This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, I have another exciting episode for you today,
and today we’re at the National Heirloom Expo, as you can see the sign’s up there,
September 11, 12 and 13th. And for those of you guys and girls that haven’t made it
out to the Expo, what we’re going to do today is a vendor round-up. So I really like
to go around to the vendor booths to find out the latest stuff, latest happening in
garden tools, and ways to build your soil, heirloom and different edible plants, and
there’s been a lot here. So in this video we’re going to go around the Grace Pavilion
and show you guys some of the best booths at the National Heirloom Expo.
We’re going to walk inside the Grace Pavilion, and the Grace Pavilion is where the majority
of the vendor booths are, there’s also a few other areas including outside in another
hall that has more vendors, but this is where the bulk and the majority of them are. Let’s
go inside and check out my favorite vendors that can help you grow more food.
One of the reasons why I like the Heirloom Expo is that there’s all different kind
of vendors selling seeds and also plants, and here’s actually a really cool one. You
never know what each nursery or each plant seller’s going to sell and they’re always
[inaudible] to have that one plant that you want. And I found one of those today, I’m
really excited. This is actually Carmen’s nursery, they do ship plants and they’re
at carmensnursery.com. And what I found today was the standard what I thought was Cuban
oregano, and this is the one that I actually showed you guys as Cuban oregano, they also
have a variegated variety of this, but today I learned that it’s not really Cuban oregano,
it’s actually called the menthol plant. So this is the fake Cuban oregano, so I’m
corrected now that I’ve learned the truth, and here’s the real Cuban oregano right
here. This is the real Cuban oregano, you can see the leaf shape is totally different,
it’s in the same, they’re related plants, but totally different and I haven’t yet
tasted this guy yet, but what I’m going to do is I’m going to buy this guy and bring
it home, and I’m going to taste it and maybe it will taste better than this guy. These
guys are definitely frost-tender so they don’t like freezes, they do good in South Florida,
somewhere like Hawaii or if you live somewhere else then you’ve definitely got to keep
them warm. So the next booth I like a lot is this booth
right here, it’s actually called Larner’s Seeds, they’re a local company that produces
seeds to offer of native plants. And now while a lot of these are not edible, there are a
few edibles, and I always want to encourage you guys to actually grow native plants to
your area that are edible. And sometimes it is hard to find seeds even though they’re
out in nature, so it’s cool when a company like this can collect all the natives and
then offer them to you, especially when they’re edible. So the two varieties that they have
that I want and that I’ve been looking for actually, this one right here, this is actually
called the peppermint candy flower, and this is a claytona siberica, and this is actually
related to the miner’s lettuce that I grow every winter, so this is a different variety,
so a different [inaudible]. I want to encourage you guys to grow a lot of different varieties.
This has actually a candy flower, so they look really cool, they don’t taste like
candy and they don’t taste like peppermint, but they look really cool and they’re quite
edible. The other one I’m going to pick up today right here is actually called Red
Maids. And this is a ground-hugging annual wildflower under one inch tall with intense
magenta petals, likes full sun, edible leaves and seeds, and also the flowers, so these
are two edible plants that you can grow that will self-seed on their own because they’re
native to this area. So growing edibles that are native to your area is very important
to find a local seed company or wild harvest some seeds so you can grow more native edibles
that are going to work well in your area. If you want to learn more about Larner’s
Seeds, you can visit their website, larnersseeds.com. So now we’re outside, I’m going to show
you guys one of my favorite booths outside actually, it’s called Self-Watering Seed
Pods, it’s actually orta. Now what does Orta mean? Well Orta in Portuguese means kitchen
garden, in English we have to say kitchen garden but that’s the word. So I think everybody
should definitely have a kitchen garden, and this pod actually makes it really easy to
do just that, especially if you’re in an apartment, condo and don’t have enough space,
this is a really cool invention. So check this out right here, here’s a little sign
and check it out, it says “Ignore your baby plants and they’ll be okay.” And this
design all stem from actually the gardener that’s made this design up would lose her
plants because she’d forget to water, she’s so busy in her life and all kinds of stuff,
so she basically researched self-watering containers and figured out how to do it naturally
out of ceramic, and she hand-makes each and every one of these guys. So check it out,
the coolest ones are like this guy the six pack. So what this is, this is basically a
ceramic, hand-crafted that basically has a reservoir here you fill with water, and it’s
glazed so the water doesn’t drip out the outside, but it’s not glazed on the inside
so the plants absorb the water through the glaze. And the coolest thing is you could
literally, this is a six pack right and these are little tomatoes, you could pick these
guys up and now they’re ready for transplanting. Now these guys can get expensive if you’re
trying to do this on a production scale, but if you don’t have too much this is something
that’s really reusable so you don’t have to use the plastic stuff anymore, and this
will literally last forever if you take care of it, so I like it a lot. In addition besides
the six packs which I think I like the most they have a little three pack here for a small
kitchen herb garden, or probably more functional is actually this guy here, has a nice larger
area, and once again, the self-watering chamber so that you can just fill it up, and it could
literally last a week or so without having to fill the water and maybe every week just
fill it up and your plant will continue to grow. This is great to grow herbs in your
window sill so that you could have fresh herbs, especially through the winter, instead of
having to buy them. To learn more and to purchase this product you want to visit the website
Orta Kitchen Garden, that’s O R T A kitchengarden.com. Another booth I like a lot here is actually
the Yes on 37 Right to Know. And check it out here, “Do You Eat Genetically Engineered
Foods?” Many of you guys right now might be eating genetically engineered food and
not even know it if you’re buying things that are processed foods from the supermarket,
major crops like corn and soy and sugar beets are being genetically modified and they’re
processing these foods into other foods and then they get into many processed and packaged
foods that you would buy in the store, but they’re not labeled so you don’t know.
Luckily here in California they’re going to have Prop 37, and I highly encourage everybody
to vote “Yes” on 37 if you live in California, so that at least GMOs will be labeled. This
is not saying GMOs are good or bad, but it’s giving people the choice to know if there’s
GMO in there, and then the person could choose if they want to consume that food or not.
And I would highly encourage you guys not to include GMOs in your diet, and that’s
one of the reasons why I like to grow my own heirloom foods myself so that I’m not eating
GMO foods. So if you live in California vote “yes,” if you have friends in California
call them, let them know that they need to vote “yes,” as well, and also visit the
website carighttoknow.org to learn more and hopefully maybe even get some ballot initiatives
and get some laws passed in other states to get GMOs labeled.
So now we’re going to check another booth, and this is actually the booth for Gardening
by the Moon. So you know many people garden by the sun, but you might also want to garden
by the moon because that may be the reason why you got brown thumbs, because there’s
certain times you should plant and certain times you shouldn’t plant, there is more
moisture in the soil when the moon’s in the right cycle, and this calendar here will
basically share with you when exactly to plant according to the moon. They have three different
calendars, one’s for a long growing season, one’s for a medium growing season, and one’s
for a short growing season depending on where you live and besides gardening by the moon,
this is also a valuable calendar because they basically have gardening activities by the
months. So if you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing in the garden, this is
a very easy way that’ll let you know what you should be doing, like what seeds to plant,
what vegetables and whatnot like that. Now I don’t know if gardening by the moon helps,
I can tell you what the astrological signs and stuff, and me and dating I don’t know
if that really works or not, but this is something to try and I think it only could be beneficial,
but the one thing I want to let you guys know is that don’t stress out, like “Oh man
I didn’t get my plants planted when the calendar said,” don’t worry about it just
plant it anyway, it’s far better to plant it not on the right date and get something
planted than not plant anything at all, because I always what you guys to experiment and just
see what works. I haven’t gardened by the moon because I’m always busy and stuff,
but optimally I would like to do that one day. To learn more about the gardening by
the moon calendar you want to visit the website gardeningbythemoon.com. And the final word
that I like to say is that I have a friend that says he doesn’t garden by the moon,
he gardens by the weekend. Now I have another booth to share with you
guys, and this one’s really valuable especially if you guys are watching me online which I
know you guys are, because everybody has a computer that’s Internet connected, and
this is one of the best online aps that’s free for gardeners and check it out it’s
right here, it’s called smartgardener.com. Really simple smartgardener.com, and what
this allows you to do, it allows you to basically make gardening easy for the newcomer. So if
you don’t have a plan, you don’t know what the heck you’re doing, go to this website
it takes you step by step and I could flip through some of the screens here, it takes
you from setting up what you could grow, it finds out your location and it knows your
planting dates, it knows your frost dates it knows your growing season how long it is.
Then you’re going to do the layout. So now you’re going to design your raised beds,
how you want it laid out in a little grid thing, you could make it any way you want,
then you’re going to basically go in and select the plants you want to grow. Maybe
you want to grow some beefsteak tomatoes or some broccoli, it’s all in here people!
And then you could actually even buy the seeds from the website, they’ll send them to you,
or you could buy your own seeds at Walmart or [inaudible] or wherever, and then the next
step is, you’re going to go ahead and plant out, and it’s going to tell you exactly
when to plant them out, what month, it’s going to send you an email to remind you to
plant them so that you don’t forget, and that you do these on the proper date so you’re
going to get the best results so that you can start easily growing some food at home.
Finally you’re going to go through and can see here’s a layout we’re going to grow
melons in these raised beds, we’re going to grow the squashes and some sunflowers here,
makes it nice and pretty, you could even print this out and then you could just build and
fill your raised beds and just get it done. You know this will take all the guesswork
out if you’re timid and shy about gardening, you don’t want to just jump in like I always
encourage you guys to do, this will make it okay and get you approval, and a plan to do
it so you’ll have the highest level of success. Finally you’re never going to forget what
to do because it has a to-do list. And this will email you and it will have your email
address to remind you what to do. Once you plant it you check it off that it’s been
planted, then it’s going to tell you when it’s right to harvest and that kind of stuff
as well. So this is one complete system all free, they do have additional add-ons if you
want to do extra features and whatnot, but the base system’s all free, highly encourage
you guys especially if you haven’t gardened yet, log on so you can start gardening today.
The final thing that’s really important and valuable about this system is that people
in your area or similar zip codes you can find out what they’re growing and how they’re
doing it and how their garden is so that you can get ideas on how you might want to grow
as well. So once again the website is smartgardener.com, to simply grow great food.
So you guys saw a lot of cool booths here at the Heirloom Expo, people are packing up
and going home, but before everybody goes home I want to share with you guys this one
last booth I like a lot, it’s actually the insect frass booth, and if you guys saw my
other video a couple of shows ago, I had another video on this and I wanted to show you guys
this again, because they have some new products that are really valuable, and you guys should
just know about this product and you should all be using this, especially if you have
some white fly and aphid issues like that, this will totally knock it out. So the first
thing they have that’s new here is called the Phytol, and the Phytol is a fungicide,
mildicide[?] and insecticide. The thing about this is that this is an organic food grade
oil with botanicals, so it’s really effective, works really well, and it’s organic certified.
You could spray this stuff on your plants and eat the stuff afterwards, and you know
it’s not going to taste like fish or anything. And it smells good too, some of these things
like this they smell nasty. But check out what it works on, right here it works on the
two spot mites, spider mites, red citrus mites, thrips, fungus gnats, aphids, mealy bugs,
white flies, leaf rollers, leaf miner fly, armored scale, actually that’s an issue
I’m having right now in my garden, soft scale – those are those white little things
on your leaves, and it also works on things like powdery mildew to knock it out, downy
mildew, [inaudible] and black spot. You’re only going to use this if you have an existing
condition, if you’ve got white flies or aphids on all your plants right now, use this
to knock them out. And the thing I like about this is this will also take out the eggs,
a lot of products won’t take out the eggs, so you could spray today with your other products,
and then you’re killing the adults but the eggs will hatch, and then you’re going to
have another problem in just a couple of days because they have a pretty quick turn for
the insect. So this one wipes out everything. Once you’ve got your plants clean, then
you want to go to stage 2. Stage 2 is right here, this is the insect frass. This is the
stuff I like a lot, and simply frass means poop. And this is basically poop from insects
right here, this stuff’s organic, check it out. And besides being a 2-2-2 fertilizer,
the main benefit of this besides having the beneficial microbes in here as well, the main
reason why I like this stuff is because basically it builds the immune system of your plants
and makes them literally insect resistant. This has the chitin in it which your plant
will produce the chitinase and the insects won’t want to eat your plants, they’ll
go to your neighbors that didn’t use the frass, so you want to get on frass. I recently
started using the frass on one of my plants and I’m noticing some results, and they’re
being more immune to the white flies and the aphids that I’m having in my garden right
now. The final product which is a new product they don’t even got the labeling for, once
again it’s another organic product and I like this company because they get the best
of the best stuff right here. This is ocean-grown 100% soluble fish hydrolysate. So what does
that mean? What’s fish hydrolysate? Well basically they take—you guys may know about
fish emulsion, where they take fish, they heat up all the stuff and then they basically
get an extraction out of the emulsion. But when they do that they’re using heat, and
when you extract things with heat your lose nutrition, it’s like microwaving your food
versus eating raw food. And this right here, they use enzymes to break down the fish to
make it absorbable for your plants, and this is water-soluble, so you could put this in
your hydro systems, in your aquaponic systems, or even feed it through your drip lines, this
is going to get right in there and it’s an amino acid so it’s really going to feed
your plants what it needs to really supercharge their growth. So I like this stuff a lot,
and be forewarned, this stuff does smell like fish.
So to learn more about the products that I just showed you here, you want to visit the
website onfrass.com. I think pretty much everybody’s packing up, this is the end of the show, I’m
glad I got to show this to you guys before they go. These are very important products,
especially the frass. If you don’t get any of these products, you want to definitely
get the frass, this is like the cutting edge on building your plants’ immune systems
to make them immune to the bugs instead of spraying all those nasty chemicals that many
of you guys may have to resort to, so grow healthy plants, build your soil, so you don’t
have to use all those toxic chemical sprays. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode at
the Second Annual Heirloom Expo, everybody’s packing up, I’ve got to get my booth packed
up and I’ve got to run. But once again my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com,
we’ll see you next time and remember keep on growing.