This is John Kohler with GrowingYourGreens
and I have a special announcement for you guys! Until May 25th at midnight, I’m offering
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other kind of stuff. They hold up really well. That’s why I’m offering them. Click over right here to get yours today! Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com! Today we have another exciting episode for
you! And I’m still visiting So next, we’re going to go ahead and set
up the irrigation. And you guys might be thinking, “John, you
know, setting up those raised beds, that’s super simple. You put out those frames and fill some dirt,
hand mix it. Yeah it’ll get you sweating a little bit,
but it’s really easy. But I’m scared of the irrigation, man!” And people are needlessly scared about irrigation. Irrigation in my opinion is easier than all
the groundwork! I’d rather set up irrigations all day instead
of build raised beds all day. It’s a lot less work, you know. Super simple, super easy! Any of you guys could do it. And I’m here to help and show you guys how
to easily do it. So number one, what you’re going to need,
I recommend anyways, is a watering timer, digital hose and watering timer. This basically hooks up to your hose bibb
here, and it has a little computer in there. And it comes on and turn off at certain times. So what this allows you to do, this allows
you to be free. This allows you to go to work and not worry
about if your garden is going to get water. This allows you to travel to Hawaii and sit
on the beach. And while you’re sitting on the beach, provided
you got a good battery in here, your garden is going to be watered without you, without
having to ask a friend to come over. Because let me tell you, I’ve asked friends
to come over to my house and water. And they’ve forgotten. And my plants didn’t make it. And that wasn’t fun. And I don’t want you guys to lose your plants. And sometimes you get busy in your life. Sometimes you got to take your kids to the
emergency room, and you might forget to water in that 100 degree day. And if you forget that one day, you’ve put
all this money, energy and time into your garden to plant it out. And if you forget that one day, when you had
to do something else you forgot to water, 100 degrees, you know, the soil’s bone dry,
your plants are going to be kaput. They’re gone just because you forgot one
day. They are that delicate. So that’s why I recommend, you know, get
the best insurance, automatic watering system, right. Super simple. These timers depending on where you get it,
they are about 30 bucks, you know. There’s several different options. We got this as the Home Depot. We got the Dig brand. I specifically went with this brand was because
what I did was I kind of went online and saw which models the Home Depot offered and Lowe’s
and Target and other stores. And then I googled, you know, the model number,
found amazon reviews, other reviews, read all the reviews. And this one kind of had the best reviews
of them all. Not all the reviews are positive, but overwhelmingly
this had higher marks than other brands. I personally know the Dig company that makes
this, and this unit is designed and made in Israel, you know, for the extreme temperatures
over in Israel. So I think that’s a little bit higher quality,
in many cases than maybe stuff coming out of China. The thing I don’t like about this, it only
has a 3 year warranty. Whereas some of these timers have like a 7
year warranty. The most likely part of the timer to fail
is the valve mechanism that turns on and off. And what you don’t want to do is leave them
out in the cold winter months. You want to maybe, you know, cover it minimally. Because if it gets too cold and the water
expands inside when it’s frozen, it will break your valve. It will either be stuck open or stuck closed. Being stuck closed is definitely a better
thing to happen. The other thing we want to do regularly is
come by and check the little battery meter on here and make sure it’s good. If it’s getting anywhere near under maybe
a quarter or getting close, replace the battery. Don’t wait till it’s fully out, right. Because if you wait till it’s fully out,
if it’s fully out one of two things may happen. It may be stuck open or may be stuck closed. Being stuck closed is probably a better thing,
that depends. One time my garden timer was stuck open for
like a month at a time without me knowing it. The water bill was expensive. That’s the bad news. The good news is my plants were alright because
they got constant water. And I, looking back at the situation, although
my water bill was quite expensive, I’d rather have my timer stick open than stay closed. Because then I would have lost all my plants. And my plants are more valuable to me than,
you know, I don’t know, a couple hundred or more bucks of a water bill. Alright, so we’re going to set this guy
up really super simple, super easy. Open this guy up. Nothing to be afraid about. If you guys use an iPhone or android phone
or smartphone, you guys could operate a water timer, seriously. It comes with instructions in here in the
box. These are super simple to use. And if you’re kind of intuitive and stuff,
you could figure it out yourself, which I’m going to do. On the bottom, first thing is you’re going
to want to install a battery. So we’re going to go ahead and pull this
apart. And this guy takes a 9 volt which I kind of
like. It’s probably going to last longer than
some of those units that take 4 double A’s or even 2 double A’s on some of them. Always, make sure you always use a alkaline
battery in these guys. Don’t ever use the carbon zinc ones. And try to get a good name brand. They’re going to last you longer. Your health of your garden is at stake. Alright! So we put that guy in. And fired it on up. It basically has the time at 12:00 noon. I think the time is maybe 3:30. So we’re just going to go ahead and do all
the settings. I mean, we’ll set it later. We don’t need to show you guys all the settings. So basically on here the controls are pretty
easy. There’s a manual on and manual off. So if you want to just water your garden or
test your system, press the On, you could hear it. Can you hear the valve go click, there’s
some kind of like valve that just in and out. Then you press the Off. You could hear it close. And then there’s a couple different modes. You press the modes for the timer and the
days to water, the start time, the off time. And you have 4 different programs. So I do encourage you guys when you look for
a water time, look for one that you could program up to 8 times a day. That’d be optimal. They have internet connected timers. You could spend a lot of money on a timer
and all this kind of stuff. 4 times a day would be minimum. Don’t do any less than 4 times a day. Why you want 4 times a day is specially in
the middle of the summer time, what you want to do is you don’t want to do like one long
30 minute soak with the drip irrigation, you know. Maybe that might be good for like, you know,
shrubs and trees and things like that. But for the gardening, what I prefer to do
is actually short bursts of irrigation to get the root zone wet and to go a little bit
deeper. So for example, in the summer time when it’s
going to be getting hot, you know, I may water right in the morning, you know. Plants are kind of awake enough, the sun’s
coming out,yeah give them a squirt of water, right. I’ve been giving them maybe, I don’t know,
5 minutes. And this depends on your weather conditions,
your soil consistency, the plants you’re growing. There’s a lot of factors. And then maybe like, you know, the sun comes
up at noon, your garden is the space where it gets full sun like around noon. So then maybe like, you know, your plants
are kind of getting hot. If you come out and you see their leaves drooping,
then you know you should have actually already have been watering them. So then I might maybe water around 1 o’clock,
12:30, maybe another 5 minutes. Hit them another 5 minutes, another 3 minutes,
depending on, you know, also the dripper volume, how much water flow you’ve got coming out
the dripper. If it’s a 1 gallon per hour dripper, a half
gallon, 2 gallon per hour dripper, and/or your water pressure coming out. This is all going to, you know, play an influence
on how long you need to, to do it. And then, and then maybe like, you know, if
at 3 o’clock it’s still really burning up and your plants have burned through the
water, you watered for a couple five minutes at once. So then you might want to hit them again at
4. Hit them at 4 for another 5 minutes. That’s your third time of the day. And then maybe, you know, let them burn through
that and maybe like, I don’t know, 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock in the night, hit them for another
5 minutes, you know, or 3 minutes. I’m just pulling these numbers out of thin
air. I don’t even know the schedule. What I’m going to do here is I’m going
to check it out. But yeah, that’s kind of like my general
thing. And then in the winter, I dial it back, you
know, because the sun’s not directly on it. I might do, you know, once a day 5 minutes. Maybe twice a day. It’s usually once a day in the winter time
for me. So yeah, so all you need to do, you want to
make sure there’s a screen installed in here. Because any kind of particulate will drop,
clog up your emitters. And if your watering system is not working
properly, you want to check this every few months and make sure there’s no gunk in
there. You want to remove that and clean it out. So how easy this is just to install is you
put this on your little spigot and you screw it on. I like screwing things on more than I like
screwing things off. Alright, so screw this guy on. Make sure you have a nice tight fit. Then crank this all the way up high. Alright. And there’s no leaks. So that’s how easy it is to install, right! Now we’re just going to leave the spigot
on, right. Make sure you leave the spigot on. I like to usually crank it up all the way
to the full extension. I kind of like the ball valves that have levers
instead of the, you know, these gate valves. I like to crank it all the way on because
usually when it’s halfway on, if you don’t have really good gaskets in there, it might
be leaking. If it’s all the way on then it’s more
likely to, you know, have a good seal I found. Anyways. The one I have in my house is like that. And then what you’re going to do, the next
step is you’re going to want to get out your kit. Well you’ll want to program that. We won’t show that on the video to save
time. You could read the instructions. But we got a kit here. So, the cheapest way to do this is by a kit. The kit will have many of the parts you may
need. If course, if i was doing it on my own, I
might buy like separate parts because I don’t need some of the parts in the kit. But once again, this kit was a much better
value than buying all the parts separately. And I’ll be able to use all these parts
to plant my, the garden out here. So this has all the back flow preventer, the
pressure regulator, swivel adaptor, the poly tubing, the micro tubing, compression couplings,
drippers, all the different connectors, the hole puncher, the figure-8s. So definitely really good idea. And I do recommend, you know, I’ve experimented
with a lot of different brands, rain drips, and all these different ones. And the DIG brand is my favorite brand. They make generally higher quality products
than so many other brands out there. So, we’re going to go ahead and open this
up. So the one thing I should have told you guys
before even starting this job, and I should have done already, is I should have took this
main tubing out. Because it comes in a coil. I should have took this out and cut all these,
the tape on it. And just like furl that out and put it out
straight so that it wouldn’t be in a nice curl, because it like to kind of conform in
the shape it’s been in for the last couple months in the box. And I’d lay it out in the sun so it’s
nice and straight, so it’s easier to work with when you’re ready. I didn’t do that this time. Let’s see here. So this is the main tubing. And then we got this smaller tubing, which
I may or may not use. I don’t generally like to use this stuff. But due to the situation and the small budget,
I couldn’t get like a hundred feet of this stuff, so we got the small stuff. And then we got all the different pack. This may look intimidating with all these
parts, but these parts are really simple. So let’s go ahead and dig in and get this
set up and going. Alright! First step, unfurl this guy. Alright, got it all unfurled. It’s a nice big coily mess. Next step, take your pack and you’re going
to want to find a certain part in there. And this is the adaptor that adapts your standard
hose spigot to the tubing. So the next few parts you will need to do
this are included in the pack. Number one, it’s your back flow valve. So this is very important to install in any
irrigation kind of setup. It allows water coming out of the house one
direction to go into your garden. It doesn’t allow dirty garden water to go
back up into the clean water supply if that were to happen by accident. So that’s the first thing we’ll need. That should also have a rubber gasket in there. We could go ahead and screw this on to the
bottom of the timer. Make sure it’s nice and tight but not over-tight. I know some of you guys are like strong and
you’re like ‘man I can crank that on!’ Don’t do it, man, you’ll crack it. And if it doesn’t crack now, it will crack
in the heat, trust me, I know because I’ve done it. Like small man complex. Alright, so next step is you’re going to
want to get this guy. And this is known as a pressure regulator. So this regulates the pressure to the proper
pressure and psi, pounds per square inch, for the drip system. And once again, this should have another gasket
in there, make sure it’s installed there. And we’re just going to go ahead and screw
that guy in. Alright! Once again, do not over tighten. Next part you will need is the part right
here. Make sure this has another little gasket or
washer in there. And then also it has another screen. Very important, keep the screen in there. The more screens, the better. Of course this screen will probably get most
of the debris but you also want to check this one as a secondary precautionary backup. So yeah, what you’re going to do is you’re
going to go ahead and take this tubing here. And this tubing is super simple to use, man. If you stuck like a straw in a glass of soda
to drink out, not that I ever recommend drinking soda, you should be drinking fresh made juice
from your garden, you could put these two together. So all you do is you take this tubing, you
take this little thing here. Look at that, it’s about the right size. You stick it in there and you kind of just
wiggle this back and forth. And if you guys look closely at that, it’s
kind of just like going in. And it just, and then it finally goes in there
and it’s in there! That’s it, man! It’s not like you don’t have to cut anything,
you don’t have to do anything, you don’t need wrenches, pliers, you don’t need no
tools! This is a no tool install, remember. And then you’re good, right. And then you’re just going to go ahead and
screw this in! So well, once it comes out, you know, we’re
at a nice elbow bend. And let me go ahead maybe back the camera
up so you guys could see what we’re looking at. So now we’re looking at where it comes out
of the water timer, goes through the one way valve, pressure regulator, converts into the
drip tubing. And then it kind of curls and has a nice curve. We could kind of make it over to the raised
beds. But this is a little bit, you know, takes
up a little bit of space and what not. So I want it to be cleaner. So what we’re going to use instead of just
dragging this. And you can’t kink this tubing. If you kink this tubing, it’s going to cut
off the flow. So you can’t do it. So what you need to do is invest in a 99 cent
fittings. If you buy them individually, I do encourage
you guys that are doing a big job buy them by the 25 pack. Some Home Depots may sell it or go to a, you
know, irrigation store. They sell them in 25 packs. You may get the price down to 50 cents, 75
cents each. A lot more affordable that way. So what we’re going to do is we’re going
to go ahead and cut it up near here. And maybe we’ll do a close up on this for
you. We’re going to go ahead and let it come
out just a little bit. Then we’re just going to go ahead and cut
it. ‘Oh man, John, you messed it up!’ No, man, I just cut it. Then you’re going to take this L fitting,
and once again you just put it on there. And just wiggle it a little bit. And it’s going to go in. Just like so. And then now you got another fitting to put
on. So now we’re just going to put this end
on. And just wiggle it in. Super simple, super easy. And then now we just space it over this way. So now we have a nice elbow. That’s directed this down to the garden
so we could go along the edge of the house or the wall. So it’s a nice and neat and tidy insulation. Let’s go ahead and move this hose down to
the garden beds and show you guys what I’m going to do there. Alright, as you guys could see, I’m furling
this cable out. Oops, tripping over stuff as I’m walking
backwards. Furling this cable out. Now it might be good to get some stakes to
stick this down into the ground. The budget didn’t allow that this time. That’s what I would do. And you guys could see now we’re just going
by raised bed number 1, and we got it by raised bed number 2 all the way down. So now what we’re going to do is we’re
going to go ahead and take this single line and tie into it. So our first bed can get some water. If we had a single bed, we would just use
the line and have the end of the tube go into the bed. Because we have the second bed, we’ve got
to tie into that. And this is pretty easy as well. I mean, you guys all have had an outlet that
has like one outlet free. And you want to plug two things into it, like
your Christmas tree lights and your cell phone charger. So what you get is you get one of those multiple
outlet adapters. You could plug one plug into the outlet and
it gives you like 3 places to plug in more stuff. That’s easy, right? Well, putting in one of these T adapters to
go to one of your beds is just as simple as plugging it in, right? All you got to do is you’re going to take
some scissors and you’re going to cut your main line. And we’re probably go going to go about
maybe, I don’t know, 6 inches or so into the bed and then we’re going to go ahead
and make a cut right here. And don’t worry man, if you guys cut in
the wrong place, they have connectors, you know, just couplers, to patch up what you
did wrong, you know. So you do want to pay attention when you’re
cutting and try to get your cuts at the right point. I’m going to go ahead and once again put
this T fitting in there. Once again, just presses on, no problem. And then we’re going to go ahead and press
this guy in on the other side. So as you guys could see, we got an upright
here. And that’s ready to go for when we come
back to it. But now we’re going to go ahead and go down
to the next bed and show you guys how we’re going to plumb the line, the end of the line. It’s kind of like the end of the line on
the subway, up to the last raised bed. Oh and yeah in the kit luckily there are 3
stakes. There are 3 plastic stakes. I do not recommend buying the plastic stakes,
they are pos’, doesn't stand for point of sale. And I recommend the metal ones if you guys
are buying them. But these ones were free in there. So we’re just going to go ahead and tack
this down, you know, near where I need it, so that it doesn’t move. Alright! So you guys could see the line over there
from the first raised bed. Then it comes down over here. And what we’re going to do is we’re going
to go ahead and take this hose and we’re probably going to go about another 6-8 inches
in to the raised bed. Probably about right here. And then we’re going to do another cut. Alright, and double check to make sure you’re
pretty good. And I planned this out on paper, you know,
on how, the layout I was going to do before, you know, I’m doing it now. So I could buy the proper fittings. And we’ll make one cut here. And then we got a little elbow. Now we’re going to go ahead and put that
one in there. And now this is going to go up to our second
bed. And then we’re going to go ahead and use
one of these plastic stakes, and see if we could beat the stake into submission with
my hand. Alright! Pound in stake! Alright! Plant base tower. Alright, now we’re just going to go ahead
and angle that guy up. Looks nice and neat. Next step is we’re going to go ahead and
take our, our tubing. And we’re just going to go ahead and stick
it in this elbow up. Make sure there’s no kind of debris or anything
in there. So if you’re working around, I’m working
on a lawn so it’s not too dusty, muddy, gravelly, whatever, dirty. If you are, you want to do kind of protect
the fittings from getting dirt in there. And you will want to flush the system before
you start, you know, putting the drippers in. I’m being careful and we’re not really
getting anything in there today. And next step is we’re just going to go
ahead and once again put this tube in there. And just wiggle it. Wiggle worm, wiggle worm! Alright! There we go! And we have the tubing now going up. So now that we got the tubing going up to
the raised bed, what we’re going to do is we’re just going to go ahead and put an
elbow to elbow it in the raised bed. You could kind of bed it over, you know, if
you want to like save a dollar. But you couldn’t just like bend it and crease
it. If you bend it and crease it and bend it and
kink it, water’s not going to flow. So that’s why I got this, you know, bracket
here, or the elbow connector. And if we want it to kind of go right in like
there, we’re going to kind of cut it right about here. And that’s where we’re going to cut it. So we’re going to go ahead and cut it with
the scissors. Snip! I got snipped when I was less than 1 year
old. It wasn’t fun. Alright! Then we’re going to go ahead and put that
on there. And get it right there like that. Looks nice. Next step is we’re going to go into the
raised bed. So once again, wiggle this stuff in there. And normally what I like to do is make a grid
system in the raised bed with maybe like in this size raised bed I’d do like 3 rows. Like start at one end and go all the way down
and three rows connected evenly to make like, like a letter H, but it’s like, you know,
it’s filled in on the top and the bottom. I don’t have enough tubing or the budget
to buy a few extra connectors this time. So I kind of have to like, I’m going to
make like a square in the middle, you know, which is the nest best thing. And so what we’re going to do for that,
we’re going to go ahead and run this out. And try to get my square kind of even, a couple
inches in from each side. So to do that we’re going to need another
T connector. And let me go ahead and back up the camera. Alright! So we got this tubing. We’re going to go ahead and flop it over
the top. And probably going to come in, I don’t know,
maybe about this much. And that’s where I want this guy to go this
direction. So we’ll cut it probably right about here. And, you know, you don’t have to be super
anal about this stuff. Except you got to be anal about not getting
dirt in the tube. About like, you know, where the rows are,
I kind of like to have it evenly spaced out because I’m kind of like OCD like that. But it’s not really critical, man, as long
as you got water to your plants, you’re good. Alright, so now we got this T connector in
there. And then we’re going to go ahead and put
this guy on. And going to keep running it toward the end
of the wall. So that’s in. We’re going to let it run a little bit forward
and we’re probably going to maybe go to right about here. And we’re going to snip once again. And we’re going to go ahead and put an elbow
connector on there. Alright! Then we’re going to do, so we’re going
to go ahead and start on this side. And shove this in there. And we’re going to elbow that up so that
if it gets in the dirt it’s not going to swallow dirt. We’re going to go ahead and go over, I don’t
know, probably maybe at about here. And once again, snip. And once again, get an elbow connector. Get that in there and then we’re going to
go ahead and unwind my tubing because it’s stuck into my cable. And we’re going to try to do it the same
distance as this tubing. A little bit hard since it’s all kind of
like bent. It can help to maybe use like a stake a little
bit. These stakes don’t really hold down in loose
compost, loose packed compost. My best guess, right about here. Alright! Snip! Make sure it’s clean. Put this fitting on. Last one. Put this fitting here. Alright! And then we’re going to go ahead and, next
thing we’re going to do is we’re going to go ahead and run this irrigation line to
make like a hopefully a square. Tomorrow this will look better because the
sun will hit the irrigation tubing and flatten it out and get it to conform to how it should
be. If I had a tape measure I might be measuring
these to make sure I got even widths. but I ain’t got a tape measure today. So just eyeballing it. It’s alright. Let’s see, we’ll probably snip right about
here. Alright! Last snip. Then we just got to push this guy in. Alright. And that’s it! This would be a square if I had laid this
out in the sun, or a rectangle, sorry. And over time it should just kind of lay flat. Now I get to do the other side. Alright, so I’m just about to finish the
irrigation on the second bed. All I have to do is connect these two guys
to make my little box here, like this. But we’re not going to connect it yet. Because even if you think you’re careful
like I was or I think i was, you want to go ahead and flush your line. So we got the two ends kind of like headed
off the bed so we don’t get the bed all messed up. And we’re going to go ahead and simply turn
on the irrigation controller real quick. And we’re going to run back and clean out
the lines. And you’ve just got to do this for maybe,
I don’t know, 15 seconds. Make sure you don’t have any dirt or debris
in there. Then we could go ahead and turn them off. Alright, now they’re turned off and now
we could connect this last fitting up. And now our irrigation system is completely
installed and ready. The other thing also, it’s a bit heavier
because it’s all full of water now. So it might sit a little bit nicer. Oh yeah, look at that. So yeah, optimally I would have liked to maybe
space this out a little bit more towards the edge and have this closer to the edge and
then have like a middle bar running down. I wasn’t sure if I was going to have the
tubing to do that. And then I would need extra fittings. I did have the tubing so I would just need
couple extra fittings. That was going to cost like 4 extra dollars
and I was already over budget. So it didn’t happen but it’s alright. We got enough parts in the kit, so that we
don’t really need to do that. But that’s what I would have rather done
myself. So I guess now that we got all this set up,
next thing we’re going to do is actually plant out the plants. And this is actually one of the easiest parts. Alright so the next thing we’re going to
do is we’re going to go ahead and get ready to plant out things. But before I do it I want to go ahead and
share with you guys the plants I got for this install today. And the thing is, the owner here, she wants
to, number one goal was to have an easy garden. A maintenance free garden. She’s busy working and doing other stuff. And she doesn’t want to sit here and tend
to her plants. And that’s why I said, you know, get some
herbs. Herbs are the easiest thing to grow. And in most cases they’re going to require
the least amount of maintenance. So let’s go over the herbs we got for her
today. She’s also a chef. So she likes cooking and making things fresh
in the kitchen. And this is where, you know, the whole variety
of herbs that I got for her so she could do some amazing culinary creations, you know,
using fresh herbs instead of dried. Because the flavors, tastes are so much better. So here we got some garlic chives. Plant those out for her. We got next we got some mint. And one of the cool things is when you guys
plant your garden, you guys just don’t get like peppermint, which is the standard mint. They have like 20 different kinds of mint
you could buy. At the place I got these, they had at least
a half dozen. We got actually a really cool mint. They only had a couple left. It’s called mint berries and cream. And this has actually a unique flavor to it. And I tasted it before buying it, berries
and cream mint. Now normally I would recommend planting mint
like in it’s own container, own pot because it’s probably going to take over. But hey if it takes over, it’s probably
a good thing because I’ll have a lot of mint and hopefully by then they’ll have
new raised beds. Alright, next we got some garlic chives instead
of the onion chives here. Oh man, we got two garlic chives. I thought I had garlic chives and onion chives. I picked up two garlic chives. Oops. Alright, next we got rosemary. And this is variety of rosemary called spice
island, a special variety. I tried to pick out some really cool varietals. Next we have the coriander or cilantro. This is something I don’t necessarily recommend
planting this time of the year. I do recommend growing this more in the fall,
you know, fall/spring. And in some places like here you could probably
get away with growing this even in the winter time. probably not going to last too long before
it bolts, goes to flower and sets seed and then pretty much you won’t have any more. I do recommend instead growing something known
as culantro, which would do better in the heat through the summer and/or papalo, which
has a similar flavor to cilantro but is going to do amazing in this climate. Next of course we got some curly parsley. Next we got some basil. And one of the cool things is when you’re
growing your own garden, you could choose a lot of different varieties of basil, you
know. There’s probably at least a dozen varieties
at the nursery I went to. This is actually one known as the holy basil
or tulsi. This is great for making teas and even using
in cooking. And this is one of my favorites. Next we got some, this guy right here, which
is already rooting out of the pot. And oh man, he doesn’t have a tag. But this is thyme. We got some thyme right here. Try to get tags on everything. Next we got oregano. And this is a variety known as hot and spicy,
probably my favorite variety of oregano. Next we got sage. So this is called the bur garden sage. And these guys could get quite big. Next we got some more basil. You know in every different variety of plant,
like if you guys go and buy apples at the store, they don’t just got the red delicious,
they got red delicious, green delicious, gala, fuji, winesap, macintosh, they have all the
different flavors. And just like basil, they all have different
flavors. And when you grow your own, you could choose
like you know, hey I’m making a thai dish tonight, I’m going to use the thai basil,
you know, in my thai recipe I’m making. Or maybe you’re, you know, cooking something
like some spaghetti sauce and then you want to get some standard italian sweet basil. Hey you could do that if you got a garden. But if you go to the store and you just buy
dried basil, they just got dried basil, man. So yeah, this is some thai basil. One of the best ones that I like to grow,
specially in the heat they do quite well. All the basils do pretty good in the heat. And here’s the standard basil. We got a standard sweet Italian style basil
here. Oh next, another really cool one. This is sorrel. And sorrel is a nice kind of herby/vegetable,
really unique flavor. I like this because it’s a perennial vegetable. Even in the winter this will probably continue
to grow and make leaves. i love to eat the leaves. My favorite way to use these leaves is actually
to take them out, a leaf, and then actually batter them up in like a kale chip style batter,
dehydrate them and then they’re some of the best kale chips you could make with the
red vein sorrel, also a very beautiful plant. Next we got some dill, some bouquet dill. Now dill would not be the first choice that
I would grow once again in the summer. This is also like the cilantro and like maybe
like fall/spring condition. Summer may get too hot. For that reason I planted it against, you
know, near the house with some afternoon shade. We’re going to go ahead and plant this to
the back of the bed so it gets the most shade and maybe even behind something. Oh let’s see, next we got another basil. And this to me look like pesto perpetual basil
that’s what it has been sold to me before as out west. But here they’re calling it basil aussie
sweet. And it’s a variegated basil, rarely goes
to flower, should do really well through the whole growing season. So I’m interested to see how this does. Next, another basil. And this is probably one of my favorite basils. I mean, I like all the basils I got. They’re some of my personal favorites that’s
why I got them. But this is the dark opal basil. And look at the colors on that. This is a nice purple basil. So I want to encourage you guys to eat your
foods that are colored. Don’t just get all green plants, right. Get some plants with some purple pigments. These purple pigments have high levels of
anthocyanins. And these are very healthy for us to eat on
a regular basis, you know. One of my new favorite things now is to eat
purple carrots. Alright! Now we got a traditional one. East Indian Lemongrass. So that guy will also probably do pretty good
year round as well. Next here we got marjoram or marjoram, I don’t
know however you say that. Another herb we’re going to plant out. And then, those are all the herbs. I kind of had to like, you know, sneak in,
don’t tell anybody, two vegetables to grow. You know, I had to get a tomato plant, man. If you got a garden, man, you got to have
a tomato plant. So we got a super sweet 100 tomato plant. We’re probably going to plant this at the
front of the bed. That’s going to get the most sun. And maybe try to find something to stake it
up or something because it’s probably going to get huge. And this will produce abundant amounts of
cherry tomatoes, that are going to blow away the taste from the ones form the store. And then let’s see, last plant we got today,
had to get this one, it’s probably one of my favorite leafy greens to grow in the hot
climate, whether that’s a hot desert climate or a hot humid tropical climate like we’re
in. And this is known as the Malabar spinach. This should also be grown up a trellis, you
know, up a stake, probably a big trellis actually. Just this one little plant now could probably
fill like probably all the wall area you guys see behind me, if it had a nice trellis or
some like hog panel fencing or utility panel fencing to grow up on. I mean, this thing will take over. Looks small now and it grows, you know, slowly
at first but once it gets pretty big, man, then it like couple leaves a day. Well it seems like it anyways. And this will provide copious amounts of leafy
greens to eat, one of my favorites. And the last thing I got when I got my flat
of plants, you’re thinking, ‘John, there’s nothing in there’. Yeah man, look at that all in there! I got some free soil! So I’m going to go ahead and tap that out. No soil wasted when I’m building a garden. Alright, next step is to we’re going to
go ahead and take, since we got about 20 plants, we’re going to go ahead and put 10 on this
side, 10 on this side. And I’ll come back and show you guys the
layout when I got it. So now I want to share with you guys the layout
that I decided to do in each of these raised beds. So as I said, we had 20 plants. So I kind of put 10 plants in one and 10 plants
in the other. And I didn’t just haphazardly like set them
down and all this kind of stuff. I kind of thought about it. And specially if you’re a new gardner you
many not know exactly all the things I know about gardening, because I’ve been doing
it for a number of years and kind of know how big a plant gets and how, how many seasons
it’s going to last and all this kind of stuff. So, you know, try to just get 2 categories,
you know, like I’ve done here. One category is perennials, or whether that’s
a perennial herb or perennial vegetable that will grow year round in your climate. In certain climates like up in Alaska, right,
some things ain’t going to grow year round in the snow for half the year, right. So I know about climates where it’s more,
you know, not as like cold on some of the years and there’s no snow on the ground. And that’s where I come from. So I know which ones are going to do well. And that’s why I got this bed here. This is the perennial bed. And I got some of the perennial crops that
will pretty much grow year after year based on my experience and based on what the experts
say. So in this bed we got things like the oregano,
the marjoram, the sage, the lemon grass, we got the red veined sorrel, we got the mint
here in the center which I’m kind of having reservations about because this thing may
take over the whole bed. But you could always trim it back, it could
be kind of a pain. But if you stay up on it should, it could
be alright. But we’ll see. And yeah, so I got yeah all the different
herbs here on the time. I think that’s all on this side. So these guys should grow year after year
and yeah I mean I got 10 plants in here in this bed, you know. I could definitely fit more. I would like to have like 3 main rows. I could easily fit like probably like minimum
15 plants in here if I space them a little bit tighter. You could probably even do 20. And here’s the thing. Like when the plants are small you could pack
a lot in there. But the problem is once they get really big
and start crowding out the other one, you know, the strongest will survive. And that’s cool. I probably wouldn’t put any more than like
20 plants in this bed. That would be like pushing it. But as I said, I only had a budget for 10. I would probably maybe fit in, I could fit
in another 5, you know, fairly easily. Like things I didn’t get. But that’s pretty cool. So yeah, these are the ones that should grow
year round, based on my experience. And over on this side we have the annual beds. So if you guys are starting a garden, going
to be growing like cucumbers and tomatoes and peppers, you know, in the continental
US or most places in the continental United States, those are going to be grown as annuals
for you. And so on this side we got the basils, which
are basically going to grow till the frost, you know. I got a lot of the basils on this side. We got a tomato on the end, you know, that
I’m probably going to, you know, bury deep. And then also we got in the back, you know,
as I said some of these plants don’t like the sun or to get too hot like the cilantro
and the dill here. So we got these in the back behind some maybe
big plants, which may protect them a little bit. And then I got the malabar spinach in the
back. So, you know, when the dill and the cilantro
probably will go the way of the west, the malabar spinach will here be into vine and
hopefully it will end up getting a trellis or something to grow up. But yeah, oh and I got the parsley over on
this side. And, and at my place the parsley sometimes
is an annual, you know, lasts a long time, a long growing season even in to the winter. And yeah, it’s just almost a perennial. So I was debating putting it on this side,
but hey I needed something to even them out. And this is what we came up with. And the plant spacing I chose, you know, I
try to have like equal distance spacing between each one. So they have like enough space to spread their
roots and grow out. But as I said we could have fit more in there
if we had more plants. But I’m pretty much overall happy. I mean, I like to try to pack more plants
in because then you have more genetic diversity, you know. If the owner wanted to come in later and like
re-plant a few more things, you know, I’d probably buy another maybe 6 plants. Fit 3 over here, 3 over here in some of the
spaces where there’s, you know, nothing. And you could easily do that. I guess the next step is we’re going to
go ahead and get to plant these guys out. And then the final step after that is install
the drip emitters right at the plants so the water goes where it needs to go, so we don’t
waste the precious resource of water. So now I’m going to go ahead and show you
guys how I plant just 2 of the plants. Pretty much I’m just like doing one plant. And I’m going to do this same process for
all the plants except for one that I’ll show you guys next. Just planting the plants out, this is super
simple, super easy. It doesn’t take rocket science. But you do need some gloves. Well, just kidding. I like to wear some gloves because I don’t
like getting the dirt all underneath the fingernails. It can get really hard to clean. So we’re preparing for operation here. Now if you don’t want to wear gloves and
you hate getting the dirt underneath your fingernails, take a bar of soap and scratch
the bar of soap and get it underneath your fingernails before you garden. So then when you’re done gardening, you
won’t have dirt underneath your fingernails, you’ll have the soap that will easily wash
out. Alright! Yeah so to plant this guy, we’re going to
plant the parsley first. I’ll take the tag out, kind of stick it
where it’s going. And then what we’re going to do is we’re
going to go ahead and move the parsley from where it is, which is right here. We’re going to dig a hole. And once again, we don’t got no tools, we
don’t got no trellis, we don’t got nothing like that. We’re just going to go ahead and dig a nice
hole. We try to like make the hole the same size
as the pot. And so that will go in there. Now the thing to remember when you’re planting,
you want to get the soil depth that you plant at the same same depth of this. You don’t want to like put the plant down
like too deep and then bury it, right. It’s going to be buried alive. We wouldn’t like to be buried alive, neither
do the plants. So bury it at the same level, you know, as
the current soil level. Very important. There are a few exceptions to this rule. I dug the hole a little bit deep because what
we’re going to do next is we’re going to go ahead and take some of the worm castings,
some of the most valuable nutrients that I have today, and we’re probably going to
take like a nice handful of the straight up worm castings, drop it right in there, and
we’re going to mix it up with a little bit of the soil. So the plants have nice mixture. Now if I had a little bit more budget, what
I would also get is the Dr Earth’s Fruit and Vegetable Fertilizer or the vegetable
fertilizer. They have that available at Home Depot. And just take a pinch, put it into each hole
as well as the rock dust. Either the one I used earlier that I didn’t
like so much or more importantly the azomite. These are two critical things I like to do
in the planting hole. Another thing, if you want to kind of go to
the next level is get some mycorrhiza. The Brite Ideas Hydro store here in the area
had some mycorrhiza. I like the Plant Success brand. The mycorrhizae is what I personally use. And you would put that, you know, just on
the root zone not in the hole. So next we’re going to go ahead and take
these plants out. And I like to just kind of squeeze it very
gently and push down. And it’s just going to come out. And you guys are going to see like all the
roots on there. Now like if the roots are like really wound
up and you just see root balls and a root mass , that’s not a good thing. Sometimes when I select plants, I actually
want to pull them out and make sure the roots are not super impacted, and then choose a
plant that the roots aren’t super impacted. Because if the roots are growing in circles,
it’s like your husband that’s trying to find, you know, your place to go for a Christmas
party and they’re going in circles and they can’t find the place and they’re not looking
at a map because they’re a guy, right. Yeah, you need to kind of break up the monotony,
break up from their pattern. Get out that GPS and say hey look maybe we
should go this way. But the roots here are kind of like been entwined,
so they’re kind of growing in circles and they’re really not going to grow out unless
you kind of help it like you give your husband the GPS. So I just like to try to take my finger very
carefully and just kind of like tease it out, like you’re teasing out your hair if you
were like were in the 80s and stuff. We’re just kind of teasing this out. And breaking them up, you know. If it’s teasing out a little bit, if it
ain’t breaking up a little bit then I’ll just like, you know, try to just, you know,
rough them up a little bit and try to get some of these roots hairs like directed out. Because otherwise this thing is just going
to continue to grow in its own mass and not like, you know, reach into the good, good
soil. So that’s probably pretty good. Just like that. And then once we got that that, that’s when
I’d sprinkle on the mycorrhiza, which actually we don’t have today, and then I’d plant
it out. That planting hole looks a little bit too
deep. So then I’d just kind of put in a little
bit of the soil. I’ll like take a little bit of the worm
castings too, crush it in there, mix it up with some more soil, and it right about the
soil level. Then we’re just going to go ahead and take
maybe another handful of worm castings. I like to mix them with the soil I just dug
out. And then we’ll just sprinkle this around
to fill in the hole. I mean, gardening is really easy. This is like way easier than like operating
on brains. Unless you’re a brain surgeon and you never
gardened before. Alright! Got that guy all planted out. Looks pretty nice, pretty easy. i do encourage you guys to save your pots
and re-use them. And if you’re not going to re-use them,
take them back to the nursery you got them from and then they will re-use them. You know, the pots are a valuable resource
and I hate to see these guys go to the landfill. Needless to say, I have a probably a collection
of pots that I need to cull through and give some back to the nursery. Because I got a lot. Alright! Next let’s go ahead and go over to the other
plant that I want to show you guys how to plant, that’s going to be different than
most of the plants. 99% of the plants that I’m planting today
are just going to go in like this. Super simple. Except the tomato. So let me show you guys what I’m going to
do with the tomato next. Alright! So now I’m ready to plant out the tomato. And this is the exception to the rule. I’ve also done this with peppers but it’s
not as successful with peppers as it is with tomatoes. And what I’m going to do is actually we’re
going to plant the tomato deeper than the soil level. I normally do not recommend this except on
things like tomatoes. You could get away with it on peppers. I don’t know what other ones I have done
like that. Maybe like tomatillos. But otherwise I don’t normally do this. Because most plants don’t like their roots
buried. When you do bury your roots, specially on
things like lettuce and cucumbers, if you bury them too deep they may rot on you, which
is not fun. So once again, we’re going to take out the
little tag there, put it right there. And what we’re going to do first on this
tomato, because this is actually long and lanky, you know, I was kind of like that in
high school, we’re going to go ahead and clip these guys off. So we’re going to go ahead and these bottom
set of leaves we’re just going to go ahead and pluck them off. You could use the scissors. I just have my finger nails, my finger tips. We’re going to go ahead and pluck these
guys off here. Go ahead and pluck this guy off. And I think we’re even going to go up so
far to pluck this guy off. And what we’re going to do is actually we’re
going to bury this guy, probably clear up to here. And maybe even I’ll go up to here. Because what’s going to happen is this,
this stem here and these little hairs coming out, all these will turn into roots. And the roots will actually absorb more nutrients
so that even though you’re burying this like halfway now, this will be a much more
vibrant and stronger plant in the future. And so yeah, that’s why I am going to do
this on tomatoes. So next we got to get digging. I feel like a dog. Good thing my dog doesn’t dig in my garden. Alright, now that I got a nice, deep hole,
look at that hole, really deep, we’re going to go ahead and take a nice handful of our
worm castings, mix it back in there. Then go ahead and take our tomato, squeeze
it, dump it outside down, pop the bottom out. Now these roots look pretty good. They’re not super impacted like as bad as
the parsley. We’re going to just kind of try to like
pull these guys out a little bit. Knock them down. Tease them out on the sides a little bit. They look pretty good already. And then we’re going to go ahead and drop
it in the hole. Maybe we’ll dig the hole a little bit deeper. And I think I will knock off this branch right
here. And very important you know, one of the things
I like to do is like kind of like orient the plant, which I could do with plants but not
people, to where I want it to go. So I probably want to try to have them come
up right here like this. And then we’re just going to go ahead and
back fill now. At the same time I’m back filling, I’m
also putting in my soil mixture. Today I’m just using the worm castings,
but I said I would use the Dr Earth’s veggie mix as well as some other stuff. So putting a few handfuls in, mixing it up
with all the soil as we bury this stem alive. ‘Aaahhh don’t bury me Mr John!’ Alright! So there we go. Got this guy. Now we don’t want to like pack down the
soil like super hard. Oh would check this out, we found a produce
sticker in the compost. And it’s actually Villita brand. Avocados from Mexico, 4046 is the code number. Shame on you Villita brand avocados for having
non bio degradable labels. They suck. I have a lot in my compost that I need to
pick out. It’s easy enough to have bio degradable
paper labels on your produce. That’s the, that’s a shame on one hand. On the other hand, I’m glad that actually
avocados and peels are in one of the composts that I’m using to grow this stuff. Alright! So, you know, we’re just packing this in. And we’re not like tapping it down super
hard, you know. The thing to remember is that the plants grow
the roots, not into the soil but the space between the soil. And that’s why it’s good to have a kind
of nice fluffy mixture, specially in a raised bed that you’re putting in like I did today. So, yeah, we’re going to go ahead and see
if we could get this guy going straight up, and level him all out. Get the soil all leveled out. Looks good, planting that tomato. Now I’m going to go ahead and plant out
the rest of the herbs just like I did the parsley, and will be back at you when I’m
done. Alright, so I’m just about done planting
everything out. You guys could see I got 10 plants over on
this side, got a whole bunch of empty pots now. And then over on this side, got 9 plants in,
1 plant left. And I got just a little bit of worm castings
left. Well I’m going to go ahead and plant this
last one out. Maybe I’ll talk to you guys about some of
the things that I’ve learned doing this. Always when I’m gardening, you know, sometimes
I’ll put the radio on, sometimes maybe play like, you know, audio books from audibles.com,
to educate my brain. Today I was just kind of like gardening in
zen mode, right. And that’s good! We really need to get back to nature, have
a connection with nature. One of the things I was thinking about is
that, you know, gardening is a lot about repetition. That’s why I didn’t show you planting
20 plants. That would have been pretty boring, I’m
sure. This video is already long enough, and already
some of you guys are complaining it’s long and boring. I just do videos because I want to teach you
guys, you know, I don’t want to have a 3 or 4 minute video. You can’t teach somebody in 3 or 4 minutes
like how to put in a full garden from front to end. All those little minutiae details, so that
you guys aren’t scared to do this yourself. So that you guys can do it yourself. Last one I’m planting is my red veined sorrel. This is one of my favorite plants actually. I like it a lot, I have been starting to grow
it maybe, I don’t know, 6 years ago, 4 or 5 years ago, I don’t know, a long time ago. And it consistently does well in many climates. Let’s see here, drop it right in there,
mix that guy up. Drop it right in. Oh, one of the things I like to do is I like
to handle the plants by the base stem instead of the leaves, they may break and that’s
pretty strong. And also we got the roots teased out. Make sure we’re at the right level and let’s
see we’ve got a little bit of worm castings left, so this guy is a lucky donor. Like flip the bag, get all those worm castings
out and mix this up in the soil and carefully spread it all around and back fill. Tap this guy down a little bit. Make sure all our soil is level. Yeah gardening is about repetition, you know. And once you plant one plant, you could plant
them all. And it’s not hard to do this. It just takes a little bit of time. And the more you, the longer you go the better
you get! The faster you get also, you know. I mean, this is a plant out with like 20 plants. This is nothing man, I’ll plant beds with
like a hundred plants. Now that could take some time. But, yeah as you go you’ll learn little
techniques. And I always want to encourage you guys to
think about like when you’re planting, how could I do this more efficiently, how could
I save time? I mean the easiest way I just scoop out the
dirt, take a scoop of this, mix it up a little bit, put it in, done, boom, you know. One of the favorite things I like to do is
use a bulb planter. I’ll put a bulb planter, boom, take a scoop
out, boom, it’s done, I have a whole almost a perfect size to put the plant start in,
you know, shake all my stuff on the roots and put a, you know, dropper of some of the
my mixture in, my rich mix, for the nutrients. And we’re done. And here it is. My finished raised bed all planted out. But we’re not done yet. Did you think this video is over? uh-uh-uh. I got to show you the most important thing! Now that we’re planted out, go ahead and
take off my gloves here, we got the most important thing, and we got to put in the irrigation. We got the main irrigation tubing run but
I didn’t want to put in the drip emitters that will basically give each plant the water
until I knew where the plants were. So in that little kit here, you got a few
things. And I guess we’ll go ahead and do a close
up on you guys to show you guys how to put these in. So now that we got all the main irrigation
line and the plants all planted, all we need to do is use this little tool. It’s a hole puncher. This punches the proper size hole in the irrigation
tubing so you can put in a drip emitter here. And the tip on the drip emitters is that a
certain color emitters means a certain flow rate. And that’s kind of an advanced topic for
a beginner. But basically they gave me a couple different
ones, and so I’ll probably I’m going to put like the low flow rate dripper on plants
that are more like desert dry plants and they don’t like to get too wet. And then maybe like a dripper with a higher
flow rate on something like tomatoes that can actually get quite thirsty in the summer
time. Anyways. So use this tool. All you’re going to do is go, you know,
near the plant, and I always like to have my dripper, specially for new plantings, within
a couple you know 2 inches, 3 inches max, from the plant. And then also you should run the dripper for
a nice amount of time so it actually gets a nice, you know, spread of the water. So we’re just going to go ahead and take
the tool here and pop it in. And I like to kind of like rotate as I’m
turning. If you’re doing this on a hot day, it’s
a little bit harder because the tubing is soft and it doesn’t like pop in easily. And it’s better to do it when it’s like
a little bit cold out, like maybe in the evening. And once you do it, you could go ahead and
snap this guy in. You guys hear that snap. Make sure every one that you do snaps right
in because if you don’t hear it snap in, it may not make a good seal and that means
when you turn your system on it may fly out and then you’re going to have a leak. And it’s going to be a pressure leak. So then maybe some of the other drippers may
not operate properly. I’m going to go ahead and do the rest and
maybe I want to do a close-up on one of the ones that are in the center. Because, you know, if you put a dripper here
or here, it’s pretty far away. So I’m going to show you what I do for that
instead. So now I’m going to show you guys what to
do if you have like a plant in the middle, not near a main drip line. Now the thing I would like to do, you know,
I would prefer to have like another main drip line go like right across the center here
line. So then I could easily put a dripper in the
main line and feed it to the plant. This is a lot more maintenance free, and in
my opinion looks cleaner than what I’ll be doing next. And I’m only doing this because we’re
short on the budget. Alright. So mainly what you’re going to do is you’re
going to go over to where the plant is that you want to water. And you’re going to basically make sure
that the line is clean and has like the most closest and direct path, which is about right
here. So we’re going to go ahead and once again
we’re going to rotate and turn this as we’re pushing in. You could hear it kind of like make a little
pop. It’s going to pop out a little plug. Then what we’re going to do is we’re going
to go ahead and put this little coupler thing in. And this just sticks right in there. Once again, make sure you hear that snap. Then we’re going to take this smaller drip
tubing stuff and stick that in there. Make sure it’s, you know, all the way in
there because this stuff has been known to fall off, which also means, which may mean
a leak. That’s another reason why I don’t like
to do it. And I’m going to wiggle this on until it’s
pretty far down on the fitting. Alright, I think that’s not going to come
off. Then what we’re going to do is we’re going
to go ahead and take some scissors and say it’s going to come out to like right here. And we’re going to go pretty close to the
plant and just snip. Ouch! And once you snip that off, then we’re going
to go ahead and take a dripper and then put the dripper on the end here. And wiggle that on till it’s tight. Very important last step, specially important
if you have a longer run. You’re going to go ahead and take a little
stake and stake this down, put it right on the drip tube. And stake this down to where you want the
water to go. That way it stays in place and your plant
gets all the water even if it’s not right on the main drip line. You know this gets kind of messy and is a
little bit more difficult when you’re replanting the following season. Because then you’re going to have all these
things sticking out. What I prefer to do is just have the main
lines and then I pull this whole thing off. And then I’ll re-plant my bed for the new
season. And then lay it back down. As long as I have my lines and the rows marked. Alright! I guess the next thing I got to put in about
18 drippers. I’ll come back at you when I’m done. So as you guys could see, I pretty much got
both beds planted out and I got all the drippers in. I know some of you guys are thinking, ‘John,
what if I make a hole in the wrong place, what happens?’ It’s alright man, even if you mess up man,
you could always fix it. You could always fix your mistakes until you’re
six feet under, then you can’t fix them no more. So fix them now! But yeah, if you put a hole in the wrong place,
they got these goof plugs that has a small side and a big side. Pop it in. That will plug your leak! Wish you could do that with your plumbing
in your house, wish it was that easy. And the other thing you could do is if you
put a hole in the wrong place and you don’t have a plug like this, because they cost extra,
this kit came with two of them, just put a dripper there, man. Water the soil, the microbes will appreciate
it. Now I got a drippers on all the ones and I
made sure I went around to every plant to make sure okay you got a dripper in this one,
dripper in this one, dripper in. Make sure you got a dripper in every plant
so that they will get water. The last thing I’m going to do is let’s
go ahead and turn this system on. And make sure that all the dripper are functioning
and water is coming out of each and every one of them. The other thing you’re going to want to
do is, you know, take out a stopwatch or a timer and see how long it takes so that the
water percolates down and basically wets out the root zone. This is very important because this will tell
you how long to run your water timer; not me telling you hey run your water timer for
5 minutes because it’s always 5 minutes no matter where you live in the whole world,
no matter on your soil, no matter on how hot it is. At least if you know if you’re running it
for 5 minutes it gets the nice root ball wet, you’re in pretty good shape. And then, you know, of course depending on
how hot it is, it’s going to dry out that root ball, then you’re going to have to
run another cycle for the same amount of time. So that’s what I’m going to go ahead and
do next. Alright! So I just engaged the system and you will
hear all these air bubbles sounds and as the air clears out of the system. And then you should see water dribbling out
each and every one of the dripper and you’re going to want to go around and make sure each
and every dripper is dribbling water and is getting to where it needs to be. Sometimes on rare occasion you do have a defective
dripper. It looks like all the ones on this bed is
working. Let’s go over on this side. This guy is doing pretty good. I put drippers that actually give a higher
level of water on my malabar spinach and the tomatoes, actually shooting up pretty good
over there. But every other drippers appears to be working. We’re just going to go ahead and let this
run a few minutes and then see how long we need to water until we get to a good saturation
level. And if you don’t know what that is, go out
and buy yourself a moisture meter that will test the soil moisture for you guys. So after poking around in the soil just a
little bit, I kind of figured that about after 3 minutes, because the cycle time went on
for about 5 minutes total, and I counted down, and right when I was at like 2 minutes, that
means it ran for 3 minutes. You know, we had really good soil, you know,
moisture level, you know. And I kind of dug out next to the plant. It might be a good idea to put like a phantom
dripper in to, you know, that’s not near a plant so you don’t have to dig up a plant
to see how the water is capillating out. I was very careful and dug around the plant
to kind of check it out. I figured 3 minutes. So with that, we’re just going to go ahead
and hit the Mode button once. And it basically flashes how many hours. We’re not going to do that, so we’re going
to press the arrow button, go over the minutes. We’re just going to go ahead and set it
to 3 minute cycles. And then we’re going to go ahead and hit
the Mode button. That’s going to take us to how many days
you want to water. I’m going to go ahead and water every day
at this point. Because every day, unless it’s raining,
it’s going to get hot and sunny, the water is going to evaporate off and it’s going
to need water. And then it says what time do you want to
start your cycle? So I generally, you know, as I said earlier,
I want to have a cycle in the morning, so maybe we’ll have a cycle starting at, maybe,
why don’t we do like 9 am. Then we’ll go to cycle number 2, and I think
for now we’re going to go ahead and turn it off, you know. Some plants don’t like too much water, including
some of the herbs. You could literally rot out their roots. And actually I noticed on one of the plants,
it had some root rot where it was getting too much water at the nursery. And then let’s see, click the Mode again. We’re going to go to cycle 3. We’re going to go ahead and turn that off
too. And 4 is off as well. You click the Mode button again, it goes back
to the time and currently it’s 8 o’clock. And then we’re going to go ahead and close
this so the rain don’t get in there. And that’s pretty much it. I mean, we set our timer. You guys learned how to do that. We set up the raised beds. This is the whole process okay. So basically what happened is it took me 2
days. First day went I was shopping. The second day pretty much installed the raised
bed. I could have finished the end of the second
day. I don’t know, maybe like 4 hours. And if you mix soil and you got some tools
it would probably take you less time. But this is a fun project, man! It’s not about how long it took you guys. Let me go ahead and give you guys an overview
shot of the garden and share with you guys a few things I’ve learned along the way. So as you guys could see, this is the end
of the job and the end of the video. As you guys just saw, I don’t know, how
long it ever took me to make the video. It’s probably like an hour video after editing. You guys saw the, the program, the deals from
start to finish, where I got the raised beds on Craigslist pre-built, you know. Where I got the soil at the Home Depot, Brite
Ideas Hydroponics and some at Lowe’s. You learned about the best soil and what to
look for and how to save money buying bulk if you can. Soil test before you buy things in bulk to
make sure you guys are getting a good mixture. And yeah, we were right in around $300. And I’m, you know, I’m not going to say
gardening is cheap. You could surely just dig up your backyard
where the grass, double dig it maybe buy a couple bags of compost and start planting
out, and do it that way. But I, the method I prefer is raised beds. It keeps things nice and simple, neat and
tidy. And this is a nice little way for the home
owner here to start gardening with minimal work. Because I did plant all plants that have low
maintenance. Now the one thing she will need to do is maybe
come out and see if she needs to do a second watering cycle. I’m only watering once a day. Come in out at the evening, see if the plants
are dropping their leave, see if the soil around the plant is really dry and if it is,
run it a second cycle. At this point, at this point in time in this
season, I think once a day is probably good. But, you know, I won’t be here to double
check and see. Otherwise everything’s going to pretty much
grow on it’s own. Most things are going to be pest resistant,
you know, that’s why all the herbs have their aromatics and essential oils to resist
the pests so that they could do it naturally without any human intervention. They are going to soon have, you know, plenty
of fresh herbs and even some veggies to eat in their cuisine. And this is the first foray into, you know,
getting herbs in. Then maybe next get some fruit trees in. And then convert the rest of this back yard
to a whole back yard edible garden. And I’m glad that I was able to play a part
in getting them started easily. And now you guys also could know how to do
it, because I took you guys step by step. I haven’t done one of these step by step
videos in a long time, so it’s kind of cool to have the opportunity to install a garden
step by step, and even get back into the garden, you know, when I’m visiting my girlfriend. Since I’m, you know, out of my garden I’m
like a fish out of water. But I’m a fish back in water. So a few other things I’d like to add is,
let’s see if it was me I’d probably add a few more plants in, get a few more drip
emitters, maybe like no more than 5 plants max for each side, maybe some, where there’s
some big spaces. And run some more drippers to it. That would be really cool. Other than that, I think this is pretty much
a good setup and I, you know, I did want to comment on the price. I mean, I know for a lot of people $300, that’s
a lot of money. But here’s the thing, you guys buy a house
it’s a lot of money. But you have to make the investment in your
house once. And once you got it paid off, pretty much
you’re free and clear. And just like this, everything you guys see,
98% of all the money that was spent, I don’t know, maybe 95 or 90%, whatever, I’m not
good at math, is infrastructure. The raised beds aren’t going to go anywhere. They’re going to last 3 years. The soil, that’s never going to go away. That’s going to last indefinitely, right. The irrigation system, I mean, my irrigation
system has lasted, I don’t know, 8+ years already. Not going to happen. So the only investment you guys will make
for next season is actually buying some new plants if they’re not perennials. And this whole side is perennials, this whole
side you’re probably going to have to replace. Or buy some seeds and plant some new seeds. So much like you got the house there, it’s
a one time investment, the garden is a one time investment and in my opinion it’s one
of the best investments you guys could make. And if you guys aren’t ready to put in a
garden just yet, after watching this video showing you guys how easy it is so that you
guys could do it, start making your own compost at home, you know. Start composting your food scraps, your food
waste that you don’t have to buy as much soil, you know, when you do put in your garden,
you know. You could compost your food waste, get some
wood chips, get a delivery from the tree trimmers that are chipping up wood chips, you know. Even if you don’t know how to compost, just
start laying wood chips on your property if you got a lot of property. Lay it down as ground cover. And in a couple of or over 3 years it will
rot down into some really nice rich black soil, better than all the crap that I bought,
right. You guys could do it better. Make your own compost. Start now and even if you got a garden installed
that’s a new garden, put in a compost system as well so that next season you’re not having
to, you know, top off your beds with store bought compost. You will have your own compost that you guys
made at home. Let’s see, final thought before the sun
goes down, and I got to go inside to eat dinner, I think I just want to really teach you guys
how to do it yourself. I don’t want people saying, ‘Hey John,
come up to my house and put one in’. I just made this video to show you guys how
to do it yourself! It’s really that easy! You guys don’t need me, right. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime;
feed a man a fish, feed him for a day, right. I want to teach you guys how to fish. It is really that easy. You can’t mess up because you will always
learn as you grow, right. And check, and you know, if you guys liked
this format, liked this video, I haven’t done one of these in a long time where I plant
something out from scratch and start something new. Really fun for me because all my stuff is
already existing. Please like it and I’ll make more of this
like this format for beginners and for people just starting out. And I always have all these little tidbits
of knowledge that you guys learn along the way. And also be sure to check my past episodes. I have over 1100 episodes now to teach you
guys all aspects of gardening, whether you want to grow fruits trees, vegetables, herbs,
whether you’re starting out like this. I have a number of series like this where
I go from start to finish including at my house myself. And be sure to click that Subscribe button
so you don’t miss out! I have videos coming out every 3 to 4 days,
full of new content, full of fresh information that you probably won’t hear anywhere else
on YouTube. And I am the number one most watched YouTube
gardener with nearly 300,000 subscribers, which just boggles my mind! So thank you guys that are all my subscribers
and thank you guys that continue to watch me. And enjoy my videos but more importantly,
it’s most importantly, that I’m actually making a difference in this world and being
the change that I want to see in the world, as Mahatma Gandhi said. So well, once again my name is John Kohler
with growingyourgreens.com. We’ll see you next time, and until then remember- keep
on growing.
