How To Make Your Own Grow Bags

hey guys you know one thing that I've been using quite a bit more are these grow bags I've been using them for quite a few years but I've only recently started started using them more extensively so you're going to see them probably around the property here a lot more if you just Google using grow bags there's a lot of articles and videos on the benefits of using them so I'm not going to get into all that but but I got to tell you I'm really impressed with these and the more I use them the more I want to use them so rather than get all the you know all the I've got you know I'm a blowhard right I mean I can easily go on so I'm not going to do that I'm just gonna actually get into how I actually make these and they're really inexpensive to make so let's just get right into the making okay okay so the first thing you want to do is get yourself some landscape fabric now not just any landscape fabric you want to get the stuff that is thicker now I like the DeWitt brand because it has on here it says that the year now this is a twelve year fabric and it's much thicker than say like they're three year now this was $15 for a three foot by 50 foot roll okay so let me show you this stuff here see if you can see that on the camera here how thick that is the the really thin stuff like the three-year stuff you could actually see through it you can hold it up like this and it's like I mean it's like Kleenex you can just see like you I mean you can't rip it but you could you know it's that thin so this stuff here if you hold it up to the light you can see the light through it but you can't actually see objects through it and so this is the stuff that you want nice and thick okay so this grow bag here is about a one gallon it's six inches by six inches and it's about eight inches tall and I love the 1 gallon because I'm able to grow things like lettuces and they're manageable too I can just I can move them around easy but I grow lettuces and other greens in here and believe it or not have even grown some of my dwarf Tomatoes in here and they've done perfectly fine they've done well so I'm going to show you how to make this one first and now you can make any size that you want of course I've made five gallon ones before once I show you how to make these you'll kind of understand how it's done and so you can adjust the measurements accordingly to make any size that you want you can make even smaller ones if you want to but let's go ahead and I'll lay my fabric out and I'll show you how to make the 1 gallon grow Bay and then you can you'll you'll get the idea of how to do it so let's lay out the fabric okay so for the 1 gallon bag I'm going to cut a piece that is 12 inches by 24 inches and this stuff cuts very easily with just a pair of scissors and then to mark it I just have one of these it's a colored pencil but it's one of those erasable ones and I use this for like other fabric because I want to erase it I don't want to see the lines but I don't care if I see the lines here you know the beauty of working with this stuff here is this this is not a wedding dress and so like nobody's going to really care I mean who's going to care if it's a little bit off and it's just the corners aren't perfect right I mean the spiders or the worms I mean they're not going to really care so alright so there is my 12 by 24 now what I'm going to do is now also if you didn't have a long piece and you're just using scraps or you can just use two pieces that are 12 by 12 and I just have the luxury of having a longer piece and then I can fold it over and then I don't have to sew one edge but if you're putting two pieces of fabric together then just you'll just sew this edge so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to I'm going to sew two edges here this one and this one so I'm going to have three closed edges but before I do that I want to I want to make my top and what I'm going to do is I'm going to come down about a quarter of an inch here and I'm going to sew a him or a seam along here and what that does is that'll kind of stiffen the top of it if it's not if it's just left I mean it's I mean I guess you didn't you wouldn't have to because this stuff doesn't typically fray but the purpose of doing it is so that it won't just in case you've wanted to and it will stiffen the top up a little bit and so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to pin this or use my clips on it typically with woven fabric like cotton stuff you would press this you would use an iron on this but because this has a plastic type material if you try to put an iron on this you're going to end up with a big glob oh you'll stick alright but anyways I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to clip this and then we're going to sew a seam right along here before we start putting the bag together okay okay so I've got my clips on here now I don't want to get ahead of myself I almost forgot to mention what I'm using for thread I'm using what's called let me see if I can get a good shot here it's called Coates outdoor and this is a polyester UV thread in other words the UV light doesn't break it down if you were to just use a regular cotton thread on this your bag is going to deteriorate very quickly and so you want to make sure you use this outdoor stuff and it's actually quite a bit thicker too so it works well with this with this plastic type stuff here and so now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to sew this seam along here and I hope that my big fat sausage fingers don't be in the way I'm not the world's greatest sore butt and I and I really didn't want this to turn into a sewing tutorial anyways that's I leave that for other channels but I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to would help I turn the machine on and I'm going to start it into a back stitch to set the thread and I have to might you know what it's really funny my wife pleased that this is hilarious this machine that I have I only paid like 79 bucks for it and it's been a wonderful machine but why she laughs is because it's got flowers all over it it's the brother JX 2517 and I just got it because it was inexpensive but it works like a charm this has been a great machine for me but so anyways because she's been laughing so much about my machine she went and she she put flames on my machine I'll show you that in a second it's really hilarious because you know I'm actually very secure in my manhood though the flowers didn't bother me but I think she landed up a little bit for me and put some flames on here and so it looks like I don't know a sports car now and now when I get to the end here I'm going to go ahead and do another back stitch reverse basically just reverse stitch okay okay so now let's slide this back and let me show you what I'm doing here for this get rid of this extra thread okay so I want to sew these open edges and leave the top open and when I do this I want to actually I want to go this way because I want the seam the the cut part to be out because I want all my seams to be out so when I turn the bag right side out it this won't show what you'll just see is this is the thread seam right here so now I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to lay a stitch down here and up here and leave this open okay and I'm going to give it about a quarter of an inch seam allowance and what I will also do is I always run two stitches now I don't have this really expensive sophisticated machine that will run two stitches there are some machines out there that that I guess that are very sophisticated and can do that they have two needles or something I don't know I think I read something about it but I don't really care I'll just take the time and run two stitches and it doesn't take much time really high and I probably don't need to do that I can probably just do it with one stitch I've always run to just because it's stronger and so there we go I love these these clips here they think they're so much better than pins because pins just annoy me because if you happen to drop one it good luck finding it or you can hear my dog collar no not my dog collar my dogs my dogs and on this here from the backstitch and I'm going to run it fairly close to the edge typically when you're running this you don't keep an eye on the needle you keep an eye along here you find an edge here a marking and then you just run it along the marking that way your scheme comes out straight then when you come to the end to turn the trick is to make sure your needle is down in the fabric like that when you when you lift your flick you lift a foot and then you just pivot it on the needle I see some people that the needle is up and then they have to adjust in their threat moves and stuff like that but that's just I mean that's just mine that's my thinking anyway that's how I do it so we turn the corner we continue on yeah this machine has been it's been a wonderful machine for me but you know what I suppose because it's my first machine I'm impressed with it because I don't know any difference you know in a sense oh it's like it's like my first car was a piece of junk and it was I mean it had all kinds of problems with it but I loved it because it was my car okay so let's go ahead and I'm gonna I'm going to go ahead and I won't bore you with you watching me do another stitch okay so now I'm going to show you how to make the bottom basically to square it off if we were to just leave it like this and fold it right-side out you just end up still with a flat bag let me show you how to square off the bottom okay so I want a six inch bottom so I want it to be six inches wide so what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut a square I'm going to cut on the bottom part here it's open up here I'm going to make a three inch square here and a three inch square here that will give me my six inches and I know it sounds kind of complicated right now but let me let me lay this out for you and I'll show you what's happening now I'm measuring three inches from the seam not from the outside of the bag okay so it's three inches I really should sharpen this pencil wait and like just like anything else with these bags I'm not I'm not trying to be perfect I'm going to go up three inches here I should sharpen this thing it's like okay so there is my three inch square right here I'm going to do the same on this side also so there now what I want to do is I want to take the bag and I want to match this side seam up with the bottom seam just like this so I'm going to take it on edge and then I'm going to match these two seams like this now I want to match them because I'm going to continue drawing a line across here now this should be six inches so what I want to do is I'm going to lay one seam that's on this side I'm going to lay it one way and then lay this one another way and that'll jewel that does is makes it easier for me to lay it flat okay so I'm going to lay it down here and this should be six inches across and if it's not then I'm a little bit off which means I've got to adjust this a little bit here so this has to come over just a hair just like that see I was a little bit off I didn't quite have it matched up after you've done this enough you could actually just kind of even eyeball it and just shift it this way one way or the other with your phone and and even then I tell you the truth most of time when I make these I haven't even measure did I just put it and just mark my line and not even worry about it so that Ridge there it should be my six inch mark right there yeah that's six inches right there I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to continue this line across here so that's where I'm going to lay my stitch down I'm going to go ahead and put it back in the machine and I'm going to put a stitch right here okay let me mark my other side before I do that that way I can just when I bring the machine back over I don't have to stop so okay so just like that I'm going to go ahead and put a stitch there and a stitch here I wanted to actually show you what my wife did this is the original here with the flowers and whatnot and then she went and put the flames on here to kind of I guess man it up or something like that done now I'm secure in my manhood I'm okay with the flowers but god bless her it was fun her her and my daughter laugh about my my machine the very last step is to cut off this stuff here because we don't need it anything on the outside of the stitch so we're going to go ahead and I'm going to go about a quarter of an inch and cut these off because we do not need them like that okay now the bag is just about complete the last thing is to moment of truth turn it right-side out and we should have ourselves a nice little one-gallon grow bay just push the corners out like that and there we go there is the one gallon grow bay now as I said before you can adjust this to any size that you want make it much larger if you wanted one that was just a little bit bigger like an inch or two instead of the 12 by 24 go 14 by 28 and whatnot that's going to give you a seven inch bag so just you know the possibilities are endless so there it is the one gallon grow bag piece of cake now once you get this down you can make it in just a few minutes okay well there are the grow bags and I think that if you start using these I think you're going to enjoy them and I think that you're going to find that you're going to get some really good production out of them and like I said that you can make these any size that you want I've actually seen some where people are I mean they're they look like they're like six feet in diameter and so there's no I think there's no end to the side the sizer or what of these so on yeahjust if you've got some landscapes laying around or whatever even if you have to go down and buy it it's not that expensive so yeah give these a try I think you're going to be thoroughly impressed alright well a lot for watching guys and don't forget to subscribe and we'll catch y'all later

Channel: Grow Your Heirlooms

Views: 765,806

Rating: 4.9130168 out of 5

Keywords: grow bags, mel's mix, container gardening, landscape fabric, gardening, diy, diy grow bags, greenhouse growing

Id: vq3aBghgGfo

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 17 2017