Welcome to the new chapter - The Epic Urban Homestead.
Kevin here from Epic Gardening,
where it's my goal to help you grow a greener thumb,
and as I go into this new journey, perhaps grow much more for yourself.
Self-sustainability, self-reliance,
a lot of different things that give us more freedom in our lives without
sacrificing a whole lot of modern comfort.
That's really the goal of Epic Urban Homestead. Speaking of,
that's what we're looking at right here. So without further ado,
I'm going to take you on a rough and dirty tour of the new space that I'm
growing in and living in, here in San Diego, California.
So I'm gonna start at this corner of the lot,
which is the northwest corner of the lot.
And the first thing when I was looking at places was,
does it have existing trees? I'll be honest with you,
I barely looked at the outside of the, or the inside of the home.
And I've got some citrus on the property already in this corner,
which is really great. So here's the front yard.
And the whole lot is somewhere around a third of an acre,
about 13,000 square feet.
But the house itself is only about a thousand of those square feet.
So do the math. There's quite a bit of empty space here. So in the front yard,
it's already been mulched with some natural wood chips, which I like,
but I'm going to need to lay down quite a bit more and do some serious soil
rehab here. You can see,
we already have a lot of weeds already making their way back up.
So we're going to have to manage that.
And this section right here,
where the house porch ends til about there or so,
is where I'm going to put down the old Epic Garden.
So I already have a built-in gate here, which is fantastic.
And as we move up to the front door, which I will take you inside,
this is what I'm thinking. I'm thinking right here until about there,
the original Epic Garden will be right here.
Cause I never want to forget about small space gardening techniques.
That's what I know the best.
And that's what I think a lot of you really engage with.
So I'm going to keep putting that there. But over here, that's a loquat tree,
which I find to be very poignant.
And this section is probably going to become a landscaped miniature
orchard/pollinator section. I'm not a hundred percent sure on that,
but I'm pretty sure that's what's going to happen right there.
Now let's go ahead and do a little tour of the inside.
All right.
It's going to be a little echoey cause I haven't moved in, but here we go.
So we have a little living room here.
This is probably the kitchen-esque area right here.
And then as we get in to here, forgive the mess, but we have our little kitchen.
And what I really like about the kitchen is,
the backsplash actually goes up cause I'm pretty sloppy as far as cooking goes.
So if I'm spilling or whatever,
it'll go up against there and that's pretty nice.
Now here's something that's really cool.
This little nook area has two windows right up against the
corner of the home that I can look into the backyard.
So before we get to the backyard,
I'll take you on a little tour of the rest of the home.
So we've got just two bedrooms in here.
This one faces the street. So this might not be the best one for me to use,
but we'll see. So here's this one.
Closets are kind of interesting. They kind of go in like this,
which is pretty typical of an old school San Diego style home.
And then here's the funny part. When you get into the bathroom,
it's a pretty small bathroom, cause this is a pretty small house,
but check this toilet out. The toilet's a little, little cramped,
so I'm going to be having to struggle here, but
that's part of the game in San Diego.
So then we've got another bedroom back here,
but really I have to be honest with you guys,
when I first put an offer in on this place, I barely looked at the inside.
I didn't really care that much because I care more about the outside.
So as we move through our little laundry room,
here is our backyard area. So there's a couple sunlights here.
Maybe this could be a nice entertainment space, I'm not really sure.
But right about here is a cool sink that it's got all the hookups,
but it's a pretty crappy sink and it doesn't really work that well,
it's like kind of flimsy and stuff.
So I'm probably going to put one of those steel wash sinks and maybe take it out
to there. So this is going to be my produce washing area.
But let's go into the actual backyard. So here's the back part of the yard.
And you can see it's a lot less manicured and landscaped cause it seems like
they just didn't really care about it.
So I've got a bunch of leaves here that are falling down from the tree above
right there, that I'm going to start harvesting as leaf mold.
But I also have a pretty gnarly weed here in this foxtail barley.
So I'm going to have to figure out how to control this over basically the entire
property here, which is a significant amount of space.
But I know you guys are thinking, what's going on in here?
So let's go ahead and take a quick peek.
So this is what looks to be a little makeshift shed.
I'm not sure what they really used it for,
but it's kind of small.
It has these interesting windows that flip down like this, they
kind of stop right there to provide a little bit of extra ventilation.
And it is wired up. So you can see,
there's electrical switches and stuff right here,
but they're not connected to the breaker or the panel.
So I'm not really sure why they are like that.
But this is also kind of in a weird part of the home.
If we kind of walk backwards,
take a look,
it's just right in the middle of this back part of the backyard.
So I'm thinking it doesn't make a lot of sense there.
And I'm thinking I may want to remove it for scraps and use it for something
else. But as we go over the back of this section,
I do have a couple more edibles that I've identified already on the property.
I'm pretty sure this is a walnut tree right here.
Over there we've got an apricot, which I can show you really quickly,
it's throwing out some fruit. So I do have some other edibles on property.
Now you can see the apricot right there.
So these guys are hanging out and they look like they might get ripe pretty soon
here.
But yeah, so there's the rest of the property over there.
Everything on this property is a different fence.
So there's a chain link with the slats on there.
There's an actual cinderblock style wall.
There's a bent-over chain link with bamboo.
Then there's a black chain link right here.
Then there's the one in the front yard - that wooden slat one.
And then there's the white picket fence.
So there's like five or seven different fences here.
Cause there's also one through there,
which is where I'm going to take you guys next. And man,
there's a lot of work to do here, but is there a lot of potential? Oh my gosh!
Yes there is.
So here's the driveway and then in here is probably where a lot of
these homesteading projects are going to be built.
So I just picked up some new tools from DeWalt.
Never really had a tool set before and I'm probably going to have a little
workbench right here where I do a lot of building.
So a lot of building for the compost bins that I'm going to be making,
a lot of building for the leaf mold,
the mulching, all that sort of process is, I have to build it all,
because there's, there's nothing here. It's a completely empty space.
So I know this was kind of a funky style video,
not the one that I'm used to doing most of the time,
but I hope you guys enjoyed it.
I wanted to take you on a really quick and dirty tour of this property and it
really is a totally blank slate.
Like I've always thought about doing something like this,
but I just didn't think I would ever have the ability, frankly.
I didn't think I would be able to actually do it,
to afford the ability to do it and just, you know, saving, saving, saving,
saving, saving,
and all the support and help that you guys have all offered by just paying
attention to the work that I'm doing,
whether it be on YouTube or buying a copy of the book or whatever has allowed me
to actually do this.
And so I'm super grateful and it feels that the only correct thing to do is to
pay that forward in documenting the transformation of this space into a truly
Epic Urban Homestead. So, ooh, it's hot out here.
Uh, I hope you guys enjoy this video. I really hope that you,
you love what's to come.
And if you have suggestions on things that you'd like to see,
then please let me know because man,
there's enough room for just about every idea I have and I'm excited to share it
with you. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.