Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Boo! Today I have another exciting episode
for you guys. Where I'm today, I'm here in Houston, Texas and I'm traveling on a field
trip and I'm actually here at the Harris County Office Texas A & M Agrilife Extension Service.
The reason why I'm here today is because once a month on the, what is it, the fourth Tuesday
of every month they have an open house day and I'm here to check it out. So the open
house is like between 9 am and like 11:30 pm and I think at like around 10 am they have
usually have a class or something like that to teach you guys how to grow food.
I want to encourage you guys whether you guys live here in Houston or somewhere else most
every county has some kind of extension office so that you can get information on how to
grow your own fruits and vegetables at home and they've done a lot of the research for
you, hard work figuring out what grows well, when to plant, all this kind of stuff. So
just follow their advice on what to grow and what to plant.
Now I don't necessarily recommend all their guys’ fertilizer or pest application because
they may not even do organic growing and they may use synthetic chemical fertilizers which
I'm not in favor of but they have a lot of good stuff that we can glean as organic gardeners
from them. So what I'm going to do is go in the back of this building and they have their
demonstration gardens to share with you guys what they're growing and some of the research
and work that they're doing back there. So let's go ahead and head to the back.
So now we're entering the Harris County Master Gardener’s demonstration gardens and there's
many different areas. When you walk in there's like a chain link fence off to left of the
building, you're going to want to go through and then the first thing you're going to get
to is this side of the building. They've got a little power garden up there
that looks like it's growing pretty good. That's growing hydroponically. That wouldn't
be my first choice to grow food cause they are actually quite expensive actually but
they have all these beds here up against the building here and this is the herb garden
which is really cool and they've got the herb of the month and the herb of the month this
month is the arugula, so I want to encourage you guys to get some arugula especially if
you're having challenges with your heart and stuff. My friend that had a stroke actually
eats arugula to be like anti-stroke because it's one of the best things you can eat for
your heart. So eat a lot of it. They've got things like lemongrass, lemongrass
is like about four feet tall [00:02:28] - [00:02:31] unclear, no problem they got lemon basil.
They got different things like the oregano and they got, wow chives are doing really
good. Looks like dilengo ginger, they've got rosemary and they've got this one's really
cool, if I lived here I'd be growing this one, they just call this the sweet plant.
Not stevia but it grows really good. They got, they have the basil, it's growing amazing.
Just all kinds of other things in this little herb garden, sage, lemon verbena.
So this is amazing use of a side of the building to grow more food. I want to encourage you
guys to always grow some herbs. They're one of the most medicinal foods on the planet,
a lot of herbs, we like them because they have high essential oil content and some companies
might want you to buy their essential oils and all this stuff but you could just buy
the plant and use it in your regular cooking each and every day because of these essential
oils have beneficial properties within us. There's like herbal medicine and so that's
why you should grow some herbs, alright. Let's go ahead and check out the veggies garden
next. So now we're inside the demonstration garden
area and there's many different gardens including like a water garden, a butterfly garden, this
garden or that garden, an herb garden and I want to cover like the vegetable gardens
for you guys and show you guys unique ways they're growing some vegetables.
Now over here is the test garden and what they're doing over here in this area is around
the outside is like a demonstration garden, so they show people what you can grow here
and crops that do well. Right in the middle they kind of do trials. So they're constantly,
the master gardeners are constantly testing and growing different varieties of different
crops to see how they're going to do so that they could make recommendations to you guys.
This is why I encourage you guys to seek out your local university extension office because
they've done all the research and they'll tell you grow these one, they do the best
in this area so you want to go ahead and contact them. I'll put a link down to the Harris County
extension office so that you could get linked up with these folks to get their information
if you live here in the Houston area. So let's go ahead and head inside and just
show you guys just real quick a few of the things they're trialing and a few of the crops
that are growing really good right now. Part of the main thing I want to do is I want to
go over to the other area where they actually got a bucket garden that I've never seen before.
Alright, so I mean right here what they got is some raised beds and this is a really good
way to do raised beds, it's similar to what I've done and they've just got solid concrete
blocks. They just put it even if it's on concrete, you could just stack the blocks up, build
it over concrete, fill it with some good dirt and compost and grow some stuff.
So they got some turnip purple tops and they got some sugar snacks carrots and some broad
leaf mustard, some spinach that looks like I don't know what's going on with, some radishes
and arugula and what I really want to let you guys know because they've got buttercrunch
lettuce. They got all different kinds of things growing,
right and check with your extension office to see the ones that are going to grow best
for you but also be open to experiment, try some different ones and see what grows well
for you, that's how we learn as gardeners. That's how they're learning here, they're
doing the trials and then you could learn from them or you could just try it and grow
it yourself. Raised beds definitely one of the easiest ways to do it, that's how I like
to do it. Oh, let's go around to the edge and show you guys some of the amazing cabbages
that they're growing this time of year. The other thing I want to let you guys know
is that they have open houses, and that's, I'm here on an open house day, the open house
days are every fourth Tuesday of the month, like I think it's between 9 to 11:30. So get
here early and you could walk around. It's like a self-guided tour. There's a lot of
people working here, master gardeners you could ask them questions, they're very friendly.
So over here they got different varieties of broccoli growing in the raised bed. As
you guys could see this raised bed is probably like about 30 inches or so and it's doing
pretty well. Not only do they have broccoli in a raised bed, many, some of you guys might
not have the space to put a raised bed in but you guys could grow in containers like
if you just go over here and they got all these big pots. If it was at my house I would
space these guys a lot closer, there's a lot of empty, wasted space here.
But what they're doing here is they're doing trials and they're testing different compositions
of the soil that the broccolis are growing in. So in some of the pots they've just got
a standard potting mix and then some of the pots they got like a shale, half shale/half
the potting mixture. The ones with the shale and the potting mixture aren't growing as
well. This is something we could all do. Do different
mixes and grow the same exact plant from the same transplants, the same size. See what
happens. This is one of the joys I have gardening, to learn. I think to keep our minds young
we need to be always need to be learning and growing and learning and gardening is one
of the best ways to do it in my opinion. Alright, so what I really wanted to show you
guys in this episode is actually over yonder they're actually growing in some half of five
gallon buckets, which is really different, unique and I've actually never seen this anywhere
else. Let me go ahead and show you guys what they're doing.
Okay, so the next area I want to show you guys is just right here, so they got a little
raised bed here but they're not just growing in the raised bed actually they have raised
bed and then got little buckets in the bed. Now these aren't full sized buckets. What
they do is they take the bucket, they first slice off the bottom so it's just a cylinder
or tube and they slice that tube in half and now they just put the half of a bucket in
the raised bed and then fill that with soil. So now you got like a little mini raised bed
bed. If you get that. So what this does, basically this gives your
plants a little bit more extra soil, also because the soils in a tube you potentially
it has a little bit different temperature, which could be a good or a bad thing. I want
to go ahead and show you guys more about this and some of the specific crops they're growing
that are doing well right now. So over here they've got the Swiss chard and
Swiss chard is one that I like to grow especially in the heat, it grows well for me year round.
This one, I don't know, I think it might have gotten eaten by something but it's a bok choy,
good winter crop. They got some scarlet and then that's carrots. They got some amazing
cauliflower which is looking really good and they got different types of broccoli and sugar
snap peas. This is, what they've explained is that they've just put this install like
a similar situation like this in schools to get schools and kids gardening.
So this is a really easy way to do it, you could put in a bed and even if you don't have
a bed you could just do it on concrete, cut the buckets in half and even if you guys don't
have a place to garden at home, like in soil, cut buckets in half, you could set them on
a concrete sidewalk, on a patio and I mean yes, it's going to leak but it's going to
have good drainage and good water flow and all they put in here, not that I would necessarily
recommend this is miracle grow potting soil with some microlife fertilizers. So I do recommend
the microlife fertilizer, please check the link down below for the video, I visited actually
the microlife fertilizer company here in Houston and talked more about why I believe their
fertilizer's a superior product over most others in the market.
But that's what they put in here and then basically they put the fertilizer and the
miracle grow in there for the teachers, they get them started with the plants so that they
kids can see how food is grown and it grows all year without having to do any additional
fertilizing. So this is really cool. Now another thing they're doing actually is they got it
on a table here which is basically just a, some blocks upright and then they got a table
there with all the same buckets cut in half, so lets go ahead and go over there and show
you guys some of the plants they're growing up in there.
Alright, so over in here they got a lot of different plants growing and want to go over
a couple of them. Number one they have this one it says an herb- Italian parsley. Well,
I'm not a master gardener and I surely know that this is actually cilantro not parsley.
But this one over here is tagged cilantro and is actually parsley, so I don't know if
a kid was joking around and got that mixed up or the master gardeners got it wrong.
But no one gardener can get one thing right every time, including me. So we're all here
on this learning process and I want to encourage you guys to always be open to learning new
things and not always like this is the bible, this is what it says in the book, this is
how you do it, right. Nature, there's no book to nature. Some of you guys might debate me
on that, but nature it's always changing, it's always different, it's always adjusting
according to the times at hand and that's how I want you guys to be as gardeners, flexible
right. Be really flexible. So they got the carrots up here, which didn't
do good in a situation like this on a table, but it did do good like in the ground. Of
course they got the dark red beets, some purple top radishes, kohlrabi, white kohlrabi, they
have purple kohlrabi. This is the bush bean contender so this is one bush bean you're
going to want to grow if you're here in the Houston area, it does the best out of all
the different ones. Let’s say, some spinach palko hybrid, so that's one they liked to
grow. Let's see, red sails lettuce, buttercrunch lettuce, the warp curly kale, cherry bell
radishes, white icicle radishes, watermelon radishes which are some of my favorites to
grow. Then finally they just have this little area
here with more of these buckets. What I want to let you guys know is that any way that
excites you about gardening, whether you think is an amazing idea, great do it. I might experiment
with doing something like this and see how it grows, how it maybe holds more moisture,
how it's a bit different. I always encourage you guys to experiment
in your garden to see how things are going to happen, right. Sometimes they happen good,
sometimes they happen worse, in this set up they're using this specific growing system
for a reason, because it works and lot of times I would encourage you guys to model
or follow or do things of people that are getting good results, especially university
extension offices in your area because they're out here like every day doing this stuff.
So they know what works especially if you're new and have no guidance. Aside from my videos,
check your local university extension office, they've done a lot of amazing fabulous research
that you could learn and grow from. So I think that's pretty much the end of this
episode, I've got to get running, got a bunch of stuff to do. Hope you guys enjoyed this
episode, hey if you did please give me a thumbs up to let me know. Also be sure to click that
subscribe button right down below and be sure to check my pass episodes, there are over
1100 episodes now covering all aspects of gardening. So once again my name is John Kohler
with growingyourgreens.com. We'll see you next time, until then remember keep on growing!
Latest Episode on Growing Your Greens Alright this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Today we have another exciting episode for you and as you guys saw that last episode
was all about rock dust. I'm here at one of the quarries that rockdustlocal.com sources
from and