(upbeat music)
- It's been two and a half years
since I purchased this piece of land
here in San Diego
to turn it into a suburban homestead.
In today's video, I'm gonna take you on a tour
and see how I did.
Here in the raised bed garden, (gate squeaks)
this really was just a patch of dirt
when I started. (gate squeaks)
And the first thing we did, of course,
was add the raised bed garden,
but also add this beautiful pathway,
which we're gonna walk down in just a mere moment.
But one thing I wanted to highlight, first of all,
this is the raised bed garden,
and of course we are using our beautiful Birdies beds here.
But this bed in particular
I'm very excited about, and the reason why
is because I created the subterranean garden.
Potatoes right here, of course.
Sarpo Mira variety,
one of the more delicious eaters out there.
But what I did is I put the potatoes down
about six to eight inches,
a little bit deeper than you might normally do a potato.
I planted lettuce on top,
which you can't see anymore 'cause I harvested it all,
but by the time the lettuce was mature,
about 30-ish days or so,
the potatoes were just starting to peek out of the ground
and I was able to pull the lettuce
and then let these potatoes grow.
So I was in fact growing one thing below the other thing,
potatoes here, lettuce here, subterranean gardening.
A nice sort of vertical timing offset
that allowed me to grow a little bit more
in just this one Birdies Tall Round bed,
which is really, really fun and really exciting.
The rest of the raised bed garden right now
is sort of in transition.
I have beds like this with nasturtiums.
I'm just sort of leaving
until I figure out what I actually wanna plant here.
Spring is a great time for nasturtiums to thrive.
I'm just gonna let them thrive.
They look beautiful.
And see what I want to get going for spring.
We haven't really started
the full round of crops for spring yet.
In fact, right here you're starting to see
a little bit of that spring in action.
We've had quite a rainy spring here,
almost eight inches of rain,
which is like 18 centimeters of rain
in an area where that's almost what we get the whole year
and it's only February so far.
And what I'm seeing in this onion bed
are these little I believe ink cap mushrooms.
And you get this question a lot,
certainly we do here at Epic Gardening of like,
"Hey, are mushrooms bad for the garden?
"What's going on here?"
And the answer in almost all cases is no.
It's a sign of fungal life.
Of course, the mushroom is the fruiting body
of the mycelial network that's underneath the soil,
so this is just what's coming up,
kind of showing you that, hey,
at least there's some good fungal growth in here.
It often can be a sign of woodiness in the soil,
too high wood content,
but that's actually what they're breaking down
so they're sort of solving the problem for you.
So this is our raised bed section.
Now, let's check out the artichoke patch.
Some things in the garden
just take a long time to get established,
and this rose arch here is no stranger to that.
This is a Cecile Brunner rose,
which is just starting to flower.
It's probably gonna be, I don't know,
another week or two before this really gets going,
but this is one of those things
where it just took kind of a year
for this to grow all the way in,
and I'm very excited to have this kind of throughfare
that is just so, so beautiful.
I've never been much of a flower grower
and now of course I'm getting into it.
But the thing I really wanted to call your attention to,
this is year two and a half or so of the artichoke patch,
which of course is fed by my laundry machine.
This is a gray water system that waters this whole area.
We almost never water this manually
or with any other type of irrigation.
And as you can see,
this is the craziest I've ever seen the artichoke patch.
Artichokes are a delicious, delicious plant.
Amazing to grow.
Can sometimes be challenging.
Certainly like a little bit of a warmer zone,
but you can pull it off in a lot of different climates.
And take a look at this semi-protected area.
Look at just how lush these look.
We're gonna get incredible amounts of artichoke this year,
probably six to eight per plant.
And every year at the base,
they'll throw a little bit of an offshoot off,
so you can reset, cut, transplant,
grow your patch, transplant into a different area maybe,
go into a container if you want, or just reset.
So once these flower in the spring,
you're gonna cut off that immature flower
and then you actually cut the plant to the ground.
It actually seems crazy,
like you would mow this whole thing down
but that's what you do
in order to reset them for the next season.
Something I really wanted at the homestead
was just sustainable water collection.
It's very difficult to get rain here in San Diego,
so the rain tanks are installed, they're full.
We got a full video on that
if you wanna see exactly how we did it.
But I want to call your attention now to dragon fruit alley.
I will say that all of these dragon fruit
at least 18 months ago were just one small cutting
right down there, not big in any fashion.
So I put four on each side of the trellis,
built the trellises, bought the pots,
put some irrigation on it,
and now you can see we have a crazy dragon fruit forest here
that I've actually gotten fruit off of every single one now.
So all of these, I've tasted the fruit
and they're all quite delicious.
Now, what I'll say is these are starting
to get a little bit wobbly, a little bit wonky.
The last thing I wanna do is have one of these collapse,
because not only is the terracotta degrading
but also they're leaning.
And if they fall, I'm gonna lose almost all of my growth.
So a project coming up soon,
maybe on the Epic Homesteading channel, our sister channel,
is gonna be to rebuild these in a way
that is gonna last for the long term.
But if I can make my way through the dragon fruit patch
without getting scratched, let's talk about the orchard,
which is really starting to come into its own.
Over here, I have a fig that I'm very proud of.
This was actually given to me by a good friend of mine,
Richard over at Grafting Dragon Fruit.
Many of you have seen his channel if you love dragon fruit.
This is a yellow long neck fig,
and it came to me a little bit wobbly.
The stem kind of came up and did this right turn this way.
And as you can see, it's kind of doing this,
but the reason I planted it here
is so it kind of dodged this big loquat tree,
which in fact if you take a closer look,
is actually starting to come to fruit.
I'm very excited about that.
Loquat is one of the most delicious fruits.
If fruits for about a month in spring.
That's all you get for the year.
And to be honest, there's gonna be more than I can handle,
so I'm gonna have to figure out something to do with it.
But this year we've done some grafting.
I have four different varieties of figs
grafted onto this one fig.
So anything that's not grafted
is still going to be the yellow long neck fig,
but I have one here,
and then one, two, and three right here.
So this one branch in fact
is going to be four different types of figs,
the three on top, and then any sort of offshoot
that might come from down below
of course would still be the yellow long neck.
Trying to get into grafting here at the homestead
because, look, I still live in a relatively small acreage,
about a third of an acre here,
so if I can put more varieties on one tree,
that is a lot better than having to grow 17 fig trees
to get all the figs that I want to eat.
About two years ago almost to the day,
I decided to do something a little crazy here in the orchard
and plant citrus trees four feet apart from one another.
These are plants that grow honestly way bigger than that.
And you might think it's a little bit crazy,
but in fact what I wanted to do was create a citrus hedgerow
that was full of uniformly grown citrus
that are producing as many types as I can cram in.
I think I have about 12 types just in this row
in this beautiful arrangement.
Now, how has that gone?
It's been two years.
Well, certainly we are starting to see them
get a lot closer to one another.
I'm getting to the point
where I'm actually gonna have to figure out
how to prune and shape this hedge.
Of course, on these larger trees down there,
some of the younger trees, they're still growing up,
but I've eaten almost a fruit
off of every single one of these trees.
In fact, just right here, this is my Bearss lime,
which has been my most prolific grower,
and these are some of the most delicious limes
you will ever eat.
And so something I'd leave you with in the orchard section
is you don't have to follow all the rules
of traditional fruit tree care
because your goals are different
than that of a traditional fruit tree grower
often when you're in a homestead or suburban environment.
What I care about is I want a little bit of privacy
on this north side of the property,
but I also don't really care
if I get hundreds of one particular fruit.
I'd rather get a more reasonable amount
of many different types of fruit,
and I can keep the trees smaller and actively prune them
to make the shape and the output that I want.
So the next part of the orchard is something
that at least I didn't have a lot of hope
I could grow in my area, which would be the stone fruit.
So this is a peach tree.
This is my most prolific stone fruit,
and it's just in that sort of teenager phase, I suppose,
where it has mostly flowered for the year.
You're starting to see green growth
and you're actually starting to see young peach formation,
compared to my nectarine over here,
which is still beautiful,
bees all over it in that flowering and pollination phase.
So if we come back here,
something that I learned with my stone fruit
is that look how many peaches are on this thing.
I mean, literally hundreds, literally hundreds,
and peaches of course get quite heavy.
These branches cannot support all these peaches,
so there's a very common thing to do.
It's a little bit painful,
but it's just a thinning technique.
And for example, on this particular branch,
if I take a look, I see these two right next to one another.
This one looks a little bit weaker than the other
so I'm gonna give that a twist and just break that off.
And this branch actually has a lot more forming.
You actually see one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 more forming.
Come on,
do you think this branch is gonna support 12 peaches?
It absolutely will not.
So what I'll do is I'll thin,
I'll actually remove these two as here,
and I might allow one more of these
as it sizes up to remain.
I'm gonna have to go around and do that on my tree.
So I did this last year
and I got about still 50, 55, 60 peaches.
I thinned off about 50, 55, 60.
So I thinned off about half.
I still got an amazing amount of peaches.
The rest of these trees in the stone fruit area,
a little bit less mature, still sizing up.
The one thing I'll say, especially in a warmer zone,
is just you gotta pick a variety
that's gonna perform in your zone.
But that's pretty much it in the front yard.
We have the backyard, which has a very exciting development.
Here in the backyard,
The thing I'm probably the most excited about plant-wise
is the passion fruit trellis.
This is just a pretty simple chicken wire and t-post setup.
I have two Frederick passion fruit, one on each side,
just to speed it up a little bit.
And the whole purpose here is to protect the very full
rainwater cistern from the sun heating the water up
and also just to provide a beautiful sort of scape
where I can come and pick one of the most delicious fruits
you'll actually ever eat,
which would be of course the passion fruit.
So what I expect to see here is the passion fruit
to kind of vine like crazy.
As soon as the temperatures start to warm up,
it grows readily, at least in the San Diego area.
And it's just a really great way to throw an edible climber
in a spot that really wouldn't have been used otherwise.
Another thing that I've been thinking about
and maybe dabbling my toes in is this little succulent area
on the backside of the pond.
I'm getting into some cacti, some succulents,
and pretty soon some native plants around this pond area
to really create that feeling that it's a real pond.
And in fact, for all intents and purposes,
it's going to be a real pond pretty soon.
Here in the pond there are so many changes
that I want to make, most I've already mentioned.
I just want to create a more beautiful native landscape.
I put some rush and some ground cover in.
We're actually gonna add some more fish
to the pond pretty soon.
And of course, whatever aquatic edibles I can grow,
I will grow.
In fact, I have watercress self seeding readily
around the pond.
I kind of wander around and pluck it
and make soups, make fresh salads with it,
and that's just a perfect aquaponic plant.
So the pond's looking really good.
One thing I'm thinking about is maybe adding
a pergola of some sort over here,
where what I can do then is grow maybe grapes up it
and I can have a sort of Roman dream
of grapes kind of raining down from the ceiling.
But we are coming now to the newest edition,
which would be the Epic Greenhouse.
The greenhouse is far from fully set up,
but I'm excited about it (door clicks)
and I have a lot of stuff growing in here already.
Most of it is seed starting.
Of course, it's a warmer environment, it's more protected.
Seedlings are going to really appreciate that.
And honestly, I haven't had seedlings grow this fast
on my property since I put them in the greenhouse.
They're absolutely exploding with growth.
So this is most of the stuff
that's gonna be going out this spring.
I haven't started anything
for the classic summer season yet.
So I actually don't have any tomatoes in here,
I don't have peppers, eggplant, okra, melons,
all that kind of stuff.
Still actually going to wait a little bit longer
and get as much as I can out of my spring.
So what I'll do is I'll just come in every day,
take a peek.
You don't have to water these every day,
especially in the greenhouse because it's more contained,
but I'll just bottom fill
'cause the trays don't have drainage holes
so they'll hold the water.
And then of course the seedling trays have big bottoms.
They'll soak up that water,
and they've been doing really well.
Now there's a couple additions that I have to make in here.
Number one is just better space optimization.
What I could do is lift these potting benches up,
have a surface right here, have another surface below,
and maybe even think about a third tier right here.
So there's a lot of optimization on this side,
and on this side there's even more
because there's not even
any shelving structures of any kind.
What I've done though is I've moved in my tropicals,
like my coffee plant, my lychee,
I have a banana in here now.
And then from the ceiling,
I've started to hang some house plants.
So getting back in the house plant game.
You'll see some more stuff on house plants
coming pretty soon here on Epic Gardening.
But hey, I don't have any potting benches in here.
I'm just setting stuff up and letting it grow.
And then really exciting, I have propagations.
So this is another grafted fig right here.
So this is a black mission fig
with four different unique types of wild figs grafted to it.
But over here in our new Epic Grow Bags,
we've got dozens and dozens of fig cuttings
that are sort of just haphazardly stuck in there.
Figs root pretty readily
so we'll see how many of those take.
But the greenhouse is fun.
I can't tell you how often I love coming in here.
There's still a lot to show you, though,
in the backyard with the in-ground beds.
So here in the in-ground beds, it's again a period
of transition in between that winter and spring.
So what we harvested off were a ton of broccoli right here,
a ton of cabbages right there,
but we still have stuff like Brussels sprouts sizing up
and we still have beautiful things.
In fact, the Romanesco cauliflower,
the first time I've really grown that
to sufficient size and quality,
at least for up to my standards.
And then behind me, we have probably
the biggest stand of potatoes I've ever grown,
as well as the biggest, well, also the healthiest
amount of garlic I've ever grown.
So I made a lot of little shifts this season
in planting timing and planting spacing,
specifically for those crops that have really helped us,
which we'll be sharing more soon.
And now we have an exciting update to our chicken.
In fact, more chickens are coming soon.
I'm gonna be getting four more breeds in May,
so these girls are gonna have some new sisters
and I'll go over how we actually integrate them
on the Epic Homesteading channel.
But I added two little kind of cute
little decorative planters here.
For now there's some peas in there, but the idea here is,
as you can see, they're getting a little bit inquisitive
and they'll go straight through and try to pick from here.
So it's spaced off just enough to let the plants grow
to the point where it can bush up
and they can get some nice natural forage here.
This is the outdoor run expansion to the coop.
So if you haven't seen it,
this is basically two and a half times
the amount of square footage on the indoor run,
and there's an automatic door that will let them out
and back in every single morning.
So they get way more space,
which of course has now allowed me to have more chickens.
No garden is complete without a composting setup,
and ours certainly exists now.
It didn't exist for the first year and a half
of owning the property here,
but now it does and it's been going pretty well.
We've certainly had our own challenges
starting the compost bin in our winter,
trying to keep it warm.
We have a lot of stuff coming on that,
but we've got at least a bin filled at any point in time.
And in fact, I just saw some steam coming out,
so we must be composting right now.
Let me take a look, give it a turn, give it a feel.
That's hot.
So, composting is going on.
Now, I use the chickens as a compostor as well.
So a lot of stuff will go to the chickens first
if there's enough things edible on it.
But if it's just a bunch of scraps and some random stuff,
I'll end up throwing it in here.
We'll give it the turn.
What we'll do though is we'll keep
usually two of these going at any point in time,
and then the rest is what I call material storage.
So compost, mulch, mixed potting soils,
they'll all go here because why have a bunch
of bags lying around if you can contain them
in a single spot.
And that's the Epic Homestead Two and a half years in.
It's crazy to me as I look out at this space
and realize that not five, six years ago
I was doing this little microgreen tutorials
in an apartment.
So if that's you right now,
this is something that is certainly possible for you
in the scale, budget, and size that makes sense for you.
So get started, get growing,
and until next time, my friends,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
(upbeat music fades)