If it's your first time gardening, I'm of the belief that getting a win
under your belt is a huge moment. That first harvest is
something you never forget. That's why in this video we're going to
go over five different crops or families of crops that you can
grow in under a month. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where it is my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. All right,
my first harvest was so bad. I mean I tried to go from zero to
a hundred like boom, like that, and I did hydroponic cucumbers
just straight out of the gate. Which tasted terrible. I didn't
feed them the right nutrients. And so how do we avoid these problems?
Well, that's what this video is for. Easy harvests. So in this video we're going through
the fastest to the slowest all within a month. So we're going to talk about some stuff
you can grow in 10 days and we're going to talk about some stuff that pushes
up right against that month mark. And at the end I'm going to take
some recommendations from this video, from my garden, and whip it into a simple garden salad
just to show you kind of how I actually use this stuff. So cultivate that Like button if
you want 20 years of good harvests. And we're going to need it these
days. And let's get into the video. Fast crop number one is microgreens. Now the only reason that I'm showing
you these seeds that I'm starting is because I don't have a tray
of microgreens right now. But I've done so many videos and it's one
of my favorite crops to grow actually. So I have an entire 45
minute guide on microgreens, but let's talk about them
really quickly. Number one, the fastest crop you're ever going to
get are microgreens. What are they? In a nutshell, it's basically just growing plants
more or less to this point and then harvesting them. So it's the same seeds that you would
use to grow a plant to its full form, but you just plant way more of them and
you plant them very densely along a tray like this. So you'd usually
use like a 10x20 tray, you'd seed it very heavily and then you'd
water that in and they'd grow in this big mat. It's kind of like
those chia pets and in fact, you can actually grow chia microgreens
if you wish. Now, the reason I like them, number one, they're fast. Number
two, highly nutritious. Number three, you can cycle grow them. You
can keep succession sowing them, tray after tray can
come out of the garden, and they're very easy to work into
recipes. You just harvest them off, chop them up, put them
into a salad, a soup, whatever you want to do and
they're good to go. So again, I have massively detailed and in-depth
guides on microgreens already on my channel, but I do want to show
you some things. Basically, this is the stage that you
would harvest a microgreen at. Seeds have seed leaves - cotyledons,
cotyledons - however you pronounce that. But those are the leaves that are actually
already structurally within the seed. When it sprouts, those ones are the first to show up and
they don't look like the typical seed from that plant. So if
you're growing arugula, the seed leaves don't
look like an arugula leaf. The first set of what we call true leaves
is right around the point that you'd want to harvest a microgreen. And so you can see right here we have
some true leaves and the reason I know that is because right down below,
specifically on this one right here, it's very easy to see,
we have some seed leaves. Those are like the little baby
boys and then these ones come out. Now imagine you have an
entire tray of these, then that's a really nice meal in eight
to 12 days. Some crops take longer. Basil for example, could be 21 days, but that's still an entire tray
of micro basil at three weeks. So, fantastic first crop in our fast
crops guide. Second group of crops, peas and sunflowers. They're
technically still microgreens. A lot of the times they're
sold as microgreens, but they do look quite a bit different
and I kind of group them in a different way. So these are pea shoots, these are pea shoots that are probably
going to go into my garden to grow as actual peas, but I could certainly
just literally eat these right now. They have a nice fresh vegetal pea flavor, high in nutrition and they're very easy
to sprout. You know peas, you soak them, the seeds for a little bit if you want
to. You don't even have to do that. And then once these come
up, you can literally just eat those right there and that tastes
really nice. Really fresh pea flavor, very easy. Now over here on this side
right here, we have some sunflowers. Sunflowers in fact are probably my
favorite microgreen of all time to grow because they really retain that
nutty flavor, which is really unique. You wouldn't expect them to, but they do. They kind of just taste like a greener
version of a sunflower seed and it's a very fresh, refreshing flavor. And
I really love doing sunflowers. And the thing about sunflowers when
you're growing the microgreens is you do want to soak them and you do want to make
sure you're watching out for mold and such because it's just a bigger
seed. More things can go wrong, but still you're getting these in 12 to
15 days. Okay, our third group of crops. It's going to be the whole world
of baby lettuce, baby lettuce, baby greens. Now what's great about
this example right here, as you can see, I have some looseleaf lettuce here
that's very mature, very adult. Behind us we have looseleaf lettuce that is, ooh,
I don't know, two, three weeks old. And then this stuff here
is just transplanted in
about four or five days ago. And so you can see how we talked about
microgreens earlier in the video. Well, this is the natural growth cycle
of lettuce. It's growing up. Microgreens harvest at very, very young. But if you let that same exact plant
go a little longer then you can harvest right here, you can harvest right
here for a micro head of lettuce. Or you can let it go
and harvest around here, although this is longer than a month. Now what I'll say about this is if you're
planning to specifically harvest at a younger stage of life, then your
spacing should be a little different. So right here I'm spacing around four
per square foot and that's because I've planned for them to be about this big. So I've spaced them roughly
four or five inches apart. But if I know I'm going to be harvesting
my lettuce at these sizes back here, then I can plant them much more densely. So I might plant them
at nine per square foot. And then I know that once they kind of
start filling up that space clip, clip, clip, clip, take them into the
garden and or sorry, the kitchen, and then start cooking up a great meal. Our fourth group are the
greens of root crops. Yes, you can eat the greens of
all root crops. And in fact, some of these are my
favorite greens to eat. What we're looking at right here
in the foreground are beets. Beet greens can be eaten and in fact
sometimes I actually prefer them. I like these beet greens nice and
sauteed in some olive oil, some onions, some garlic. It's a really nice flavor and sometimes
you know the beets aren't as appetizing to me. So you can
definitely grow beet greens, radish greens and turnip greens and you
can just harvest them for their greens before they start to bulb out.
There's nothing wrong with that. They germinate fast and they grow fast. Now I will say you can get baby radishes. Sometimes the beets take
a little longer. Turnips. You can get baby turnips to some degree, but baby radishes can definitely
be harvested at that 30 day mark. You can get a really nice
crop of radishes. In fact, let's just go ahead and show you kind of
what you can get here if you wait just a little bit longer. See this. This is a great example of a baby little
root crop that you could harvest in a really short amount of time. Our fifth group of crops is what
I'm going to call upgraded greens, some more fancy and cool ones. So we have a whole mess of kale back here.
This is certainly older than 30 days, but again, baby kale is
oftentimes more tender. It can be a little bit sweeter, a little
bit less fibrous, and it's very tasty. So sometimes the baby kale is a lot
easier to use in a salad if especially if you don't like kind of
crunching through this. I personally am probably gonna
turn this into kale chips, but you can see a different cultivar of
kale here. This is dazzling blue kale, which is quite beautiful and the main
vein down each leaf has this amazing, amazing color. But the leaves are
also much more tender, much fresher. And so kale is a fantastic elevated
green that you can grow in under 30 days. Another elevated green that you
can grow in less than 30 days, certainly not one of this size,
but it is bok choy or pak choy. I recommend getting a dwarf
or baby bok choy variety. They're very cute and you can
kind of just pluck them out, throw them in a stir fry. They're very
good. Here's another one right here. This is Beni Houshi mizuna
or it's basically a mustard, which kind of gives that nice, peppery, spicy flavor to either
a salad or a stir fry. So there's a lot of different, you know, extra greens besides the
world of looseleaf lettuce
or these more simple greens. Now that we have our list
of quick growing crops, I've got my beet that I pulled out for
you guys earlier and we're going to grab a couple more selections here and
whip it up into a really quick garden, fresh salad. So I'm going to take this looseleaf
lettuce right here because it's looking really good. Boom.
That's amazing. This is, maybe it's a little longer than a
month, maybe 35 days or so I would say. And mizuna, this is the Beni Houshi
mizuna, the flowers are edible, so I'm going to take the
flowers for a garnish. Just take a couple of those and I'm also
going to take some leaves on my kale back here. Again, this is an older kale but the same
rules apply and the same theory applies. So we're just going to grab
from the oldest leaves, getting those oldest leaves
first, cut and come again style, which I have a video on on
my channel. And look at that. This plant is still rocking and rolling. It's looking really good but
we've cleaned it up a little bit. We've let some more light in and we
have a nice little micro salad here that we're going to turn into really quick. Well, I'm certainly not a chef but I
have to say it looks pretty good and it's probably going to taste good. But
before we taste this, first of all, thanks for watching. Second of all, if you enjoy urban gardening or you want
to learn how to garden in small spaces, then this book Field Guide to Urban
Gardening is my book and I wrote it specifically for that purpose. Take you from nothing to learning how
to grow your own food. It's on Amazon. You can get signed copies for
my store. But, Bon Appetit guys, thanks for watching and I'll
see you in another video. That's good, that's fresh. And you know the best part
is that at Trader Joe's, Everything but the Bagel Seasoning, that stuff literally can go on anything.
This was great, thanks! I want to start gardening!