7 Ways to Feed Your Garden For Free (Complete Film)

hi I'm David the good and today I'm gonna share with you seven ways to feed your garden for free you should put in some dramatic titles right there [Music] no that was folksy I want dramatic titles epic [Music] alright that was better a lot of us started Gardens because we wanted to save money I mean fresh produce is expensive and organic produce is very expensive plus what you get out of your backyard garden is a lot better than anything you can get from the store because it's perfectly fresh all the intact enzymes everything Sun warmed Tomatoes right from the garden you can't beat it yet sometimes gardening can be more expensive than we'd like saving money in the garden doesn't have to be a big deal first of all don't worry about building yourself perfect raised beds and that sort of thing you don't even need raised beds just clear a spot and start planting second of all you don't need to give your money to nurseries to buy transplants buy seeds seeds are much cheaper learn to grow your own from seed a lot of times direct seeding is fine for quite a few plants so when you can do that do that the third of all a lot of us are spending money bringing in compost and bringing in amendments or bringing in fertilizers today I'm going to take that burden off of your shoulders so let's start with what everybody knows you're supposed to put in your garden compost buying compost I don't like it for multiple reasons first of all you don't exactly know what went into that compost most of the time I mean they'll they'll give you a breakdown you know maybe it was a certain amount of woodchips and maybe there's a certain amount of this and a certain amount of this but you don't exactly know where all those bits and pieces came from and when you see terms like bio solids okay that means sewer waste and what can be in sewer waste is I mean if you were just composting human waste and safely putting it back into the soil that's fantastic I love the idea of completing the cycle but when you think of all the other stuff that goes down the drain into the sewer system heavy metals toxins hormones and pharmaceuticals that stuff is going in there I don't really want all this stuff in my garden I mean one of the benefits of having a garden is we are away from that crazy factory world right the getting away from the toxins is why we garden so buying in compost I don't like and I don't like having to pay for something that I can make myself do you see all this I see potential compost everywhere you could use this for a brown layer right here you could use this for part of a green layer when you clean up your yard don't throw it by the side of the road and obviously I'm not in favor of chopping and dropping the entire jungle to feed your vegetable garden but you can scavenge bits and pieces in more places than you might think got an empty lot across the street break some leaves up cut some of the tall grass by the side of the road you got a brown layer you got a green layer stack it a compost potentially everywhere all the kitchen scraps in your house I mean including meat bones eggshells hair whatever throw all that stuff in there people freak out about it but nature is a fantastic recycler you can just things together and she'll deal with it don't worry so much I know some of you're thinking right now what about rats in my compost what about vermin okay you can close in the bin if you're really worried about it or let the rats go tunnel their way and eat their way through and then later trap them all and compost them I actually had a pumpkin I harvested the other day that I grew on top of a rat I caught in our kitchen buried it underneath planted pumpkins on top rat fed pumpkins beautiful pumpkins the best pumpkins if you're going to compost it's important to make it easy the easiest form of composting is you eat a banana you throw the peel underneath the tree say there you go tree have some potassium but if you want compost for your garden you're gonna need a bin or you're gonna have to just dedicate one of your garden beds and dump everything on top of there make that your compost pile for a while this is my current compost pile this is my big one I don't know what it is it's like a big metal bin that my kids found in a lot next to a crumbling house and we thought hey why not let's use it for a compost pile I guess if anybody ever comes and asks for it back we'll give it to them to make composting easy I'll leave a 5-gallon bucket with a lid in the kitchen and you can shut it you go through a lot of food in our house eat a lot of vegetables so there's a lot of peelings bones old oatmeal spoiled dishes whatever is in the fridge you clean out the fridge all goes in the compost pile now that I have this rough stinky stuff here I can go and I can get a little bit of brown leaves and cover it up if you're in an area where the leaves fall in the fall and people are putting big bags of leaves by the side of the road go gather up those bags when they're by the side of the road leave the next to your compost pile and then every time you put in something green and sloppy throw some of those leaves on top of it it's very easy that's the poor man's wheelbarrow $8.00 tarp that's ready for another layer of green whenever we get around to it for you lazy composters out there there's another cool method and that is to let the chickens do the work for you I learned this from Paul Gao Qi I'd always thrown scraps to the chicken's and most the time they turn it all into the dirt and it mostly disappears what he actually does is go into his chicken run after throwing them all kinds of vegetables this is the back to Eden guy by the way if you don't know the name Paul Gao Qi great movie very good quite encouraging but he he would take all of the kitchen scraps and everything and throw them out to the chickens the chickens turn them in to the ground and what are they doing they're manoeuvring they're turning they're putting it into the soil and then he would take the soil from his chicken run sift it out and put it on to his garden so he's actually feeding this rich compost filled soil what I have right here is a lot of material that I threw in here we threw in kitchen scraps and we threw in grass clippings and weeds all kinds of stuff and it rots down and the chickens turn it and what I end up with is just layers of beautiful compost underneath which I can put through a sifter and put right into my garden beds and this takes no work last time I sifted this Hey look at there's a leg oh it's nice maybe I'm kids I'm sure you find Legos everywhere but all of this last time I sifted this I got 10 gallons of compost out of this little chicken coop look at how beautiful this is it's my kind of composting it just through tons of yard scraps in here a few months ago and then we threw in a lot of kitchen scraps with it the chickens keep turning it it keeps rotting and then you get this rich manure and compost stop marvelous another easy way to compost at this point you might say but David the good I live in a small space I have a little yard I can't go on into the rain forest and rake leaves and chop things down and I don't have chickens they're illegal in my neighborhood I only have a little bit of material how could I feed my Gardens if I don't really have much that I can compost well in this next segment method number two my wife is going to demonstrate a crazy insane terrifying compost tea method that we use when we're feeding a large space or we have a shortage of materials more than likely you're already familiar with the idea of compost tea in its simplest form you would probably imagine you put compost in a barrel with some water and you end up with compost tea but people like to make it kind of well complicated just like with regular compost they often like to add all these gadgets and things to their compost to compost tea to make it more better amazing and they had bubblers and enzymes and I don't even know but David has been experimenting with very simple compost tea that is user friendly easy for you to just pick up and and work with right away with what pretty much what you have on hand right now let me show you by the way I forgot to tell you this is the no no bad naughty compost tea that your mom told you never to make it's anaerobic I know I know I know but let me tell you it grows really good plants so we have here a large drum they come and fill with leads when we read the garden we fill up a bucket with our weeds throw it in here and we put water here we just continually fill it up with more weeds does it smell yes it smells plants aren't that picky they they eat manure as well and you know how smelly that can be so there you go [Applause] this whole fermenting plants thing making compost tea this way people will say this isn't really compost tea because this is insane or something like that but really if you look at Korean natural farming and the Giada method jad am i discovered after doing this fermenting weeds and manure and all kinds of things in barrels and having it work really wonderfully on my guard I did all these experiments with it and then just this last year I discovered the Koreans have been doing it for thousands of years so go Korea but you can make custom versions of it for different plants like this here is a batch I made to feed my coffee and so what I did was I took the coffee cherries when we split them off and we took the beans we processed our own coffee out I took the cherry portion which we didn't use and we put it in here along with coffee grounds and I made you just big pile of them in here and I've let them rot now for months and I figure that's probably got most of the nutrition that a coffee plant would need so I'm gonna stir this around and go feed my coffee plants with it look at that some sort of fungi that has just grown and colonized all this this is very alive think of the the mother in vinegar and you might have something like this look at that so this is all gonna get stirred in here and then I'm gonna take some take it and mix it with some water and put it on the coffee I have a bunch of little coffee seedlings I started stir that in it doesn't really smell bad I mean not horrible bad that's pretty cool even know what it's doing here so I usually thin it about ten parts water to one part scary fermented plant juice works wonderfully I did this with my corn one year out in the field of just pretty nasty-looking sand and I ended up with some beautiful beautiful green corn you would not believe how wonderful it looked and all I did was take a barrel throw a bunch of weeds in it and chicken manure and I just let it sit in the Sun and ferment for a long time and then I pinned it out with water and I watered all the plants and did marvelously often what I'll do when I come out into the garden is to just grab a bucket and I'll start out by weeding a bed and then at the end of my garden time I'll dump the weeds into our compost tea barrel stir them around grab some in a coffee can and put it in my watering can and then I'll finish off in the garden with adding it back to the garden by watering it in if you think about it what you're really doing is taking the weeds that have grown in your garden beds and they've pulled up nutrients minerals vitamins from the soil and if you were to take them and just toss them away you're taking all of that good stuff that they've gathered up from the soil and you're throwing it out you're getting rid of it I mean maybe you're going to compost it in your compost bin but this this is a very quick way to do it to throw it in a compost tea weed juice barrel like this and you're making it all go back into a liquid form and putting it back onto your garden you're completing this cycle and it's it's actually kind of a nice revenge when you think about it you're turning your weeds in back into fertility back into the soil you're gonna want to keep it covered so that you don't breed mosquitoes and before you eat anything from the garden you're gonna want to give it a good rinse but really it's not all that scary and it's not even as scary as the next thing we're gonna talk about [Music] the fermented plant juice or compost tea or anaerobic swamp water seems kind of insane it's not nearly as likely to damage your garden as this next amendment manure people are scared of anaerobic compost and anaerobic composting but they happily put cart loads of manure on their gardens now manure is great manure is fantastic but I've warned people over and over and over again don't trust it it's not that the manure is too hot it's got too much nitrogen in it and you need to compost it first or something like that no it's that a lot of manure has persistent herbicides in it that will utterly wreck your garden completely destroy it we're talking for a year or two it'll kill fruit trees things start to twist up your plants start to look weird over time it's the manure not the manure itself but it's what's in it you can compost it you can let it sit for a long time and you put it in your garden in your garden dies but today I'm going to talk about using manure in your garden that is safe I know that this manure here is safe I got my hands in it isn't that gross Marjory would love me for this she doesn't care about getting dirty this manure I know is safe because I don't live in the United States I don't live in a place where toxic long-term herbicides are sprayed regularly the cows around here are grazing on jungle grasses and through the rain forests so they're living a very natural life for cows they're eating whatever they find to eat and when they leave their droppings the droppings don't have anything dangerous toxic in them so I just wander around with a bag sometimes they'll go on a jog up the road and I'll pick up the cow pies along the road as I go I'm sure amuses my neighbors then as you can see here when you crush these up it's just it's almost cow manure is almost just compost the cow is like a composting machine and it passes through the digestion of a cow all four of those stomachs and the enzymes and everything work on it and grinds it all up if you've ever seen the inside of a cow and how it works it's utterly amazing you end up with this beautiful finished stuff which has a lot of nutrition left in it for your garden so you can take it and put it directly into your garden if you're going to plant later you know you could turn turn fresh manure into the soil and then once it's kind of been worked on by the soil organisms a bit you can turn around and plant in it or you can try the manure in the Sun use the dried manure crush it up and throw it in as an amendment this scavenged piece of sheet metal roofing this is my manure dryer when I get pies and pick them up in stick them in bags and bring them home and I put them on this and I lay them out in the wonderful tropical Sun I've actually put them I left this entire thing and put it up on the roof of my chicken coop because that way my chickens won't kick them over and knock them all over the yard and make a big mess because chickens are really good at doing that and they like to pick through the manure too so I'll take them dry them in the Sun get the real nastiness out of them I guess and then crush them up and mix them in the gardener mix this directly into potting soil mixes I'm gonna put some in the garden right now I got a bed that needs it I loosened up the soil in this bed too about a foot deep the other day it's about ready I've got some transplants going the gardens are all wreck right now because we're in the turn over from the wet season to the dry season and so the rainy season has petered out we are in the dry season right now and it's time to sort of start getting ready for the next round rainy season is coming back in a couple months this bed here is all nice and loose and I'm just gonna top dress it with this manure dry manure like this is really nice to work with it doesn't smell bad it actually smells a little bit sweet on offensive completely inoffensive and very easy to distribute it's not like wet nasty manure so I like drying it out and then just using it like this this is a ton of good stuff for this bed everything I plant in here is going to be very happy probably won't have to feed it anything the entire time that they're growing in this bed you guys are lucky I didn't subject you to the segment I originally filmed I was gonna do sort of a fake BBC documentary on an eccentric old guy who gathered manure every morning this man gathers what he calls God and gold you can use manure from goats and sheep and elephants drafts probably ostriches hippopotamus nearer spared you can use a lot of varieties of manure it's true chicken manure is really good but I like to let the chickens kind of turn the compost and manure it because chicken was really hot and I don't find that it's particularly easy to gather when you have free-range chickens I mean I can't go around the tsp and try and no forget it I let them just feed the yard and go where they want to go up manure is fantastic because it's a sort of a slow-release manure it's very nice to throw on the gardens rabbit manure is wonderful I actually used to mix rabbit manure into the pots when I had a plant nursery and it would sort of slow release like people spend money on fertilizers for but we're all about not spending money you only say the only kind of manure is that I really don't like I mean there's no way I'm going to be putting cat droppings into anything because I don't like toxoplasmosis I'm usually not that concerned about dog droppings but I would throw them into a hot compost pile if I was gonna do that I don't have a dog so I don't know but cats I would stay away from but you're herbivores are really what you want and your poultry they differ from us enough biologically that we're not likely to get ill from them just use some common sense don't eat manure eat the plants that manure feeds that's pretty much a good rule of thumb for a long time people have known that putting a little ashes in your garden makes your gardens grow better particularly for melons it was funny one of the local farmers was walking down the road just as I was telling him what I was doing here lighting up a fire we had the camera out he says what are you doing and I said I'm gonna fill in a little gardening video we're gonna make some ashes and he says my - these are good for melons that's what we're doing right now if I look this burn about half way though I can get what's called biochar which is just charcoal now this is what I call redneck biochar this is just an open burn and then I put it out I don't bother with making kilns and all that jazz to make biochar just do an open fire burn it fast and then turn around and quench it and if I let it burn all the way I get ashes I'm gonna show you how I use ashes in the garden too but this here when it cools off I'll gather it up and then I will charge it if you're familiar with charcoal activated charcoal in particular if you've got a person that swallowed something toxic actually I read that the guy that really pioneered activated charcoal he drank strychnine and ate the activated charcoal and didn't die he did it as a demonstration I don't recommend putting that much faith in charcoal but charcoal absorbs a lot that's because the pore structure just sucks things in it'll hold a ton of minerals from the soil so if you just put this directly into your garden it'll pretty much soak up all the minerals in your garden and you're gonna have trouble for a year or two until things equalized out but if you soak it first in some of that compost tea that I showed you if you soak it in urine which is rich in minerals if you soak it in in just about any fertilizer solution or if you just put it as a layer into your compost pile and let all that soak into it and let the biological activity move in these little pieces here are like bacteria condos for the good guys mass living communities of fungi and bacteria and they become bunkers of fertility and life in the soil at least that's the theory so what I've been doing is smashing these up mixing them into my garden beds after I have soaked them in something rich and nutritious or layered them in my compost pile they keep getting turned into my beds so over time I'm getting more and more potential soil fertility as this acts like a sponge and holds on to the good stuff and loosens my soil if you have sandy soil and particular adding biochar is a good idea because sand tends to let everything go through it this traps it holds on to it keep some of the good stuff around for your plants I'm back at this bed again I have here a bucket of ashes I've already got some biochar in this bed from the last season these ashes are just from a fire that I let burn all the way down and I pile up a bunch of random junk I mean not like plastic and stuff don't know don't I know you're thinking of it don't do that you want wood you don't want pressure-treated wood you know rotten wood whatever turn into ashes and ashes are high in potassium and calcium so we've added the manure which has organic matter and nitrogen and some other nutrients mixed in and I am going to throw in some potassium and some calcium and it's all free it's real nice spread Nash's because you can tell where you've covered quite easily if you have acid soil ashes are great if you have alkaline soil I want to back off on the ashes the problem with them is that even though they have a lot of nutrition for the soil if you get your pH messed up it's gonna mess your garden up your plants are not going to be able to uptake the nutrients properly so high pH is not what you want it looks pretty good to me turn this around a little bit mix it in and you're looking good for some transplants here or for some direct seeding I make my own transplants though so it doesn't cost me much of anything [Music] this next amendment well it's really a drag but you get it I have to go to the beach tough life [Music] seaweed is one of the best amendments for your garden because it's loaded with minerals if you live near a beach it's a no-brainer go pick up some seaweed the thing is I know a lot of you don't live near the beach and you're probably watching and going well that's completely not helpful to me well maybe next time you go on vacation bring a couple of bags with you or if you really want to spend money you can go to the store you can buy some kelp meal I got two buckets of these Rachel and I gathered so I'm gonna do something with one of the buckets in the garden and this other bucket is going to become the green layer in this compost pile so now we've got kitchen scraps we've got the layer of brown stuff that we raked up and we've got the biochar and now we're going to put mineral rich seaweed which acts like a green layer to compost on top of it and I'm not worried about the salt in this plants actually need some salt tomatoes will actually taste better with a little bit of salt and by the time this compost finishes the salt and all the other minerals are going to be well mixed in and it's not going to be a problem with burning plants trust me I've done this before I'm an expert on the Internet there we go I've got a bucket half full of water here and then I've got our other bucket of seaweed and I'm going to rinse this seaweed in the water now I've done this without rinsing and it hasn't killed my plants but I don't want to recommend it because you don't really know if it's gonna be too much salt so I'm gonna rinse these and then I'm gonna use them as a mulch on this new garden bed that I've prepared so think of all the stuff we put in here we've got ashes in here we've got manure in here I already forked the ground all up now we're gonna go ahead and we're going to multiple see wheat which adds micro nutrients like crazy now there's another way you can use seaweed in your garden and that is to make a liquid fertilizer out of it stick a little bit in the blender blend it up real small or put some in a big barrel or a bucket like I've done with the weed tea and just let it rot down and then you've got all the minerals of the ocean ready to go on your garden or if you're really lazy and you don't want to go to the beach but you do want a liquid fertilizer there's one that you make every single day [Music] we've probably heard that if you pee on something you're going to kill it well if you dump a bunch of fertilizer on anything you aren't going to kill it and urine does have salts in it that can be too much for a plant but if you think about everything you eat during the day and how many nutrients your body filters out because you just can't use it at that point it goes through into your urine and your urine is an excellent fertilizer so if you want to use it in the garden what you got to do is save it somehow and then mix it about ten parts water to one part urine or there abouts pending at how much salt you eat I just go ahead and randomly mix by eye unless you're putting it on straight you're probably not gonna burn anything just thin it out somewhat so it's not too much I saw the most beautiful garden down in South Florida sand we're talking like beach sand all the plants were incredibly green because the homeowner would save urine every morning mix it with a little bit of water go out there and just water a little bit water a little bit makes a very good foliar feed and it's very good for the roots as well so yeah I mean it's like Miracle Grow and your body is making it every day it's gonna wait right now if you have to go take this moment save a little I prefer to use urine on plants that we're not going to eat off of directly like I wouldn't use it in a salad garden but I would use it in getting transplants established and in feeding these little fruit tree seedlings that I've started here and in feeding things like sweet potatoes which are not gonna be that big a deal you obviously don't want to consume it so again like manure use common sense if the idea of using urine directly on your plants is a little bit too much for you you can still use it as a Kickstarter for your compost pile because it's loaded with nitrogen and compost needs a lot of water to get going so I thin out some urine with some buckets of water throw it on the compost pile after I've made my greens and browns and within 24 hours it is cooking hot [Music] if you were hoping there was another way to feed your gardens other than pee-pee well you're in luck we're up to number seven number seven is a method that works probably a little bit better for perennials unless you're thinking ahead but if you have an invasive tree or a pain in the neck plant or a whole bunch of pain-in-the-neck plants or invasive trees or trees you just need to clear well this methods for you get out your machete we're gonna take some stuff down this is lukina some sort of Lucania species probably leucocephala which are probably totally mangling the latin on because i've only ever read it nobody actually speaks latin so far as I know I think they're all dead but this tree here is a nitrogen-fixing tree and that means it has a relationship with nitrogen bacteria beneath the soil so every time you cut it back it's releasing a little bit of nitrogen to the ground well there's nothing really right next to it except for this little jackfruit tree and I plant a dis track fruit tree over here from a seed and I have been feeding it with chop and drop many of these trees here I have cut before and I just drop every time I cut put some pieces around the tree so all the hard work that this Latino tree did to build itself is now going to rot into the soil and feed this little baby jackfruit tree so we are mulching and feeding at the same time I'm not a genius you know I could my gardening is the result of learning from a lot of people that are smarter than I am people like Jeff Lawton and Bill Mollison Steve Solomon Herrick Kimball people that have invented or come up with really cool ideas and then I just sort of absorb and follow and you can do the same thing this chop and drop method it's just the way that a forest builds up we're just doing it in fast-forward the forest drops branches now and again when it gets to it we're dropping branches rapidly growing really fast growing things and then knocking them to the ground and making soil fertility all this is going to rot it's going to build soil underneath this jackfruit the jackfruit tree will respond to the additional minerals and nitrogen and organic matter it just grows wonderfully I've got to show you the other jackfruit tree which has already grown up in bearing that we've been dropping all kinds of compost around let's go take a look at that around the base of this tree for the last year since we moved to this property I have been piling up bits and pieces my kids are throwing banana peels and all kinds of thing and the trees fruit has just increased like you wouldn't believe and you see it's turning into compost right around the base of the tree and I have my little compost helpers here these millipedes are always down here at the base of the tree and there look at that you shouldn't be scared of things like this you should be very happy these are primary decomposers meaning they're coming in chewing things up leaving their little droppings all over the place and working hard and making it so things are rapidly available to the tree aren't they beautiful they're not offensive they don't bite or anything look you can pet them so all of this here is getting turned into soil slowly and if you don't like the way it looks having a bunch of rough stuff there you can always keep a few bags of mulch nearby dump your kitchen scraps chop stuff from the yard whatever and then just put a nice little thin layer over the top so people don't know how extreme your composting really is this mango tree has been the beneficiary of lots of yard waste we saw how well it worked through the jackfruit already and when I had to clean this yard up and do some thinning to allow light to come through we just took it and dropped it so there's mango prunings and banana prunings and Sapodilla prunings and whatever bits and pieces of hedges and everything all at the base of the mango tree it's going to feed the ground and make it happy it acts like mulch and actually compost and it's feeding the soil if you have a tree in your yard too that you can't stand this tree just keeps growing back I really want to kill that tree okay and it doesn't die right and you've tried and you've tried you've tried and you're about ready to break out the gasoline stop stop that tree is a renewable resource for your soil it's growing well it's growing back just keep cutting the top of it off and feed it to something else something you love and care about chop the pieces up and throw it around your blueberry plants chop pieces up and give them to one of your apple trees don't worry about getting rid of the tree just keep cutting it it's pulling up more nutrients it's building the top it's pulling up more nutrients it's building the top just take it's hard work and give it to something else it's really simple and it works we layered and soaked this less than 18 hours ago and then it rained and and this is hot this is baking hot already it hasn't even been 24 hours seaweed I hope today's presentation has given you guys some good ideas this is only the beginning of the cheap gardening and composting rabbit-hole and i'm very glad you join me as we Dovan if you want more ideas on extreme composting from everything from fish guts to human waste check out my book compost everything the good guide to extreme composting which is available on Amazon I also invite you to subscribe to my youtube channel it is popular it is entertaining and it has me and my beautiful life on it my beautiful wife and I on it so you'll find me by looking up David good on YouTube hold me [Music] thanks for joining me and until next time may your thumbs always be green [Music] I see your mother and always say please be loyal to friends and compost your enemies be tasting your mother and always say please loyal friends [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 344,029

Rating: 4.8603973 out of 5

Keywords: urine as fertilizer, composting with chickens, chicken compost, deep litter, deep bedding, composting manure, bad manure, seaweed in the garden, easy composting, fast composting, making biochar, chop and drop, nitrogen fixers, marjory wildcraft, compost everything

Id: h7CyFqs2qWc

Length: 46min 12sec (2772 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2018