This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, very special treat for you today I was at
the farmer’s market, my local farmer’s market here, and I met Tyler Teberage [?] from
Future Farms, and we got to talking about growing food and stuff and he’s like “Hey
man, why don’t you come check out my farms?”
I was like “Yeah, it would be great for my viewers to see what a real farmer’s doing,
and amazingly enough he’s using the square foot gardening method, so I got really excited,
and he has chickens and I don’t know quails, and chickens and this is like the urban back
yard, I mean we’re just literally like a couple of blocks from my house here, this
is an acre, he’s actually farming about a quarter acre, and it’s amazing, he’s
going to go over a lot of the different techniques he uses to share with you guys, and I’m
going to learn some stuff too for sure.
So let’s talk with Tyler.
So Tyler, why did you want to start a farm and do all this stuff?
Well farming is a really therapeutic activity, and originally I started it as a way to take
my mind off of work and kind of just have a healthy activity out in the sun, and it
grew into something where I said “Hey, I wouldn’t mind making a couple extra dollars
off of this,” and I got compulsive and just built this really large garden, so with the
surplus of vegetables that I had I wanted to move them so we started working the farmer’s
markets, and one thing lead to the next, and now we’re trying to get some restaurants
and just growing as much vegetables as we can, but it’s a very therapeutic healthy
hobby, and that’s one of the main reasons why I started.
So do you do this full-time or is this just a part-time passion you have a real job and
you kind of do this on the side or…
Yeah I have a full-time job on the side and then a full-time job on the side, so I have
two full-time jobs I like to say, and yeah it’s a lot of work, but you don’t have
to do it on a large scale, you can grow a lot of vegetables in a small amount of space,
and it doesn’t take a lot of work.
But yeah, at some point I’d like this to be my full-time job, that’s where I’m
going.
So if you have two full-time jobs that you means you work 80 hours a week and then you
still take care of all this?
Yeah, well I mean that’s, no this is my other full-time job.
[inaudible] So I’d say that it’s anywhere from 20
to 40 hours a week out here, depends on the season and what I’m doing.
Yeah that’s good for people to know, I mean he’s managing a quarter acre basically 20
hours a week, so if you just have a small box, I mean that’s a couple hours a week
easily, no problem so even if you’re not going to do this scale, I mean I don’t even
have this much stuff growing yet.
Yeah this is a farm right here, it’s a landscaped farm, I like to call it.
If you’re going to get into farming and you actually do want to sell your vegetables,
you have to grow the veggies first of all, that takes time, and then you also have to
factor in harvesting, cleaning the vegetables, taking them to the market, and then the actual
time at the market itself.
So all that’s included in the farming schedule.
I see.
So it’s not just out here watering, it’s also the three hours that you spend at the
market, the two hours that you spend loading and unloading, and then the two hours that
you spend harvesting and cleaning your vegetables before you take them to the market, all that
adds up.
So if you just want to grow for your dinner table or your lunch table, for your family,
friends, it’s really easy and it doesn’t take a lot of work.
Hey let’s go down to your farm now and check it out and learn more about what Tyler’s
doing here, so come on.
All right so today we’re going to talk with Tyler about growing things vertically, he
has many raised beds, growing many things vertically, I see water melons, pumpkins,
tomatoes, cucumbers, so let’s take a look at just some of the things he’s growing
vertically, and the pumpkins, you know there’s a lot of weight on some of those trellises,
so let’s go over there first and check it out.
So we’re here with Tyler and he’s growing in the square foot gardening method as I had
mentioned, and he’s using the nylon string trellis.
And so you may have saw that I built an eight foot by eight foot monster trellis for my
pumpkins, but you know he was a lot smarter and he’s just using a nylon string trellis,
which is supporting all these pumpkins up on here.
So now we’re going to have Tyler talk to us about pumpkins and growing pumpkins and
how he’s using it to support it, and if this nylon string actually holds it and how
he does it all.
Well, first off, these aren’t my ideas, I have to give credit where it’s due, it’s
Mel Bartholemew, the guy who wrote the Square Foot Garden book, and I just took his ideas
and have sort of run with them.
The trellis netting can hold up to 70 pounds, if not more.
I’ve never taken it that far but I’m guessing that at each one of these pumpkins weighs
at least seven pounds and there’s about seven on there, so it’s getting up there
in weight.
How many did you count there?
Eleven or twelve.
Eleven or twelve, so yeah, it’s getting up there.
As you can see, my electrical conduit’s starting to sag a little bit, but it’s not
going to break, this stuff’s actually really sturdy, so what I need to do next as soon
as I harvest these is just put the middle support in.
The reason why people like to hang trellis pumpkins is it looks really cool, that’s
why I do it.
It keeps the pumpkins off the ground, and a lot of times if you just let your pumpkins
sit on the ground they’ll develop mold or they’ll be kind of soggy on one side.
This totally exposes them to air, it’s way healthier for your fruit.
Last year I grew a pumpkin that was about 25 pounds on one of these trellises.
What you want to do if you grow a really large fruit is you support it with pantyhose works,
any sort of stretchy nylon, and you just basically create a hammock for the fruit itself and
let it finish its growth period in there.
So yeah, growing pumpkins up trellises is cool, it makes a really nice wall as well.
You can make shade areas with squash and pumpkins, water melon, any vining crop, cucumbers, yeah.
And these are sugar pie pumpkins.
They’re really good to cook with, really good pumpkin pie.
I’m going to in a couple of weeks be making a lot of pumpkin pie, looking forward to it.
All right cool, so how many pumpkin plants did you actually have here?
In Mel’s book The Square Foot Garden, he recommends planting the pumpkins every two
square feet, so for two square feet you have one pumpkin.
This year I just did one for one square foot, so it’s kind of up to you.
I do have my suspicions that had I just let them, if I would have planted them one every
two feet I would have gotten the exact same production out of one plant as I’m getting
out of two.
So if that makes sense, it’s kind of – one of the very important thing about planting
is spacing, and a plant will produce under close spacing proximity, but if you give a
plant the proper room it will actually grow to its full potential, and we’ll talk about
that more as we go.
So I’d say for these pumpkins if you’re going to trellis pumpkins it’s anywhere
from one square foot to two square feet.
And mess around, do your own experiments at home.
I kind of planted these really close together because I wanted a wall of green, and I got
that.
In the middle here we’ve got some melons, these were kind of a failed experiment, they
didn’t do so well.
The squash grows – squash is pumpkin – it grows a lot faster than melons, and if you
plant squash and melons too close together, a lot of times the squash or pumpkins will
overrun it.
And one thing about melons is that they need a lot of sunlight and a lot of heat.
So I kind of shaded them out a little bit.
So you can see here, Tyler’s growing things vertically, even though he has a half acre
to grow on, growing vertically is really important [inaudible] almost every raised bed has a
trellis on it, and he’s making the trellis out of basically electrical conduit and the
nylon string trellis, and this is one of the most affordable ways and actually long-lasting
ways to grow on a trellis, and it looks like it’s really easy to install, so let’s
ask Tyler about why he’s using this kind of trellis and how he installed it and how
it’s been working.
So, the way that you install it is, what you do is you’ve got to get your electrical
conduit, so these beds are all measured out because of the square foot method, they’re
each four by four feet.
So what you can do is you get a four foot piece of—or you get a ten foot piece of
electrical conduit, if you want a five foot trellis you cut that in half, and then you
get a five foot piece of conduit, cut that down to four feet, this would be the crossbar
here, and this trellis is actually six feet tall so, but anyways, you just cut your—I
use a hacksaw and just saw them, and then you use your corner brackets here to put the
conduit in place.
The way that it’s—this can actually, this will never blow over, I mean I guess [inaudible]
a hurricane would actually maybe take these out, but they’re really sturdy, but the
secret of that is you put rebar in the ground here, and…
How far up does rebar go?
I get four foot pieces of—if I’m making a trellis that’s over six feet tall, I use
a four foot piece of rebar, I go two feet deep and then two feet up, so that is really
secure, that ten foot trellis over there, if you can see that through the camera, has
just two feet of rebar above the ground, but it’s got two feet of rebar in the ground
as well, and it’s really, really sturdy, that’s really essentially what is going
to keep your trellis from falling over, and that’s why this will last a lifetime just
in the ground where it is right now, and the nice thing is that they’re portable too.
I can’t really do it right now, because there’s plants vining on here, but if I
want to re-design my garden a little bit, all I have to do is lift the trellis up, move
it to another spot in the garden, and I’ve got a whole different feel, a look, you know,
depending on how high I want to grow.
One of my recommendations is don’t do a five foot trellis, do six feet, seven feet,
go big, it’s more fun, they grow bigger.
You’ll be surprised at how tall a pumpkin can get, and even how tall tomatoes get, I
mean they get ten feet easy under the right growing conditions.
So to just kind of re-explain this, this is half-inch electrical conduit right here.
Half-inch electrical conduit with corner brackets and then half-inch metal rebar, 48 inches,
and the rebar is really important.
And it gets a little expensive, I’m not going to lie about it, if you have a friend
that can weld for you, that will save you a lot of money because these brackets run
from 2.50 to 3.50, and the rebar is expensive as well.
Rebar gets really expensive.
But the actual conduit is super-cheap.
I think that a ten foot pole of half-inch electrical conduit runs you like two bucks
or something.
So yeah if you’re making a couple, obviously I have a lot so I’ve invested a good amount
of money in these trellises, but they’re totally portable, if I ever need to move my
farm, or if I ever want to move some of these over to my other planting site in Santa Rosa,
I can do it really easily.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our visit here to Future Farm with Tyler, and he’s invited
me to come back for future episodes, so he’s open to having people visit his farm and share
his wealth of knowledge through email, you can contact him at helping, letter U and grow,
so helpingugrow@gmail.com.
So once again this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com keep on growing!