What's up everyone, Kevin here.
So we're in a spot in my garden that I almost never show you guys and this is my
backyard and it's hard to call it a garden because I don't grow a whole lot.
I have a bougainvillea here I've got a ficus,
but there's not a whole lot going on and that's because it's a shady zone of the
garden.
But today I've joined forces with a company I've been working with for a long
time Gardener's Supply Company.
They're actually here in San Diego and they're doing a complete transformation
of the backyard into a Shady Zen Oasis. So stay tuned.
The first thing we're going to do is show you what it looks like right now.
So as we come into the backyard, I have my garden shed,
which you guys have seen before.
But over here I don't think I've really showed too much of,
and so I've got my little dining table.
There's just a section of emptiness right here and more or less an empty ish
bed. We have a couple plants that are, that are buried right there,
but not a whole lot going on right here. It's underneath this pergola,
which gets slatted sunlight through portions of the year.
You can see a little bit peeking in, not a whole lot.
And then over here I've got a massive bougainvillea that always gets a little
out of control. This ficus always gets a little out of control as well.
It's kind of going through the power lines.
And then I have my patio section here and there's some empty space behind the AC
unit just hanging out. Nothing going on back there.
And nothing really besides the clutter going on over here either.
So it's kind of an open field day.
So the plan is to turn into a Shady Zen Oasis.
We're going to be putting in some raised beds over in this zone. Over here,
we're gonna be putting some raised beds over here.
We've got some really cool plants at the local nursery,
so let's go ahead and jump into it.
Gardener's supply team and I headed on down to Walter Anderson nursery here in
San Diego. Beautiful, beautiful nursery,
great for some of these rarer or larger species and specimens.
Now Deb and I here are discussing which bamboo we want to grow.
The reason why we're choosing bamboo is because we want something that's going
to grow decently tall and act as a living privacy fence in the two foot by eight
foot raised bed.
It's going to go against the back fence and kind of protect against that alley
and some of the noise and urban sprawl. I knocked a couple of bamboo over.
We don't need to worry about that. Now we were like,
we don't know what to choose until we saw this black bamboo right here and this
one is just absolutely amazing, beautiful, little pricey but beautiful.
I believe it's Phyllostachys Nigra. I could be wrong there.
Now Jenny here is going to go ahead and do a little Vanna White compare and
contrast.
We just couldn't decide which one to choose and then we finally made the call to
go with the black bamboo and we chose a low lying clumping bamboo for accent
around the bottom of that two foot by eight foot bed.
A lot of you are probably thinking,
why would you ever get in bamboo that's going to spread and grow like crazy?
Well yes,
but it's planted over concrete and it's in a contained raised bed.
So it's really not going to do the thing that most people think it would do.
Now the next thing we had to solve was the double two by four foot beds or two,
two by four foot beds going underneath the awning,
which is more cool or humid,
less light and immediately you start looking in the fern section, right?
So we've chose some birds nest ferns as our low lying planting in that that bed.
And then we chose some accent pieces, some very large powerful,
beautiful alocasias is to provide that high contrast.
I also couldn't help getting an Australian Tree Fern, this huge accent piece.
You can see they're delivering it right here as well as the rest of the plants.
And that concludes the nursery trip.
So we're just starting out. But we have as you can see quite a bit of soil,
little sneak peek of a staghorn fern that's going in and we have one of the
raised beds, the eight foot raised bed,
which will be back there creating a little privacy from this urban sprawl over
here. We are making the raised beds guys,
Deb is hard at work and we constructed one of the two by eights and this is
where the bamboo is going to go.
You can see all we did was just screw it together,
very simple construction and we stacked two on top of each other to get a little
bit more height because number one those are some pretty decent sized bamboo and
number two we just wanted a little bit more height to put a little more volume
of soil. Now Sue here is bringing in our Phyllostachys Nigra.
We decided to go with four different Phyllostachys Nigra to go one, two,
three, four in that two by eight foot bed and those are accent pieces.
Now this is my first time growing bamboo.
And so if you're out there and saying why are they doing it this way?
Or why didn't they think about this?
Well probably because it's my first time growing bamboo and we just made that
call at the nursery. So it's something that I would love to learn more about.
It's a fascinating, fascinating plant and if you have a comment on it, please,
please share it down below because I would love to learn from you as well.
I'm much more of an edible gardener and this is way more an ornamental planting.
And so you know, sometimes you just have to experiment.
So here we are just kind of planning out the layout and figuring out the way
that we really want it to aesthetically look,
but already it's starting to just take shape and look absolutely amazing.
This is how we do it here at Epic Gardening. I watch
it seems harsh but the plants will be fine. It's bamboo, they're tough.
So here we are just chopping these clumps up and trying to get the most value
out of them. Bamboo, pretty resilient plant overall.
And so we think that we can spread it out a little bit and just get a nice
aesthetic look and slowly it will fill itself in over time provided we care for
it correctly. So that's the final look of it and I think it looks really,
really nice. It has a lot of potential to grow in in the future.
We put in one of the Gardeners spike irrigation kits, which is really,
really handy and you can see we're just testing a little different water
pressure here and we came across a healthy medium and there you go.
We have our little bamboo oasis put in. Now it's onto the rest of the garden
Here we went with some alocasias, some really cool looking ones here.
And then we interplanted with bird's nest ferns for the lower growing section.
So it's kind of a fern tropically but shade loving area.
Cause this time of day about four ish,
five ish pm is the only time this gets direct sun coming in over this little
hard to see cause I just blocked it but like basically where my finger is to
where that roof is is about an hour and a half worth of sun that comes in
through here.
So we chose some stuff that would work well in that condition and look really,
really nice.
It's been a few months since the Shady Zen Oasis transformation.
So I figured why not show you how things have settled in? Now,
the part we didn't focus on so much was some of these awesome plant accents.
So you have this big tree fern right here.
This is actually a completely new frond that has come out since we did the
transformation. Honestly, I thought this might not make it in the space,
but it seems to have really acclimated the first month or so it just wasn't
doing that well and it's settled in now and it's really, really performing.
I mean this looks amazing. So that's a fantastic addition.
Then you have your alocasias and your bird's nest ferns. I mean,
a lot of these are plants that many of us grow in our homes as indoor house
plants. But I remember there's no such thing as a house plant.
All plants evolved outside and so they're going to do well outside provided you
give them the right conditions.
And so these massive alocasias are putting on new leaves.
The bird's nest ferns are immaculate and I've added a couple of accents here and
there. So let's take a look. So in my bougainvillea and ficus,
we have these cool globe lights. They're solar powered on the top,
so they recharge every night and then they just throw a light out right
underneath or sorry, right underneath, right here.
And this pattern just cascades out over the course of the night,
which is really, really nice. So I have three of those.
And then over here in our bamboo section,
which the bamboo has been a little bit more rough of an adaptation to this
climate, but we're going to hope, go ahead and hope that it pulls through.
These lights are really nice.
So these are also solar charged and you can leave them on if you want.
But I end up turning them off.
And what you do is you just unscrew this and there's a little switch under there
and you turn it on.
But it gives us really nice pattern throughout the back here.
And then we've got these cute little boxes or these little planters right here.
Here's a better look at the alocasia and fern heaven over here and there's my
little grow bag. And then look at that guy right there. Let's go see him.
The staghorn,
the staghorn has been doing really well in this slatted sunlight area.
Obviously there's a little, a little dryness right here,
but we're putting out a lot of new growth. So it's going to be completely fine.
You can see some more shield development going on right there. So overall,
I mean this is just such a better space than it used to be. Can you imagine?
I've got my little bird feeder here.
And what's been really nice about this is up in this area with the bougainvillea
and the ficus. Uh, it's become a bird haven.
It is a little unkempt and actually I think the city's going to come out because
we really don't want it growing through these power lines. But in the meantime,
it's an amazing bird haven. I found multiple hummingbird nests, et cetera.
So it's really looking good.
So I have to say a huge thank you to Gardener's Supply Company company I've
worked with for years now. Amazing people.
It's an employee owned company and they just do good work and they want a lot of
people to grow plants and grow food, which is what I'm all about.
So thank you to them for coming out and helping me transform this space into the
Epic Shady Zen Oasis. And you're going to see,
and you probably have seen a lot of videos back here. So we have,
now we have back here, we have our side yard,
we have our front yard and we have the houseplant jungle upstairs.
So like four little spots for videos to come out,
which I'm really excited about. So stay tuned.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.