How to Start Your First Garden (COMPLETE GUIDE)

[Music] if you've wanted to start a garden but you're confused on all of the information out there this video is the one to watch cuz I'm going to take this regular Suburban backyard into a productive backyard vegetable garden we're actually not at my house right now we're at my brothers who have been trying to get to Garden for like 10 years the last thing I saw him grow was like this sad cilantro on a little balcony and it really made me depressed as the Epic Gardener he called me up and he said hey I'm actually excited and I want to get back into the garden so I jumped at the chance we're here in his backyard let's get this going my brother hey where art though here he is the mythical brother who started guarding with me 10 12 years ago it's been a long time and stopped 10 or 12 just about years ago so I don't know what do you think do we look like twins do we look like brothers tell us down in the comments but Bri so you're here you have a wife a beautiful child yep we want to start a garden why um yeah I think a big part of that is really the space we haven't really had it we haven't been in in a house before like townhouse and apartments really didn't have a place to do much besides little herbs so now that we have the backyard we have a place for it we can grow some herbs vegetables some fruit trees um with our daughter now we can get some fresh vegetables teach her a little bit about gardening back here which is going to be really nice as she gets older so I think that's really been a big driver for everything there's really two major considerations when you're designing a garden space the first is where is it in location to your own home so if you're in the kitchen and you say oh hey I need some some you don't want it to be annoying mentally to come out and run and grab it and then if we walk over here the thing you can really get wrong and a lot of beginners will get wrong is literally where is it in relation to how the Sun plays over your space so let's say like you were in a rural area and you just had complete open space you could basically put it anywhere yeah right CU there's no major structures blocking sunlight and sunlight's what a plant really needs to grow now not all plants need the same amount of light but you want to give them as much as they can get right so do you know where East South North West are yeah so West is a this direction generally East over here south that way okay we kind of took into out a little bit as much as we could okay and the reason why that's important guys is because the sun's going to rise in the east it's going to set in the west and the sun exposure is going to change of course throughout like the summer and the winter and so even if you look right here this is kind of like a Southwest facing wall you notice that it's about midday and you're seeing some Shadow right there and so we know it's not bad cuz we have plenty of plants that can grow well in the shade but if you look at this line right here that's kind of the Shadow line throughout the day and it is winter right now so it's going to be a little more harsh but we're going to want to locate some of our sunnier plants over here and if we can or you can in the backyard you want to pick a spot that has as much light as possible and I have another way we're going to solve some of this light problem if I was growing something on the ground right here Bri uhhuh it's in the shadow right now it's not in the shadow right here it's not the shadow right here and when you're talking differents a backyard vard you could just dig into the ground andow or you could put it in little containers but we're going to use something called a raised bed and we're going to use pretty tall ones here to avoid some of that shadow cast there's a lot of different ways you can work with a space that even has this much shade and we need to get the raised beds so let's go grab those great yeah all right BR so we pre-built some of our birdy's beds here uhuh but there's a lot of different ways you can do this you can do with wood you could do it with metal like these guys you could just kind of scr up whatever you want and do it on a budget but we need to talk about placement so what do you know about you know how to space stuff out in the garden not much not a lot other than you need space to work in and that's about it I guess well there's the height of the bed uhhuh and then there's the spacing with which you want to like exist in the garden when you're walking between a bed you almost always want about 30 in all right 30 in gives you enough space to maybe bring a wheelbarrow down if you wanted to okay or to bring some tools or just you know just a walk okay so we got the taller beds mhm I kind of like this okay I think that's generally what we were thinking too yeah it's nice you get some low maybe some herbs over there maybe some leafy greens in that more shaded out spot and then these ones you can pretty much grow whatever you want but we need to grab at least two more the nice thing about these is if you say you didn't want it to be this shape on the end you could just move the panels around oh yeah okay that's true switch it out to whatever you really wanted but we do need to build out one more bed okay it's build time we've got the corners we've got the side panels what dimension were you guys thinking we're doing another 7 by two okay yeah so we're going to need all the pieces yep let's do it all right we've got our 2x7 Bri you're putting the liner on which is helpful for the the fingers but whether you're using one of our Bird's beds or you're building a wooden bed or some other type of construction after you get past the certain length it's usually a good idea to have some kind of brace even with a wood bed you could have like a 2x4 going across in our case I'll show you how we do it we got these bracing channels and you just slide it down just like this this is why you don't screw down those last couple right there lock it in place so now we can't come out at all really and because of the bracing channels we can't really go in helps from bowing cuz like the soil when it gets wet can actually exert a lot of force it's pretty heavy I guess too right when you get it full yeah exactly okay so we are almost built out now we have to get into the problem of filling these beds it's the most common question anyone has when starting a raised bed vegetable garden especially when you're using a taller bed or just if you have a lot of beds right we have roughly the layout which I think looks pretty good and we'll tighten it up up but we have to solve the problem of soil the first thing you have to figure out is how much you need and the way you figure that out is by going back to probably middle school or high school math and doing a volume calculation we take this one that we just did the 2x 7 so 2 * 7 14 and then it's 30 in tall so it's like 2 and 1/2 so that ends up being about 34 cubic feet that's the volume for just this bet so this one over here 34 + 34 68 so you do have to crank out the calculator and do a bit of math here but what I'm going to show you is two different ways to get the soil and one technique to cut the amount of soil that you need so most most of the time a plants roots are going to get to about here or so it's fine if they only get to about there so they don't need to go all the way all the way down oh okay and you can fill that up with like logs or sticks or Twigs or whatever that's way cheaper than soil okay so we're going to fill about half of it with that uh that'll cut our entire calculation of soil volume for this whole garden by half yeah so let's hit the Nursery great we're here at Armstrong nurseries the closest nursery to you Bri one of my favorite nurseries in the Southern California area okay and tell me what you think when you see all this soil I don't know where to start honestly there's a lot I know so let's talk through a couple of the different options that you have but the first thing I want to say is if you have a budget mhm spend most of it on your soil oh really because that is where everything is starting for you like when I first started that Garden I had back at that old place that old I had this like really clay soil that got delivered and it just was bad like one year it was okay and then after that it got really compacted really hard and if I had spent a little bit more money cuz I was trying to save some cash it wouldn't have been that way and I would have not had to replace it and I would have not had to dig it all out you know so if you're going to spend some money in the garden spend it on a really nice soil but that being said I mean you've got a potting soil here you have a cactus succulent potting mix you have something called ocean Forest over here you have a rose mix it gets a little overwhelming it's it's a lot right so the first thing to think about is you're going to want either a raised bed mix like this right here so raised bed potting mix that's pretty straightforward I guess yeah I mean that's like right down the middle what we kind of want or you can get like a just a standard potting mix it doesn't have to be for raised beds okay but the things you want to avoid there's something called garden soil mhm typically you want to avoid that that's more of like a filler material it's not doesn't have as much nutrition in it it has a little bit more wood product in it it's just not as powerful I like to look at the back and just see what's inside so let's take a look at the ingredients here the first thing you see is composted green waste which is basically things like food scraps or grass or something that's been broken down mm so that's a decent ingredient then you've got fur bark that's like going to help loosen up the mix and and make it a little bit more Airy then this one this one's a little controversial it's called spag num Pete Moss basically that adds your moisture your retention so if you have Pete Moss in there there's another product called coconut quar which is made out of shredded coconut hus both of them basically except water and like hold it in the soil so it doesn't just drain out doesn't just fall right out right cuz the soil needs fertility which is fertilizer compost that kind of thing it needs drainage so the ability for Stuff water to actually get out of it but it also needs retention and like 1/3 1/3 1/3 so if you look at it through that lens you could say well the green waist there's for the fur bark is a little bit more of drainage the P Moss is retention sand and perite that's going to be drainage CU sand and then perlites like these sort of white little pck type things that's going to let water kind of fall through right and then the rest of this is all fertility alphalpha meal fishbone meal bone meal feather meal kelp meal Ecto and Endo micis what that means is they inoculate it with micro risal fungi and those fungi sort of eat all this fertility here like the alphalpha the fishbone the bone meal the feather meal and unlock it for the plants okay so that's kind of like one of the nerdier relationships that happens in the soil so let's take a look at this one this is called ocean Forest spry you've got these three numbers here do you know what those mean at all uh no I don't okay so it's going to be called an NPK so your nitrogen phosphorus potassium okay plants need those nutrients in the most abundance they need more than that those are the big three so when you see fertilizer labels or on soil fertilizer breakdowns it'll always be the N the p and the K and this is sort of the ratio and the amount so it has the most uh phosphorus has the next most nitrogen and then has a little bit of potassium in there is that a pretty standard ratio like a good ratio for growth of vegetables that's pretty standard I mean you're you're going to want a lot of nitrogen early that creates a lot of nice leafy growth and then as a plant matures it tends to want a little bit more of the ladder to as it makes like a flower or a fruit or something like that so you might sometimes see like if you were to get a fruit mix maybe it's a little higher than those other two it just it just kind of depends so let's take a look at a soil that we might not want to buy and figure out like why is that you know this is the same brand as the first one we looked at and a lot of people when they start they go well I've heard of that word compost right so I'll just get that and it's got veggies so I would think I could that'd be great for what we're doing yeah exactly and it says ideal for and this if you walk if you read you can see why it might not be ideal so it's ideal for mulching an amendment so adding to something right seed cover breaking up clay soil improved soil texture doesn't say just plant in this though okay right so when you look at the back of this green waste sawdust alfalfa meal bone meal feather meal Kel meal all that stuff that was in the first one but what is it missing seems like some of the drainage potentially some the drainage it's not it doesn't have that Pete Moss it doesn't have that perlite that sand so it's not really a potting mix it's just a fertilizer okay it's just that one/ third part so if you filled your bed if I filled a bed with this the growth wouldn't be quite as not grow but it wouldn't grow super well okay so given that we have to just say okay well what's our budget and I think let's come in with a lower budget here and try to be a little bit conservative yeah it's a lot of beds so it's a lot of beds and so we're going to get a delivery of some of this stuff probably right here and if they don't have enough we might have to go over there and grab some of the other stuff but we also have to talk plants yeah and I want to know what you guys want to grow so let's at the seed wall great we're here at the wall of seed indoors of course Botanical interests mhm again overwhelming quite a bit yeah a lot of what are the questions that you have so we know what we generally want to grow because it's things we eat so like we're talking like chives and herbs vegetable wise like some bok choy jalapeno tomato so like the classics the classic stuff just we know we'll go through I guess but like I don't know what right now in January can we really grow successfully of those okay so a good way to think about this is when you're starting from seed you save money because you can get way more seed than you could go out and like Buy the plant of right so if we were to go buy this end dive outside we're getting like six of them for more almost double the price of this or more and this has like hundreds of seeds in it right and then it also allows you let's say you really like eggplant like there's this long purple eggplant right here you can't really grow eggplant in January so you can buy the seeds now learn to start the seeds and then you can grow those out when it's actually the season and so one way to think about it cuz we're going to do both we're going to get some seeds here but we're also going to do some seedlings out there is let's pick the stuff you like but it's like a summer crop cuz you can't grow that right now in January so what we'll do is mess around with really whatever you like that's more of a summery thing all right so your jalapenos there's a Megatron right there that's really nice you can always do onions from seed I think any sort of bunching onion is like really easy to grow from [Music] seed so we got a good selection let's go plants there's secrets on how to like get the right ones actually one of my favorite parts of Nursery which would be just like messing around with all the different plants that are actually alive uhhuh so the tradeoff is what do you get you get an actually started plant yeah but it is a lot more expensive right so a six pack of these is s $7 for the veggies $649 for the herbs we paid like a couple bucks for the seeds but what are you getting you're getting time yeah right so you're getting all the time it took grow so how long am I saving by getting like this versus seed it depends on the seed so something like a lettuce you might be saving one to two weeks something like a sage or like a rosemary you might be saving over a month or maybe even two months that's not you know or if you bought a tomato let's say they don't have them here right now but if you bought a tomato that was like this tall you're saving two months and you're paying four more bucks for the privilege right it's not bad so sometimes it's worth it and also if you're a beginner we're going to show you how to start seeds but you might not actually know how to do it that well at the start and you might start one and then like kill it then you lost all the time all over again right how do I know what's a good plant we just grabing whatever looks like vibrant or it's actually a really good question this guy versus this guy I mean honestly these are all kind of the same but sometimes you'll find like you know I'm personally not going to pick this floppy one against this guy just looks more this one yeah you know how you know is like this one's floppier there's a lot of seeds down at the bottom this is not just one plant right this is like five to seven plants and they do to make it look a little bit more bushy if you just had one little thing coming out you wouldn't sell it at a nursery but you don't technically need seven growing in the same space And so there's a couple like fun little tips I'll show you but this one looks pretty nice and if you wanted to this again has like a ton of stems coming out split those out you could split them right so this tie basil could become if you got really crazy something I've done before is you actually spray all the dirt off separate the roots out and replant them all separately you could turn this one which is looks like 649 into seven Ty Basil if you wanted now it's tedious but like you could if you wanted to but we'll throw this in here the thing about herbs to by the way is they all pretty much like the same thing they almost all these herbs are Mediterranean herbs like oregano uh the French thyme the sage like you can put them in the same bed maybe that like circular one and you can just let them let them okay yeah so Sage is definitely one we'd want to do there's Sage I do see some strawberry here not herbs you know what would be interesting if you did like strawberries in that little circle bed we definitely would use the strawberries for sure so that would be awesome okay and is it better to start the or is it a time-saving thing again like strawberries versus the seeds you can grow strawberries from seed we have strawberry seeds at Botanical but it takes a long time okay and so for a beginner I would say definitely don't grow strawberry from seed absolutely worth doing this but then you have the Dilemma you can buy just one like this mhm or you can buy two of these six packs would probably be great cuz you'd have 12 so the thing about stobs is you have what's called June bearing mm which I think you get it right it's going to fruit in June and then ever bearing so June bearing is going to basically create like huge strawberries from like June to early July and then it won't and then ever bearing is going to make two or three flushes of strawberries but they're smaller and it's going to be like kind of throughout the year if you want like big old juicy straws I would do this also I think they only have this so we're probably going to go with all right should I grab some that are already flowering then cuz that's obviously a good sign or that's no no actually what I typically do is when I plant them I cut all the flowers off oh in the very start why cuz I want more leaves first and it's January it's not even close to June and so I'd rather just let them get massive and then they'll produce way more strawberries in June so it's not necessarily good that they have the flowers but it's not bad either it's not a big deal we can just I'll show some of this growth looks pretty good yeah that looks really nice you got this nice little thing coming out right there but then see this in January I'd be pinching that right off and we can do that when we get home great when you're picking stuff to put into a bed you got to think okay well how much space do I have in that bed right so if we were to put the spinach in this kale in that 3x4 ft bed well then you have to go how do I know how much I'm supposed to put in there that's true yeah like is between those if we were to plant both of these sixes of these plants would that be one whole B would that be the entire bed essentially I would say there's probably a little more room cuz you want to plant these you can plant this any like 6 to 12 in apart and spinach you can actually put pretty close together and I kind of like to put Plants a little closer in general especially in a raised bed so I think we could probably get away with maybe grabbing like some filler lettuce maybe or something like let's go over here and see what you like so now it's just like whatever type of lettuce you actually enjoy yeah Roma is pretty you know tried and true I guess yeah yeah Paris Island is a really famous variety yeah so like you're looking at you know a 15-day old lettuce now at least that's pretty good and so you just save that much time right so if you're trying to get like something going fast seedlings are the way to go all right Bri we've got all the stuff from the nursery took a while to get here and now what we have to do is truly start the construction of the garden and the first step is to finalize the placement uh so do you like where they look in general yeah definitely well first of all why don't we come down here dude let's look cuz you really want to look at like how the space feels you know uhhuh it doesn't have to look absolutely perfect but it it feels better uhhuh you know so if you walk in you got a tree maybe here grab some herbs grab some herbs come down go here I like it do you like it yeah and there's other ways you could you guys could play this like you could you could arrange these this way right or you could bring this and turn it mhm or you know these could be at the B there's a lot of ways you could skin it that's why it's important at this part you just like think through it like do some Jenga and just figure out what feels the best let's try it going this way just cuz we've never visually seen it so maybe makes sense cuz then you do have a nice middle line coming through you know so why don't we lift and try [Music] it it's so nice to have these beds kind of like this cuz you can do like a trellis from one to the other if you want it you could even have this would be like the perfect one dude to do an arch and walk through and have like cucumbers coming down or something like you could totally do that another thing you can think about is you don't only have to have have beds here if you have a nice walkway and you bring these in right you can put little pots with like little things or little propagations or you can put a little flower bed here or something plus when I mow the lawn I don't want to have to be up against a bed yeah gives me more space there by the way Little Epic Pro tip I know a lot of you in the comments are going to say what about this landscape fabric you see down here it's definitely not required you don't have to put landscape fabric down this is just what Bri had on the property so we're going to use what we have but if you don't want to use landscape fabric and you want to maybe not use any sort of synthetic material you definitely don't have to the one thing I'll say is you want to prevent the weeds from coming up at least in your bed which is what the logs do and we usually use the actual cardboard of the boxes and put it in the bottom oh okay so it's just a good way to repurpose it so you kind of like toss all the cardboard in the bottom toss the logs in then toss your soil in and then like gophers and stuff like we'll have a harder time coming up but the landscape fabric will also help yeah okay I think it looks pretty damn good now how do you fill it with soil right so the the little guys you just fill with soil okay you don't have to do anything but the reason why we have all these logs is because we're trying to save that money right so grab a few okay and it's you know if you can get logs for free that's obviously the best yeah so I like to kind of wedge one in just like this in the corners why it just sticks it in place okay so if you like where your bed is so it doesn't move like anchor it basically it's not moving anymore you know what I mean so we're not doing like a like a very organized stack it doesn't really matter you can the only reason you would is cuz when you put the soil in there'll be little pockets of air and stuff so sometimes if it's not fill later it'll sink it'll start to sink which isn't really that big a deal like you what you can do is just put some extra soil on top top it up and you're good to go okay okay so we're going to keep filling these Bri and then once we're done getting it to about halfway up then it's time to fill with soil okay perfect all right bro the day is getting long yeah it's time to do the fun part okay which is plant out so let's talk what questions do you have about getting stuff in the ground from a Seedling level we're going to start some seeds in a uh I guess not so much getting it in there as much as just like what do I need to take into account when I'm planting what together I guess like water needs like that is that important is it not it is yeah no it definitely is so let's kind of group these by type right we have our herbs so let's grab the herbs and pop them over here these guys cuz that's that's the theme for a bed right an herb bed is a very common theme we have these strawberries we bought so this is our idea was to put those in one right yeah we got our lettuce our spinach and then our our KES and our looks like uh we got some cabbage here okay nice nice let's start out with our herbs they're the easiest they're the hardest to go wrong okay yeah so it's just really really simple so grab those two over there by oh yeah and I'm putting them here because these are Mediterranean herbs what is the climate like in the Mediterranean area Sunny warm sunny warm this is in that area of your Gard going to get the most sun right they're low these These are will kind of bush and spill over look really beautiful but also what do you probably use the most yeah right you're going to come out for herbs probably way more than you're going to come out for an eggplant for example and so we're going to pop these in here spacing wise you don't have to think too much about it but we'll talk about each plant and what the way it grows it's called growing habit like the way it actually okay bushes out so take this Rosemary here this guy it's called upright Rosemary so this is a variety that is going to be a little bit more like colar it's not going to get cover a bunch of space in this it's not going to be on the ground so these are your ground plants for herbs your oregano and your thyme those are called those will creep and kind of fall so they'll sort of fill the bottom okay whereas a rosemary will go straight up right so I like if I'm thinking about like where I'm looking most of the time when I'm coming in I don't want to put a rosemary right here it's going to block the rest of this bed visually you know what I mean put it towards the back i' put it towards the back so why don't you pop that one out okay and and get that one in the ground and what am I am I bringing the bottom of this soil to the top of this soil basically yeah and almost all cases when you're planting something you're just matching the height of where it is to the soil so one thing I'll say is break it up sometimes you do you don't have to do it every time this isn't too too bad but sometimes tight yeah if it's tight and if you see it swirling what you can do is you can be way more rough than you think too you can just kind of do this uhhuh kind of do a little bit of this and that that's good that's totally fine and then just plop it in I'd plop it in yeah give it a little space off the side so then you get into a basil and this was your plant you remember back in the day I know about the basil he's a basil Master he might have to feature on a video just doing basil for us so this is one Bri that I would not really worry about breaking up much okay cuz it looks pretty good right so this one again basil you remember yeah you're going to probably want to put it somewhere like this right cuz it'll block everything if you don't do that and leave if there's more than one of these plants together for now just leave them as is it's really up to you one thing I might do if I was using this just for my kitchen right and I wanted to grow a big old bush is I would actually pick I'd say maybe pick the best looking stem like this stem right here I might cut all these the first time I harvest and just cut it completely off and just leave one and the reason why I do that is because these are all competing for the same nutrients and the same space is this one got it right so I'd use this just as basil to harvest and then what I might do is I'd prune this basil see how these two leaves are coming out right here if you prune right above that these are going to shoot outwards like this and Bush out so basically if you prune above it forces bushiness so you see what I'm getting at like use these as herbs and then Force this one to Bush out and become its own really big bush got it but if you want to to keep it simple you could just put it in like this so now now I could cut all them you could do that immediately if you want or just like tomorrow when you're have your eggs and basil or whatever you I see okay yeah this can get quite big yeah I remember pretty big I might bring it like somewhere around this area oh okay and then what I like to do too is just kind of space these and think you know how do I want these to lay out this looks pleasing right mhm cuz part of it's just like does it look good aesthetically aesthetic but then secondly Sage is going to grow a bit taller than these two oregano and time so what I want this kind of further in the back as well so it's not covering some this or you totally could or the only reason I was thinking maybe not do this is then these kind of blend together oh cuz they both will just and they'll kind of cover into one another but if you put these kind of close to the edge what you'll get is this nice like spilling effect over the edge that could look really cool but we could also maybe do this partially right in the middle do that or just to throw a curveball we could put that basil right in the middle bring this over here and then the Basil's the center piece could look cool up to you I think parsy in the Middle look good okay let's do that so the thing with growing herbs is it's really mostly about maintenance like once they're in it's mostly about using them regularly enough pruning them cutting them back you don't have to fertilize them all too often you don't have to water them even all too often because they're Mediteranean herbs right they don't really grow in a place that's getting so much rain that it would need it and they're just really Hardy plants sometimes you want to smell smells like doooo yeah I smelled that coming from somewhere I didn't know what it was from if you smell that that means that it's gone anerobic cuz if it smells bad it's all those bad bacteria another good reason to kind of break it up give it a little bit of air and you don't even really need a water there's too much right now cuz it's already too wet you know mhm why don't you grab those strawberries Bri and then I'll get um I'll get the scissors all right okay strawberry time yeah these ones are honestly going to be massive dude yeah June bearings are huge I'm going to do the unthinkable and have you trace the flowers down to the root stem there cut it all the way off how far to the as far down as you can cuz if you if you look at the anatomy of the strawberry you can see it's mostly just single leaves right and they have this long stem and then same with the flow right so if you're cutting off here M why not cut off all the way there cuz you're making the plant keep this random stick alive I see for no reason right so snip all these off just the flowering yeah just the flowering and then we'll talk a little bit about strawberries and how they grow so strawberries are going to put out all these leaves and then the stuff that Bri's cutting off that's the flour that will then form the strawberry but if you remember from the nursery these are June bearing strawberries meaning that in January there's quite a bit of time before these really are going to be of size where they're going to put out those beautiful fruit so Bri pruning all these flowers off basically to force the strawberry plant to keep putting out more leaves what do leaves do they give you energy right they give the plant energy so it's going to have a lot more energy when June comes so you could even do this BR up until about the beginning of May so the beginning of may you could do that you'll force them these massive strawberry bushes and then when you start seeing flowers in may stop pruning and you'll start getting an incredible amount of like huge strawberries what about the ones that are growing off say which one was I just looking at there was one where there's some leaves some flowers just go all the way down I still go all the way down cuz that's primarily a flower okay like there's this random little leaf but it's not a significant one you know what I mean it's not like you're cutting off one of these guys or like how about this guy where there's a couple smallies coming off the side of the flowering that's actually just twisted up yeah well there you go just cut that guy off there there you go easy okay so we'll talk spacing so that the way strawberries propagate themselves is they put out what's called a runner so it'll throw a stem out kind of like this that stem will have a leaf like this but the leaf will have a little ability to put a root down so it'll kind of go likeo and then it'll go like this and a root will put in soil and then you could actually sever this and youd have a new plant oh so what you want to space the strawberries out so that they can do that a little bit but not too much cuz if they do that a ton then they're not really making strawberries you know U so you want to just in this case just space them as evenly apart from one another as possible okay so kind of do some around the edge we have how many 12 here there around the corners nice go there there there yeah I mean that looks pretty good to me got one extra here yeah maybe like that yeah yeah go if you want you can just toss this in a random other bed too you know yeah it's true so when you plant a strawberry it's super important see where this new growth is coming out of right there uhhuh that's called the crown that's where all that new stuff is coming you want to plant below it so you really would never want to put the soil like up to here certainly not up to here cuz it's going to rot the crown that's where all the growth is so if that rots the thing is done it's done yeah so when you come in you put it in like this come around and I kind of like to just like press it down into the soil like that and see how it's it's still sticking up a bit uhhuh that's my way of knowing I didn't accidentally kind of drown my strawberries I see just pack it down around there basically yeah yeah cuz if you plant something and you don't pack it I mean you don't have to like cram it or anything but if there's a lot of air pockets around it's not really great for the plant so basically if you keep pruning those flowers off eventually you won't even be able to see the soil wow and then you'll have to go hunting for the strawberries you'll be like looking under and you'll see some big old strawberry and every day when you come out when in June you'll randomly find another one and you'll think you looked for it and then the next day it's like almost like it grew overnight it's crazy sounds delicious okay let's hit the lettuce bed okay we'll do the lettuce right here cabbage are huge huge so you actually might want to put the cabbage over here okay so let's leave that for now let's just pop all these out there's like way less rules to this way less guidance to the lettuce cuz you're just I mean really what is it you're just eating the leaves of a plant that grows really fast that's true it's not stressing too much it it does like a little bit of fertilizer you know how we looked at those npks on the bags uh it likes a lot of n it likes a lot of nitrogen okay cuz it's primarily what plants use to grow their leaves mhm but honestly with what's in this from from the nursery we're totally good so for me when I'm making one of these call it salad beds I like to just design it based on what looks good uhhuh and spacing wise you can kind of be as Loose as you want like for example if you were to plant these two romains really close well then what's going to happen as this grows it's going to right into one another right and so that's fine if you wanted to harvest it young so you could Harvest it maybe like honestly almost a couple days after this it's like baby Leaf let ROM kind of bulb up not bulb up but like Leaf out you know and so that's kind of up to you and also it's up to how much space you have in the bed so let's just kind of lay them out however you think looks good does it make sense to grow the same thing next to each other it doesn't really matter with this either you totally could and or you could just mix it mix and match it like if you wanted a nice ability to come down this line cut off some lettuce mhm I might put it in a row if you wanted to kind of like have that varied look I might just mix and match what are you feeling uh probably I think I like the idea of the same one by itself near near each other in that case I'll show you a spacing technique that helps then so lay them out roughly even but what we'll do is we'll stagger the kale in the middle the other cuz it's a little more efficient with the way that you can space so instead of doing this right if I do this then there's more space oh I see and grow for that to actually be there you know what I mean so that looks pretty good to me so I just pop them in so if you wanted we're putting these all in at the same time right so what's going to happen they're all going to be ready at the same time yeah which you might you might not want right so I would say when you come out I'd Harvest some of these as you go and you could even take like a whole head that's young or too early but that's fine cuz that's just a baby lettuce yeah if you wanted it to be more stable and you get a normal amount at like in a week uhhuh then I would plant some like once a week I see or once every two weeks you know cuz then you're staggering it a bit [Music] mhm you know my story with cabbage I've tried and I failed and I've tried and I've succeeded but mostly I failed to grow giant giant cabbages we don't need giant we just need cabbage just need like a couple we're not looking for world's best okay so do you know much about how it grows just a big big boy in the middle right big boy yeah there's a big boy in the middle which means it needs a lot of small boys on the outside to help it kind of grow which means that you need to give it the space right so if you're ever in doubt and you just don't know obviously go to Epic gardening.com we have like thousands of blog articles on how to grow plants but you can also look at the tag okay so you've got space 18 in see that so what that means and sometimes spacing it'll be a little confusing but usually when in doubt just follow that exactly be at least safe yeah so the reason why is because let's lay out what do we have three three and three is this even enough space for six I would say it's just barely enough okay right because 18 the best way to think about it is just nine on each side right because if you're spacing multiple plants together if you go nine on each side that'll be Nine and Nine that'll be 18 right so what we want to do and another hack is when you're next to an edge you can cheat that spacing you could go to here you don't have to give nine here or 18 cuz there's nothing over here okay right so it'll grow up and then the way cabbage grows is it does these crazy leaves out and those leaves start to curl in and that's the Cabbage it's just a bunch of leaves like curled um so it needs those leaves out which is why you have to space it out at the 18 so that's pretty much it and the thing I'll say about this is much like the kale cuz cabbage is actually the same exact plant as kale you want to bury this give it that stability cuz look how floppy this is yeah this one too you could legitimately just break that on accident right so let's get these in there we've just planted out four of Bri's beds there's two left to plant but we're not going to plant them I'm going to show you how to start the seeds that we bought at the nursery so you don't even have to plant these right now if you don't want to you can just start like your favorite pepper your favorite tomato and I'll show you how to do that over there Perfect all right the Moment of Truth this is when you become an advanced Gardener when you can start your own seeds why because you get all that variety like for example I'm surprised you picked this one this is actually a really cool one I met the guy who bred this potato oh wow so normally you just plant a potato to grow potato this one you grow from an actual seed so this is kind of a fun one it's an adventurous one we can try it if you want to uh but let's start out fun to try yeah yeah we definitely should let's start out with something a little bit easier how do I know when to start what or timing wise like which one should I plant now okay so we have a garden right here right you have lettuce cabbage strawberries and herbs so you probably don't want to plant any of those and if you were to grow something like like I don't know uh tomato that would be a really good choice why because you can grow tomatoes in a seed tray for like 2 months before you even put them in the ground in fact when someone's in a colder climate than we are what they'll do is they'll start their tomatoes in January February put them in like little pots they'll grow them up and then they'll put a plant like this in the actual Garden Oh W cuz you can transplant in right that's the whole point so I would say maybe get a head start on some of your summer stuff that bought okay and then also anything else you think is interesting got it right that you didn't buy so what what looks Tomatoes yes I think jalapenos would be really cool to start so we'll do the maybe the Megatron jalapeno you pop that one open okay and I'll do we'll do the Cherokee purple tomato which is a really classic heirloom tomato so there's your pepper seeds so A good rule of thumb when you're using our six cells is just to plant six yeah or if you want to get really particular you could maybe plant like three or two and put little labels in M but I keep it simple usually I just plant six of things cuz you get so many seeds You Know M so here's what I'll do I will usually grab like a little twig or something like that and I'll just make a tiny little depression in the middle here you don't even have to do this you could plant right on the surface and just put more soil on top but to me it's easier to put it just in a little hole here as a rule of thumb not every seed is guaranteed to sprout or it's called germinate so I usually put two in a hole to guarantee it'll come up but if you're planting six you're going to get one yeah so I would just put one in just to save your seed a little bit okay just pop one in so these seeds are in do I need to like Pat them down or something what we'll do is we'll put these right here just so we remember for now but I'd always label them but yeah what you'll do is you'll just cover Just a Touch just Boop cover it up a little bit almost all seeds want to be buried there's some and they're mostly flowers that do not want to be buried but almost all can be buried like roughly a/4 inch or so down okay we'll just plant out some other stuff like I'd say it's probably a little bit too early to grow cucumbers and the reason why is because these ones take longer to sprout and they they grow a bit slower cucumbers are a much faster plant and so if you start that in January it's not really going to be summer whereas this it has a lot more time it's fine I'm scared of cucumbers anyway so we'll we'll save it on after after that mishap yeah uh bo Choy if we could do that that would be do bok choy so here why don't you do that and honestly bok choy you can Harvest it young it's baby bok choy so you could plant a lot of this okay you know you do like a couple six cells of that I might do three six cells if you love if you love bok choy you could throw 18 bok choy down this row no problem all right and while you do that I'll get some of these onions in cuz I don't see any onions in the garden yet we're going to hold off on the squash in January even though you see summer and winter squash on the names that doesn't mean it's when you grow it it means it's typically when you would eat it so summer squash you harvest young and you har and you eat it really quickly so like this black beauty summer squash you harvest it sort of young okay a big old winter Butternut you actually let the squash fully mature and the idea is you could store that over the winter why it's called a winter squash got it so you could eat it young too but it's it's eat it's edible when it's it's older than than the old summer squash there quite a bit of seeds in the bok choy here yeah you're going to get a lot on the bok choy still one per you think yeah I mean one or two is fine the the germination of those is really fast and it's pretty consistent the thing with bunching onions is the name tells how you can plant them right you don't really have to worry about like you don't do like we with a cabbage you put like one every 18 in you can throw like three or four seeds in a hole and then grow it like that got it cuz they kind of want to grow next to one another so then for watering the seeds when and how often are we talking so in the beginning there's nothing really to water cuz there's no root it doesn't it doesn't need it beyond the fact that it needs some moisture to know it's time to start sprouting right so what we'll do is we'll just give it a light amount of water and this seedling mix that we used which is just another type of soil mix it's a little more fine and so it takes water really well and it holds it really well and so what'll happen is we'll water it in we'll wait a couple days you'll start seeing some Sprouts all you need to do at that point is just make sure it's moist but don't hit it every day okay cuz people will kill their seedlings all the time just by dumping water all over it and there's not a lot of soil here so there's not a lot of soil and look at that that root will be like this big like what can it really take so as long as it's it's you're you're in a good spot and in terms of like where to place these while they're germinating yeah full sun no not really they don't really need sun for the first 3 days because there's nothing there's nothing that's above soil right exactly There's No Leaf but you do want it to be in a warm spot so if you just left it out here at night that wouldn't be your best option uhhuh i' put it in indoors like 70ish degrees like room temperature is going to be a good way to think about it okay because it they are triggered by uh moisture and by heat so unless the heat gets to a certain unless the temperature gets to a certain degree it will not generally will not Sprout so when they start to sprout what you'll do is you'll move them to a sunny area uh and make sure they get like I don't know 8 to 12 hours of Sun a day they could take even more than that honestly or you could solve that by using a grow light like a shop light even would be fine you just put really like really close and then once they start to sprout after about 2 weeks generally cuz they're all different right generally like with your lettuces and your spinach and your onions and all that you could start tossing them in the garden if conditions are good if they're not or you want to wait like with your peppers or your Tomatoes those might take up to a month or so then you might want to pop them out of these trays and put them in like a smaller pot and let them keep growing got until it's time to actually put them in the ground okay but we might have to come back and do a transplant and planting session with Bri because I don't know I'm kind of excited to see how this goes so was there anything in particular for flower seedlings versus vegetable seedlings that are that different or sometimes yeah so like take a look at the sweet peas so everything's really going to be on the back and so if you take a look at the Sweet Peas on the left side look 15 to 20 days to emerge seed depth pressed lightly into the surface so this is 1in seed depth so I should be pushing those down way further to the seed so at the bottom of the seed like the sixl basically I'd say about halfway down okay and then like in this case seed spacing sew in groups of 12 to 20 seeds so flowers are way different than vegetables they they usually take longer they the flower seeds are like weirder looking and sometimes more delicate and sometimes you plant like five in one place versus if you're growing like a cabbage you just need one and it sprouts really fast and it's you know it's kind of easy so flower seed starting is super fun it's just a little bit more complicated got it they're just more finicky basically yeah all right bro what do you think it looks fantastic stoked to start harvesting and just watch the growth I'm stoked that you're in the club now 10 12 years later my brother the Epic brother he's finally in guys I finally got him so all you need to do now is just water this in for a couple minutes each bed okay don't overwater it they're just transplanting you just want to make them settled and then keep an eye on those seedlings or the seeds that you started and I want you to send me a video in a month and I'll show you that right now all right hey Kev wanted to give you an update on the garden progress so far it's been about 2 and 1 half weeks and we've got some good growth and a lot of progress so let's take a look we've been getting a lot of rain here lately since everything was planted which is great the last Bed full of soil still haven't planted there we're waiting to get those seedlings in there but when it comes to what we've done already doing well everything's doing solid we got the herbs here we we planted a grocery store bought basil and that one's doing all right but everything else that we planted when we got these in is doing well coming over to the strawberries which are doing fantastic as you can see Runners are kind of splitting off everywhere we've been keeping an eye on the flowers and getting those removed so we can get a lot of that growth but overall really happy with how the strawberries are are doing right now and then our cabbage is doing well as well we're getting some bug problems here and we're keeping an eye on that but beyond that it's looking good and then we got our leafy greens our Roma kale and spinach kale will have to take a a closer look at is struggling a little bit maybe overall really happy with how everything turned out especially with uh adding those the passion fruit and the trees it's going to be really exciting to see those uh start coming in and as we get into the summer months see the strawberry start to blow up once we get the seeds planted seeing those flourish is going to be really exciting really happy overall with this Garden right now as Kevin would say good luck in the garden and keep on growing

Channel: Epic Gardening

Views: 239,350

Keywords: epic gardening

Id: X3SP1Fub3bw

Length: 46min 47sec (2807 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2024