Great, this is John Kohler at growingyourgreens.com.
We have another exciting episode for you.
What we’re gonna do today is give you guys a tour of my front yard garden.
As you guys cans see, here’s one of my neighbor’s and due to all the watering restrictions he
don’t wanna deal with the lawn anymore, cause everybody’s lawn is turning brown,
cause they’re not watering, cause lawns waste a lot of more water.
The cool thing is, while there are watering restrictions against ornamental plants, and
you can only water in certain days between certain times.
Those do not apply to edible plants.
So everything I’m growing is edible, and this provides food for me and hopefully my
family one day.
So let me go ahead and give you guys a tour and what you can do in just a small residential
lot.
So I mean, as much as I like to have a farm, most Americans that are watching this, you
don’t have a small tract home like I do and just because you have a tract home, doesn’t
mean you can’t grow a significant portion of your own food, because if you set it up
right, you totally can.
So I’ve maximized every square inch, you know to have some walk ways, but also to have
basically nice four foot long or wide by 40 feet or 16 feet long beds to grow in a square
foot gardening style.
Also bio-intensive, where I plant things really close.
I bring in the soil, including things like the rock dust and compost, and you know wood
chip compost, or composted wood chips and worm castings and I just grow things.
This is the tour of the very garden that put me on the map on YouTube.
I started this back in 2009 and you could check my videos, go back to 2009 and see when
I still had a lawn and we were setting this up.
So this is what has been growing since then.
A lot of the plants, like the trees have been growing for a long time and some of the plants
like in the beds are more annual plants, that grow a year or two years.
Some are just even growing one season.
What we have on this first bed is one of my favorites, one of my favorites leafy greens.
It’s called Ashitaba, or Angelica keiskei, it’s from Japan.
So I like to use this like the celery, the stems, you can eat like the celery and the
greens, you can just eat any kind of leafy greens.
It just does have a stronger flavor, stronger than the lettuce, but not as strong as say
dandelions.
So it’s somewhere in between.
And these plants actually bleed a yellow sap, which is rich in Chalcones, and that’s really
cool, because it’s like, they’ve done a lot of research on anti-cancer and all this
kinda stuff.
Let me see if I can show you guys what it looks like.
So this is where I actually chopped off a part of leaf through the small leaf tips at
the stem, and you could see it’s just like literally bleeding this yellow sap, and it
has basically covered itself to protect itself from further water loss.
And that’s really good to eat.
Now, because it just bleed there, I just scraped off some of the bleeding yellow stuff, because
it’s like really good for you and it’s like, it almost looks like paint.
Imagine painting your house with this stuff, I don’t know if the plant can make enough.
It’s kind of gooey, it’s a consistency, it’s like gum, but it dissolves.
And actually this stuff tastes fairly bitter, so it’s kind of like, it’s like when I
juice the stalks, it’s like the stalks time ten.
It’s probably something good for me though.
Ok now let’s continue to my garden.
Over on this side we’ve got a plant called [inaudible] [3:26] [wokete], which is really
cool.
It has a nice fragrant scent.
I use it as herbs, for herbs.
I made a soup earlier in the week and this acted as one of the flavors instead of like
using cilantro, which you can’t really grow in the hot summer.
You could grow this.
It tastes a little bit the same, but different.
Of course on this side we’ve got my massive feijoa tree, or pineapple guavas.
You can see there’s a whole bunch of baby fruits on there, and it’s actually still
in the flowering stage, and these plants, when they’re in the flowering stage, they’re
the best cause you can pick these little petals, and this is like, when the petal is like when
the petal is nice and soft, comes off easy, you could eat it.
Kinda tastes like cotton candy, like floral.
They’re like super delicious.
That’s what the fruit’s gonna taste like when they’re fully ripe.
So coming back more we have more of ashitabas since I like them so much, and I’ve been
saving the seeds.
I do have a specific episode on it if you’re interested.
I’ll put a link down below.
And then below here, we’re growing some oca, and the oca makes tuberous root, vegetable
from the South America and so that’s growing pretty good, it’s kind of like radish.
And then underneath my feijoa trees here I got some cucumbers.
This is like a little pickling cukes underneath here.
And of course I’ve got my blackberries, they’re now in season.
So I planted thornless blackberries, so there’s no thorns on these guys and these produce
lots of nice blackberries to eat.
Way better than anything you have at the store.
We keep going, we got a whole four foot by sixteen foot bed, of peppers, of actually
some cucumbers, came up as volunteers so I’m kinda leaving ‘em.
And then in this next bed we have a whole bed of peppers and these guys are actually
doing quite well.
There’s lots of peppers that I’m waiting for them to ripen up.
Over on this side we have a pomegranate tree, so you can see some of the pomes here and
you know, we’ve got all these blackberries that have yet to ripen their red.
They’re not ripe yet.
And then over on this side we have a whole bunch of you know once again, thornless black
raspberries that are now past their prime and if we continue on we got a nice tall fig
tree here, with figs that I had early season, and that will give me another late season
harvest here just in a month or two.
This next bed, I’m growing peppers since I like peppers a lot.
And these guys are doing pretty good also, and in this next bed we have a trellis set
up.
And we have a whole bunch of cucumbers growing down, I was going to trough this up and then
I got lazy, and then a whole bunch of beans, including some standard green beans and some
Native American [inaudible] [6:28] beans.
Going back further we have this, my sweet gummy tree, and I forgot about the persimmon
tree right, here.
You could see some of the persimmons on there.
This this is like, the first year that it made fruit it made like three, and the next
year it made like ten, and this year it has like, maybe a hundred.
It’s insane.
And let’s see, going back we have a nice swiss chard here.
And in this area we have a loquat tree, that I planted from seeds, some [inaudible] [7:00].
And then back over here in this fence area we have a whole bunch of cucumbers going up.
And here’s the other side of my front yard vegetable garden and here we got some sugar
cain, that’s growing, but is not growing a lot of cain for me.
I think the season here is a bit too short.
We have the New Zealand Angelica, which actually is not as good to me as the Japanese Angelica.
And we have a huge tall sunflower.
This thing goes up and I don’t think it has a bloom on it yet.
And we have some basil, I think It’s growing really nice this year.
We got a nice large zucchini plant, that’s producing some zucchinis, and a really pretty
sunflower here, hanging over the front.
Check that out.
I was like up there the other day, smelling it, and licking the pollen, I like to lick
the pollen of the plant and then I smell it and it’s like the most intense smell, one
of my favorite smells in the whole world.
I wish every girl could smell like that, it smells so good.
They should make like sunflower pollen perfume.
Let’s go ahead and walk through the arbor here, and in the arbor I decided to grow some
standard green beans this year, and also I have the akebia vine and hopefully this year
I’ll get some akebia fruit up there.
This side of course there’s the ashitaba and then going back over here we’ve got
ashitaba and some figs coming up.
This is my huge fig tree that I planted even before I put in my garden.
So I’ve eaten a number of figs off of it today and a couple of days ago.
And here we have, this is when I started like tree collards, green and purple ones from
cutting.
So I just took cutting, stuck them on the ground and then, here it is, half a year later,
and you know they’re pushing four feet tall.
So that’s working pretty good.
And down below we have some Ashitaba growing.
And this is just one of the pepper beds from the other sides.
I wanna show you guys the bigger plants.
These plants are just like rocking out like, especially this one on the corner here.
Check it out how thick that stem is, I mean that’s totally insane, so I think that’s
because of the special nutrients I’m using.
This here including the boogie-base is part of the soil base that I put down and CBD rock
dust minerals.
I mean this is just like a stout pepper.
You know I think it’s stouter because it’s got the silica in there from the CBD minerals,
which makes the stem thicker so they’re not gonna break on you.
That’s totally amazing.
How well it’s growing, but also producing.
It’s got a couple of peppers on there now, but even as it’s still flowering is making
more peppers.
And this plant is gonna be loaded up here pretty soon.
Continuing back, you can just see from the other side, we’ve got a lot more peppers
happening on both sides.
Over here, these guys have been out of control.
This is the [inaudible] [10:04] akira or kena adalas, and I grow this for the edible tubers.
Down below you guys can see they’re popping out of the ground.
So those have got to be harvested and eaten like potatoes.
You could cooke ‘em up or actually eat them raw, very high in starch.
And if we continue back on this side, we’ve got a lot more beans, including just the standard
green beans here.
And on the green beans, I really like to pick the green beans when they’re a little bit
young, like not when they’re too old.
They’re a lot more tender and quite tasty.
On this side we’ve got a lemon verbena tree, and this was an herb bed that was over grown
so I had to cut it back and we still got some wild arugula and some parsley going on in
there.
So this last bed is an herb bed and I just got different herbs growing, like some rosemaries
and thymes, and basil, and even got some lettuce flowering over here.
So basically I’ve just been collecting the lettuce flowers, and in the lettuce flowers,
in the bottom there’s the seed and I just spread the seeds out.
And hopefully pretty soon I have tons of lettuce.
I always want to encourage you guys to save your seeds, you know let some plants go to
seed, so you could grow your own lettuce instead of having to buy the seed again and again,
plus the lettuce seed that you’ve created is now part of your specific, you know climatic
conditions and soil.
So it’s adjusting to where you live.
Next we’re gonna go over here and in this section we’ve got a tufas, [inaudible] [11:40]
a nut set that makes edible little tubers.
Let me go ahead and pull one up for you guys and show you guys what it looks like.
Alright here it is.
This makes the grass up top that many people consider a weed, but down below, check it
out, attached to the root, is like this little ball and this looks like a little garbanzo
bean.
But this is not a bean, this is like a sweet root vegetable.
So let me go ahead and wash this off and I’ll eat it.
Let you guys know how it tastes, like a fresh corn.
Alright so here it is.
I’ve detached it from the mother stem and this is what it looks like, just a little
tuber there.
Nice and crunchy.
And I can see why they call it a tufa nut.
It’s like mostly carbohydrates, but it’s got a nice fatty texture.
It’s really delicious.
Probably one of my favorite tubers you can eat.
It’s pretty good.
But you’ve got to watch out this guys will take over your garden.
So I’ve dedicated this space, which is an undesirable shaded space and they’ve actually
done quite well for me, I’m glad for that.
Moving on we’ve got some pumpkins and some melons and some other [inaudible] [13:00]
growing underneath in this little small bed underneath the overhang.
That’s pretty much it for this garden to have just basically have pretty quick garden.
I’ll show you guys what I’m growing this summer.
As time goes on I’m trying to get smarter when I’m growing and kinda grow more perennial
crops like the Yacon that I have planted over here, just grows all year long.
You all know it will just grow next year.
The ashitaba is more perennial and I’ve got the middle beds kinda more annual crops,
where I’ve got to tend to them and harvest and pick ‘em and I plant new stuff.
So as I go on my goal has changed a little bit.
And I think perennial gardening as I started is actually the way to go so you can actually
have less work and more food for you and your family.
If you guys like this video please give me a thumbs up.
I’ll be doing a video tour of my backyard garden here pretty soon, so be sure to subscribe
to get notified when that one is out.
Also be sure to check my past episodes.
I have over a 1050 episodes right now in all aspects of growing your own food at home,
where I get to show you guys videos at my place, or when I’m traveling to show you
guys what other people are doing so you guys can have more knowledge and applied knowledge
is truly powerful.
So once again, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
We’ll see you next time and till then remember, keep on growing.