Start a Garden: EVERYTHING You Need to Know

hey everybody welcome back to another nature's always right video today I am at my parents house because as you guys know recently I shut down my urban farm and I was going to be moving to Tennessee to go to try to find land and buy a home and all that well because of the situation in the world right now I've got to wait a couple more weeks before I'm able to travel there and start that search so today I want to make a video all about beginning gardening skills how to set up a raised bed seed starting transplant planting how to find two transplants if you go to some place like Home Depot so this is going to be for your beginning gardener somebody who's just really new to this and I'm gonna give you tips based upon this the easiest things to acquire sow seeds and transplants and we're also gonna bring my mom in here and she's gonna help us garden as well so it should be a really fun episode and I hope you guys enjoy seeing some of the back-to-basics skills that I hope will help a lot of people maybe who are finding this video and are just getting started on their gardening journey alright so I just brought my mom in here this is my mom everybody just wanted you to meet her and she's gonna be helping us today and I want her to talk about the garden here when did you start this garden and what did you make these boxes out of before we even go well I best recollection that I have is was about 27 28 years ago when we moved in here about 30 years ago we built some decks and some patio covers and then at that time we had some leftover wood and so we decided to go ahead and make some planting boxes that we could grow vegetables flowers whatever kind of suited my fancy at the time I think it's Douglas fir they've held up actually quite well for this many years we've got areas where we have some termite damage but for the most part they've held together really well and I've grown a lot of vegetables over the years in them yeah so it's pretty cool to see how long when these boxes can actually last you sir talking about 27 years and then what were some of the things that we used to grow in these initially we grew tomatoes onions strawberries we did some artichoke we did squash that's that's majority and then eventually the strawberries gave me a lot of problems your dad fell in love with pomegranates right and then we went to putting two pomegranate trees in one of the beds let it take over and they've done really well all the rest fears and then tell them did I like gardening when I was a little kid no you did not I thought it was gonna be this will creative thing get your kids out here let them help you know grow things see how things grow maybe they'll like vegetables more if they didn't didn't work in fact I was a bit disappointed you were a little more helpful than your sister by frankly in the garden she was more excited and playing sports and skating and doing other things but I kind of kept it up until your lives got really busy as children and got very involved in what you were doing and between that and working at that point I kind of let the garden not do very much other than grow some Tomatoes possibly that kind of thing and then we just I just kind of did minimal minimal things and then my mom created a really amazing garden just around the yard all these landscaping plants and flowers and just create a really beautiful space here she did blueberries and citrus and pots and stuff so yeah if you're a parent out there and you're you wanted to get your kids interested in gardening don't give up hope because I eventually came back to it and I had all those memories of doing all this stuff so they can still find the love for it and hey now we're gardening again in these beds so all right let's get to it and the first thing that we're gonna do to these beds is just amend them it's been a maybe about a year or six months or something like that since they last had some veggies in here so the first thing we do is just add some gardening soil and we're gonna go get some transplants right now at Home Depot just to show you the simplest way to go get some plants of course local nurseries are fantastic if you want to start your own seeds we're gonna show you how to start your own seeds here in a few minutes so let's go to Home Depot here we go let me show you guys my favorite potting soil mix and I think they have it pretty much throughout the whole country but you want to look for something that is of course organic and naturally made no synthetic chemical nutrients the brand that I like is called Kellogg this is their raised bed and potting mix and this one's really great because let's look at the ingredients courrier perlite poultry manure feather meal peat moss kelp meal worm castings back 100 all natural fertilizers really good nutrients and it's just a nice soil and it's consistency you can start seeds with this of course at Home Depot or Lowe's there's a whole lot of other choices a lot of stuff but like Miracle Grow and companies like that which I don't recommend buying Miracle Grow they're a synthetic nutrient company they do make organic stuff now about now but they're really just focused on making money and I really don't care as much about you know making good soil so that's like Kellogg if you have it's the best and some of the other Kellogg products that are really good if you just need some garden soil just to kind of pep up your beds maybe you've already got really good drainage then this is these bags are a little bit cheaper and also it's the same formula just without the perlite if you need to top dress any of your trees things like that the grill mulch is really great because it's gonna provide nutrients and then it's got some larger carbon pieces that will help retain moisture and prevent weeds so becomes my mom's beds are pretty fertile and the soil looks really great we're just gonna add one bed of the raised bed mix per 8 by 10 bed and we're gonna add in some other nutrients as well that I'll show you when we get back to the house so now let's go ahead and check out our transplants and I'll give you some tips on picking transplants and how to pick a healthy one that's gonna do really well in your garden so if you take a look at these two Tomatoes here one thing you want to know is the word indeterminate and determine it the determinant is a bushing type so it'll fruit basically just one time you'll get a lot of fruit and then it'll be done the indeterminate will keep giving you fruit it's a vining type so it'll keep making flowers that will produce fruit for you I recommend just always growing and determinate because you'll have a much longer season of growing your two major differences you're going to have your cherry tomatoes and then your larger slicing Tomatoes so that's going to be your decision on what you'd like to grow the cherry tomatoes though are really prolific for a much longer time and when I was running my urban farm I grew only cherry tomatoes I like cherry tomatoes because they don't have problems with rotting or bugs if you lose one small cherry tomato to a bug it's not a big deal if you lose a big tomato it's a lot more painful and they just don't produce as many but they're larger so now let's just take a look at the transplants and what you would want to look for in a healthy transplant so first I'm gonna show you guys one that I don't think looks very healthy this is some sort of probably fungal issue the leaves are a little bit pale or yellowed whereas if you look at a transplant over here you see how green those leaves are and the entire plant all the way down even at the lowest level of leaves they're not very yellowed which is a good sign because as the plant grows the lower leaves will get yellow and die off and I've got a great video on pruning tomatoes that you should watch if you want to learn more about taking care of indeterminate tomatoes these are all the suckers here if you see a tomato like this you see how the leaves are curled it looks like a worm was on here eating it so this plant is having issues so I wouldn't definitely not pick this one you want to find a tomato that has the leaves completely flat and unfurled like this any of these look fantastic so here we have some zucchinis and now if a zucchini is the tomatoes peppers cucumbers anything that produces a fruit it's gonna need full Sun so keep that in mind and you know all these are gonna get very large so when you're planning out the size of your garden think about how large these are going to get these are going to get to about three by three feet in size you're also going to notice that some of these have multiple plants in one pot now when you go to plant these you could actually break these apart and get multiple plants out of them or you can select for the largest plant the best looking plant so that would be this one here and you could just cut these away and only plant this one and you only want to plant one squash plant in one spot otherwise they're gonna compete for light and you will not get very good fruit they may even be more susceptible to pests and disease if you do that so make sure you're planting only one plant in the one spot but you will see at the nursery is that a lot of times this will happen where they've planted multiple seeds so you get multiple plants another great thing to look for at Home Depot is their discount section these are plants that they let you know grow a little too long you can see there's multiple seedlings in there but as long as the plant still looks healthy you could totally plant this just cut it back to one plant and go for it [Music] [Music] okay so we're back from Home Depot with our Kellogg garden soil and we have two four foot by 12 foot beds right here and what we're gonna do is do the same thing to each bed so we're gonna pour out one of these before I do that let me show you some other nutrients we were gonna do as well so from my urban farm I had a bunch of leftover things like some organic fertilizer some leftover peat buff some left over seeding propagation mix we're going to dump all that in here so I've got kelp meal and this is azomite rock dust for minerals minerals are super important for your garden just like humans we don't have all the vitamins and minerals we need it's hard for our bodies to produce the ability to have a strong immune system and this also feeds the soil life as well so as my rock dust is fantastic and I'll put links down the description to the different organic fertilizers and minerals things that I like to use in my garden so we're just going to spread a little bit of this out maybe two full cups of azomite over the surface probably two cups or three cups of the organic fertilizer and they always have instructions on the bag to show you how much that you should use for the amount of area and then now we're gonna add our one three cubic foot bag of garden soil and this soil is already really good so we're just doing enough to pep it up if you're starting your soil from scratch then you could just use all of the raised bed potting mix from Kellogg or if you're able to I recommend getting some locally made compost that's really high-quality because you're gonna save money and it'll be even better soil than what you can buy at a store so now we're just gonna rake it and get it even across the whole surface now you guys know who watch my channel that I'm super into no-till which means we're not flipping the soil and mixing the soil layers together so we're just gonna mix it together here at the surface and then when it rains or we water this in that's gonna help to mix these nutrients down deeper into the ground just like when it rains in a forest we're also gonna water at the end of this with our plants and we're gonna even water in some other nutrients that I have leftover from my farm like fish emulsion and seaweed I'm just gonna show you guys some other things that I'm doing with soil drenching for feeding but just doing what we did right here some organic fertilizers some good composted soil that's all you really need to grow good plants so now we've prepared both of our beds with all the amendments and the compost so now let's get our transplants ready and we need to put them in positions that are going to be good for these plants now summer fruiting plants like squash tomatoes peppers eggplant cucumbers anything that produces a fruit it needs a lot of sunlight in order to produce things really well so when looking at your yard it's really important to know where's south where's West where's East where's north figure out those positions and the winter you're gonna have the Sun traveling in the southern sky but in the summer time it's gonna really come directly overhead so the camera right now is facing west and the two corners right here of these boxes get the most sunlight throughout the year and especially the summer so that's where we want to have our squash our Tomatoes our peppers things like the basil they don't need as much sunlight and you can even plant these underneath your tomatoes or with your Tomatoes and that's called inter planting and that's a really fantastic way of getting more crops in a smaller area and I have an in-depth video all about that and I'm gonna put links in the description to some other videos that I've made that will really help you to go more in depth on some of these concepts that I'm just briefly touching on in this beginner video so the other thing to think about with your light is what's around your garden so you can see that there's that tree there that's constant a little bit of shade here so in this back corner because it gets less light that's gonna be a great place for green for herbs even like radishes or some of the smaller root vegetables will do really well right there so look all around your garden we've got these eucalyptus trees on the west side so in the late afternoon those blocks Sun as well so you really just want to look all around the garden so you see what's gonna cast shade you could even watch come out every couple hours into your garden and see where the shade is before you even plant to plan out your garden so the next thing we kind of touched on it at Home Depot but we need to prepare these transplants so these squash because they're so far spaced apart we're gonna take a knife and just cut through here to try to separate the roots out it is gonna damage the plants a little bit the most guaranteed way to help the healthiest plant would be to come in here with some pruners and just clip out the weaker or smaller looking one and plant the entire root ball into the ground but in order to save money if they're far enough apart like this that's about two and a half inches apart you can actually save these so that's what we're gonna do now on your Tomatoes tomatoes need to be prepped by removing the couple bottom leaves because we're gonna actually bury this up until about here right below this first leaf here and when you do that on a tomato it'll actually produce roots higher up on the stalk the other things out of tomato you want to do or remove any suckers which are places in the crotch of the plant between the main stem and the side shoots and those just draw energy away and we want to really force this plant to get tall and go on to the trellis that we're gonna make and I've got a video all about pruning Tomatoes as well any dead or dying leaves on a plant it's better just to remove them okay so here's the configuration that we came up with we want to make sure that there's enough space in between some beings once they're bigger we'll be able to get lots of room and light and you'll notice that it's kind of a diamond pattern here planting in a diamond pattern is the best way to get the most light and air to all of your plants okay so we're gonna go ahead and plant our tomato and pepper right now peppers are planted at the soil surface level so where you see the top of the soil in that pot you're gonna match that up with the top of the surface here so you just want to dig a hole and put it in the tomato I'm gonna plant it to that first stem there so I'm gonna plant a little bit of that stem in there because like I said the tomato is able to get more roots on the stem by doing that and it will allow the plant to get more nutrients and water easily so a great way is to just dig your hole and then test it by putting it in and then you can just put your hand at the top of the surface and then see where it's gonna hit so that looks pretty good to me you just squeeze around the outside of the pot I like to put my forefinger and middle finger to support the plant let it come out if there's a lot of roots around here which this does not have that but sometimes they get root bound and that means that there's just roots or spiraling around the soil so it helps to just kind of lightly massage the roots and get them loosened up so that they can go out into the ground easily I'll just rest that in there and I like to kind of hold on to the plant as you're putting the soil in so that you're not pushing it around or accidentally snapping the stem push the soil around and then you can slightly compress it down just snug it in there and when you water that's also going to help to congeal and and take out any air pockets around the root zone and that's it we go there we go it's really helpful so that you remember what varieties you did you know that your pop your transplants are gonna come with this little sticker deal so just put it in the ground and then you know what type of tomato you have this right here is a beefsteak and that right there is a as Bonnie Belle sweet it's got pepper this is a jalapeno and that's a zucchini green squash over there the plants are a little smaller and weaker you can pile up more dirt onto the stem to help support it so if there's a lot of wind or rain just get knocked over we want to divide our swosh so we're gonna get two plants out of one so I'm just gonna cut it right down the middle and whenever you're doing something like this or you take the root ball out of the pot you want to get it planted immediately don't let it sit out in the sunlight so I pulled both of them out yeah there you go so now you got roots on this side roots on that side and these will survive no problem and now we got a two-for-one deal from Home Depot so my mom's gonna plant that one I'm gonna throw this one in the other plot so one other thing that we could plant here using an inter planting technique would be to plant lettuce or cilantro green onion maybe some radish seeds in between the tomatoes the squash and the pepper that's gonna grow in about 30 days you could harvest that before the squash the tomato get big enough to shade out those plants so you can also think about playing with the space in between plants and the days to maturity that each plant will take to grow we're just gonna throw these in real quick and just a little note on spacing now tomatoes in a garden system you want to space them you know about two and a half feet is pretty good if you're doing a production farm based system you can stack them as close as 12 inches apart if you want to see a video on that I can put that in the dish but this is going to be a lot easier especially for first-time gardeners keep a bit more space you want to make sure they have enough light so that you're successful they're easier to trellis all that now this pot when it came with has one of these compostable outer materials it's like a cardboard material you can plant with it in there I'm gonna pull it off whatever comes off really easily because I want to let the roots kind of dive out you can just plant these but you know there's a little bit left on there I'll probably just leave it got basil in the middle here as our companion plant and basil is really nice obviously because it tastes good with the tomatoes and it'll even help to resist some of the pests so the last crop that we'll put in these beds are potatoes because they're super high-calorie and we already have some ready to plant basically what you're seeing here these are the eyes that come out of the tuber and they're super easy to plant you just take your knife and cut the potato in half and you can actually split these eyes so I do it like this now I took that one potato and now I've got two potential potato plants you can think about these as a seed to get your own potatoes to do this you'll just store them in a dark place and wait and eventually they will do this so real cheap way is just to go to the store buy them organic let them sit around you can do the same with sweet potatoes and once they come the eyes start coming out this is even a little later than you need to wait they're ready to go we need to plant these out about every 12 inches and we can fit two rows in this bed you need to space them out every two to three feet in the row now for planting you can dig a big trench here or you could just take your shovel dig down in plant which is I'm going to do since I don't have a lot of them and when you plant them you want the eyes to be facing up I think it's really tall you're gonna start piling up more dirt around it and it'll be able to send off more nodes that are gonna create more potatoes for you so check out some other videos to learn how to grow potatoes but they'll take about 70 to 120 days depending on the variety before you harvest them so the last couple things that I'll mention just check it out my mom put these tomato cages here so this is going to be how we will trellis these up if you want to check out a more advanced trellis or some other ways to truss I've got videos on those that I'll put in the description one last thing to mention is rodents and rabbits things like that so we're gonna be putting up a fencing here basically to keep them out so they don't come in and eat our baby seedlings so that'll depend on your area though so you can get fencing like this from any type of hardware store Lowe's Home Depot and stakes that you can put into your garden beds also bird netting is another cheap way that works really well to cover you can make little hoops from 9 gauge wire or half-inch EMT conduit there's a lot of different ways that you could build protective structures for your garden so the final step is just to water these in they need water immediately after being planted get the ground saturated so that they have plenty of water the plants are gonna be a bit weaker in that first week while they get acclimated to the new home that they're in we are gonna actually add some nutrients to our water now this isn't necessary but since I have the extra nutrients I want to show you guys some more techniques so for this we're gonna add in some of my fish emulsion and seaweed that provides NPK nitrogen phosphate and potassium and all the minerals that they're going to need I also have some of my Korean national farming inputs such as water soluble calcium calcium phosphate and we're also gonna water in some more azomite I'll mix that into the water as well and then make a really beautiful nutrient blend there and water in with that so that the plants will have everything that they could possibly need right from the start but if you're growing in great compost don't worry about it that will also provide enough nutrition this is just something extra that you can do and I want to inform you about all right so now we're gonna make our nutrient water I'm not gonna go into depth on all this you guys but I've got other videos about it and I will make more videos about this sort of stuff in the future Oh HN or oriental herbal medicine it's a bunch of extracted herbs garlic licorice a bunch of other ones this is calcium phosphate and calcium this helps with the structure of the plant helping it to build good root systems good grew this is a fpj fermented plant juice this is different plant enzymes and nutrients bacteria this is IMO - this is wild harvested biology this is fish emulsion and seaweed we'll do some more azomite as well now you could get some products online I'll put some links in the description that's easy ready to go these other things these are things that I made and things that I'm gonna be talking a lot more about on my channel so be sure to subscribe so you can learn how to make all your own nutrients at home for very very low cost so now we're going to dilute with rainwater here and my parents have a super cool rainwater setup actually they have all these 250 gallon water tanks so that let's go ahead and add the water so we're gonna water in with this first and soil if it's dry it's it's deceptive how much water can actually be held in the soil so we may add this and check the soil and see that it's still dry underneath which means we'll come back in with a hose and water this in further so this soil is already pretty wet from our rain so as I stick my finger down in there I can see it's soaked all the way down we will come in with a hose though after we plant our seeds and just give it a final soaking to make sure it's fully wet all the way around the root zone but a great way to check if your plant has enough moisture is just to dig back the soil about an inch now when you're initially watering you want to do a deep watering I'm a big fan of doing deep watering less often and that's gonna more mimic what rainfall is gonna be like ok so now let's get into seeds first we're gonna do direct seeding right into the bed some crops that you can direct seed are things like root vegetables beets radish carrots beans bush beans you can of course direct seed things like lettuce and spinach as well some things are better to do in cell trays just because it's a little bit easier you can keep them protected make sure that they sprout and then you put them into the ground when they're big enough so I'll show you guys how to do cell trays right after this so for the direct seeding here we're just gonna do beets radish and carrots all these seeds are from true leaf market they're a great seed company that I'd highly recommend and I'll put the link in the description but we're gonna do a the rainbow blend of carrots Chioggia beets which are really beautiful when you cut them out of a candy cane striped pattern and then French breakfast radishes which are really juicy mild not very spicy radish so for this we just need to make some lines places little furrows where we can put the seeds so I just like to take a big stick and just pull it all the way across now if you've seen my other videos and my farm you know I use a direct cedar like the earth way cedar but you can't really do that in a raised bed like this so you can see these horizontally you can also see them parallel with your bed here it's just going to depend you can do it either way and be successful we have our lines running vertically here so we're gonna do them in line with our irrigation lines if you want to have more variety or try to stack more types of plants in here then doing it the horizontal way is kind of nice because you could fit more rows in here so it just comes down to personal preference and we're gonna go vertically to give my parents a lot more vegetables of only three types I just like to use a stick or something like that just because it makes it a little bit less effort we're trying to plant these seeds about a half an inch down the larger a seed is the deeper it typically needs to go but most of your veggies will do fine at half an inch carrots do better at about a quarter inch that the highest planted seeds beets you can do about 1/2 to 3/4 inch something like a bean or corn seed that's huge can go down about an inch beans can be 3/4 inch so just to give you guys some examples of how to plant these so I'm going to clean we're just gonna clean these lines up a little bit we're do two rows of carrots one row of radish one row of beets so this row I'm gonna make sure that I get it flat and not too deep for the carrots and if you go a little bit too deep when you cover the seeds at the end you could just lightly cover them and if you so that if you made your holes a little bit too deep for the seeds it's just a way of getting around that whereas the ones my mom did their radishes and beets so if they're a little bit deeper that'll be great and just you want to be sure at the end when we cover them that they're only about a half an inch in depth so now as far as the seeding density how many seeds you're gonna drop in here you just can just do it by hand and I'm doing way too many that's an example over seeding that's that's too much when these sprout up we're gonna have to thin them down a little bit if you leave it this thick the carrot won't be able to grow into a really big root so let me try that again so here's the example of a good seating density for the carrot seed that's gonna come out really nice and produce nice big carrots that is way too many seeds that's gonna require you to come back and thin them out if you want to have nice big carrots so just be careful as you're seeding to not do too many it might even be a good idea especially if you're starting out to take a picture of what how many seeds this looked like so that when they sprout up you can learn from the experience so that next time you don't do as many or maybe you do more because a lot of this is going to come by trial and error for you all of these sprout I'll be able to feed the entire neighborhood yeah so here's an example of some really good beats eating density and don't worry if some of them sprout close to each other one will get bigger than the other you can harvest that one first and let the other one grow larger and that's what I did on my farm it's just a great way to get more harvest in the same amount of area these are the radish seeds and that's a nice looking density radish you can oversee it a bit more and still have great radishes so this looks great so on the carrots when we can we cover them we're just gonna really lightly cover them very that's a little bit too much they only need about a quarter inch of covering they barely anything and they'll be fine we made these furrows a bit too big that's okay because you can kind of correct that mistake for whatever your seeds you have as you cover them lot more leeway so for that we can just grab the furrow and close it like this we want these to be covered half an inch and then one thing you can do is come back and then Pat it down and that's going to give the perfect seed to soil contact so once we add water it's going to help use germinate perfectly okay so that's it and now all we need to do is just water these down with a hose we can use our irrigation lines and those will help to keep it wet but for germinating seeds it's really important that once they're wet you keep them wet and especially for carrots if you get the carrots wet they start germinating and then they dry out they will die so if you're having a problem getting your carrots to germinate keeping them wet and maybe the issue that you're facing some people will tell you that if you get water on the leaves it'll actually refract the light and it can burn your leaves but that is not true you can get plant leaves wet and they're completely fine I would recommend though don't water leaves of your plants in the evening because that moisture is gonna sit on the plants all night long so things for like cucumbers and tomatoes that can cause fungal issues developing in your plant so and even during the day I don't water the leaves of my cucumbers or tomatoes unless I'm full you're feeding which means feeding the plants nutrition through the leaves and in that case you can do that in the evening or early morning because you want the water to sit on those leaves inoculating biology and and nutrients into those leaves so now we just want to make sure and check to see how wet dry wet or dry this is and by checking it needs more water so we want to make sure that it's for sure an inch down of wet and like I said soil will take a lot of water so you may need to do this to three or even four times depending on how dry your soil is to be but it's how big the distance is between that summer squash to the tomato and the pepper summer squashes get gigantic so you'd really need a three by three foot area for them or as they continue to vine and get longer you can put them on the side of your bed once they get big enough you can drape them over the edge of the garden bed and look continue to grow out on the ground surrounding the bed and they're getting the nutrients from this good soil where their roots are down here and that's another great way that you can grow more and less space you can do this with a winter squash like a pumpkin or a butternut squash as well nice so now that's super wet in there that'll be good enough to germinate and then we'll just come every day give it a little bit more water until we see the plants germinate and pop out of the ground and we're gonna continue to make sure that they're very wet for that first week until the plants get taller and they show their first true leaves so the first two leaves that come out of most plants are their cotyledon stage leaves those are the first ones that allow them to get sunlight and then put out the next true leaves which are the leaves that the plant will put out for the rest of its life so once the plants are about two three weeks old out of the ground they're gonna develop a root system and that root systems gonna go out and seek water at that point you don't want to over water and water them every single day that may be required in the heat of summer if you have 90 or 100 degree temperatures you probably are going to need to water every day but if it's a cloudy day or temperatures in the 80s you're gonna want to wait once plants get really established like a huge tomato plant even if it is a hundred degrees you don't need a water every day because the roots are gonna go out and find that water for the plant so it's actually better to let the plant seek out that water and you're helping to train the roots to do that by not giving it water every single day if you give it water every day you know it's gonna be comfortable it's not gonna want to seek out and create a bigger root system because they're gonna think hey I've got everything I need right here in the top but you want them to really seek out and expand the root system so watering deeply less often once the plant is in its adult stage is a way to make that happen so that's how I recommend watering once the plant is full-grown so one final note on watering today it was about 70 degrees and cloudy all day long and the beds are already really wet they don't need any more water so I would not want to water today keep in mind the temperature and the Sun and the water that your beds are currently at before you decide to water more and if I check any of the transplants here also super wet so if you check and there's already plenty of water you can actually do more damage by adding more water and keeping everything too wet so keep that in mind when you're thinking about if you need to water so another fantastic way to garden is to use a big container like this so I'm just gonna show you how I would set a large pot up for planting strawberries but you could put anything in here you could put a bunch of herbs you could put lettuce kale and chard whatever you'd like you can get one of these just from any of your hardware stores drill some holes on the bottom for drainage and then we just need to add soil which we're gonna use the Kellogg's potting mix again and then we're gonna add in some of our own fertilizer azomite and then that nutrient water that I created as well okay now we want to make sure we leave enough room for our tomato our strawberry in here so Knicks we're gonna add our fertilizer our azomite I just mix that into the top like six inches you don't need to mix it throughout the soil all the way to the bottom the roots aren't even together gonna go down there at least for a long time and when you water that's gonna help to incorporate it down into those lower areas so we're just gonna mix the top here because this is an enclosed pot mixing this up is a good thing to do and then after this I would just keep adding nutrients to the top top what's called top dressing you don't need to mix nutrients in anymore after this okay and now we're ready for our strawberry so let's pull the soil to the side here doesn't need much pulling away the roots aren't very established yet for the lure okay and then we just want to put it in the center of the pot all right and then maybe we'll add a little more soil to this side here make sure everything is covered nice and low push it down a little and that's it now we're just gonna water this in also this is a way that I'm keeping all my berries together I've got blackberries I have goji berries and barrels like this that are surrounding the same area so now we'll throw in our nutrient water because this is already a fairly big plant we'll water this every couple days and once you know a week or two from now the roots are really start to branch out and we can water it less and less you know every three to five days probably until it gets really hot here in the summer where it's gonna require more water and again you can just pull back a little bit of soil see if it's dry if it is dry about an inch or two down then give the plant more water and we'll also water it a little bit more right now to make sure the entire root zone is completely wet okay so the final major gardening skill that you need to know to be a successful gardener is how to start your own seeds so you can get cell trays these are never sink cell trays I'll put a link to the video if you want to find more about cell trays and the different types but if you're just getting started I recommend just your standard fifty to a hundred cell tray and I'll put a link below for you guys buuut chef farmer makes really high quality ones that'll last forever so they have these individual holes where you're gonna put the soil and then plant your seeds we're just gonna use the Kellogg's raised gardening bed mix because it has perlite it has good nutrition everything ready to go and it's $10 a bag so if you have that in your local area that's a really great one or try to find another propagation mix that you could use or I've got a video about how you can make your own propagation mix if you have all the different raw ingredients so we're just gonna put our soil in if you're wondering what these little white rocks are that's called perlite perlite allows for airflow and water flow so that there's good drainage some people will mix in a fertilizer or worm castings into their propagation mix and that's a great thing that you can do to get really good nutrition for your plants from the beginning this this seedling mix will work really good though and it already has worm castings and a fertilizer in there so now I'm just gonna kind of let it drop and see if there's any areas I can give a little bit more soil to and you can just run your hand across the top and that'll help to make it flat and easy for you now the next step is to soak these get them completely soaked all the way through to the bottom of the cell just like when we watered in our seeds it's the same concept you've got to keep your seeds wet the entire time to germinate and investing in a nice water wand is a great idea this thing is not the best okay so now I can just dig down a little and check yeah we're completely soaked so the next step is we want to make little half-inch holes for our seeds so I like to use my finger and I just poke it down a little bit and we're gonna come at the end once we plant our seeds and put soil over the top so just keep that in mind as you're poking your holes so this is set up for most seeds now half-inch so here's the way I like to approach planting and trying to decide how many cells I want to dedicate to each type of plant I either like to separate them out by by row here so there's 12 here so I could have 12 different types and get six of each type or I could do it vertically maybe I want a lot more of each plant so I get twelve rows of six different types of plants we have nine different types of plants here so I'm going to go for the twelve row spacing here now the other thing to keep in mind is how much of each plant you want so something like a Swiss chard or a kale you know for a family of four if you have about five kale plants that's gonna be more than enough kale that you guys will be able to eat and that's the same with your basil you know five to ten plants max is what is the most that you're gonna need oh the bunching onions though you'll need a lot of those so I might dedicate two rows to the bunching onions so I did forget one type of seeds and this is going to be a lettuce blend so we'll do two rows of that as well but lettuce is really great because you can get a continual harvest and just harvest around the outside of the plant rather than harvesting the whole head that's a great way to do it for home gardeners so we're doing the seeds I like to pour it into one on my hand and then grab with my other hand and my two fingers and then just rub my fingers slowly back and forth and drop a couple of seeds in for lettuce and any of these seeds you want to put you know about two to three seeds per cell so that you can guarantee germination and the beauty of starting them in a cell trait is that they're very easy to comeback and thin to one plant so you have a perfect large transplant ready to go out into your garden so next we'll do the bunching onion and a bunching onion is unique because you don't need to thin them you can plant three four five all together so when they sprout up I'll just plant whatever's there I'm not actually gonna thin them but the rest of these like spinach cilantro Swiss chard kale totsoni all that we're gonna go down to a one plant now Swiss chard this type of seed is called a germ seed so inside of these there's actually multiple seeds so you really only need to do one if you're real worried about it you could do two if you accidentally drop two don't worry about that tot soy is a type of it's called Asian spinach and for tots soy these seeds look identical to kale and broccoli seeds so if you're not familiar what these plants look like it's a good idea to either label your seeds or space them out accordingly so rather than putting my kale right next to the topsoil I'll put it way over here on this other side that way without labeling I can know that they're different types of plants and it'll be easier to tell the difference for me next we've got some herbs so this is dill seed and this is dill that I saved from plants that I grew from I don't know three years ago probably now so a little bit older seed I'll put a couple more seeds in there just because the germination rate will go down a bit cilantro do 2 to 3 of these in there OOP if you drop too many don't worry about it you can always thin them out spinach seed and this is some Jenna Vasey basil this is my favorite type of basil I just the fragrance and the flavor is just the best it's an Italian heirloom basil and then the final we're gonna do some sunflower seeds these are also seeds that I saved like I said earlier the sunflower seeds I'm just gonna push them in deeper with my fingers here to make sure they have enough depth and now all of this is ready to receive soil over the top then you just rub over the top to get it nice and even spread it out just like that and now the final step is just gonna be to water this and then every single day I'll come out and water these in the summertime you'll need the water probably twice a day maybe even three times depending on the spot you can't even put this in partial shade in the beginning so that the soil doesn't dry out as quickly so I'm gonna go put this probably under the pomegranate trees and then just water that every day until I see germination so here we are about seven days later we can see the chard the the kale and the top soy are starting to sprout now and even some of the lettuce seedlings here so things are off to a real good start and then the next week the rest of them will start sprouting and I just wanted to mention a couple things about where I place my seeds I actually put them over here on this black plastic it all my farming stuff was covered up and the black plastic attracted a lot of heat and I kind of use that as a mock heat mat so temperatures were in the high 60s low 70s I just wanted to try and heat up the seedlings a little bit more to help the germination process that's another thing that you can do with seedlings is you can get what's called a heat mat and put the heat mat underneath so that if you have lower temperatures or if you're starting your seeds out in a much colder climate the heat mat is gonna really help you get a better germination rate and now we're just gonna I'm just going to keep watering these once a day I did skip one day of watering when it was just cloudy all day because I noticed they were plenty wet and these will grow for about two three weeks once the seedlings get you know about yay tall and they have their true leaves they will be ready to be planted another thing you can do to test to see if they're ready is you can if your cell trait has some deep enough holes you can kind of poke them from underneath or you can squeeze the side and grab from the base of the plant and pull the plant up and out and you'll see how much roots that they have it should have a good amount of roots developed before you plant them and if the plant is tall enough and has good size tree leaves then then that'll be the case today's fifth installment of this series is gonna be about irrigation and I'm going to show you two different ways to set up simple gardening irrigation that's going to be cheap and very efficient on your watering bill all of my drip irrigation I buy from drip depot.com they're just a fantastic company work with great prices the quality's excellent I've been using them for the last three and a half years and I have zero complaints about them or their products if you want to buy any drip parts or tools I highly recommend them and I have a link down in the description that if you click through that and buy through them it's an affiliate link that gives me a small kickback so that's just a great way that you can support the channel getting something that you need and at no cost to you so I really appreciate you guys using the link and I know that you're gonna be super happy with their service as well and if you missed any of the other five parts of the gardening series or any of the live streams that happened later in the day where I answer all of your questions for one hour I put all the links down in the description so you can check those out and I have a lot of other irrigation videos that I've made over the last few years that should really help you if you want to build a more complex irrigation system a larger one or even for a smaller system like using grow bags and things like that and I'll put all those videos in the description as well so let's get started and first I'm just gonna introduce you guys to a couple different types of irrigation systems and some different terms that you'll need to know moving forward so we're going to talk about three different types of lines polylines emitter or spaghetti line and drip tape each one of these has their uses advantages and disadvantages and I'll speak about each one so the first one let's talk about is your main line your poly line so this and all these parts are made from a long lasting UV resistant plastic this is half-inch you can also buy three quarter inch or one inch main line for a small garden you'll really only need a half-inch for a larger garden let's say 500 square feet or more worth of lines then I recommend a 3/4 inch main line and on drip depot.com they have a irrigation calculator where you can put in the lengths of lines a gallon per hour of the lines your flow rate pressure all of those different things and then it'll calculate how much line that you can do on the amount of pressure that you have so I'll put those tools and the links in the description so this is the tubing that's going to deliver your water from your valve or your hose faucet to your beds then from here we deliver the water to the beds through either emitter line or drip tape so here's an example of emitter line or spaghetti line and for intensive gardening I recommend every six-inch emitters so where this little bump is this is where it releases the water and they come out at different different flow rates I like the higher rates so around four point four six gallons per hour so then every six inch you have one so that when you do a real intensively planted garden it's gonna give plenty of water to your plants and your soil and what's nice about these is that they're really small so they're easy to maneuver and get around your plants take in and out and they don't get in the way when your seeds are germinating one disadvantage to these though is that they get clogged fairly easily especially if you have hard water and I'll show you guys in this one irrigation bed that we're gonna fix today at my parents place these spaghetti lines are all like most of them are clogged and that's why we're going to replace them and I'll we're gonna replace them with my special drip tape system that I use at my market garden and I'm gonna adapt it to a raised bed garden so that you guys can see that and this is I think the best way to set up irrigation in terms of cost reliability and just even spread of water overall but if you want something that's just ready to go not complicated at all I like these spaghetti lines and I'm going to show you the spaghetti line setup and this more complex but better drip tape setup so now we have drip tape and drip tape is just like the emitter line but as you can see it looks like tape and it lays flat it is a bit wider so it can get in the way of things a little bit but in general it's really not bad at all and like I said I use this in a super productive market garden and all farms use this stuff if they're not using overhead irrigation so just like the emitter line every six inches there's a spot where the water will come out these are way less prone to clogging and I really don't have problems with these clogging ever because of the way that these work because these when you fill it up with water this will expand into a tube so it's much more difficult even for hard water to clog these but hard water can eventually clog these up but it's very cheap to replace these and I like to use the thickest 15 mil plastic because those can handle a 15 psi pressure regulator and the higher pressure allows you know more flow rate more water coming out more quickly so you don't to leave the irrigation timer on the valves on is long and prevents clogging more so let me show you the emitter line setup and then we're gonna go and then we're gonna modify my parents existing spaghetti line or emitter line set up and show you how I would do that so at my parents house they have a more complex irrigation system where it's running off of this timer and this runs to some electronic valves that are inside of this box which I'm not going to show you guys that the best way for a home garden I think is to run everything off of a faucet but these valves run out and over here I tapped into the PVC that runs underneath the deck here and then I attached the half-inch line right here to that so that's where I'm getting when I turn that timer on the water's flowing to this half-inch so for your home setup just imagine this is going to a hose faucet this half-inch lines running here now I have a quarter-inch line with no holes in it running to a on/off valve I like to use the on/off valves instead of the transfer barb a transfer barb is what connects the quarter inch to quarter inch so that's what I'm using here I'll pull it so you can see it and with this you can control pressure or completely turn off one of these lines so it gives you a lot of control and I really like that with the emitter lines will just be replacing these with a drip tape setup so that's one of the beds and then you can see there's a tee that comes off another tee and an on/off valve and I like to have valves in between each section or plot so that if I want to I can turn one of these off in case maybe the other beds it's too wet but this bed needs water that way I can run the single valve from the timer on and then have control over which beds are getting water so this one runs all the way here you can run the polyline aboveground which is great or you can just throw you know an inch or two of dirt if you want to keep it protected from the Sun but it lasts a long time in the sunlight and then it's the same setup over here that's an example of the transfer barb and you punch in to the half-inch line with a couple different tools so these lines are working perfectly they're not clogged at all so that's why we're gonna be leaving these alone now in these you might be able to see that we're getting water at the beginning of the lines here but then at the ends it's completely dry and there's nothing coming out we tried poking them with a knife to unclog them but they're just completely clogged so we just need to get rid of these and replace them so now let's talk about your timers I'm a big fan of the orbit timers I've had great success with them they've worked for years off of the original batteries had never failed on me the valves never broke and I've used you know five different ones over the last three years for my different valves and I've been very happy with them they could have a little bit more custom control but for a home-based garden they're just perfect so what's great about these is they will attach to a hose faucet so first you're gonna put your particle filter on and you'll put your timer and if you want you can get a like a boogie brew filter this filters out chlorine and heavy metals and just makes your water a lot better and it'll you know make the salt it'll help the soil biology thrive a bit better I always use these at my farm it's just a very simple filter that's going to just make the water a bit cleaner for you plants in your soil so you can put that on next and then your timer on a faucet like this it's a bit harder to have this set up because it's so long so next would go your timer then your pressure regulator on the valve this is an extra manual valve or you can hook up a hose to this and then you could run your half inch polyline from here and they have a compression fitting that you shove on to the line and that just screws on to the regulator here or like I said if you want to maintain pressure all the way to the bed then just and you'll just adapt the half-inch a compression to the three quarter inch hose threaded fitting put that on here run it to your bed and then you'll put the pressure regulator on the half inch going into your bed and there's something that you should know there's something called hose threaded fittings and there's pipe threaded fittings pipe threaded is for like a PVC pipe hose thread is for just like it sounds for it for a normal hose and if you buy the wrong one it will not thread correctly the hose threaded fitting is a bit wider spaced the pipe thread it is a bit skinnier threaded so all the faucets coming out of your house that's called a hose thread now with this faucet is attached to of going into this wall this would be a pipe thread so I just keep that in mind when you're looking at your fittings stuff for irrigation though it's pretty universally hose threaded but you can buy pipe threaded stuff for your irrigation so just keep that in mind but all of this orbit stuff we is all hose threaded pressure regulators they can come in pipe or hose threaded but because we're using my parents more advanced like landscaping valve setup we're running it off of that so we're just going to imagine that be half-inch over there that we're about to go work on is coming from a timer set up more like this or you may have a landscape irrigation setup like my parents have and for that you're just going to need to tap into the PVC pipe adapt that to half-inch and for that your you are definitely going to need a pressure regulator because those landscaping lines are much higher pressure so you'll just buy the pressure regulator that you'll need whether you're using the emitter line which is 25 psi some and you'll just check your line some of them can go up to 40 psi I believe so it'll say that on the packaging for the line that you buy 15 psi or 10 psi depending on which type of drip tape that you buy and the links down in the description I'll all put some notes there to help you guys when purchasing and of course you can call drip DeBell and they can help consult you on what you should buy as well they're really helpful on the phone and I have many other videos explaining some of this stuff and more depth if this wasn't enough for you because irrigation is a bit confusing especially when do you dealing with all the fittings the pressures and all of that especially when you're hearing this stuff at first it kind of gets a bit jumbled in your mind so don't worry about that I'll try to make it a little bit easier for you and the instructions below so what we're gonna do is put a tee right here 1/2 inch up and then into the bed and create our new drip tape emitter system so I want you guys to think about this this half-inch is is running from the valve now coming from the PVC into this half-inch that's where we could run this 15 psi pressure regulator and then boom into this half-inch line now I don't have the other piece that I need for this regulator but that's okay because I'm gonna regulate the pressure with the valve that we're gonna attach here now for you running off of a hose faucet valve you can put the psi regulator you know off of the timer and then adapt it and 1/2 inch this is a compression fitting the 1/2 inch goes inside of there and it would bring it all the way here to the beginning of your garden bed so what I want to do is raise this up and put the 1/2 inch right at the edge of my garden bed here so for the tea we're gonna bring it in and in between here the 1/2 inch will go and it'll stop here on each side so I'm just gonna mock it up and then cut the line and now we'll put it on and see once I put it on that side see how much room we have on there and you could even put it on one side first and then cut this side to length that'd be a really safe way to do it so now we're ready to get the 1/2 inch up and into the bed and 1/2 inch is super cheap you can get 500 feet of this stuff for like 50 bucks so now we'll put this in it's just like a bunch of Lego pieces what we're gonna do now we're gonna adapt my on and off valve system that I used in my market garden for a raised bed system so we're gonna take this apart a little bit and I'll put a link for the video of how to actually make these if you want to do in-ground beds but I'm gonna show you a better way to adapt these for a garden bed so what I want to have happen is have this 1/2 inch run completely flush with the backboard here so I know this 1/2 inch is gonna go inside about this much and I want it to be pretty flush so I'm gonna cut it right in there and mock it up one more time to check it yeah that'll be really good and now we're gonna run a half inch piece all the way across to the other end and cap it off I'm gonna leave this half inch open because we want to run water through this line to clean out anything that's in here whether that's spiders or insects or dirt that got clogged in here so we're gonna blow it out now we're going to come back and pop some holes into the line and then we can attach our drip tape adapter pieces and there's two different types that I'll show you to help you make a decision on what you would like and there's one more piece that I'm gonna add to this which is this valve and that way we can turn our bed on and off if we would like to and this is the really cool kind that you can twist on and off so it's not like a normal compression because you can take them off and then reuse it so that's why I really like this this type well for the valve I could put it in a couple places I could put it here I could put it down here and I will just kind of nail this into place it's got a nice Bend here it's not getting a kink in it at all and I could have made this a little bit better but I'm kind of in a rush to finish this so I can get to the live stream so I think I'll just be happy with this we'll just attach this to the board and then we'll run the valve right here so we just need to cut in and this is what's so nice about this kind of half-inch of adapter piece you can shove the half-inch on there you twist this and now it makes a perfect watertight connection but I can always take this off and reuse it and you're probably seeing a bunch of dirt on here and that's why we really need to blow the line out before we attach anything else because if we get any dirt in the drip tape there's a high chance that it could clog so if we take the precaution now and blow everything out at each step you're way less likely to have any issues with clogging later on awesome that looks great and we just got a little creative there and just made it work I could do this a lot cleaner but this is going to work great so let's move on to the next step punch our holes and then we'll attach our drip tape almost done so here are the tools that you use to punch into a half-inch line this is your most basic and cheap one where you shove it in and make the hole this is my personal favorite especially if you have to do a lot of lines because you can just put the half-inch in between here you squeeze and it makes a perfect hole this is one that was given to me but it's kind of nice because it has a knife so that you can cut the pipe and then on this end it has a punch so you just press it down and that punches the line and makes a hole so that you can put in your transfer barb and then of course I always keep my Felco pruners with me I use these for everything around the garden I highly recommend this brand of pruner I've had these for eight years and I can cut irrigation with them I can prune trees with them I can thin out seedlings whatever I need to do I use these pruners so we just blew out our main line here nice and clean now we're ready to poke our holes we always want to make sure that our drip lines are laid out equidistant so that we get a perfectly even water spread so I've put out this tape measure here to help us do that I'm gonna be poking a hole at 8 inches this is a four foot box so if I started eighth night and I do want every 12 inches it gives me basically a perfect layout for this box and I'm gonna use my little Rain Bird poker here we want to double check your poking from the correct side and when you're poking your holes you want to make sure that it'll be on the flat side of the tubing here so either perfectly parallel with the ground or like slightly up it's better than it being down because this needs to poke in right here so if it was down and be kind of a bad angle so you want to make it even or slightly up now we're gonna put in our our transfer barbs which will transfer from 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch into drip tape connection and I'll put links in the description for these different pieces so it's easier for you to find now I've got some that have valves on them I only had three of them left so one of them will be one that does not have a valve this is how I ran all of mine at the farm and I ran you know just using one main valve but for my parents a little garden right here I'll give them a little bit more control so that they can turn each individual line on and off except for this one now all you got to do is just push this end inside of the hose and when it's completely in Lamesa it make a nice popping sound just like that and as you're doing all this work just be extra careful to keep dirt out of the line but we are gonna blow these lines out one last time before we connect everything so we'll get them perfectly clean so all four are in now we just need to cut our drip tape to length and we need to make another header piece that's going to match this one so for making the header piece I am just gonna line it right up here and I want to make sure that I have enough length so that I can fold these over in order to tie them off and if you check out my video on how to like make these in mass for more of a Market Garden larger size you'll notice I have a whole process of how to do this so it's really efficient and doesn't take as long and then as I go just make sure that these holes stay lined up and then I'm just gonna with with a hose I'm just gonna blow this out really quick and then now we can tie this guy off and I'll fold it back the opposite direction so I can have some more room okay now I'm going to throw this at the other end and put some irrigation tees to hold it in place and then we can measure out our drip tape and cut it to length now on the drip tape itself you just want to you know give enough link so that I could fit on here if it's too close to your would if your box or something take that into consideration if maybe you want to have a little bit more length away for the very first dripper so before I add anything my drip tape I want to blow this out real quick and now attach okay give it a little tug to make sure it's nice and stuck on there and then you want to make sure when you screw it on to completely unscrew before you screw it forward to make sure it's very tight because these can blow off if the pressure is too high so now I'm just going to trim these up and get them as tight as possible and as drip tape gets older and expands and contracts it will stretch a little bit so you'll have to come back and trim them up occasionally and you'll notice that the lines will get like kind of loose looking but once you clip them a couple times they get really good and then before I screw any of these on I need to blow the tubes out [Applause] so I'm just matching it up I'm pulling it past I know that the tubing will go right basically to the edge of the green if these are completely unscrewed you also want to make sure that there's not a emitter in the way and then I just cut [Applause] slide it up because I don't have the right adapter for my pressure regulator I'm just gonna run this with this valve not open all the way and that will reduce the pressure enough so that my tape is fully pressurized as you can see but it's not blowing them off the adapters here so this will be really great and it's gonna be a great system for my parents so this is the adapted version from my market garden and the reason to have the header at the other end is that it keeps all the lines really straight and it's flow through which means if there's a clog let's say in that line and the water can't it goes to here and then it gets clogged the water can flow around to that side come back through and still get to the other emitters so even if there is a clog it solves that issue alright so that was a bit more of a complicated episode today but I really hope this helped give you some of the nitty-gritty details surrounding drip irrigation and I know it's a lot to take in but keep studying about it and once you figure it out it's really just like putting LEGO pieces together and if you want just the easiest way to do it then I guess I would suggest 1/2 inch poly main line with a quarter inch emitter line and using on and off valves but like I said I really love this drip tape system and for all the different reasons that I mentioned and there's links down the description to help you guys find the parts for this so go check those out and I'll put links to all my videos about drip irrigation and anything else that you might need to help you along the way if you found this video helpful be sure to share it with a friend that wants to learn how to garden to help them get going that would be fantastic and be sure to like comment I'll be sure to help you guys if you have any questions about what we did here I love to help you get started in your garden alright everybody that's going to be it for this episode of nature's always right I really hope this helps you to learn some of the beginning gardening skills that you're going to need thank you so much mom for joining me had a great time yeah and we can't wait to do more gardening out here for the last couple weeks while I'm living here and I'll be sure to show you guys updates check out my Instagram and follow me there I'll put it updates on this garden and maybe I'll even get to do one more video about this before I leave so alright have a great day on your farms Lee Gardens and I'll see you guys and the next nature is always right video [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,605,677

Rating: 4.8547754 out of 5

Keywords: garden, gardening, organic gardening, nature's always right, natures always right, urban gardener, urban gardening, urban garden, backyard farmers, backyard farming, learn to garden, how to garden, learn to grow food, how to grow food, home garden, grow your own food, how to grow vegetables, how to plant vegetables, how to start a garden, everything you need to know, homestead garden, homesteading, grow food at home, grow your own greens, grow your own plants

Id: NY3jf0chngU

Length: 77min 58sec (4678 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 06 2020