'm not tamping hard I'm just letting the weight of the rake just lightly touch the soil we're going to take the water and you don't want it you want it just on shower you don't want to spray a hard stream on this when you do it you just want on shower and I'm just turning on lightly letting it just barely run because I'm making sure I have the top of this soil damp really damp you don't want water standing but you want it to be damp all right we've got this watered now and you know you want to what you want to do is you want to block out the sun's ability to dry this soil out cuz seeds don't need the sun really to germinate these carrot seeds don't they can be in the dark now what I do is this is I I've one of my companies that I own uh gets in lots of metal and stuff like that over the years and I save this because this is what comes the metal comes covered in you can use anything you can use plastic now not clear plastic it got to be black plastic but you need something that the sunlight doesn't penetrate uh you can use Lumber plywood anything like that to put on it now I'll come back in a little while and I'll put some boards on top of this to kind of across the to keep this not on top of this but across the pot to actually keep this from blowing out from under here and uh in about I'm going to say somewhere around 5 days I'm going to start coming out here picking the edge up on it looking at it to see if I see the little forked tops coming up cuz carrot comes up in a little forked top and if I see that beginning to happen then what I'll do is I'll go ahead and pull the top off of it and I'll take the garden hose and I'll put it on the misting side and I will lightly Mist that soil all during the day to make sure that it doesn't dry out because that's your key once they start sprouting is to make sure the soil does not dry out at all you want to keep it damp and keep it moist that is the secret to growing your carrots and getting a good start with them Miss Wanda has problems growing radishes so uh and she has taped the fool out of this one uh to make sure the seeds don't come out of it so what we're going to do is we're going to take one of these pots and we're going to actually see how radishes do in them uh we're going to see if they will actually grow in our mixture that we have set up for the carrots and other stuff cuz Miss Wanda loves her some radishes now this is the French breakfast radish it's more of a longer cylindrical type radish with a white bottom on it I've never actually grown these myself Miss Wanda has these come from high mowing organic seeds but I'm going to take these radishes and I'm going to try to get them going around in this pot here now the secret to radishes is don't get them too thick when they start coming up you got to thin them out and that's one thing this one has a problem with is thinning stuff out cuz she thinks that she's getting rid of some good stuff when actually that's the only way you're going to have good stuff so I'm going to sit here and try to take these I'm going to try to I'm going to try to sprinkling around in here there's enough here to plant two of these pots I can see that already already we're going to try to do it all in one we'll thin them out cuz actually I don't know how old these are we're going to bring our shorts over here and we going to start and don't worry about these pots being so full because I guarantee you by the time spring gets here these pots will be way down got about a qu of an inch of uh the pot and soil on top of it now and we're going to go for the soil seed contact we're going to wet them in you don't want it to dry out so you going to have to come out periodically during the day and check it if it starts looking like it's trying to dry out that's why you see it is 9:30 in the morning we're still in the shade uh the shade is your friend now it used to wasn't but it is now you actually because it's radishes radish are very fast growing and anytime you have a very fast growing seed there's no need to cover it but now things like your carrots that are very tiny Growing Seeds uh they really need to be covered uh also I want to mention to y'all we're going to be doing electroculture throughout the fall and winter also now we have Mr Mickey's uh coils that he made what I'm going to do is I'm gonna be sticking this uh right in the center uh of the pot because these pots are not really that big I mean it it'll reach the whole radius of this pot without any problem so we're going to stick this right in the center of the pot to be drawing in uh our electromagnetic currents for our radishes to help them get started interested in these electroculture rods now you can make your own they're very simple to make out of 12 gauge wire uh but if you don't like me I don't have time to sit here and make all these things I just ordered mine from uh Hills Mill Homestead Mr Mickey and Miss Kathy they're shipping them out by the hundreds to people so uh you know if you want to get some you might want to go ahead and get your order in now because they're backed up I'm going to tell you they got a lot of people ordering these things because people have realized that electroculture is not a myth it has been around since the 1700s and earlier than that people have known about the use of copper and the types of metal in the soil and stuff like that so uh check out Hills Mill Homestead and you will be able to uh get a hold to Mr Mickey there through his website and stuff at hills.com and order your copper coils for your plants now there's rules you can't just stick this thing in a pot and expect it to do Miracles there's rules that goes along with using electroculture it has to be on the south side of the plant it needs to be within 2 to 3 in of the base of the plant I mean guys there's it's got to be wound clockwise if you're in the northern hemisphere counterclockwise if you're in the southern hemisphere there's tons of rules that goes along with it so don't get discouraged if you use it and it doesn't work like you think it's going to work I have other electroculture setups here that I'm going to be using uh an antenna that I'm going to be using in my carrots once they get growing I'm going to stick them in there to grow with my carrots there's lots of ways to do electroculture so check out Hills Mill Homestead Mr Mickey all right guys y'all know we love onions and onions is one of those things you got to buy the right variety for where you live at you can't just go buy onion seeds or onion sets and plant them and expect it to be successful because they're short day long day day neutral intermediate day whatever you want to call them there's all these different types of onions that are made to grow in specific climates uh go to dixondale dixondale has a chart you can look at that tells you which one of those zones you live in and then you can go online or you can order from dixondale or like us we plant our own seeds um and you can figure out which onion is best for you now this is a savannah sweet onion from Hall tool it is a short day variety it has done exceptionally well for us here that's so we're getting a little bit late start on our seeds because we normally plant our onions in mid November to late November we normally have them in by midt but it's been so hot and so dry here that even in the containers the heat was just too much so we're going to go ahead now it's a we actually it's October the 1st today uh we're going to go ahead and try to get these things in the ground in the pot and hopefully we can get them up big enough that we can transplant them last year I transplanted onions no bigger than that right there the little sets and I told one I said they probably will never do nothing and they made onions this big around done fantastic I'm a Believer now they don't have to be really huge now I'm going to go ahead and try to do this uh and you don't have to worry about them being too thick because onions you're going to separate them anyway and you can you can thin them out as they get going now I have done probably put enough onion seed in that pot for a Year's worth from me and Wanda out of this one variety now this is you know like I said this is a savannah site now once again we're going to do this just like we did the carrots let me get my bag and we're going to do it just like we did the carrots okay we're going to do just like we did the other we're going to Tamp it down get some good soil contact all right we got these tamped in now we're going to just lightly water them remember no high pressure just missing just a good little steady shower of water on them and you got to make sure they don't dry out that's why you don't want them out in direct sunlight we've got two more varieties here we got the Texas Legend which is a fantastic onion I'm talking about really super sweet and then we got the red Creole which is another one that's a short day variety both these are short day we're going to plant the Reds in the middle and the Texas Legends on the end here and then guys I'm going to call it a day because I have got a lot still left to do and this gets my container gardening up to par and then we'll talk about that in just a minute we have our Savannah site our red Creole and our Texas Legend I'm mainly doing that guys because I have to go back a lot of times look at my own videos to see what I planted we so Savannah red Creole Texas Legend now we do have the other pots here we've got uh one two three four four five more here uh we're not going to plant them today uh it's a little bit too late for us to go plant cab cabbage and broccoli seeds and stuff like that so when we see a fresh batch come into town when we're in there at the implement store or the feed stores or whatever we'll go ahead and pick us up a few plants while we're in there and uh we'll bring them out here and set them in these pots to kind of give us a little bit of a head start here so it's suppos turn cool next week and hopefully we'll be all downhill from there so guys I hope that today we have shown you that growing your own food doesn't have to be expensive it can uh it can be very economical uh the only money we have involved in this right here was the few bags of Schulz potting soil which is will be there from now on uh we had the seed purchase which was very minimal the mineral tubs was left over from the farm uh feeding the cows from the minerals so we really don't have have any expense involved in that uh the blood meal that we put out uh we had we bought that last year so that was a little bit of an expense uh the rabbit manure was a byproduct of raising the rabbits the cow manure is a byproduct of raising the cattle uh the soil was already here uh basically everything else including the corn cobs come from the Danny corn from this past fall uh or this past summer it is fall now this past summer so you know the sand in the bottom come off of the property here uh pretty much everything uh the blocks was left over off of a construction job the tuba 12s were left over after the greenhouse construction and stuff like that we don't have a lot of expenses in what we done because we used a lot of leftover material now you could use leftover material that you have on your place and do the same thing and it's not really that expensive I mean this setup right here now will last us for several years now I don't change my potting soil out the only thing I'm going to do I will say this that I have not done and I have not shown here is when I go back to town which I don't do very often I'm going to go by a bait store and I'm going to buy a container they're called red wigglers in the Deep South we fish with red wigglers they have like three or four different kinds of worms here you got red wigglers night crawlers jumbo worms there all kinds of stuff but I'm going to buy some little containers of red wigglers and I'm going to put them in each one of these pots through here so that they live in the pot I do this in my high tunnels and it works out fantastic the worms turn the soil into worm castings the plants feed on the worm castings the cow manure the rabbit manure the blood Mill the corn cobs they feed on the mic this nutrition that's just in the soil and the worms are an added benefit so I hope that today we've shown you how we're doing this at Deep South Homestead yes the containers are up off the ground that's because of the new gamma rays that the Earth is giving off high levels of radiation right now we trying to get them up out of the earth and trying to make it where it's as economical and productive now one thing about this you see this height right here I'm getting I'm in my 60s this is not hard on me I can come right here if I have to weed or anything like that or Wanda we can weed right here we can we can work to work them uh we have these uh tomato cages that we have back here let our Bean let's look at our beans right quick before we get out of here here is the tomato cages these tomato cages that I make are made out of concrete reinforcement wire they fit right inside these pots perfectly and if you want to know the number of squares let me let's just find them out here it's one 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 nine there's 10 squares and the 11th Square you cut the things and wrap it and it fits inside the mineral tubs perfectly gives you you can uh you can take these when it gets to be like if you going to have a frost or something you can wrap plastic around them and clip it off it keeps the frost from if you want to put tomato plants in it or something like that keeps the frost from killing your Tomatoes uh you can use them in the spring for that like these beans here are running up it now it's a great climbing thing for cucumbers whatever you want to do I just thought I'd throw that in there right quick and let you see the results of the uh this is the tubs we did this one had the 30-year old calor this one is the Very Fresh calor and guys I didn't I don't see any difference in them I'm going be honest with you uh they're both up to the top both up to the top now we are having some problems over here with what's called Leaf Cutters uh they're starting to uh you can see one of these leaves down here how they they cut that and they roll it over and they lay a little bit of larvae right there an egg which will actually eat the plants uh we have had a little problem with that now we don't spray for anything so we don't worry too much about it we just come out here every day and we mash them and kill the little lavas and that way it does a away with them so that's where we're at um I hope that by showing you how we do things it's helped you to understand that gardening doesn't have to be massively hard it can be very easily done now I know a lot of people don't have access to cow manure a lot of people don't have access to rabbit manure a lot of people don't have access to cattle tubs like we do but I can't fix it for everybody but what I can say is if you can come across these things gardening doesn't have to be expensive and it doesn't have to be hard thank you guys from Deep South Homestead

Channel: Deep South Homestead

Views: 86,155

Keywords: Deep South Homestead, homesteading, homestead life, container gardening ideas, container gardening vegetables for beginners, container gardening for beginners, container gardening vegetables, container gardening tips, container gardening ideas for vegetables, growing in containers, soil mixture for container gardening, using animal manure, kuroda carrots, hoss tools, savannah sweets onions, french breakfast radishes, soil amendments, soil amendments for container gardening

Id: rJT2UzVXcHE

Length: 41min 16sec (2476 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2023