If you think that you can't
get a productive and lush
garden off the ground in under a year, I'm going to show you a garden today
that disproves that completely. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. This is a really cool video because
I've had someone over here at the Epic Homestead helping me out quite a
bit in my garden, planning things, we're building projects together,
all sorts of awesome stuff. My garden assistant Jacques. He also
likes to go by the garden hermit, but that's a story for another
video. In today's video, I'm going to take you to his garden and
I'm going to show you everything that he's done to transform his space
in just the time that we've been on lockdown here with this global
pandemic. So he's done it quite quickly. It's a really, really interesting
garden, very different style to my own, which I always like to showcase. So cultivate that Like button and both
myself and Jacques will bless you with 27% less pests in your garden this year. And let's go over to his garden. So I'm
hopping in the new used Epic mobile. Let's go. Alright. I'm here at Jacques' garden,
already I'm seeing something I like. And I see the man himself hiding
behind there. Hey. What's going on? Going pretty good. Got my little corn
patch here. The front yard garden, right? Yep. Which is pretty small
but still growing. Yeah. So this is actually the latest expansion,
I guess, in terms of food growing. Okay. So this is a new little patch we've
just put in. What do we have going on? So what we have is a bunch of
kind of hybridized sunflowers. So these were accidentally put here. Yep. I had this giant mammoth sunflower
last year and I thought the seeds were wrecked by caterpillars. So I just threw it out here and
this is what ended up happening. Let's take a look. We've got like some
of the. Cause it looks planned. Yeah. Well, I guess that's good. Yeah,
we got the red sun sunflower. I think it hybridized with the
mammoth. That's the theory. That's why we got a little bit of red.
You've developed a new sunflower variety. I guess. Yeah. I guess I don't
need to save seeds. Yeah. You've got some corn it
looks like down here. Yeah. So this is actually golden bantam corn, just like standard
classic yellow sweet corn. And so I put it in pretty tight cause
I didn't want to get rid of these sunflowers. Yep. And actually I'm
starting to do a Milpa style here. So I've got like three melons here. These are all high heat tolerant and
drought tolerant melons cause I don't want to worry about this front area. And I'm going to put a bunch
of cowpeas around the corn, which I already have started in the
back, which we can take a look at later. Sure. And hopefully these
artichokes will take but, I don't know about anyone else, but here in San Diego my biggest
pest is an earwig. Mine as well. You can see that here. And you know that well cause you've been
battling it at my house as well. Yeah, for sure. They seem to really
like eating plants. Yeah, let's take a look at the earwig damage
so people can understand what it is. It almost is like they skeletonize the
leaves and they leave the veins of the plant for the most part. Yeah. This is
pretty typical for the earwigs. Yeah. And I just put these in transplanted
from seed like three days ago. So, pretty bad damage. Yeah. Not too great. So that's most of
what's going on in the front yard, yeah? Yep. But the real gardens are in
the back, so. Let's go on back. Let's go check it out. All right. So,
let's go check out this backyard garden. Let's do it. I'm telling you. This is one of the coolest
gardens you'll see. Here we go. Welcome. So here's our seating area, got a little picnic table
and one of the main gardens. We'll go ahead and walk
through both of them. Let's do it. Yeah. Before we get into the full
tour of Jacques' garden, I wanted to ask you a couple of questions. I think it's a really cool story to show
you that you really can grow even if you didn't start out
growing a whole lot of food. So when did you start
this expansive garden? You have like three or
four growing spaces. Yeah. So this all pretty much
started at the peak beginning of the pandemic. So maybe like March? March.
Yeah. March. So Katrina, my girlfriend, actually went to Home Depot
and bought nine tomatoes. Okay. And this was like an overgrown
field of grass. Yeah. And we put nine tomatoes in and from
there it's kind of taken off. Right. And you'll see just how much he's
done in maybe 14 months or so. Yeah. Yeah. So really, really cool. And then what's your general
approach to the garden? Cause everyone's got their own style. Right. So at the beginning
it was kind of everything. Started off on the basic route
of buying like Miracle Grow or like synthetics. Yep. And from there I've slowly transitioned
into square foot gardening, John Jeavons' bio-intensive. So most
of our beds were originally double dug, which was a lot of work. Yeah. If someone doesn't know what double
digging is, you take a shovel, you dig a shovel's length
down, you remove that dirt, you dig another shovel's
length down, you remove that. And then you swap the dirt and you
sort of loosen the soil. Right. Sort of like a manual tilling method. Yeah. So you're kind of breaking it in and
you're adding a lot of fertility when you do that. Yeah. From there I'm kind of starting to lean
more towards not digging or maybe just like low disturbance. So we find that the low disturbance
is nice because we have less weeds and we seem to have to water less,
which is always a plus. Sure. For us, in our climate in
San Diego, watering less, if you can get away with it, is probably the best bet because we
don't really get much rain at all. We get maybe 12 inches of rain and
we'll be under that this year for sure. I think this year we're probably close
to like eight, but I just guessed that. Yeah. We're not even close to our already
low average annual temperature or rainfall, so it's not a great situation. So anything else you want to
say before we really get into. The garden? I guess the other thing is I've had a
lot of help from everyone in the house, which I really appreciate.
And so now obviously, like I'm not organic
in the certified sense, but we do like things that
are organic practices. So we don't really use any synthetic
stuff anymore and we're really big on mulch, which you'll see. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of like a beyond organic
approach because as a home gardener you're never going to get the
organic certification anyways. But there's stuff you could do
that wouldn't pass you on organics, but actually is more
organic from a philosophical
standpoint. Yeah. So anyways, without further ado, let's get into
Jacques' garden and take a look. Cool. So here we are. Before we get
into the main garden right there, or even the back garden, there's
this little garden right here. So what's going on here? So this is our like little bonus strip. So here we've got a lot
of kind of herbs, flowers, actually all sorts of things. So
down here we have our rosemary. Yep. And then here we actually
have some poppies. So I believe these are the mother of
pearl poppies. Those are beautiful. Which I'm really into. Yeah. We've got our columnar basil here.
This has actually been overwintered. So it seemed to not mind the winter
at all, which is really quite nice. And it's a Greek columnar basil. Yep. And
I've started propagating a little bit. It's pretty friendly to
propagation, I found. You really tell how the name came
about because I mean it's straight up, almost like a topiary. Yeah. Yeah. And this is
actually a volunteer sunflower. So I have no idea what
this is going to look like, but I didn't have the
heart to take it out. Sure. And so as we go over to this side,
I have to show off these leeks here. My eyes are on these. These look amazing!
So check these out. So these are, they should be buried I think another
six inches underground actually. So I'm expecting to have
quite a serious leek here. You've blanched the stem
effectively. I tried to. So I grew my seedlings when they
were about nine inches tall. I dug, made a hole like six inches deep
and just dropped the leek in there. And then this is all top
growth out of the soil itself. So you started to leek seed how. Deep? So I started them in trays and then
once they were about nine inches tall, I had a little pipe and I poked a hole
out that was about six inches deep and I dropped the whole plant
right in that hole. So you blanched it by burying it deep,
not by hilling it up. Exactly. Yeah. Smart. Yeah. So that's like one of the ways that a
lot of small scale farms will do it. And these are actually
a Bulgarian giant leeks. So they're living up to their name. Yeah. These are, honestly they're massive, especially in a little container box
like this. It's really cool looking. So this was kind of a
surprise for sure. Yeah. And also this is a volunteer
gooseberry or yeah, it is a gooseberry. Yeah. So once
these leeks are harvested out, I guess it'll be a gooseberry patch,
which I'm fine with. It's a win. As we keep going, we have like some of our
mints. So I've got like pineapple mint, mojito mint. This is double
mint, which is a funny name, but it literally tastes like
exactly double spearmint. So it's really good. Good intensity? Yeah. And so this is growing in really nicely. We really like having mint in the summer, especially with like our
drinking water. It's really nice. As we kind of move over. I think
I see some berries, yeah? Oh yeah. So originally the birds weren't bothering us but I
saw a steller jay on here yesterday so I had to get into protection mode. These are actually berries from a friend
that we're watching over and we got to reap the benefits of
those tasty blueberries. Look at these right here.
Blueberries in Southern California. I didn't know they'd taste that
much better, but they do. Yeah. So it's definitely worth it. Any tips on these that
you found really helpful? Honestly, these were
set up by somebody else. I think the big pot size is really
helping keep the moisture in. Yeah. And also I have added like some
of that Espoma Berry-Tone to it. So I added a little more acidity,
a little bit of fertilizer. So they seem to be really
appreciating it. Cool. As we kind of pan over a little bit, we have kind of a jungle
in our seating area here. So this is plumeria. We've got a bouganvillia in the back. That's a kiwi plant over
there in that clay pot. Yeah. And if you look at this table, we have
some abutilons. You've got it everywhere, man. Which is pretty sweet. That's a gorgeous flower.
They're really cool. One of the cooler flowers you're
ever going to see right there. Definitely like Katrina's favorite and
I've grown quite fond of them. Yeah. And these guys are actually,
these are golden nugget tomatoes. And they could grow in really small pots. But you could see that this is like maybe. A different color. Yeah. So they
will turn like a more golden color. Would you say that that one's ripe then
right there? No, it has to be full gold. Full gold. But these are really small pots. The
only struggle is watering it enough. Sure, sure. Okay. Cool. Well
let's, why don't we go, I mean, what's crazy about this tour is that's
not even really the real garden, so to speak. This right here is and so
let's go ahead and pop in here, Jacques. Yeah, let's do it. So here we
are in the front yard garden. Let's actually get in
here and take a look. So let's do it. Got this little fence
here. It was just a DIY? Oh yeah, everything is DIY. Was this for just to add a little
border to the structure of it or what? It was for a border
and for the dogs. Okay. That way we don't have to worry
about it. A little pro tip, you get a little PVC pipe in the ground. It makes it real easy to throw your
post and not have it wobble around. So you just sunk that in? Yep.
Yep. So yeah, we could walk in. So you can start seeing the mulch. Yeah. It's kind of a mix of straw
mulch and these Aspen wood chips. I kind of went with strong mulch around
vegetables because vegetables like straw mulch more. The wood chips I kind of have around
the canes cause they'll appreciate that more. Yeah. That'll be a
multi-year crop. Yeah, exactly. And so basically what we have
here is a variety of canes. I actually don't know
any of these varieties. They were a gift from
Katrina's dad. Okay. And yeah. So what I have here is they're all in
the ground and have this kind of funny little trellis. Since I have
them up against the fence, I get a lot more vertical space.
And in order to maintain them, so we're not walking
into thorns basically, every so often I put these little
bamboo stakes in the ground. Okay. And then what I do is I run this twine
across the bamboo stakes and then tie it to the fence post like this. So you're
sorta just basketing them in? Yeah, so they can't really go anywhere but up
now. Right. And they look really great. Yeah. These look extremely healthy.
You getting any fruit off of them yet? Not yet, but you can see some of it's
trying to escape through the fence here. So there's one, look at that.
So I don't know what it is. Hard to see but it is
there guys, it is there. But yeah. Kind of look over here,
this kind of monstrosity of a tomato. So the reason why it looks like this
is because this is actually one of the original tomatoes that we planted
in March of last year. Wow. So this is a husky cherry tomato
and nothing seems to stop it. This tomato is then over a year
old, it's 14 months old? Yeah. And it just keeps producing. Look at that! We had tomatoes all winter off of
these, which was really a nice bonus. And they're actually really good. So
that's definitely a keeper in my book. It might not look the prettiest,
but it's definitely still producing. Still producing, yeah, which
is something we have to say, it's hard to do if you're
in a lower zone. Yeah. This is San Diego so I have
some help there for sure. Yeah. I guess we can keep going this way. Let's
move on down. So walking through here, got a little more canes,
have the last of the peas. You can see that I have powdery mildew. That's just the name of the game in
San Diego. We're close to the coast. Nothing I can do about that. But over
here, what we really have going is, these are some Oriental Express eggplants. And so these are actually
overwintered from last year. And so we're already actually getting
fruit and this is. Oh, wow, look at that. This is pretty early in the season for
eggplant to actually start producing because they really do
appreciate the heat. Eggplant usually is going to start
producing in like July or August, right? Right. And so since I overwintered them, I was able to just basically cut them
down until they were like a foot tall. It was just stem. And I actually used this bed to grow
like greens all through the winter. And then now that we're going into
summer, I'm just letting it be eggplant. Yeah. it's a really cool idea because what
Jacques is basically saying is when winter came, he cut these down to
about a third of their size, planted some vegetables that
were leafy in the wintertime, grew them right next to it and then
harvested those and then let these come back. And you can do it with the
tomatoes, like you said, the eggplants, but also the peppers. Yeah. So actually I have a
couple overwintered peppers
that we can see as we're walking around. Sure. But yeah, it's been a really nice bonus because
now I don't have to start eggplant. Right. And if you're in a colder
zone, you could dig these up. Right. Pot them up, cut them back and
then try to bring them back. You might get a failure rate of maybe
50%, but you still get something. Right. And that's, I think it's definitely
worth it for eggplant. I agree. Just by your feet, that's actually
our wine cap mushroom patch. Oh yeah, look at that. It's like an
eight inch thick straw mulch. And then I have burlap on top just
to keep the temperatures down. If you pick it up you could
probably see some mycelium starting. Let's see if we got any in here. I'm
doing the same thing at my place. Oh yeah. Look at that. So hopefully we'll
have a nice flush in like fall, it would be my guess. You've got a nice
bit of white growth there. Oh yeah. I got this monster borage volunteer. Looked pretty funny when
all the cabbages were here. I was very slowly harvesting them out.
It looked like a mutant plant basically. Sure. So back like in this little section
is kind of like what I'm looking at as like a perennial patch. So on the
ground here I have some currants, but really like the main star
that I'm trying to get going is, this is our asparagus patch. So this
is actually asparagus from seed, not from crowns. Wow! So they're
already starting to grow quite well. But you know, I won't get
any actual harvest until. The following year. Yeah. At which point
you may not even harvest those. Right, they're probably going
to be pretty small. Yeah. We don't want to take
away from the plant,. But I got like a little bit of
pollinators here. Some blackberries, strawberries, et cetera. I'm really excited about this one
because it has a lot of shade too. So it keeps the watering down. Got it. You'll see that a lot of things I
do leave to flower just because the pollinators really actually
appreciate these small flowers. In this case this is parsley and
honestly it looks pretty nice. Yeah. It looks great. It's got this sort of umbral
flower structure that a
lot of things specifically need. They need that support to land on. They really seem to appreciate it.
Yeah. Kind of going over to here. These are kind of like the
first beds that I double dug. So it's mostly leafy greens in this
garden cause it gets more shade. So I like to take advantage of that.
But I have to show off one thing here. Let's do it. Which is a rutabaga. So this is one of those things that
I always see in the colder climates. And, I mean, look how big that is.
That's massive! So just trying to show, you know, Charles Dowding,
maybe not quite the same size. But, I'll tell you straight up
when I was at Dowding's house, that's not the same size, but still
very impressive. Still very impressive. I'll take it. So we've got a little
more overwintered eggplant here. This is kind of a DIY trellis, which is just tree stakes with
a conduit on the top. Yup. So total cost there is
like 12 bucks. So not bad. Yeah. A lot of what you do
in your garden is quite DIY, quite like repurpose material. Yeah. So we really like to repurpose
stuff and of course for the budget, it's great too. Sure. But the main like really exciting part of
this garden that I'm personally excited for is the garlic. And what
we have is all this garlic. So all of this was started back in I think October. So this
is all softneck garlic, four or five different varieties. I kind of did a little bit of a thing
here where on this side I have them tighter spacing and on the other
side I have a looser spacing. So I wanted to see if it would matter
as much. We could actually pull one up. Let's do it. So I'm going to go for a big one
cause I want to know. Okay, hold on. This one right here? Yeah, I
think this is the one. Here. We go. Moment of truth. I haven't. Actually looked so. Oh, that's not bad. That's actually really
nice! So I actually have to find the tag, but. That is a nice looking bulb. It's a
pretty decent head. And that's softneck? Yeah. All of these are softneck. So
that's all I messed with this year. Now that I know, based on your
experiment, that I can grow hardneck, I think next year I will. Sure.
Cause I need those scapes. That's pretty impressive though. It looks
like you have one, unless that's just, it's got a little purple hue to it. Yeah, this might be one
of the purple varieties. I have like the early Italian and like
a purple early Italian, I believe. Yeah. So pretty soon I'm going to
harvest this whole bed out. Okay. Which I'm excited for because that means
I get to plant something else there. Why don't we take a look at this
little herb patch over here. I think this is something
really interesting that
you particularly do in your garden. Yeah. So we really like herbs a lot
and we like doing borderings with herbs. They kind of
define the garden nicely. But really the main purpose of this herb
patch is that it's really close to the kitchen. So when we're cooking, we just come out here and we
can take a look at some of it. I'll try not to shade it, but basically the real winner here
that I think everyone should have, is this. This is lemon thyme.
If you could smell this, it's actually incredible. Oh, that's
fresh. It's so good! And very citrusy. Oh yeah. It's surprisingly
citrusy. But yeah, so I kind of let this calendula grow
pretty big because we really like the flowers too. And if anyone
hasn't seen this guy, this is actually called rue. It's
a really funny looking plant. And what we actually use it for
is you put a stem of this in your coffee and it makes your coffee like
kind of mellow out and have like a really nice flavor. Yeah, you turned me
on to that. Great idea. Quite nice. Okay. Well that's the
front yard garden. Yep. Why don't we zoom on over and take a
look. Cause you thought this was it? It's not, there's actually
a huge garden in the back. So let's go ahead and
take a look. Let's do it. So here we are at Jacques'
seed station. And first, honestly before we even talk about this, I kind of want you to talk a
little bit about this right here. So this is Pride of Madeira. It's kind of been all over our
garden and if you take a look at it, you'll see that it's
absolutely covered in bees. So there's no way we're taking this out. It's really great around the borders.I
actually really like the color too. Beautiful color. And yeah, you'll see
the bees just go nuts for it. Yeah. And right underneath it is where I
kind of have these two seedling tables. So I mean, first off we
gotta talk about these. So that's that Epic 6 cell seed starting, but look at that. So these
are actually cowpeas. These are what I'm going to
put between the corn out front. And you can see all those roots. Yeah, let's take a look at those
roots. And Jacques is the first person, besides me, to try these out. And I'm hooked. We hooked him. That's
like, oh, that's all I want to use. So that's just how it's going to be. But
yeah, I've got some more peppers here. I always start more than I need. I
always wish I had more space than I have. Right. Do you have any specific ways you start
seeds that you think would be valuable for someone to know about? Yeah. I mean, so one of the main things I like to do
is to really make sure that I have a nice even - like whenever you're using
potting mix or seed starting mix, you want to make sure it's not too chunky.
They really don't seem to like that. And lately I've been a really
big fan of vermiculite. So you can see these trays over here.
Most of these are actually flowers, so they're quite small seeds
that need to be surface sown. And so by putting the vermiculite on top, it makes it really easy for me to not
have to be on top of watering as much. Because each little piece of
vermiculite is basically like a sponge. Yep. And it still lets the light through if
it's a light germinating seed as well. So that helps a lot. But really it's just about how
much water and I try to make sure that they don't get too
hot in the beginning. So I start most of them in the shade
until they actually sprout. Cool. And that seems to be working for me. All right. Let's pop into the main
show. Yeah. It's crazy how many, I mean, most people's gardens, it's one space. And you have three spaces
that are equally impressive. I mean, so we like to eat. The main purpose here is to
grow food that tastes great. And we've discovered that everything
we grow tastes way better. So, I mean, that's the name of the game here. First of all, let's just take a quick
look at these structures. There's a, there's a rooster. So bear with
us. It's real garden life here. But take a look at some of these
structures, again with the DIY method. So why don't we talk about
a couple of these first? Yeah, sure. So again, these
are those tree stakes. They sell them at like
Home Depot for four bucks. And what I have is conduit
on top that's 10 feet. And all I did is just throw
a simple trellis net on it. And with this I could really
grow anything that climbs. Last year I had beefsteak tomatoes on
this and it's really easy to kind of just weave the tomatoes through
each net. Nice and light, yup. And underneath I'm currently kind
of cover cropping with fava beans and have some more in the back
there. So basically the idea here is, I mean, I guess I'm not cover cropping necessarily
because I'm letting them actually produce. If I were to cover crop I'd
really probably take them out once they flowered. And let them drop, right? Right. Because when they flower that's when
you have like peak nitrogen in the soil. Got it. But yeah, over
here, Florida weave. And. This is a new project for you,
you just did this. Yeah. So I. Actually just put these in the
ground, man, maybe like a month ago. And so the basic concept
here, T posts on the edges, wooden stake in the middle, just cause I
had them. And I have them pretty tight, so they're 18 inches apart. And along each row of tomatoes
I have two sets of drip lines. So I really want to do the deep
watering. I have the again, really deep mulch here. Yeah.
Should probably go deeper. This is probably getting down to only
half an inch. But especially here, like if you look around the drip,
as I dig, it's really quite, quite moist underneath. Yeah. And so
I only have to water this area like, I mean once or twice a week max. Why don't we talk about the soil
that you're dealing with? Yeah. So the soil here has been
pretty good. It is pretty clay, so some of the problems you could have
is overwatering because once you do it once, you're basically not going
to dry that out for a long time. So I found that adding the straw helps
a lot because it adds a little bit of organic matter over time. It helps the
soil kind of drain a little better. But beyond that, it seems to
have the nutrients we need. It's mostly just about sort of continuing
to add organic matter so that we could increase the drainage properties every
time. Sure. Behind here we've got, it looks like more favas. Yeah,
more favas. This trellis net, I have some peas on there that
I'm letting dry out for seed. But I'm a little scared to plant on
this cause I've had two chayote plants entirely disappear from gophers. Oh no. So I'm a little bit
hesitant to plant here. I'm letting fennel go to seed and dill
go to seed cause that's one of our favorite kind of seasonings. So you'll see a lot of kind of
flowering dills and fennels around. Something I like about your garden is
you let things go "past" what they should go to and you use it
for a different purpose. Yeah. We like to kind of use
things as much as we can. One last like little pro tip I'll say,
or I don't know, not pro tip, sorry. Amateur tip is, so if you
like between the tomatoes, what I have is that's sweet alyssum. That's a purple carpet variety I believe. But hoverflies really like it
and hoverflies are the natural combatant to like tomato hornworm.
So you bring more of those in, hopefully they handle your
hornworms for you. And also basil. So those are some Greek
columnar basils I propagated. And I also have some sweet basil that
I'm also going to be planting around the rest of it. Cause you know, basil. Right. When you do these Florida
weaves or these big tomato trellises, you can actually prune off a lot of the
lower growth as it matures and then. Put something below. Exactly. So,
I mean, once they get up to here, there's pretty much not going to be
much leaves on the bottom foot or two. So yeah, this is kind of
the tomato patch. Right, we could kind of walk over maybe here. So these two beds here
are actually double dug. So these are some of the
other double dug beds. I just want to call out a couple
interesting things. So down here, these are actually onions that we grew
from like those little pearl onions you could get at the grocery store. So
all I did is just buy a bag of those, plant them. And so these are
supposed to be Cipollini sweet. So I'm not getting a huge
head, but I mean, look at that. That's going to be perfect on the grill. So that's what we're going for
here is a nice onion to grill up. And just to repeat, you bought it from
the grocery store for like 99 cents. Yeah, so it's like a little bag of like
50 little tiny onions for like a dollar. And that's it. What's weird about that is at the
grocery store that's a pearl onion, but at the nursery, that's an onion set. Exactly. So it's like, well, why not? So looking over here, this
is our kind of pepper bed, or one of them. So this is actually an
overwintered ancho poblano. Look at this. This is almost a tree. Yeah. So you
can see it's kind of interesting. The growth over the winter has
this like really dark color. So these are the older leaves and all
of this stuff really shot up in the last month,. Everything above your hand? Yeah. And we already have some peppers
on it on that side over there. And so we're really pleased about
that cause we love poblanos. And what I'm going to actually do here is, you can see these kind
of big bamboo stakes. I have them on both ends of the bed.
I'm just going to do a basic like, not really a Florida weave, but
just have lines running across. And that's just to kind of help
support the peppers as they grow. So I don't really want to get
too involved in trellising, but I want to make sure
that they're not breaking. And maybe the reason why
you're doing it this way, instead of just staking each individual, is because you have them in a perfect
row. So it's more efficient? Yeah. And I have, I think in this bed
there's like 20 pepper plants. So I don't want to get 20
cages or something like that. So again like these stakes, maybe like a dollar max and the
twine is basically negligible. Yeah. So that's what we're going for. Why don't we talk about these bad boys
right here. This is what I want to see. So these, trying to compete with potato daddy
over here but I don't know if I'll get there. So these are all potatoes.
They're grown in grow bags. So right now these are about
like two and a half months old. I harvested one of them at two months
and they were amazing basically. So I'm really excited for these!
What kind of, what size grow bag? So I have a single potato and this
is just a five gallon and then I have like two potatoes in a seven gallon.
And I was going to hill them up more, as you can see I rolled the bag, but
I didn't really find it necessary. So now I kind of wish I filled the bag
all the way and just planted deeper, honestly. But we still
got a great harvest, like 10 to one or something like that.
So I'm definitely happy with that. I know everyone wants to see
this. We need to talk about the, we need to talk about this. So this,this is like a
little teepee trellis. So this is actually
Katrina's idea, the design. And the basic concept here
is maximizing vertical space, having like a nice shady place,
once it's fully grown that is, to kind of hang out in. So the way this works is each one of
these conduits has like a four foot rebar underneath it. And you know, a little bit
of trigonometry, nothing too advanced. But basically we figured out the angles, hammered in the rebar and
dropped the conduit in. So where they cross is about eight feet. And what you'll see on this
backside is this is a passionfruit. We actually kind of decided that we're
going to let this passionfruit basically take over because it will. Yeah. That's
the name of the game with passionfruit. So just to be clear, you drove in the rebar at an angle down
into there maybe two feet or so. Yeah. So I think I used like a little compass, but basically you just need to find an
angle, hammer that in, roughly right. You can see they're not perfectly crossed
up there. It doesn't really matter. And then you just drop
the conduit right on it. So it's not going to go anywhere. It's been in the ground for over a year
now and it hasn't budged. There you go. And in the meanwhile we have
some you know, cucumbers, all sorts of runner beans. I notice you also built in a
non-twined section. Yeah exactly. So you can actually sneak
in and kind of chill. Yes. So you could go right in here, once it's covered in passionfruit
it's going to be amazing. Cause it's going to be shaded and
there's going to be passionfruit hanging everywhere. A little garden
fresh dinner in there. Exactly. So at least that's the
plan. So I guess over here, we can look at this. Yeah, this is. Interesting because this is
another application of that herb. Border idea. Yeah. So originally
actually the way this worked is, this was the fence line right behind this. And so I decided like the best use for
that would be a nice strip of herbs. So this is a huge variety of
herbs. We're really huge on herbs. And then what happened was we're
like we need more garden space. So if you look over here, this bed
is actually all no dig entirely. So what we did is we pushed the
fence out, threw down some cardboard, three inches of compost and just
planted right in it. So this is like a, really truly, "I've never dug
this at all" bed. This is the. Charles Dowding extraordinaire bed. And you could see, I mean, one thing for sure for no dig is I would
recommend going with squash. Cause, I mean this is Lebanese squash.
You could see it's loving it. So we've been eating
squash for like a month. Straight compost from the Miramar landfill
actually. So it's municipal compost, so it was free. Yeah. So you
know me, I'm about free. Yeah. And I see something that I really
like seeing in the background here. Ooh, yeah. So this,
this is the GreenStalk, which I think everyone
has seen before or at least on your channel, for sure. This is definitely the best
vertical system I've seen. Yeah. So when I was working with Kevin, he has two of these and I was
actually really impressed. I didn't know I would be this impressed, but it's basically amazing for beans. So we have like five rows, just beans. And we're actually starting to get. You've got my favorite bean
of all time. There we go. Yeah. Dragon's tongue. Yeah.
And they're just going off. All the beans started in here started
producing faster than anything in the ground. And I'm going to say that this is because
this warmed up faster than the ground. Yep. So they're really doing great
and it's really low maintenance, which I really appreciate. There you go. I guess we could kind of look over
here too, which is the wild zone. So this is all chamomile. I
can't keep up with booping it. Like you can see here, like I just came through and booped
it but it's just not going to quit. Beautiful. And in the back here I basically have a
variety of pollinator mixes that I just kind of scattered. And it's
great because this area, just like as a little tip, if you have
like an area that's really quite crazy. So these are kind of invasive vines, which I guess eventually
we'll have to deal with. But it's too much trouble to worry about
growing in this area cause it's full of pests and it has all this
kind of invasive stuff. So we decided to make it a pollinator
patch that way we don't have to worry about damage. We don't have to
worry about watering as much. Just let nature take care of it. Yeah,
exactly. And, there's that big sunflower. It's the same one from the front I
guess, it's a volunteer. Massive. Yeah. And actually, we didn't really
talk about that much. But oh yeah, one more thing, sorry. So here we've
still got some broccolini going. So we are starting to get a little warm
but this broccolini is not quitting yet. So until it quits, we're going to keep
getting it. Yep. And in the back there, I don't know if you could see it, but that's kind of like one of
the main compost bins. Yeah, let's do one over there. All
right. So we're over here. This is kind of the compost bin. So this is kind of where I do
like the aging of the compost. So, everything can go in here pretty
rough. I'm not too worried about it. I turn it maybe like once
a month. You could see, as I prune stuff I kind
of just throw it on top. I'm not really that worried about it. I
have a little compost thermometer here. It's right now it's sitting
at a hundred degrees. Not bad. And I just have some burlap on
top and it's a lot of straw but it's really just going to, over
time. I'm not in a rush basically. But yeah. Oh yeah. All sorts of bugs
in there. Nice fungal spores in there. So this is a really slow way to do
it but it requires like no time. So that's kind of what
I'm going for. Yeah. And then we have something
special right here. Oh yeah. So, we also wanted to grow some wheat here. So we really got into sourdough
and making our own bread. So I mean the obvious next
step is to grow your like, grow your own wheat and try
to make a loaf of bread. So this is a total experiment. Seems
to be going really well. Again, this is kind of a wild area, but
the wheat doesn't seem to mind. No and you're actually getting a
little bit of a seed head. Oh yeah. It's developing right here. So, you know, it looks like we're
going to get something, hopefully at least one loaf
of bread. That's the plan. So we're here with two of the
harvests from Jacques' garden, the example harvest. This beautiful
garlic and our Cipollini. Yeah. It doesn't really look like
a Cipollini though. No. It's basically just like
a giant spring onion, but it should hopefully
have some of that sweetness. The thing I think is so interesting
about Jacques' garden is number one, you did this really fast. Yeah.
So within 15, 16 months of, would you say this is when you really
started gardening or what were you doing before you had this space? So before we were really working on
this I was actually in an apartment, so I was not gardening there. Okay. So. Nothing, effectively to
this in 15, 16 months. Right. Yeah. And you know, growing up
we've always had gardens in our house, and especially tomatoes. So we're definitely all about
tomatoes and as you can see, I have quite a lot of tomatoes still.
Yeah, but I mean, lately honestly, like it might, I don't know
how it comes out on video, but there's definitely some work
that can be done on here. Always, there always is. I mean,
yeah, but that's the realness. So it's just about finding like
the time to go out here and it's not a chore to me. It's more about
like what I actually find fun to do. And we get to reap the
rewards of eating it all too. Yeah. I think what's cool to me is, as soon as I had my space at the Epic
Homestead, I really started to go. And it took some time to get it ramped up. There's a lot of things going on in
the Epic Gardening world. But to me, I think it's really inspiring
to see someone go from, I'm not going to say never gardened
before, because that's not true, but certainly not with this much
space. No, not with this much space. To have a garden, this productive and this well thought
out with all these different elements, honestly, for, I know you probably
can't do the math right away. But how much do you think this roughly
cost you in money? Not time, but money. Honestly, in money? The biggest expense
is probably going to be buying soil. Yeah. So I mean, I mean, I could
say like maybe a thousand bucks. I don't really know. For all of the
structures. Yeah, I mean. The soil, the tools. A lot of the
structures are pretty cheap. Some of the tools we just had. I've been
expanding as we've been growing. Yeah. But it hasn't been like
enough to be noticeable. Yeah. I guess maybe my seed addiction is a
little worse. Well that doesn't count. It never counts in the garden
budget. That's free game. Yeah. So I hope you guys enjoyed this
tour. If you like what Jacques is up to, I'll put his Instagram
in the video description. He helps me out a lot at
the Epic Homestead as well. So it's been great to tour the garden. I think it was high time that everyone
kind of saw behind the scenes of what you've got going on. Yeah, for
sure. And if you have any questions, drop them down in the
Comments. Until next time, good luck in the garden and
keep on growing. Thanks.
