- When I first started gardening,
I was in a small townhouse with a north facing balcony
and a tiny windowsill. So I had almost no space. Obviously, things have changed here at the Epic Gardening Headquarters, but in today's video
I'm going back in time to how I used to garden to
give you five incredible small space gardening tips. So cultivate that like button, and I will personally
increase your square footage by 100 or more. And let's get into the video. I modeled my raised bed
garden here at the homestead after my original epic garden that many of you watching
probably remember. It was much, much smaller than this. It was actually about
here to maybe here or so, and I had 11 raised beds in that space, which brings us to our first
tip, what I call cramming. And what I mean by that
is cramming your design and also cramming plants into that design. So let's imagine I was
in a much smaller space. What would I do here? I like this space. It's great. It's about 30 inches or so. But if I'm cramming, and
I'm trying to get stuff in, I'm actually gonna bring this
bed in at least halfway more. So I would probably bring it into here, and I'd just slide on
in through like this. That's what I did back in the day. I had about a foot spacing
between all of my raised beds, and then I even put
containers into that spacing and kind of just tiptoed
around the garden. It worked. It worked at the time. Was it the most convenient? No, but did it allow me to grow
about 50 or 60% more plants? Yes. And speaking of, you actually
wanna be looking in your beds and breaking some of the
classic spacing rules. So for example, this bed
isn't really planted out very much just yet, but
take a look at this lettuce. This is a pretty standard lettuce spacing. It's about every four
or five inches or so. If you're in a small space, every square foot really, really matters. So what I would be doing
here is I would say, okay, I've got my lettuce here. I'd go lettuce, lettuce,
lettuce, lettuce, lettuce on this triangular style spacing, and just go really intensive with it. And I'd be a little bit more intentional about how I'm harvesting those so that I can make sure
they're not really running into one another. So it's a little bit more of an intensive management
process, but it totally works. Because I could take this space here and compress it into
about 50% of the space with a little bit of sacrifice on just the annoyance of dealing with it. But hey, at least I can grow. That's tip number one. Our tip number two is extra spicy. - Growing vertically is the perfect method to maximize the food
production in a small space. Over the years, we built
different vertical gardens using plastic bottles, and they helped us to create another layer of growing plants above the garden. Just making sure that you
select HDPE 2 plastic, which is the safest plastic
to use in the garden. But you can also build
your own vertical trellis with a bit of DIY like I did in the past. So you can see how easy
with a few materials you can start growing
your plants vertically. Alternatively, you can use
bamboo to build a structure for peas or beans by simply
placing them in a circle, and then join them together at the top. And this is called a teepee, and it's a super easy and effective system Grow bags are a small
space gardening essential. You have to have these. I used them extensively when
I was in my small space. And in fact, I love them so much, I literally wrote a book on
them called Grow Bag Gardening. So I'll show you how I like to use them if you're in a tighter quarter. But this is the magic. You've got the handles. You can move it around. So like I said, back in the
old days what I would do is I would come in and just slot these into random spots in the garden,
wherever there was a gap, sometimes even putting them
on top of my raised beds. But for a crop, let's say like potatoes, or onions, or something
where you're planting it, and you're waiting for
that growth to come up, it doesn't even need to be in sun. Thus, it doesn't even
need to be in the garden. I would actually keep these
in the garage or the backyard while I was planting out my potatoes, and then I'd move them into the garden the second that they
actually needed a light, which allowed me to grow
something else in a grow bag in that space before the
potatoes needed to come out. And so because they're so portable, you can move them around. And in fact, when I first
moved into this space, this place was desolate. There was nothing here
whatsoever except for an old shed and a non-productive tree right where you see this greenhouse. And so what I did is I laid
down some quick landscape fabric and put a grow bag garden in place. And in about a 10 by 10 square foot area, I think I had 25 grow bags. So you can grow a ton
in these little guys. - This plant is called comfrey and is the absolute golden ticket for every organic gardener. It produce flowers, which
attracts pollinators, but also the wide leaves shade the soil protecting the soil biology. And he has a long taproot,
which withdraws the minerals down deep into the ground in a bioavailable form for your plants. So you can simply chop
it down into pieces, add it into an old sock, and submerge this sock
into a tank of water. And then you can use that
water to water your garden and have a completely
free source of fertilizer. Alternatively, you can add it
straight into your raised bed. So it will slowly decompose and provide food for your plants. But you can also use it in a
sort of tea infused solution to reactivate your compost
because it's full of nitrogen, or you can place it around your plant. So chop and drop as it's normally called, and it will create a barrier
against slugs and snails. So if you're limited it on space, growing this swamp plant
will give you a wide variety if you use this in your garden. - One of my favorite
things about gardening is that you can grow hundreds of plants, hundreds of different types
of plants for the same plant. Like tomatoes, there's probably
4,000 different varieties. So if you're a small space grower, there is a variety for you. Pro tip is look for anything
that says space in the name, anything that has the
word patio in the name. Of course, at our seed
company, Botanical Interests, we have a ton of these varieties
for small space growers. But back in the day, I used to live in downtown
San Diego in a condo, and I had a west facing balcony. It was okay. It wasn't great. I had a railing planter, and I would put in patio
baby or patio choice, or if it was a cucumber,
I'd do spacemaster. All of those allow you to grow
one of your favorite crops without having it trawling
all over the place and just making an absolute mess. And speaking of, there are some crops
you might want to avoid. Corn in a really small
space, kind of difficult. You have to plant it in blocks. I've seen it done in grow bags, but again, a little bit more
of an advanced technique. Huge pumpkins, huge squash, absolutely massive indeterminate tomatoes, stay away from those and go
for some smaller varieties. There are hundreds of
options out there for you. So check some of those out
at Botanical Interests. But small space gardening, we're gonna do a lot more
of it here on the channel. So if you're a small space grower aspiring to something bigger,
make sure to subscribe. Check out our other tips right here. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
