- Welcome back my friends
to another "Ask Me Anything" episode,
solo edition, at least as far as the humans go.
There's about 100 tomatoes in front of me,
and Babka is having some kind of dream.
Her tail's going like crazy.
Today is a homestead focused "Ask Me Anything,"
so I'm gonna go through as many questions
as I can get through here
on general questions from you guys about the Epic Homestead.
So a really interesting question to start off,
"What is inspiring you at this period of your life?
Your friendship with Jacques
has inspired me to find
a garden buddy to geek around with."
Actually, that is a really, really big benefit
of having Jacques around, especially so close,
is he's just someone, we're on the same wavelength.
We're both trying to grow stuff.
We're trying to get better at it every single day.
We're learning, we're testing,
we're debating, we're competing.
But as far as what inspires me at this period of my life,
it's actually a really interesting question.
I would say that the growth of Epic Gardening,
I mean, I think you guys know from watching
and seeing new people on the channel
that Epic Gardening is growing.
I mean, we're up to about 21 employees now,
and I'm the CEO of the company.
So I'm on these videos,
but I'm also running the company itself.
And so what's inspiring me is trying
to become the best leader and CEO that I can be,
because last year, we had about four people on the team.
Now we have 20.
It's a lot different company
and we're trying to do something really cool,
teach the world to grow, offer the best products
and the best in class education that we can,
which is a tall order.
So I'm inspired by that right now.
What are my favorite recipes I've learned
from being a gardener?
So there's an arugula salad that I've made,
even from back in my early days
when I was just an apartment gardener, balcony gardener,
which was basically chiffonading arugula.
So you kind of roll it up
and you give it that chiffonade style cut,
and then what you do is you go Parmesan cheese,
olive oil, salt, pepper, and a little bit of lemon.
So stuff pretty much everyone has on hand,
or if you don't, it's at least relatively cheap to get.
And it's a really fresh salad.
I mean, the bitterness of the arugula
gets cut down by both the oil and the cheese,
and then that lemon adds some acidity to the mix.
So kind of the flavors are nice and balanced,
and it's pretty healthy, somewhat filling.
You can of course add some proteins
and eggs and et cetera to it.
But that's like my base level thing
that I really enjoyed.
Obviously on the channel here,
we've been doing some cooking videos,
so some of these recipes that you'll see coming up
have become my new favorites.
"Since you are in a climate that
you can grow in almost year round,
do you ever experience gardening burnout?"
Actually, yes.
I mean, I'll be honest with you guys,
we can grow 365 days of the year,
and also we have the added pressure
of trying to grow things maybe a little out of season,
or that we might not like,
because we know that enough people out there
love eggplants that I wanna show you guys
how to grow eggplants,
even though I'm not personally
a huge fan of eating them myself,
and that just could be a preparation thing.
But you know, for us,
I think as this summer starts to come in,
August, September, it's really natural,
and definitely forgive yourself for this,
to feel a little bit of burnout,
like, oh man, it's so hot.
I don't wanna go out in the garden
and do this for the 100th time.
It's a very natural feeling.
So, you know, grow garden at the scale
that is comfortable to you,
so that you don't experience this.
But there's also nothing wrong
with just chilling out and taking a break.
"How much does it cost on a monthly
or yearly basis for all the tools
and materials you bring to the homestead
to supplement your composting,
recycling and product development,
in order to maintain and grow the homestead?"
It's hard for me to answer this one directly
because I haven't done a full tally,
and it really depends on if you're going to consider
the projects that we did, the solar,
the new roof, the garage floor.
Does that count or does that not count?
'Cause that's kind of a personal expense
that I just wanted to beautify my space with.
So I would say,
(sighs) it's definitely more than your average garden,
and that's including the fact that a lot of product
we either get gifted or donated to test out
to see if we like it.
But I mean it's quite expensive.
Then again, we are constantly reinvesting
in the channel to test out tools.
I mean, I have three broad forks
sitting in the shed right now.
No one needs three broad forks,
and you might even argue that
no one even needs one broad fork
at a backyard garden scale.
And so I'm unfortunately not great at answering this,
because number one, I haven't tallied it,
and number two, it's kind of just a nebulous definition.
But suffice to say, it ain't cheap.
"How's your relationship with your neighbors?
Are they bothered by the camera, projects and Jacques?"
Well, everyone's bothered by Jacques.
Why do you think he's not in this video?
We had a fight.
We're not talking right now.
It's a big thing.
No, I'm just kidding.
Jacques is great, and honestly,
I thought that maybe I would annoy
the neighbors more with some of the stuff that we do here.
We get big deliveries of mulch,
and we're messing around,
and we're filming content.
But for the most part, quiet area,
not a lot of issues, and if there is, you know,
throw a couple of squash on the doorstep, things are good.
No, a good relationship with the neighbors.
Haven't really inspired too many of them to garden,
but hopefully I'm inspiring you guys to garden,
and maybe my neighbors will come along sometime.
"How much did the chicken coop from Carolina Coops cost?"
So this is one of those examples,
kind of going back to the question
of how much did the homestead upgrades cost,
where the coop itself did not cost us anything
because we did that in partnership
with Carolina Coops to put a little more awareness
on what I consider to be the best built coops in the world,
if you're looking for a deluxe or a higher end coop.
So how much would it have cost?
The coop I think as configured was $12,500,
which is an absurd price,
and both Matt, the owner and myself
would fully admit that.
But look, the Epic Garden is called epic for a reason.
I'm purposefully going a little bit overboard
because I want to build a space
that's really inspiring, and aspirational,
and fun to be in, with the full understanding that
there's a Carolina Coop that's $2,000,
which is still somewhat expensive.
But there's also coops you can get from Tractor Supply
that are in the three to $400 range,
and as you saw from Jacques' channel,
you can also build a coop.
So hopefully it comes across that
by putting in some of these higher end projects
here at the homestead, we're not broadcasting that
that's what we think you should do.
We're just saying, here's sort of where the peak is,
and here are other ways that you can get there.
So there's a lot of different approaches.
But yeah, pretty pricey coop.
"Do you let your chickens
run free in the garden sometimes?"
I've started to under very, very careful supervision.
I know that we have a bunch
of predatory birds that fly over.
I hear hawks all the time.
Babka is sleeping right now.
I don't know if she would go for them.
I think they're at a size
where she probably wouldn't mess with them.
We have raccoons, we have skunks,
we have opossums, et cetera.
So if it's sunset,
I feel like they're a little more relaxed,
I'll let a few of them out
and kind of roam through and see what they do.
But we're gonna be building a project
pretty soon here on the channel
to let them free range a little bit easier.
"Where have you learned all of your homesteading knowledge?
You're like a professor."
You know, really all over the place.
Direct experience, messing around.
I've learned from books.
I've learned from different YouTube channels.
I've picked up information from Jacques
and different friends of mine.
Chatting on Instagram.
The thing that I think I have going for me is,
for one reason or another,
I simply just don't forget things
and I can connect things really well.
And so if I get a piece of knowledge about homesteading,
let's say it's chicken care or, you know,
growing garlic over the winter,
as long as it connects to something else
that I know from my gardening and homesteading experience,
I really won't forget it,
and that's kind of how I can put out
a lot of this information.
I don't know, just a skillset that
I seem to have had from when I was a kid.
"What adversity have you come across on your journey?
I'm an up and coming farmer from Florida
and I've gone through a lot of my own."
You know, I think I should probably save that
for a whole different video.
I'm planning on doing a video
of like how we became Epic Gardening,
or how I became the Epic Gardener,
whatever you wanna call it,
sort of like a life story.
Definitely have had some adversity,
not directly in gardening, but in life itself,
and it kind of deserves its own story.
So I'll probably save that for another time.
"What has been your favorite
or most worthwhile project that you've done so far?"
(sighs) Man, there's a couple.
So I'm gonna cheat and give you two answers.
The most worthwhile one is clearly the irrigation project.
15 different zones all set up on automatic timers.
Of course we still spot water and check,
but a lot of the garden is watered on autopilot
and we just tweak the system.
We don't go out there and manually water it,
which is really fantastic.
So that's an obvious one.
I think the most satisfying one is the pond
and the patio, as far as my lifestyle.
Recently celebrated a birthday.
Had a bunch of family and friends over.
We're sitting by the pond, enjoying it,
watching the koi, fire pit on the patio,
having some s'mores.
That's really the experience
I've been trying to develop here,
surrounded by this beautiful garden.
So I'd say the pond has been the most satisfying one.
"With the solar panels now added to your home,
any future plans to add an EV to the homestead?"
You know, I've gone back and forth on this.
I think I'm not super sold on Tesla vehicles these days.
The build quality's been going down.
I've really had my eye on the Rivian, either R1T or R1S,
but the price tag is pretty high up there,
and I just bought the first car
since I started driving last year.
So I have a Toyota 4Runner.
Gas mileage, not great on that.
I love the car.
I feel like it fits who I am.
I just am obsessed with it.
But an EV would be great,
especially because the solar,
we're not even coming close right now
to using as much energy as we are generating,
so I'm kinda leaving some money on the table.
"I'm curious about what the water
in your giant reservoir is being used for.
Is it for feeding the pond only?"
In fact, I don't really use it for feeding the pond.
What we do is we use it for irrigation.
So you can actually hook it into our main irrigation
in certain different zones,
and so I can irrigate the backyard
off of the reservoir water if I want to.
And as we move into the late summer,
it's a great time to do that.
So I have a pretty much full reservoir right now.
I'm gonna start draining it
as the likelihood of getting more rain starts to increase.
So it's really a buffer to offset these hotter months.
"Looking back on it, did you like the order
that you did the homestead improvement projects in?"
This is a really good question.
"Would you change anything around and say,
I should have installed the fencing or the gate first,
or the irrigation project took longer?"
You know, I think what I would've done first
is probably solve fencing and security first.
You know, it took a while to get these fences in place,
and it's something I knew as soon as I bought the property,
I was like, there's seven different fences on this property.
For sure at some point I'm gonna want a different one.
And I wish I did that first,
because then I would've had all of my boundaries.
And I'm not the most design savvy,
but I think designing inwards from boundaries
has been really helpful for me.
So putting the shed in,
I knew it was gonna be near the fence,
but the shed was there before the fence was there,
so installing that part of the fence
was a little frustrating.
There was also the idea of the solar project.
I could have just installed all of that at the same time,
instead of having two separate projects.
Also running irrigation
and running specifically electrical
and water lines before building
all this extra infrastructure
probably would've been a smarter way to approach this.
But the only caveat I'll say to that
is the design evolved over time.
So after a year, the lines I had
put in for irrigation probably would not
have mapped to how this garden actually shaped out,
and I'm really pleased with the potential
and the overall structure of the garden.
So I would say overall,
I would've done fencing, gating and security,
but besides that, these little peppered in projects
would've been really pretty much the same.
"Do you now feel like you don't have enough space?
Are you looking to move to a larger homestead elsewhere?
If you move, can Jacques move too?"
Well, Jacques is his own man.
He has his own home,
so whatever Jacques does is kind of up to him.
But I will say I do find myself
having these fantasies of, you know,
we're on a third of an acre here.
In San Diego, that's an absurd amount of space,
and honestly, these days,
I don't even know if it'd be affordable
because prices have gone up so much.
But I am looking at spaces
10 plus acres outside of California,
not necessarily as an immediate thing,
but as something where I'd want to maybe
purchase the land and slowly develop
a property over time with all of the knowledge
that I've gained here,
as far as proper sequencing of projects,
planning, where does the orchard go, solar, et cetera.
So it's on the mind.
Not too much coming right now.
"This question might be mundane," no such thing,
"but what are those slip-on style clogs
that we've been wearing?"
So we've actually had quite a battle
between Jacques and I about
what is the best garden clog.
I've gone with Muck Boots.
He's got, he's had, I've tried Birkenstock, Muck Boots,
and I think he's got one Blundstones.
He's got some Blundstones now.
I like Muck Boots.
He likes Blundstones.
I think they're somewhat interchangeable.
Blundstone's probably a little bit better.
I wanna try those out as well.
So it's just for me,
it's like having something that
I can easily slip on and off
means that I go against my natural state
of walking around barefoot all the time,
which is what I love to do,
and stepping on mulch and cutting myself and all that.
So give those a shot.
"How do you get sponsorships?
And is that your main source of income?"
Surprisingly, unlike most YouTubers,
our main source of income here at Epic Gardening
and Epic Homesteading is not advertising on YouTube,
like the ads you see.
It's really not even doing sponsorships
with other companies.
If you count up the ones that we've done in the past,
it is way less than any YouTube account of our size.
What we make our money on is,
honestly, the way I'm very proud of,
and it's that we want to offer
best in class products and services
directly to you guys, our audience,
so that we are not making you watch all these ads
and brands and shoving that down your throat,
because we need to make money.
Now, that's not to say that
there aren't ads on the videos
and we aren't gonna sometimes partner with brands
that we really like.
But generally speaking,
the income that supports our 20 person team
is literally coming directly from you guys
when you shop and buy Birdies Beds,
or seed starting trays, or Felco tools,
or pruning snips, anything like that.
So we have dozens and dozens of more products
that we'll be onboarding over the course of the next year,
and hopefully those are of interest to you guys
and you like them because if you don't, well,
things might have to change around here.
"Will you be doing collaborations
with other gardeners like James Prigioni?"
I've done a couple with James.
I hope to do more.
I absolutely love James.
His style's a little different than mine,
and I think that's what is so exciting about both of us.
Both young guys.
He has more of that upbeat, fiery style.
I think I'm a little more ridiculous/chill,
but that might make for a really good collaboration.
I'll say stay tuned because on the main channel,
we do have a collab coming with Mark of Self Sufficient Me.
There'll be a video on his channel
and a video on my channel, so stay tuned.
And we're also doing some cross collaborations
with Food52, who's a cooking website
and cooking company, as well as MeatEater,
who's a hunting and wildlife company.
"Will you ever try raising crop fish in your garden,
such as tilapia, gourami or bass?"
You know, I've thought about it.
I think for now, no,
but I might throw a couple tilapia in the pond,
if they play well with the koi.
I don't actually know the interaction there.
Maybe someone can help me out with that.
But I'm not against it.
I think for now, growing edible aquatics,
just plants in the pond would be a good start.
"Can you talk about your possible greenhouse ideas?"
Well, in fact, my friends,
I got off a call just today
about installing an eight foot by 10 foot greenhouse,
and I want to take you through the whole planning process.
So how do you cite the building?
How do you make sure you know it's in the right spot?
What accessories?
What size?
How do you know the different types of materials to use?
So we're actually gonna do at least a three part series
on building the Epic Greenhouse from scratch,
in partnership with a greenhouse company
that I'm really excited about,
so stay tuned for that.
"Have I done any historical research on my home?"
You know, it's really interesting,
'cause when we were digging out the pond,
we found all these weird little glass bottles
and tins that kind of pointed to a 1950s era dump pit.
So I know that there was at least a family here
during that time that was using it
for an interesting purpose.
And here's what's interesting is the old owners,
before I bought this, this is a flipped home.
I did a whole video on flipper fails and mistakes,
and I highly encourage you to watch that
if you're looking at buying your first home
or your first homestead.
Please watch that video.
There's a lot of different things
you could have avoided if you just watch it.
But the old owners before the flippers,
they came by a couple months back,
maybe in the winter of this past year,
and they said, "Hey, you know, we're in town.
We don't live here anymore
and wanted to come by and see
what you did with the place.
Is that okay?"
And so I said, "You know what, of course.
Come on in."
And they kind of showed me
what the inside used to look like.
There used to be these weird
cobblestone archways and stuff, a fire pit.
And then in the backyard, according to them,
there used to be a well, like a fresh spring well
in the back and also in the curb strip,
way, way back in the day.
I guess this family owned it since 1924,
when the building was built.
So I learned a little bit of history there.
I could probably educate myself a little more though,
but it was really cool to see.
"How close or far away are you
from being self-sufficient and is this your end goal?"
I don't think I want to be truly self-sufficient
in the sense of, you know,
I'm not going to be raising
100% of my own proteins here.
I'd prefer to fish and hunt if I can.
If I can do that, maybe fishing
I can do quite often here in San Diego,
but hunting, maybe a couple of hunts a year.
Get a chest freezer and have some protein there.
The eggs, of course, are gonna put out some protein and fat.
And I think I'm gonna eat seasonally from the garden,
but every now and then I might want an avocado
or a tomato when it's a little outta season.
I might grab that from the farmer's market
or from the grocery store.
But I think trending towards
75% self-sufficient would be ideal.
"Have there been any supply chain issues
during your project through the homestead
that disrupted your plans
or incurred more costs than estimated?"
Absolutely, yes.
So back in 2020 and 2021,
when I was doing the new roof,
which we did a video on,
the solar, which we did a video on,
and especially the fence, which we did a video on.
That's wood and metal materials and labor,
and especially the fence,
I mean, we used Alaskan cedar,
and it absolutely destroyed the budget
because it was two and a half times
more expensive than the initial quote.
But I wanted a cedar plank that was gonna last
and stand the test of time, so I bit the bullet,
and unfortunately, now wood is so much cheaper
that the fence would've cost
probably a few thousand dollars less,
which is unfortunate, but it is what it is.
I would've rather not waited
this long to design the fence,
so I think I was comfortable
paying the price when I paid it.
And the final question,
"When will you do the next Apocalypse Grow challenge?"
You know, I thought I was gonna do it
this year in September.
It turns out I probably want to prepare
for a next year more extreme version
where it's a full month, only from my own space.
I'm pretty sure I can do it by next year,
certainly with the amount of food I've grown this year.
I'm just gonna have to shift the crops around
and grow some more calorically dense crops,
and I think I can pull it off.
But I don't wanna rush it in September
and put out some bad content for you guys,
so probably next year.
And that's it, my friends.
If you have any other questions,
I'm gonna do an AMA every so often here on the channel.
You might want to ask Babka a couple.
She's probably got some answers for you.
(cat meowing)
Oh, yeah, she sure does.
She sure does.
Until next time guys,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
Babby!