In this video, you'll learn how
me getting on TikTok in 2019, as probably the oldest human and
certainly the oldest gardener on TikTok, led to building a garden from scratch, which I've never done for anyone
besides myself, with Kehlani. Kevin Espiritu here. If you are new to
the channel, it's called Epic Gardening. We teach you how to grow plants, how to
grow food successfully in very simple, practical ways. Okay, here's
the story. I got on TikTok, because I love social media, and I
started sharing silly plant videos. Someone unbeknownst to me at the time, shot me a follow and then sent me a
DM. We chatted a little bit said, hey, do you do garden installs? I
said, honestly no, I really don't. But if you have something in mind,
I'm at least willing to hear it out, you know. Cause I get the request
a lot. And so we got to talking, we ended up hopping on a
zoom call, was a great vibe. We were chatting about all sorts
of different things. You know, like the importance of growing food and
the importance of getting the youth into it on all different demographics, all
different cultures. I said, you know what? This actually sounds like a really
fun project. Let's go ahead and do it. So I'm going to take you on the planning
journey right now of how we selected exactly what to plant at Kehlani's house, all the sort of things that go into that. So you can see how we think about
building a garden from scratch, from plant selection to soil to beds
to location, all that kind of stuff. Without further ado, cultivate that
Like button for the Kehlani Collab. And let's get into. The video. Today begins the journey. We're going to head to the nursery right
now to pick up some plants for this project. So I will put the phone down and we'll
see you at Mission Hills Nursery. We're here, one of my favorite nurseries
in San Diego, doing some research. Let me show you what we've already
picked up. We grabbed a passion fruit, Frederick variety right here. We are
capping it off with a pomegranate. So we purchased a wonderful
pomegranate. Look who I found, sun cat. Hey! So what we're doing now is we're
planning on a bed by bed basis. So I'll show you what we
have. We have a squash bed. We have a budding salsa bed right here
with a couple of grafted tomatoes and we've got some peppers. So two
jalapenos and a couple random ones, as well as some yellow sweet
Spanish. But now what we want to do, for one of the larger beds we're building,
is an herb bed. You can't go wrong. Greek oregano, French
tarragon, English thyme. We should probably grab
a lemongrass. Yeah. And we'll grab some basil and
rosemary and stuff as well. All right, flower daddy update here. We have three different
flats' worth of marigolds. These cosmos are just
so beautiful. So huge. This stuff smells straight up
like sweet crystallized, honey. The Epic 4runner is loaded to the brim. I actually don't even know
how we're going to fit. We got most of what we needed
at Mission Hills Nursery. But I always like to stop by WAN, Walter
Anderson, to see what they've got. So we need some tomatoes,
which is what I've got. I mean, Walter Anderson always has an
insane amount of tomatoes. Okay. The last little bit of stuff is
picked up. We have some artichokes, some tomatillos and some
determinate tomatoes, I think is going to be
a little bit easier. We brought the seedling table under
here to protect from the heat, but also to load up all of our. Stuff that we're bringing up. So the way we're kind of
doing it is we're relabeling, bringing some GardenStraw up just
in case, we're bringing a level, a couple extra tools. Thank you, Corona.
We're going to be doing a lot more. We've got to fit all
this in the car somehow. So good luck to us. Morning. Everyone, it's early. Jacques is
here. What've we got? Some snacks? Got the road snacks. You've
got to have your Gardettos. This is the final result. I
don't even know how we did this, but we have an entire garden
plus year in the car. Okay, we've got a little little friend
on the side of the road here. Peacock. So here's the space we are
working with. Let me show you real quick. We've got this sort of open area. So north is that way. So that's going
to inform some of our garden planning. North is directly this way, which means there's good southern exposure
on this garden throughout the day. But you've got this tree here and you've
got this that'll provide some shade. We have the original 8 in 1 tall beds. And then over here we also have the
original 8 in 1 shorter version. So we're going all Birdies, all the time,
and it's going to be really awesome. So now we need to get
this back to the house. So I just want to introduce
you guys to my lovely friend, Mr. Epic Gardener himself is Kevin,
everybody. What's up? Basically I'm gonna keep it really short and sweet
and say like I stalked him on TikTok. I got a DM from you on Insta. Yeah, okay,
yes. Cause I stalked you on TikTok. At first I don't think he knew who I was. I didn't. And then I looked you up and then I
started listening to your music and now you're in my top 1% of
play. There we go. Yeah, we got to talking and you like
to garden, you grew up gardening. I did grow up gardening and I
have not gardened as an adult. And everybody who follows me knows that
I just found this incredible house that I bought about a year ago.
That has a lot of space. And my intention was to utilize the land
in the best way possible and utilize the fact that it is a
fricking heat location, like heat magnet. So as we're building the
beds in this lower area, closer towards the entrance of the house, we took a walk around with Kehlani
and we were like, you know what? This doesn't make sense. And that's what it's all about
when you're designing a garden. The place that you decide to
place your garden, the location, cements it in stone. That's where
it's going to be for a long time. You're not going to up and
move it. In almost all cases. It'll be there for at least a few seasons. So you have to choose the right place.
And as we walked around the property, we realized this is close to the
front gate. It is nice and open, great sun exposure, but it's probably not going to get
tended to because it's so far away. And that's just a
subconscious thing. You know, if I put my garden all the
way over in that corner, I'm just less likely to go over there. And so location really matters
when you're selecting a garden. So we found a spot up near
the kitchen in this neglected, underused spot with a lot of lawn space, with some gopher wire that
already existed. So Jacques and I, the garden assistant, the
garden hermit himself, we looked at each other and we said,
for sure, this is the spot. So. We've got grass here, which is dead. And that's fine because we're going
to be putting a garden over it. Gopher wire is already in the ground. We're setting up the Hoselink already
because it's going to get pretty hot. Jacques got that going. And here's
the idea. Close to the house, so we're going to hug
this side right here. Cause wind whips through this area
right here in a pretty severe way, especially in the wintertime. So we'll probably do four of
the tall beds right there. And then we're going to stage up
the shorter guys, maybe over here. We'll play around with the spacing, but closer to the house for accessibility
and just a little bit better overall conditions. So at this point. We're just hanging out building beds. The thing I like about
the Birdies raised beds, which of course full disclosure I sell
on my store in America, in Canada. Anywhere in North America
you can get these from me. The thing I like about them
is how modular they are. So you've got different heights. You've
got the 15 and the 30 inch heights, but then you also can play around with
the panels and you can configure them to almost any space. You can
make a really small one, you can make a really long and thin
one, sort of a short and stout one. There's all sorts of different
ways you can align them. So we spent the next few hours just
building them, playing around with them, almost like playing
Tetris or playing Legos. What fits and how do these
exactly interplay in the space? If I get it so confident here
with like the gardening stuff, I feel like I'll want to live here
for a long time. In a dream world, I'd have a big enough. Yeah, I
saw that. That went in, for sure. Yeah, totally. Yep. I'd have enough, I'd be able to make this place so crazy. I don't care how long it would take. That eventually I can like
give free food to people. So like maybe if, I don't
care how long it takes, but I'd rather just use my
resources to make that happen. Yeah. Yeah. Don't mess with her. Yeah.
Don't mess with her! She'll drill ya! We got what, three beds
done? Three or four beds. She's doing it the right way. And. I sent my assistant to the
store to get a straw hat. Yeah. She wants to join the club. So
we got one more of these to build, three more of these. And then
we actually have to figure out, which you're going to help with on,
actually where to put them. Yeah. Right. Straw hat on. Straw hat Mafia. Let's go. Okay, I think we got the soil. I hope. It's a steep old hill. So if it makes
it up here, I'll be very, very pleased. Okay. So it's literally 8,000
pounds of soil from Espoma. Thank you so much, Espoma.
Look at that. Look at that. Ooh. We're going Epic. We're
going Epic Gardening. Thoughts, feeling? No, you got a
couple calluses, yeah? Yeah. I got some blisters on my hand. You love
to see it. For screwing it in. We got the beds. They got the beds. I screwed
a couple screws. And they brought, this was the craziest part. I was watching them bring all these big
old things of fricking soil up here for the last like three hours. It took awhile. It took
awhile. So we got everything. We got the plants and we're going
to go hit the hotel. We're going. To chill. At the end of day one, Jacques and I were riding high but
also psychologically and physically defeated. Because we had been up since maybe 4:30
AM and then worked for maybe 12 hours straight in a hundred plus degree heat. So we were ready to chill. We
found kind of a mediocre hotel, somewhere nearby. We grabbed some food, hung out and then we tried to get
some sleep to prep for the next day. Which was all about finalizing location, filling up the soil and the most fun part
of course, planting all of the plants. It is day two. We just can't get enough
up to the house. It's very difficult. So we're going to be forklifting
in some more. Problem solved. Okay, we're driving a flatbed.
We've got some soil behind. The garden hermit himself is here.
This is really the last push. Once we get this up to the
house, it's the fun part, which is actually planting it out
and building it out. So let's go. What we've done is, instead of moving
all of the soil we moved yesterday, like five times, which is just not smart and also
not good on the body for this heat. We've locked in this bed in place. We've
leveled it out. It's in the perimeter. So we kind of know something has to go
here and we've chosen this bed to go here. The tall 8 in 1. We got some tree trimmings from
the green bin that we found. We don't have enough, but at least
for now, at least on this bed, we can fill the bottom with the tree
trimmings and make up a little bit of the difference in some of the
soil. Just saves on the cost. You guys have seen this
on the channel before. Okay. The first two beds are in. What we've done here is
we've gone 30 inches apart. So we have a nice walking path
throughout this entire thing. I think what we'll do is we'll
split the difference on these longs. We'll keep them nice and low
here. It'll be the herb garden, the medicinal garden, the tea garden,
some of the corn or something like that. And then we're going to go 30
inches apart over here and do 1, 2, 3 where that soil bed or that bag
of soil is. And then the last two, which are this one and this one, we're probably going to place here and
here to keep it all in this tight little spot where you can walk right through
this arbor and access the garden. So we think we've come up with the
best design for this particular space. So let me show you real quick. So here you have one of the entrances
and then way over there you have another one of the entrances. So I want to walk you through
the space real quick and show you how we're thinking about
it. This is an arbor by the way. So what's going to happen here is
you're going to walk in like this. This arbor is going to
be right here probably. Going just like that. There'll
be a passion fruit on this side. And then this bed right here is going to
be where the soil is. So there'll be 1, 2, 3 tall beds lining that
cliff-side right there, which I think looks really nice.
We've got some nice short beds here. And then we've got a
tall and short bed here. So you kind of get this little
arbor here, you walk and now boom, you're in the garden. You get a
beautiful amount of beds to work in. All spaced nicely, easy to work in.
And then when you want to head out, just pop out through here. I
think this spot right here, couldn't really make a bed work here. So we probably are going to
plant a tree right here. Okay, we're basically done filling and
I think it looks really nice. So what I'm going to do now, before
we actually get to the planting, is throw some Bio-tone in. Because
when you fill a bed from scratch, you're going to get natural
settling, number one. We have some extra bags of soil. We'll
see how it settles once we water it in. But I want to just sort of
pre-fert this with some Bio-tone, just so I don't have to put
it in the planting hole. It'll save us a lot of time. We're
planting out all eight of these beds. So right now I'm taking a bag of Bio-tone
and scooping it in and mixing it in. We're filled up, we're amended.
Now begins the great hydration. You've got to get this
massive bit of soil wet. You'll have the water it way less if
you get it wet one time really deeply. You'll be good to go. So we're
just leveling the beds out, watering it in and onto the next.
Okay, we have a visitor here. This is Amy, Kehlani's friend.
She's a gardener extraordinaire. So she's going to help us lay out
some of the plants that we picked out, just so that when it comes time to plant
it gets really, really nice and easy. All right, we are going to mount
the Hoselink now. In this spot, we're going to use a four by four with
some Quikrete, just make life easy. We have the plants in roughly
where we want them to be. We'll see if anything changes
once Kehlani gets back. We've got our little watering
post hardening up over there. We're going to take a lunch break
and be back in just a second. We're going to put some finishing
touches here on the arbor. Since the wind whips
through here like crazy, we're going to dig it down a couple
inches and then put the footlong bolts in. Okay, the plant is going in. So we
chose the passion fruit on this side. Once it establishes
itself it'll just chill. And it'll go all the way up over
this. We have kind of a long one. So we're going to get it in. I'll throw
some fertilizer down in the bottom. You don't need to really do this, but
I like to do it as a matter of course, fitting it exactly to there. And
then we just backfill around. Easy, easy. Oh, yo, surprise! I can't tell you how satisfying it
was in two days to go from nothing to something. I have to be
honest, even at my own garden, I didn't work at that aggressive of a
pace because there's just so much going on here at the house. So it was so fun!
Kehlani's one of the most genuine, nice, like genuinely nice
people that I've met. It was a really unique experience
for myself and for Jacques. We had an absolute blast! I hope you guys all learned a lot from
the experience and had some fun doing it. It's just so cool to be able to build a
garden for someone who used to garden as a kid, wants to get back into it. And then you saw everyone just light up
as soon as you started planting things. So. We're done, we're done. Two hard days.
Props to Jacques behind the camera. We got a little treat. We
got a straw hat for Kehlani. We got a little special something. So
let's see how the garden looks, for real. And it turned out so good. And I got you this, the book that I
wrote. Wow, thanks, this is so exciting! Let's walk through, let's see it.
Sometimes, you just got to admire. Epic Garden. And I saw some pictures from after the
fact of how things were going. Just so, so cool! So hopefully you guys
enjoyed this. Drop a Comment. Who should I collaborate with next?
Tag them in the Comments. Let me know. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
