- This time last year, the house that I'm living
in now had just bare dirt, 13,000 square feet of it and now it's a pretty
decent epic homestead. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening where it's my goal to help
you grow a greener thumb. So last year, I moved from
my small front yard garden that many of you remember to
this sprawling, at least to me, a little over quarter acre
house here in San Diego. And so what I'm gonna do
today is go back in time. I'll show you my plans for this space, or at least what I thought
they would be back then and then we'll zoom
forward and I'll show you what I've done so far in just a year. So cultivate that like
button for a truly epic tour and let's get into the video. So here in the front yard garden, I actually think I've
done a pretty good job. It looks more or less the
same as the old epic garden, but it's way less cramped in here and I have way more beds. In the old garden, I wouldn't even be able to stand right here because
there'd be another bed lined up right about here. So I want to take you around
bed by bed really quickly and just show you what we
have going on right now. Here in the raised bed front yard, let's start out with
probably the best bed. We actually had a big problem with soil on the initial delivery. There was a calcium deficiency which caused a phosphorus deficiency, and we've been correcting that ever since, but this bed here, take a
look, it looks really solid. This is our salsa bed. And so I have some peppers here going all down this front row, jalapeno, we have tequila sunrise. This one right here is
a variated bell pepper. So it's actually striped
or at least it will be, but you can see a little remnant of that on the leaves themselves,
which is really interesting. We've got purple and green tomatillos. We have some carrots and
onions peppered in here and then cilantro in the back. And now let's move on back to another sort of weird combination bed, which is dwarf corn and squash. This is in the round tall bed. And so what you can see
here already is this corn is not more than two
feet tall, I would say, and it's already tasseling and it's already pretty producing silks. And the silks have this
interesting sort of reddish magenta color, which I
hadn't seen before on a silk, which is really interesting. And what we have here is
a little kabocha squash, and you can actually see
one little kabocha guy hanging out here so we'll
see how he sizes up, but squash and corn is
a classic combination. And then the thing about at epic gardening is it's still about growing food in as many different ways as possible. So you'll see raised beds, but you'll also see
things like this grow bag. And here, I kind of
want to show you things that don't do that well. And I don't know what exactly
happened in this grow bag, I'm still trying to figure it out, but I think this tomato
just maybe got started a little bit too early, got hit with some sort of disease or looks like it might be some
spider mites or something, but it just did not do that well. Still here in the front yard and the first thing you notice
really are these pathways. I can walk through my beds. In my old garden, I would probably have maybe 10, 12 inches, and I'd be cramming myself
in between each path just to get enough space. Now I can get a wheelbarrow
through any structure that I'm growing in. And speaking of structures,
this is a great one. This is the greenstalk garden that's growing all sorts
of different things. So up top here, I wanna show you that
you can grow tomatoes in any situation. These are tiny Tim tomatoes, and they live up to the
name because they can grow in about a gallon's worth of soil and they're doing quite well here, but I filled this up with all
sorts of different things. The greenstalk for me, I wanted to be all about
bringing in pollinators and bringing color. So I have some strawberries,
I've got some marigolds, all sorts of various annuals
and perennials in here. And then up here, this bed used to be my
alternative greens bed. I was growing arugula and all sorts of different
non-lettuce greens. And it's flipped, it's now squash. So I actually harvested a couple
of these squash yesterday, but they're doing pretty well. We've got a couple baby little
zephyr squash right here. These ones will typically
have a little bit of a green right there sort of a
bifurcated color pattern. Under here, let's see if we can find one. Yeah, I think I see one in here. This is a bulam squash also
known as an avocado squash, and we've found that
they're quite productive and quite tasty. You harvest them when
they're about the size of maybe a softball or so. So things are going pretty
well in the squash bed. And then let's switch over
here to the second green stock. This one, I've got lemon grass in it. I was growing poppies. Poppies were doing really well actually. Cosmos, I did amaranth,
it's not here anymore, but that was a fantastic
one, red garnet amaranth. But these greenstalks are just really good if you're a small space gardener and you want to cram 42 plants over there, 30 plants over here in the
square footage of two by two, and then you just go up about five feet. Now there is one sadness that I do have to share with you guys. I think if you remember
from my spring tour, I was gonna grow a giant cabbage here. It's still here, it's
just not doing that well. So I have lovingly named it
San Juan Cabbage Toronto. It's kind of a silly name, but I've really come to
connect with this cabbage here and it's really been suffering. I mean, you can tell from the leaves, you can just see how much
cabbage looper damage and cabbage mop damage there's been. We've tried to control it by hitting it with all sorts of different things. Insecticidal soaps, neem cake fertilizer. We've done BT and it just
couldn't get past the point of really thriving unfortunately. It's still gonna head up. It's still actually gonna look quite nice, but I mean this cabbage, the head of it should have been this big and instead the head is this big. Over here, we're still
in the raised bed portion of the homestead guys. This is crazy that I actually
have this much to show you, but here is the sub-pod system. So this isn't in bed or
inground worm composting system. So if we were to open this up, you could kind of see how
this thing would work. What you've got is two chambers. You'll fill this one up. Look, I have a couple slugs right there. Wow, you can actually see
through that guy, interesting. You could put a couple worms in there. You'd manage that bin. Once this filled up, you'd start filling this side
up and they'd migrate in, but there's also holes in the side here so they'll be able to get into this bed. And so what I noticed
is in the sub-pod bed, I've got nasturtium,
I've got some marigolds, some African blue basal, which is a fantastic pollinator basal, one of the best ones you'll ever find. This was a very productive bed for me. I think because a lot of
the worms have crawled into the actual soil itself and started to improve it, loosen it, add their castings and dust nutrition. So sub-pod review will
come soon on the channel, but I've been really pleased with it. Over here in this raised bed, this is one of the weirder plantings that I've ever done I think. This was sunflowers, cosmos and alyssum and the sunflowers have done really well. This one obviously has been spent, but I did it in like a
stadium seating style. So I had the taller ones back here and then as you move up front,
you get the golden bear, really short dwarf ones,
which look very interesting. It's hard to see cause
most of them are spent now, but they've got almost no
blackness to the interior. It's flowers all the way through. Then you have these beautiful
sort of pale yellow ones up top that are still flowering
and still looking amazing. So these have done really, really well. The last part of the
front yard garden proper is the no dig bed in the grow bag garden. So we're finally outta the
raised beds and this no dig bed for those of you who've been
following for a long time, this is the one that I
made with Charles Doubting and I have to admit, I've made
some mistakes in this bed. I like to show you what I've done right and I like to show you
what I've done wrong and there's a lot that I've
done wrong in the garden and this is one of the
things that didn't go so well the first time around. I used probably too
much straight up compost and it just sat there sopping wet and the plants weren't doing that well. So some of the stuff has done well. Look at the lemon grass over there, look at the cabbage over there. That's all looking really nice. This is probably the pride and joy, this is the best thing so far. So I put in what's
called the Titan A-Frame from Gardeners Supply Company and we have various different types of pickling cucumbers on here. As soon as we pruned off
the lower growth here and actually got them up on a trellis, they really started to take off. Before that, we were seeing
some leaf minor damage. We were seeing some weird mildewy or blight type of things going on and we got them off the ground, they're doing really fine. So it took a while for that
soil to sort of loosen up and really let the plant breathe, but I think it's finally working now, which I'm really excited about. And then over here, of course we know I'm into the grow bags. So we have all sorts of
different grow bags here growing honestly sometimes a hybrid crop. So here I have what was
supposed to be lemon grass. I think a tomato seed made
its way in here somehow. So now I have this sort of
weird pair cherry type of tomato that quite honestly doesn't
even taste that good, but it's still there. Right here, we have a black cobra pepper. This is one that I over wintered. I do have a whole video on that, but it's a really easy
way to grow peppers. I think from now on, what I'm gonna do is grow a
ton of peppers on year one, figure out the ones that I like and then just over winter
them for the next year and you can do it in any zone provided you either take it indoors or
in my zone just leave it out. But we got a lot of
other stuff growing on. Bell peppers, another tomato,
I've got this mashua here, which is a relative of nasturtium and it grows underground as a tuber and you actually dig the tuber
up and you can eat the tuber so pretty interesting there. These eggplants I'll tell you,
Japanese eggplants, prolific. So maybe I'll do an
eggplant guide pretty soon. And then finally the big bag, this is the 100 gallon bag. This one's got ginger and turmeric. Took a little bit of time to come up. You can see it's a little bit spotty, but we have dug down in and we do know that the other ones are still rooting up. So I thought I kind of
got a bad batch of ginger, but it turns out it's just
patience in the garden. So that's it for this entire front yard. Let's go ahead and take
a look at the orchard. So when I first pulled up to
this house way back a year ago, this was the first thing I saw. I said oh, I think there's a
lemon tree on the property. And it turns out I was
right and I was also wrong. This isn't a lemon tree,
this little sprig back here, come take a look is. So I think what happened is
we had some wild root stock, whatever was grafted onto
ended up shooting out and I do have some lemons here. I don't know exactly the variety. There's no way for me to really know that, but right here is a grapefruit. I had a couple last year. I was actually pretty surprised
with how good they tasted compared to how bad the tree looked. I did give it a really aggressive prune when I first moved in last year. I mean, look, these are
coming in like crazy. They're gonna have some
serious grapefruit this year. So I was thinking about removing the tree cause I don't know the variety, it wasn't well taken care
of, it's a weird shape. At least for one season,
I'm gonna let it go. But what I have going on over
here is probably the thing I'm the most excited about. These are the first orchard trees I've put in here at the homestead. It's just a straight up hedge of citrus. So I have a Washington navel right here, nagami kumquat right here. This is a pink lemonade lemon,
this is a variated lemon. You can see the leaves have a little bit of a
funky pattern on them. They almost look like a house plant type of leaf to me, really interesting. Then you have what was this one? I think this is the cara cara. Yep, this is the cara cara navel. We have a blood orange right here. We have a satsuma. We have a lime, this is a bearss lime. Then I've got a valencia orange. I've got, what is this one? This is why you always
have to label your plants cause you'll never remember. Oh, it's the gold nugget Mandarin. And then I have a yuzu. So the question you're
probably wondering now is like why would you ever plant 10 citrus four feet apart from one another? Well, the plan for this area is to let them get to about my height. So like six, seven feet
or so, maybe eight feet. So maybe up to here max and
then prune them very delicately so that they become a hedge. They're gonna block off the viewpoint from this are of the property so you can't see in and it's an evergreen so it's always gonna be there. I think that's gonna
be a really nice look. This is on the north side. Eventually you're just gonna see fruit just dropping everywhere
on this whole property. And the really cool part
is almost all of the citrus is fed by water from my shower. Yeah, you heard that right. It's water from my shower. On my homesteading channel, you can actually see the full install, but basically what
happens is a tube of water will come out right through here. There's a trench, this is
a mulch trench right here. You can see these irrigation
control valves right here. Water will come out right
there and right down on there and all that water will
water four citrus trees each. So these four and then those four. I hadn't had enough water to set up the other hedge over there, but this is just one way
to be more sustainable. Here in San Diego, we had one of the lowest years of rain that we've had in recent years. We're supposed to get
like 12 inches on average. We didn't even come
close to that this year and that's a low amount already. And so whatever I can do to
use more water, the greywater, which is what this is called, when you're using water
from inside your home twice either with the laundry or the shower, is a great way to reuse, but there's still a couple more
trees that I wanna show you. So with the old epic garden, I actually did have a fruit tree. Weirdly enough, in that
property was one loquat tree. And now I'm sitting under the shade of actually two loquat trees right here. So take a look upwards. This just finished the fruiting cycle so we've been eating loquats
for about two months straight. My family, my friends, Jacques, everyone has been eating loquats. I did some pruning last year
that made it look this way, some pretty heavy pruning
of the under canopy, any sort of crossing branches in there. And then I started planting new stuff. So here we have a beautiful fig. This is the yellow long neck fig, it's from my friend, Richard, over at Grafting Dragon Fruit. A lot of you know him from
our dragon fruit videos that we've done, but he's also just a
fruit grower in general. So he gave me this start. I think we put this in
maybe two months ago, I would say now and when we put it in, it was no taller than about here. And so it's put on this
much growth in two months and all of these fruit. Take a look, you can see
they're not quite ripe yet. They're getting close, but I'm gonna get a handful of figs just off of this tiny, tiny little plant. Figs are a classic California plant, grows really well here. There are some varieties
that grow in colder zones like a Chicago hardy fig so
don't think you can't grow them, but I'm really pleased. Now this is kind of the weird thing. The way I planted it,
because the way this stem was sort of angling out like this, that allowed me to get it a little closer into this loquat. I have a little branch here
for a rock here for support and it'll come out this way. And then the plan I'm gonna stand up here is to just sort of sculpt it
to about a six by six by six. I don't need it much bigger than that, I'm not gonna have that many figs, so I'll have it be about here. And it'll take up this space
and really kind of look nice, almost like a little forested approach. This section here, when I moved in was brown dye
mulch, which I really hate. It's like a dyed wood chip mulch, not a great thing to put in the garden and then I think actually think someone had stuck pieces of jade in the ground to pretend like they had
landscaped the place, but they hadn't, which was kind of silly so I ripped those out. I did put in some semi natives
like this Mexican salvia, but I've slowly started to replace them with an edible perennial, which of course would be the artichoke. This is a green globe artichoke and these have been incredibly
productive in this space. I'm letting most of them go to flowers mostly because I like the look of that. I think it looks really, really beautiful and apparently it smells really good too. There's a couple interesting things though in this part that informs
the rest of the garden. The first is that little pipe
that's sticking outta my wall. What is that pipe, that
is my laundry water. So if I want to, I have a toggle in there. I can turn it on or off, but if I want to, I can toggle my laundry water to come out into this mulch basin and
water these artichoke. For the most part, I don't water these anymore,
I just do my laundry. The other thing I want you to notice here is this big honking thing. This is the 200 gallon rainwater tank. So that's collecting water off
that little terracotta patch of my roof, which is like disconnected from
the rest of the whole house. It probably won't fill up too too much, but even if it does, there's an overflow that'll go straight into this patch. So the idea with this whole
patch is perennial edibles that do well with minimal care, as long as they get enough water and they're getting enough water either through the rainwater system or through the greywater system. So it's really beautiful and
I'll just show you over here the example of what an artichoke
will start to look like once it goes to flower. So let's see if it's true
that it smells really good. Honestly, it kind of smells
like a sweet artichoke. So I'm into it, I'm digging it, let's see. Yeah, I mean, it's a
beautiful, beautiful plant. A lot of people don't
know that it'll produce that beautiful color of a flower, but this is this bed, let's
go on over to the berry patch. So the last part of the front yard garden, there's been a lot I know, is the berry patch or sort of
like the weird fruit patch. So I've got my strawberries right here. They have seen better days. The problem we've been having
with them is an armyworm or a cutworm problem or an earwig or both. So I've been putting some traps out. We've actually done some
of this, which looks weird, but it's neem cake fertilizer. So it's what you would
press to get neem oil. This is the waste product. And apparently it has a
repellent effect on earwigs. So we're testing that out
just to see, but nevertheless, there's still some good strawberries here. So I'll show you what we've got going on. There's probably like 20
in this patch right now I could eat, but let's
give this one a taste test. This is probably the seascape variety. It's so sweet. And it's weirdly one of those fruits that I kind of like slightly warm, like fresh outta the garden
instead of nice and chilled. I'm having a great time
with the strawberries, very productive here. Behind me here are the
dragon fruit though. So these have been doing pretty well. Some of the cuttings have failed to thrive until now basically, until
the weather warmed up again, but they're starting to shoot up. So I have some where I'm only halfway up. I have others where I'm all the way up. And then over here, I've got others where not
only am I all the way up, but I'm all the way down almost. So they're starting to
actually fall down the trellis, which is exactly what you wanna see. So I'm thinking on that
variety right there, which is Trisha. I may actually get a
dragon fruit this year, which would be fantastic
cause usually from cuttings, you're looking at more than a year unless you have like
perfectly optimal conditions. The rest right here is
just the berry patch, which we just did a video on so I won't talk about that too much, but we will go through the new epic fence, which also did not exist last year. I had a chain link fence. I had another type of chain link fence. I had another type of chain link fence and a weird wood fence. Now I just have one wood fence and I think it looks really nice so let's pop on back through here and check out the backyard. So at my old house, I didn't really even have the opportunity to start seeds outdoors that well. I was starting them
indoors just under lights like many of you probably do. But now that I do have the opportunity, this is the seedling table. I built it, it's not a hard build at all. I actually got the idea from
Laura over at Garden Answer, but it's an eight foot
long table by three foot and I've got chicken wire
here so I can water through it if I want to. So if we take a look here, you can see some of the
stuff that we're growing. I'm always trying to be
sewing, always be sewing. So we have some squash coming through. We have some watermelon. I already actually have these planted, but I wanted some backups. We've got just some
beautiful petunias here, some yardlong beans. So just stuff for
summer, stuff for summer, you can double this as
a little drying rack. Sneak peek guys on some of the garlic that I've been growing and harvesting. I finally succeeded in my garlic. I would say this table probably cost about 200 bucks to make. We put it on wheels. I got a video on the homestead channel, and I'm very pleased with it. One of the things I'm probably
the most pleased about, you saw what the shed looked like, the existing shed on the
property when I first moved in, that shed is gone. It has seen better days. This shed, the epic shed is here. So we built this closer towards
the corner of the property, just so I didn't waste space putting it right in the
middle of nothing back then. So this thing is huge. It's eight foot by 10 foot footprint and then it goes from eight
feet to 10 foot on the slope and I actually put a gutter on it so I can collect rainwater with this 500 gallon rainwater tank, which I'm gonna talk about
the whole rainwater system in a second, they're still
talking about the shed here. I did a couple cool things. The tools we used the
most here at the homestead I want them easily accessible. These are all stainless
steel tools from Corona so what I did is I just
mounted them to the side. We've been putting a lot of
work in on this manure fork. We've put a lot of work
in on this stirrup hoe right here and that potato fork. So I wanna be able to come
through and grab them, but why not take you inside and show you what's going on with the shed. So it is a mess in here, but I will take you in
just as a sneak peek. I haven't done a whole lot
with the actual shed itself. It's mostly just been a holding area. So we have some basic
plastic tables in here. The one thing that I really do like is this little wall control unit. That's the company that makes it, this thing is really nice. I just mounted it on the studs for now. Still deciding if I wanna
actually finish the shed by putting some drywall up or something, but we've got our little hand
tools you can easily access, all sorts of different repair things. And then on the tables themselves,
it's not very organized I gotta be honest. Just random stuff here, lights,
pots, all sorts of things. Back here is all of our either single use so like chicken manures or bone meals or mixed fertilizers from Espoma. And then over here, there's
not really a whole lot to say, it's just a total mess. I've got all my hedge clippers
and my loppers up here and some of the longer handled
tools like a snow shovel and a post hole digger
and stuff like that. But let's go ahead and
actually get back outside and see the rest of the garden. So here we are in the backyard garden. This is almost exclusively in ground, which isn't something
I've done a whole lot of, but I wanna show you a couple things that aren't in ground first. I'm calling this sort
of the unique garden, I don't know what else to call it. I've got my ginger from
that famous ginger video that I made last year. Still haven't harvested
a single piece of it so maybe soon on the channel, I will do an epic ginger harvest. This right here is a
red stripe sugar cane. So it actually started from
just one little offshoot, just like this and it's
really started to divide and multiply, really interesting. I had put in this one
here ginger and turmeric. It just didn't come up. I think I got a bad batch or something. So we've gone into the world of dahlias. I have a three different dahlias in here. I'll show you those when they
come up, I'm really excited, I've never grown dahlias before. And then as we get back here, these kind of look like
they could be a sunflower and they are related, but
it's a Jerusalem artichoke. They're somewhat tasty,
I'm not quite sure. I haven't really eaten them yet myself. I've heard that they can cause some gas, I guess we'll find out, but
they're pretty vigorous. It's a rhizome grower so you're going to grow and
eat the rhizome of the plant. We'll see how that goes. I'm just excited to grow
something kind of weird. And then back here, this one,
it's not doing that well. Something about the soil, it's kind of the same problems
we had in the front beds with the soil with the
calcium and phosphorus. I use that soil in a
lot of different places and it kind of bit me in the butt, but these are Chinese artichokes
also known as Crohn's. So they look really weird. Maybe we'll put a photo up. They look kind of like little maggots I have to be honest with you, but apparently they're
nice little crunchy snacks. You can pickle them, you can
do a lot of stuff with them. So that's what I have going
on in these containers. But I'll show you next is the corn patch. So this corn patch was the
very first inground bed that I built here at the property. It was growing potatoes. What we did is we took all the straw and we folded that in
for the potato harvest. So the potatoes were gonna
mess up the soil anyways, not really a no dig bed. Threw the straw on the ground, put the corn in and it's only
been about a month and a half and this corn's up to this level already. So it's at my shoulder, which
means it's probably about, I don't know, five foot taller and it's tasseling and
it's producing silk. So if we dig in here, I'm sure we can find an
example of a silk going on. So this corn is coming on pretty fast and it's looking extremely,
extremely vigorous. We also threw a couple squash down below again with that same idea
of that living ground cover. So I'm excited about the
corn tasseling early, which means it's producing
these mail pieces a little low in height, but
I think it's gonna catch up. I think just something weird
with the weather patterns just going on and we'll see how that goes. Now, as we go over here, you did get a sneak peek
on the seedling table, but this is the garlic patch. It doesn't look good right now only because it's actually
almost ready to harvest. This was my weirdest
experiment that I've done as far as growing anything
in the allium family, where I'm trying to grow
these hard neck garlic in a very warm climate. Hard neck garlic wants to grow in like a zone five, zone six, maybe up in Oregon or Washington and I think I've made it happen here in San Diego, California, zone 10B by putting all this garlic in
the fridge for three months. 12 weeks straight of the fridge
planted in late February, which is extremely late for garlic. Typically you plant it in the fall and it's still doing well. You saw what they looked like. They're fully formed garlic so I think we figured it out
here in San Diego, California. Now this final patch
over here in the front kind of just looks like something random. So come on in here and take a look. It's wheat, we're growing our own wheat, hopefully to use for flour and then thus maybe cookies or bread or who knows what I'm gonna make with it, but it's actually doing pretty well. There's a couple things I
probably would've changed. I maybe would've broken up the soil more when I actually planted it. I would've watered it a
little bit more deeply cause there were some dry
patches that ended up dying off, but I don't know. It looks pretty good to me so stay tuned pretty soon for
a wheat video on the channel. So here we are in the second
part of the backyard garden. We seem to keep expanding the
back garden which I'm all for because I'm having a lot
of fun with the inground, but this chair and actually there's a
chair right over there, these were built out of the
material of the epic fence, which I haven't even talked about yet. But someone who follows
the homesteading channel built these and check this out. Laser etched in Epic Gardening right here. So I like to come out here
and really relax all the time. I'll have my morning coffee out
here, hang out with friends. Right here, I have a Buddha's hand. So this is one of the first
potted citrus plants here at the property, but really in the garden, what we're talking about is
all of this stuff over here. So right here, I've got the only raised
bed in this backyard. This was just left over
from something I had in the front yard. It probably would in ground
if I could redo it today, but this is just an herb bed. There used to be chamomile right here. We have all sorts of
different herbs, some flowers, some lemon grass, more of
that African blue basal. So a lot of you probably
wondering what this is. This is basically just a trellis. It's a pyramid style trellis. It's got a little mason beehive up top. We've been growing peas in this, but as we move on down here, this bed was really interesting. We basically didn't dig it in at all and we just decided to grow as
many giant crops as we could. So up front here, and it's not even close to giant yet, we have what will be a
giant English cucumber. This is one of the healthiest cucumbers in the garden right now. No signs of any sort of mosaic or disease or blemishes or anything like that so I'm very excited about that. Back here though, this plant is the biggest
bean I've ever grown. I'm gonna give you guys a sneak peek here, take a look at this. Oh, that's not even the biggest one. Take a look at this. I mean, come on. And it's still edible at this stage, which is the craziest part
of it, it's still edible. Over here though, we have what's called
Kevin's super tomato. This isn't named after me. This is named after my friend Kevin Forty who came up with the genetics of this. His family has grown giant
vegetables for many generations. So this is one plant that just
has gone absolutely insane and the thing that makes it super is actually what happens on the truss. So take a look at this truss. This is just one of the trusses. You have one here, one here,
one here, one here, one here, there's five separate. You can get upwards of 100 cherry tomatoes on a single truss of this plant. So it's a really impressive one and now let's wrap around
and take a quick look at the only fruit tree
here on the property. This is when I first moved in. I think I had said, I need to figure out what
kind of tree this is. Well, it turns out it's a royal apricot. I did some strategic
pruning over the off season and it really has come in nicely. I mean, nice bushy growth. We'll probably do a summer
prune at some point in time, but take a look. I mean, we're getting
some beautiful apricots, they'll ripen up in the next month or so. And I'm gonna have a
pretty bountiful harvest off of this first fruit tree. So I can't give up my number one love, which is potatoes. I did harvest outta that corn patch, but now I've decided to grow even more in grow bags back here. These are some of the best seed potatoes I've ever purchased. So these are from Wood Prairie Farms. Jacques who's actually
behind the camera right now turned me onto them. I had heard of them before,
had never purchased from them. I saw him grow him and I
said, I need to grow them too. And so I have five different varieties, maybe six and what I've done here, it's maybe the last way
I'll ever grow potatoes. I've tried almost every method on earth. So if you're in a container, to me, what seems like the best idea is to fill your soil almost all the way up, plant your potato about
there maybe three inches above the ground, fill it all the way up and then just don't do
anything ever again. So all we've done is water. You might say oh, you
buried it 15 inches deep. It's not gonna come up. Well, look what happened. They've all come up. Even the ones buried extremely
deep over there have come up and these are fantastically productive. I mean there's no blemishes,
no issues with any of these. And we've put one potato
or two per five gallon. I would say my usual rule of thumb is about one potato per five gallons. Sometimes we squeezed in two, but we're gonna get a lot
of production outta this. I think maybe 100 to
150 individual potatoes off of a planting of about, oh, maybe one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, maybe like 25. So we'll get like an 8X
multiplier off these potatoes, but the biggest bed,
the most exciting bed, especially when it fills
in is this bed right here. So this one is like six foot
wide by maybe 24 feet long. So this is the pepper and
tomato bed or the summer bed. I have 43 different peppers
just planted directly in the ground over here. And then I've got those tomatoes that we did a video on a
little bit ago, Florida weave, conduit style, conduit
style with a lower and lean. And so I'm gonna walk around the back and I'll kind of show you some weird stuff we've been doing with these tomatoes. So over here on the lower and lean, we actually did run into a little bit of like a May gray June gloom
that caused some early blight on these particular ones over here. See, that's why these are
looking a little sadder. Nevertheless, they are
still coming through. I mean, this is nothing to complain about. These tomatoes right
here look pretty solid if you ask me. Over here though, these
are the beefsteaks. So I wanted to put the beefsteak style on a bigger taller trellis, allow them a little bit more support and a little bit more room. These guys are coming in really nicely. What we've done though is
I've pruned off the bottom, maybe 12 to 15 inches of growth, just because as soon as you start seeing these bottom leaves yellow, it's really kind of time for them to go. You don't want disease
to spread up the plant. So I may have to prune a little
bit more off, but I mean, just look at the fruits that are on here. Very productive and it's
gonna do really well once the season really starts to kick in. Over here on the lower and lean style, they're getting close to the point where we're actually gonna
have to lower and lean them, which is the name of the trellis. So what we would've
done is we'll take this and just drop it one and you can see how it'll start to lean. So I'm not gonna do it
cause I don't need to yet, but that's just an example
of how it would work and how I gotta get it on
there again, there we go. So let me show you a couple of these. Oh, here's a funny thing. This tomato right here, this one right here is the
same tomato that I showed you, Kevin super tomato. This is one that I prune to
what we call a single leader or one main stem. So this is an example
of how different it is when you don't prune a
tomato versus when you do. Let's see if we can get a
little taste test down here. There we go, I see one. Oh, that's not quite right. I messed that up. Let's try to find one. Here's one over here. This one is the brown berry
tomato, not my favorite flavor, but certainly if it's ripe, it's ripe. It's actually a lot sweeter
than it was last time so I'm pretty pleased with it. But these tomatoes are starting to come in and I'm very, very pleased
about what we're gonna see as the summer progresses. So this is the biggest and
most aggressive thing I've done as far as saving water. This is my 5,000 gallon rainwater cistern. I have that 500 gallon
one over by the shed. I have the 200 gallon one in front, but 100% of the rainwater from my house off of my house is actually
going to be collected in here. So we dug a trench that goes right here, the gutter system connects to
it and then water will run up in here and drop in and I
can use a pump to get it out. Now, have I even gotten to use it yet? No cause it hasn't rained, but I figured better to
get it in the dry season than need it in the wet season. So I put this in, we actually did this in partnership with the local water authority here. So they were really, really kind, they gave us some grants to
be able to get this done, but it's just one of those
things like is it cost effective? Honestly it's not cost effective compared to how much tap water costs. It's way cheaper to use tap water. But if you need it, it doesn't really matter how much it costs so that's kind of the reasoning for it. And then here you can just kind of see another look at the fence. It's nice to not be able
to see everything going on in the backyard from over there and then the property line this way is also nice and controlled. Up here in the roof, this is one of the first things
that I did to the property. This is a 100-ish year old house and so we had multiple layers of like a torch down tar style
roof that were deteriorating. So I decided to go with
what's called a TPO roof, which is why it's white like this. It's great especially if
you wanna collect rainwater because it'll run straight down. You don't have to worry
about any sort of weird tar running into that water, but then I also put solar up
because San Diego, no rain, but lots of sun. And so why not take advantage
of that and put solar on? So I put 14 solar panels on the roof, which equates to I think
about 4.75 kilowatts for a system. And my electricity bill
was anywhere in the 100 to 200 range depending on the
month and what was going on. I maxed it out at about 200 bucks a month, trying to use as much energy as I could to see how
much I would actually use. And as soon as I put these on, I pay $10 a month and I've
always paid $10 a month since because I produce so much more than I use. Some months, I'm producing
twice as much energy as I'm using so I only
pay a $10 connection fee. So that's one of the biggest things that I did for this property. My energy has now gone
to zero over the course of maybe six or seven years, cause that's the payback period, but that was fantastic and that really sort of
wraps up what's going on at the epic homestead right now. So let's just kind of take a
little quick look from above and see how it looks. So we're up on the roof, taking a look at what we've
built over the course of a year. Feels like a lot and it also feels like not
much all at the same time, but the raised beds I
have to say pretty pleased with how that looks. It'll fill in a lot more once we replant out the summer crops. We've got the orchard over there. We've got the little berry zone down here, the artichokes are
looking nice and at home. As we move over this way, see how much space there's just
not being used at all still? Rainwater collection, the
massive epic mulch pile. And then of course we
have the backyard garden. Here in the garage, I haven't
really done a whole lot. The only thing I did
is I changed the floor. I've been obsessed with this ever since I skateboarded as a kid, a really nice and smooth
floor to work off of. The floor that was here before, I swear the remodelers, I
should do a video sometime on everything that these
flippers did wrong in this house cause it was a lot, but one of the things they did
the most wrong is instead of like properly cleaning the garage, all they did was take like
painted concrete slurry and just dump it on the ground and spread it very sloppily over. And so we had to chip that off and then grind this whole thing
to put on this epoxy floor. But this is eventually
gonna be the workshop where I build a lot of
projects for the homestead, I just haven't done a whole lot with it. Obviously I've been busy
doing some other stuff. So last year I said that
it would look really cool to walk out and open this window
and see something growing. So let's see if I did my job here. Ooh, what a view. I'm pretty pleased with that,
my friends, look at that. Let's check out the other
view from the kitchen. Here in the kitchen,
obviously potatoes and books. What else would a gardener
have in his kitchen? Let's see what the view
looks like from here. So now we can see a fence and some berries and over here, we get some
trash and a mulch pile. So we still have some
work to do on these views. Well, there's been a lot of
progress over the last year and honestly it's only been nine months since I moved in in September, not June when I actually
purchased the house. A lot's been going on. I don't know, I'm the type
of person that I can see a lot of things that have changed and then really not think I did that much. And so now when I look at
everything I've actually done from a bare plot of land, quite
literally, it's pretty cool. I like to see it and hopefully it gives you
some inspiration and some ideas for what you can do with your space, no matter how big or small. So if there's anything you
want me to kind of zoom in on in the future video, just let me know. But for now I'm gonna go grab
a coffee and enjoy it out here in the garden, I'll talk to you next time. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
