- Today, I snuck up to
the Epic assistant Natalie on our team, this is her place. I see some beds here, I see
some Birdies Beds right here. Let's go on back and take you
on a tour of Natalie's house. And I'll tell you what, guys? I'm already seeing a little
treat that I like right here. We've got some loquats. These are one of the
best underrated fruits you're ever gonna have. Absolutely delicious. We're gonna take one more
for good measure here. Let's go find her. And I see her right here. - Oh, hey, Kevin. - What's up? - Hey! - So Natalie is our
executive assistant here on the Epic Gardening team
and she has an incredible, primarily container garden. - That's correct, over
a hundred containers. - A hundred containers,
indoors and outdoors. And she has an incredible
cat that's hanging out, trying to escape right now. So Natalie's gonna show you
every little nook and cranny of her container garden, and I think you guys are
gonna absolutely love it. - Okay, so as you can see, I have these awesome containers. - Yeah. - These were on sale. They're just like regular,
like Rubbermaid containers that you can find at Home Depot or Lowe's. - [Kevin] Sure, like 10 or 15 bucks. - [Natalie] Yeah, it was
actually on sale for $4 a pop. - Hoo! There you go. - And then I have these grow bags here that I got like two or three years ago. They're really great to use cause I can tote both
these and the baskets all around the garden. - Yeah, so are you moving these at all? Because of sun and we're
just kinda shifting- - So I just reshuffled everything so it'd be ready for you guys to come, but it was completely different before. These are all like
shadier areas over here, cause it gets blocked by
that wall and by this shade. - Yeah, where's North,
Southeast, and West in here? - So that's West, East, North, South. - Got it, yeah, so you're
getting a little blocked on your Southern exposure. - Exactly. - One tip that I wanna
show you is what I do with my Brussels sprouts to make sure I can keep growing them when it gets hot. - Yes, that's a huge
problem here in San Diego. - You guys are always
complaining about your bugs with your Brussels sprouts, and I don't have the same problem, so I think you should try my trick. - I think we should. - If you look here, you'll
see that the Brussels sprouts are covered in white powder. That is diatomaceous earth and what that does is basically dry out, it's tiny little particles that
get in the skin of the bugs and it dries them out, so what I do- - [Kevin] Kinda slices them open. - Yeah, yeah. And so what I do is I just coat that. It doesn't rain here enough. I probably do it like once a week, and then I don't have
any problems with aphids, any caterpillars, or anything like that, cause they just don't wanna be on there. - Yeah, we've tried. I mean, we've tried it before. I think we may have done it
during some rainy seasons or something, we got a little discouraged. But yeah, we'll try it again cause the aphids are a nasty
pest on these brassicas, guys. It's gnarly. - Yeah, the other thing
I do to help with pests is like co-plant. So you can see I have three different kinds of plants in here. - Yeah, you've got dusty
miller here, right? - Yeah, dusty miller. - And you've got, looks
like chard, or beets. - These are beets and then
this is Brussels sprout. And there's actually carrots in here too, and you can see that these
have actually been eaten by like a caterpillar or
something and that's fine with me cause I pare it somewhere else. So, it's protecting the good stuff, eating the stuff I
don't really care about. - So we've got more totes around here. It looks like we got some
fava beans, some onions, some red kale, and then peppers. - Peppers, yep, peppers, onions. These are gonna be squashes. - [Kevin] Okay. - And then back here we have fennel. - Oh, nice, yeah, yeah. - Rosemary, over here- - So are you ever planting
one thing in one tote? - Pretty much no. - No, okay. - I always put more than
one thing in a tote. - [Kevin] Okay. - [Natalie] Usually a flower,
a vegetable, and a fruit. - [Kevin] Okay, so you're doing like a classic inter-planting technique. - [Natalie] Yeah. - Is that something you learned? Cause you said you grew up gardening. You guys know, I didn't grow up gardening. I probably picked it up
in my early twenties. You have a bit of a crazy story, Natalie. - Yes I do. - Yeah. - So growing up, I learned
how to garden by my family. - Yeah. - I would consider it
a cult-y environment. And so I got to spend
a lot of time outside with my grandpa learning
how to grow beans. Let me show you my beans. They're just like the ones
that I had when I was younger. - Yeah. (chill music) - Okay, container alley here. - Yeah, so these are my beans. They're green beans, always
remind me of my grandpa. He used to have huge rows of them that he would throw over
these large trellises. - Yeah. - And I remember walking
down there as a kid, picking the beans, one
of my favorite times. - Where'd you grow up? - In Seattle, Washington. - Okay, okay, cool, in a- - Cult. - In a cult.
- In a cult. - In a cult, that's where Natalie grew up. And so, you have an interesting
perspective on gardening cause obviously it, I
don't know much about it, but it sounds like
preservation, canning, prepping, survivalist elements are in that. - Absolutely, everything- - So you've got that sort of in your DNA. - Yeah, I do, and you know, I've taken all the best
parts of what I learned since I've left the cult and turned it into this
beautiful garden you see now. - Yeah, so talk to me
about the system here cause it's grow bags, almost exclusively. But you kind of did this little trellising or terracing action. - Yeah, so when I moved in, this was just a completely dirt lot and there was a big erosion problem. That's where my dryer is and I would wake up every time it rained to a mud puddle at my dryer. So I decided to use these garden beds to do actually like terraform the hillside so that it doesn't have an
erosion problem anymore. - Yeah, yeah. - So I actually started at the top and I would dig out a little circle for every single garden bag
so that it's even down there. - Oh, okay, so you'd
flatten that one spot. - Flatten the one spot, and then I place it, and then I move down, and then I flatten that
spot, and then I plant it. So I moved down the hill
one by one that way. Honestly, probably took me
like 12 hours to do this set. - Cause, I mean, anytime you're
doing something like this, it takes time to make sure
that you're not messing with the erosion or- - Yeah, and it's clay
under here, hard clay. So I was like (strained grunting) - A friend of mine had
a situation like this in his front yard and he did
all wildflowers, same slope. And it just (squishing noise). Do you have a really eclectic collection of things in grow bags? And you guys know, we actually
wrote a book on grow bags called "Grow Bag Gardening." So there's a lot of different
things that we can show off here that I think are really cool. Like pomegranate, right here. - Pomegranate. So this actually has two fruits, pomegranate and, down here, strawberries. - That's a great inter-
plant, I love that. - Let me show you. - A little quick taste? - Nice ripe strawberry,
here's one for you. - Okay, thank you. (laughing) - Cheers.
- Cheers. - Mmm, sun-ripened strawberry. - Oh, that's good. Strawberries, you've got
another dusty miller here. You've got, this is a rose. - Yeah, these are really fragrant roses and they actually turn red. They go yellow to red, so
you can see right here. - Wow. - This is a new one, it's yellow. It goes to this orange color- - Natalie, these smell so good. - Doesn't it smell so good? Guess where I got them? - "Walter Anderson". - "Food 4 Less". - "Food 4 Less"? - "Food 4 Less." - Okay, so talk to me about the budgeting of a garden like this, cause
there's different scales. Of course, at my house
we go a little hard, and a little crazy. And I can imagine, this probably
didn't cost you that much. - It didn't. A big part of prepping is making sure that you are living within your means. So what I do is take a lot of cuttings. - Yeah. - This grew from a cutting,
that grew from a cutting. This grew from a cutting. A lot of my roses came from cuttings. As you know, these two
came from "Food 4 Less". They were on sale for a dollar each. They were bare root roses. - Wow. - And I saved them, look
how gorgeous they are. - They were sold as bare root? Or they were just so dead that they were- - No, they were sold as bare root. But they were also kind of dead. - Yeah, what I love about yours is, first of all, the visual, the
look of it is really nice. But, just the eclectic planting
that you've got going on. - And then under the salvia and verbena, you have a strawberry, you have a beet. So in that, you have,
you know, lots of food. - Are you looking at 15? These are all 15's, right? - Yep. - Yeah, 15 gallon grow bags. - 15 gallon grow bags. - Which, 15 gallon, guys,
is pretty much the size. You can do the most with it. You can get a little
pomegranate tree in there, and you can get strawberries, and a tomato or something like that. - And it's attainable for pretty much any able-bodied person. I am small, I'm five
foot two on a good day, and I can pick this up. - No problem. - There you go.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - It's a good workout though, so after a day of moving this- - Sure. - Feeling buff.
- Sure. All right, let's check
out this other side. - And let me show you
my cool color garden. - Okay, cool. - So you'll find more dusty miller. I like to plant this at entrances to create an entryway experience. I learned that in
"Landscape Architecture". - Okay, so what is your love? I love this plant, but what is the reason that it shows up so much in your garden? - It's super easy to grow. These are all from cuttings of one plant. - Wow. - Over here, I have a lot of
different kinds of salvias, which are native to this area. - Gorgeous, and you're saying,
this is your cool color area. - Cool color area, over
there was my hot color area. My warm colors, this is my cool colors. So over here I have beets inter-planted. That is a watermelon right there. - No way. - Yep, a little watermelon I started- - You're just gonna let it sprawl? - Mhm, let it sprawl over, yep. These are more beets, this is a rosemary. And these are some of those fava beans that you saw over there. - Yeah, yeah. - And then under here is a little pepper that I started from seed. - Look at that. - So it's going it's, you know, it's gonna be a banana pepper. - What's cool, Natalie,
about your approach is one bag, three purposes,
and then many bags. And, how much square footage you think you're working with in the backyard? - Ooh. - Not much, I mean it's like
300 something square feet of plantable space. - Yeah, yeah, and a lot of it's on a hill, so I reclaimed some of that space too, by planting on the slope. - And then even look at this, like what you guys notice is, you notice how Natalie's kind
of scaping this rosemary. I mean, this is a very well
pruned and managed one. You can see as she's sort of
chopping the tops off here. So you have like this one beautiful plant that's really gonna last you
like as long as you need it to. - Yeah, and in container gardening, it's really important
to have correct pruning because that root structure
needs to support the plant the best it can. - Yeah. - So with this rosemary, I cut it back about four weeks ago and in another four weeks, I expect it to be popping off new shoots. - Perfect, okay, I see
something I like over here. Something actually that's new for us that I've been using for a few years now. The air pot. - I love this air pot,
I want more of them. There's so much better
than the Vivosun Bags. - We'll hit you up, we'll
hook you up with it. You're on the team, you're
gonna get hooked up. - So this tree actually came from Jacque. Yes, Garden Jacque. He gave me this fig. He had propagated it from a tree that they chopped down
on his friend's property. - Yep, yep. - And, as you can see down here, I have it inter-planted with strawberries, and this is gonna be another watermelon. And what I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna let the watermelon
grow down this slope. And so there'll be a little
melon path, and that'll be nice. - So the thing we like by the way, guys, on these air pots is effectively, it's like a different
version of a grow bag where you can see the sides have all these little holes cut out of them. And basically, it just air prunes. - Correct. - Which is really, really, really good for container trees because
you're not gonna get that root curl at the bottom
where it circles around. It's an OG, old school way. We love them so much, we actually put them on
the store pretty recently, I would say. - Yeah, I would love to see more of these in my garden because
they're really aesthetic. Like they look cool, they look modern. - They look neat, yeah. And they actually hook
in really well to like, if you had five in a row, just pop irrigation on each
of them, it works really well. - The other thing I really like is, eventually I'm gonna need to pot this up, it's really easy to do. You just basically unwrap it. - Yep. - So right here, you see
there's this hole right here. This little screw right here. You just unscrew it, unwrap it, and then put it in another pot. That makes it so much easier. - What I found this, I think I found it like maybe three years
ago, three, four years ago, and I was growing indoors in my old place. - Yeah. - And the thing I loved is that, when you get it, it's
literally just a flat sheet that you roll into the container and then it comes with
the container bottom. Cool product. - Totally. - Anyways, so you got
a little bit more stuff going on back here. - Let me tell you about this sunflower. - Random sunflower. - So, I had sunflowers
in my yard last year. I noticed that one of them was gone and a gopher had actually
pulled it down a hole. This year, this popped up
where the sunflower was after the gopher pulled it down the hole. - So he did you a favor, I guess. He just made it perennial
for you, that's all he did. - Direct sow from a gopher. - Yeah. - So I let it grow, and then I will grab the
seeds from it once it's ready, and grow more seeds next year. - Okay, so how come we've
got some bags over here? These are, are these quarantines or- - No, these are actually shade. So you see that this fence right here- - Yeah. - Blocks the sun for the most of the day. These are my celery, my mint, other things that don't like the sun very much. My beats, you can see that this has bolted and I was trying to
protect that from the sun. - Sure, okay. - Well see that, and then
actually I have loquat starts. You were talking about how
loquat is such a under-deserved fruit. These are straight from the tree. So I just potted these,
these are about a year old. You just put the soil, you put
the seed right on the soil, on the top, just like right there- - Cause there's a huge seed in the loquat. Yeah, it's a huge seed. - I can actually show you some seeds. And then this is one year old and I plan on planting a few every year so that I can give them out to my friends. - There you go. Yeah, loquats, I mean, we talk about them a lot here in San Diego,
they grow really well. It's like one of the
most interesting flavors. It's sort of like a tropical peach. But yeah, the plants themselves
are kind of expensive. - Yeah, they are.
- To get a start. And then each fruit has like, at least two or three seeds in it. So if I harvested off
of the tree at my house. You know that one, that thing
would have thousands of seeds. - Thousands of seeds. - So if I really wanted
to start a loquat nursery, I probably could. - You know, Kevin, I just might. (both laughing) - All right, Kev. So here I wanna show you
my seed starting table. - Okay, it looks like we
have a new guest here. - Sandy. So, Sandy likes to sit here behind the window and
I do too every morning, watch my seeds. So here you can see I have the four cells and the six cells. I'm actually using the
six cells to propagate. - I was gonna say, you've got a unique little setup here. - Let me show you what I'm doing here. So these are salvias, like I said, so I told you I grew
those from propagation. - Yeah. - These are salvias being
propagated in an Epic Six Cell. - Yeah, so you've made
good use of the bottom dome and top dome that we have. We created these little individuals. Either way, it's like, if you have one of the
Epic Six Cell trays, you can put on an individual
humidity dome and bottom tray. If you're a smaller space
gardener, like you, Natalie, this can be really good cause this plant might just need humidity, and nothing else does, so it's great to do that in the tray. Anyways, you've got this going
on and you've also got some- - Yeah, I like to recycle. - Cheap and free. - So you can see sometimes
I do buy six cells. I keep them and then I use them to pot up stuff that's really small. - Yep, you got a strawberry tin. - A strawberry tin that I'm
also using to propagate. I have some roses in here, tomatoes, a Cuban oregano, and a salvia. - Honestly, strawberry things are perfectly designed for propagation, cause you got the ventilation holes and then you got the humidity. That's perfect.
- And it's great because you can't actually
usually recycle clamshells, and so this is a way to reuse
it and reduce that impact. - Really almost all plastic,
like 90% of all plastic, is thrown away, even if you
throw into the recycling bin. - It's crazy, it has to be like clean. It has to be number five, there's
all these different rules. - So it looks like we've
got a couple other things. Is there a reason why some of these totes are in this particular area? - Yeah, so if you look closely in here, I'm actually starting a
bunch of different plants. And so it's kind of in the shade. You pull this nasturtiam back, I have geraniums that I cut
and are propagating right here. - So, it's like a prop station? - Yep, and it gets the same south-facing, so it gets the shade for most of the day. And I'm propagating all in these guys. There's all different
kinds of starts in here. - Amazing, and then it looks like you got a couple house
plants going down here? - Yeah, I have some house plants. Hydrangeas are my favorite flower. - [Kevin] Those are
gorgeous, those are gorgeous. - Look at this, I mean,
who doesn't love that? - How do you beat that? - Who doesn't love that? It's just so, it's my
favorite color periwinkle. - Yeah. - They're so pretty and, of course, I have vegetables mixed in here, so I have some squash,
some tomatoes, some herbs. These are actually carrots
that I'm gonna be pulling for the stew later. And over here more fava beans. - So as we kind of get
to back to this cool zone and see the rest of the garden, how long do you think
this took you to set up and how much do you
think you probably spent? Like just roughly. - So I probably have spent
like about $800 on my garden in the past year and a half, it's not bad. Most of that was actually on soil, because I was able to
get really good deals on the bags and the bins and all of that. If you add in the price for plants, maybe I spent like two or
$300 on the plants themselves. So total, thousand bucks. - Prop the rest. - Yeah, prop the rest. - Very similar to how
Jacque approached his garden back in the day. A lot time, not a lot of budget, which is a perfectly valid way to do it. So, something a little special. Natalie told me a couple
weeks ago, she said, "Hey Kev, I'm not gonna be
available this afternoon", which is totally fine, "because I'm going out to
learn how to harvest rabbits." - That's correct. - And I did not know
that that was something that she was into. But she went out, she
took the afternoon off and went out and dispatched some rabbits because you wanted to see
if you could handle it. - Yeah, I can. And I learned I'm actually very good at making it a soothing
experience for the rabbit and that's a very most
humane way to do it. - Right, and so this
kind of ties to, I guess, your upbringing, right? - Yeah, self-sufficiency. - And your desire to be self-sufficient and so, what we're gonna do right now, is harvest a few things
and bring it inside and kind of wrap it up
there with a little bit of a rabbit stew preparation. - Rabbit stew. - Yeah, let's do it. - We're gonna harvest
some carrots for the stew. - All right. - You know how to pull a carrot, just go ahead and pull them up. - You know, the secret is,
oh, look at these little guys. Carrots are always a little
surprise, aren't they? - Yeah, I love it. - Did you thin at all or no? - I did, these have- - You should pull this one
cause that one looks huge. - These have been thinned like
four or five times actually. - Okay.
- I make a stew out of them, this is the last, the smallest- - That's why we have a little
bit of a smaller harvest here. Not bad though, not bad at all. Perfect. Here, I'll gonna grab those from you. - Okay. These onions are actually really cool. They're from a friend of mine and her grandma actually brought them over when she emigrated here to Ellis Island. - No way, so these are OG onions? - These are OG onions. - Okay, cool. - They're really cool.
- Let's do it. - Just gonna- - You're getting all of them? - I'm actually going to, because I'm gonna make some
onion powder too, later. - Cool. - So I'm just gonna- - She's just on that level, guys. She's just absolutely on that level. (Natalie shaking dirt) Shake those boys out. - All right, there we go. - What's next? Look at these, these are nice. - Yeah. - Like small little bulbs at the bottom, but perfect for dicing up. - And the greens are really good too. - Yeah. - So we're gonna take some of this fennel. I'm actually just gonna
pull this whole guy. - [Kevin] Baby bulb. - Boop. - There you go. - And we're gonna get
some of these fava beans. This is my first fava harvest of the year. If you look down at the
bottom of the stock, you'll see the ones that
are nice and plumpy. - Oh yeah, look at these guys. Fava, guys, is really nice, just as a soil improver as well. - That has two pods in it. - Yep. - Two little beans. - This one probably has three. - Probably like three or four, yeah. - All right, let's go inside. (laughing) - Okay, let's go. (laughing) - Let's see this rabbit. We have brought all of our goods inside. There's one extra good
here, Natalie, that I, remember you dispatched this yourself, which I actually highly respect if you're gonna consume meat. - So lemme show you guys this rabbit. We're gonna put it in the stew. - And, this kind of ties, Natalie, to like what you've told me before. Like, you have a five year plan. - Yes I do. - You want what? - I want a homestead. I want a homestead. I wanna be like, you know, a bachelorette pad where
I grow all my food, all my vegetables, all my meat. Self-sustaining apocalypse surviving. - There you go. - And thriving. - So you guys know, we
did this on the channel actually 2019, and we might
do it pretty soon this summer. So stay tuned for that. Natalie, it's been awesome
seeing your garden. There's a lot of cool
house plants in here, which we'll probably take a look at while you're prepping this too, for another video sometime. - Sounds good.
- But until next time guys, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
