In this video, you'll learn how me getting on TikTok in 2019,
as probably the oldest human and certainly the oldest gardener on TikTok,
led to building a garden from scratch,
which I've never done for anyone besides myself, with Kehlani.
Kevin Espiritu here. If you are new to the channel, it's called Epic Gardening.
We teach you how to grow plants, how to grow food successfully in very simple,
practical ways. Okay, here's the story. I got on TikTok,
because I love social media, and I started sharing silly plant videos.
Someone unbeknownst to me at the time,
shot me a follow and then sent me a DM. We chatted a little bit said, hey,
do you do garden installs? I said, honestly no, I really don't.
But if you have something in mind, I'm at least willing to hear it out,
you know. Cause I get the request a lot. And so we got to talking,
we ended up hopping on a zoom call, was a great vibe.
We were chatting about all sorts of different things. You know,
like the importance of growing food and the importance of getting the youth into
it on all different demographics, all different cultures. I said, you know what?
This actually sounds like a really fun project. Let's go ahead and do it.
So I'm going to take you on the planning journey right now of how we selected
exactly what to plant at Kehlani's house,
all the sort of things that go into that.
So you can see how we think about building a garden from scratch,
from plant selection to soil to beds to location, all that kind of stuff.
Without further ado, cultivate that Like button for the Kehlani Collab.
And let's get into.
The video. Today begins the journey.
We're going to head to the nursery right now to pick up some plants for this
project.
So I will put the phone down and we'll see you at Mission Hills Nursery.
We're here, one of my favorite nurseries in San Diego, doing some research.
Let me show you what we've already picked up. We grabbed a passion fruit,
Frederick variety right here. We are capping it off with a pomegranate.
So we purchased a wonderful pomegranate. Look who I found,
sun cat.
Hey!
So what we're doing now is we're planning on a bed by bed basis.
So I'll show you what we have. We have a squash bed.
We have a budding salsa bed right here with a couple of grafted tomatoes and
we've got some peppers. So two jalapenos and a couple random ones,
as well as some yellow sweet Spanish. But now what we want to do,
for one of the larger beds we're building, is an herb bed. You can't go wrong.
Greek oregano, French tarragon, English thyme.
We should probably grab a lemongrass. Yeah.
And we'll grab some basil and rosemary and stuff as well. All right,
flower daddy update here.
We have three different flats' worth of marigolds.
These cosmos are just so beautiful. So huge.
This stuff smells straight up like sweet crystallized, honey.
The Epic 4runner is loaded to the brim.
I actually don't even know how we're going to fit.
We got most of what we needed at Mission Hills Nursery.
But I always like to stop by WAN, Walter Anderson, to see what they've got.
So we need some tomatoes, which is what I've got. I mean,
Walter Anderson always has an insane amount of tomatoes. Okay.
The last little bit of stuff is picked up. We have some artichokes,
some tomatillos and some determinate tomatoes,
I think is going to be a little bit easier.
We brought the seedling table under here to protect from the heat,
but also to load up all of our.
Stuff that we're bringing up.
So the way we're kind of doing it is we're relabeling,
bringing some GardenStraw up just in case, we're bringing a level,
a couple extra tools. Thank you, Corona. We're going to be doing a lot more.
We've got to fit all this in the car somehow.
So good luck to us. Morning.
Everyone, it's early. Jacques is here. What've we got? Some snacks?
Got the road snacks. You've got to have your Gardettos.
This is the final result. I don't even know how we did this,
but we have an entire garden plus year in the car. Okay,
we've got a little little friend on the side of the road here.
Peacock. So here's the space we are working with. Let me show you real quick.
We've got this sort of open area.
So north is that way. So that's going to inform some of our garden planning.
North is directly this way,
which means there's good southern exposure on this garden throughout the day.
But you've got this tree here and you've got this that'll provide some shade.
We have the original 8 in 1 tall beds.
And then over here we also have the original 8 in 1 shorter version.
So we're going all Birdies, all the time, and it's going to be really awesome.
So now we need to get this back to the house.
So I just want to introduce you guys to my lovely friend,
Mr. Epic Gardener himself is Kevin, everybody. What's up? Basically
I'm gonna keep it really short and sweet and say like I stalked him on TikTok. I
got a DM from you on Insta. Yeah, okay, yes. Cause I stalked you on TikTok.
At first I don't think he knew who I was.
And then I looked you up and then I started listening to your music and now
you're in my top 1% of play. There we go. Yeah,
we got to talking and you like to garden, you grew up gardening.
I did grow up gardening and I have not gardened as an adult.
And everybody who follows me knows that I just found this incredible house that
I bought about a year ago. That has a lot of space.
And my intention was to utilize the land in the best way possible and utilize
the fact that it is a fricking heat location,
like heat magnet.
So as we're building the beds in this lower area,
closer towards the entrance of the house,
we took a walk around with Kehlani and we were like, you know what?
This doesn't make sense.
And that's what it's all about when you're designing a garden.
The place that you decide to place your garden, the location,
cements it in stone. That's where it's going to be for a long time.
You're not going to up and move it. In almost all cases.
It'll be there for at least a few seasons.
So you have to choose the right place. And as we walked around the property,
we realized this is close to the front gate. It is nice and open,
great sun exposure,
but it's probably not going to get tended to because it's so far away.
And that's just a subconscious thing. You know,
if I put my garden all the way over in that corner,
I'm just less likely to go over there.
And so location really matters when you're selecting a garden.
So we found a spot up near the kitchen in this neglected,
underused spot with a lot of lawn space,
with some gopher wire that already existed. So Jacques and I,
the garden assistant, the garden hermit himself,
we looked at each other and we said, for sure, this is the spot. So.
We've got grass here, which is dead.
And that's fine because we're going to be putting a garden over it.
Gopher wire is already in the ground.
We're setting up the Hoselink already because it's going to get pretty hot.
Jacques got that going. And here's the idea. Close to the house,
so we're going to hug this side right here.
Cause wind whips through this area right here in a pretty severe way,
especially in the wintertime.
So we'll probably do four of the tall beds right there.
And then we're going to stage up the shorter guys, maybe over here.
We'll play around with the spacing,
but closer to the house for accessibility and just a little bit better overall
conditions. So at this point.
We're just hanging out building beds.
The thing I like about the Birdies raised beds,
which of course full disclosure I sell on my store in America, in Canada.
Anywhere in North America you can get these from me.
The thing I like about them is how modular they are.
So you've got different heights. You've got the 15 and the 30 inch heights,
but then you also can play around with the panels and you can configure them to
almost any space. You can make a really small one,
you can make a really long and thin one, sort of a short and stout one.
There's all sorts of different ways you can align them.
So we spent the next few hours just building them, playing around with them,
almost like playing Tetris or playing Legos.
What fits and how do these exactly interplay in the space?
If I get it so confident here with like the gardening stuff,
I feel like I'll want to live here for a long time. In a dream world,
I'd have a big enough. Yeah, I saw that. That went in, for sure.
Yeah, totally. Yep. I'd have enough,
I'd be able to make this place so crazy.
I don't care how long it would take.
That eventually I can like give free food to people.
So like maybe if, I don't care how long it takes,
but I'd rather just use my resources to make that happen. Yeah.
Yeah. Don't mess with her. Yeah. Don't mess with her! She'll drill ya!
We got what, three beds done? Three or four beds.
She's doing it the right way. And.
I sent my assistant to the store to get a straw hat.
Yeah. She wants to join the club. So we got one more of these to build,
three more of these. And then we actually have to figure out,
which you're going to help with on, actually where to put them. Yeah. Right.
Straw hat on. Straw hat Mafia. Let's go.
Okay, I think we got the soil. I hope.
It's a steep old hill. So if it makes it up here, I'll be very, very pleased.
Okay. So it's literally 8,000 pounds of soil from Espoma.
Thank you so much, Espoma. Look at that. Look at that.
Ooh. We're going Epic. We're going Epic Gardening. Thoughts,
feeling? No, you got a couple calluses, yeah? Yeah.
I got some blisters on my hand. You love to see it. For screwing it in. We got
the beds. They got the beds. I screwed a couple screws. And they brought,
this was the craziest part.
I was watching them bring all these big old things of fricking soil up here for
the last like three hours.
It took awhile. It took awhile. So we got everything.
We got the plants and we're going to go hit the hotel. We're going.
To chill. At the end of day one,
Jacques and I were riding high but also psychologically and physically
defeated.
Because we had been up since maybe 4:30 AM and then worked for maybe 12 hours
straight in a hundred plus degree heat.
So we were ready to chill. We found kind of a mediocre hotel,
somewhere nearby. We grabbed some food,
hung out and then we tried to get some sleep to prep for the next day.
Which was all about finalizing location,
filling up the soil and the most fun part of course, planting all of the plants.
It is day two. We just can't get enough up to the house. It's very difficult.
So we're going to be forklifting in some more. Problem solved.
Okay, we're driving a flatbed. We've got some soil behind.
The garden hermit himself is here. This is really the last push.
Once we get this up to the house, it's the fun part,
which is actually planting it out and building it out. So let's go.
What we've done is, instead of moving all of the soil we moved yesterday,
like five times,
which is just not smart and also not good on the body for this heat.
We've locked in this bed in place. We've leveled it out. It's in the perimeter.
So we kind of know something has to go here and we've chosen this bed to go
here. The tall 8 in 1.
We got some tree trimmings from the green bin that we found.
We don't have enough, but at least for now, at least on this bed,
we can fill the bottom with the tree trimmings and make up a little bit of the
difference in some of the soil. Just saves on the cost.
You guys have seen this on the channel before.
Okay. The first two beds are in.
What we've done here is we've gone 30 inches apart.
So we have a nice walking path throughout this entire thing.
I think what we'll do is we'll split the difference on these longs.
We'll keep them nice and low here. It'll be the herb garden,
the medicinal garden, the tea garden, some of the corn or something like that.
And then we're going to go 30 inches apart over here and do 1, 2,
3 where that soil bed or that bag of soil is. And then the last two,
which are this one and this one,
we're probably going to place here and here to keep it all in this tight little
spot where you can walk right through this arbor and access the garden.
So we think we've come up with the best design for this particular
space. So let me show you real quick.
So here you have one of the entrances and then way over there you have another
one of the entrances.
So I want to walk you through the space real quick and
show you how we're thinking about it. This is an arbor by the way.
So what's going to happen here is you're going to walk in like this.
This arbor is going to be right here probably.
Going just like that. There'll be a passion fruit on this side.
And then this bed right here is going to be where the soil is. So there'll be 1,
2, 3 tall beds lining that cliff-side right there,
which I think looks really nice. We've got some nice short beds here.
And then we've got a tall and short bed here.
So you kind of get this little arbor here, you walk and now boom,
you're in the garden. You get a beautiful amount of beds to work in.
All spaced nicely, easy to work in. And then when you want to head out,
just pop out through here. I think this spot right here,
couldn't really make a bed work here.
So we probably are going to plant a tree right here. Okay,
we're basically done filling and I think it looks really nice.
So what I'm going to do now, before we actually get to the planting,
is throw some Bio-tone in. Because when you fill a bed from scratch,
you're going to get natural settling, number one.
We have some extra bags of soil. We'll see how it settles once we water it in.
But I want to just sort of pre-fert this with some Bio-tone,
just so I don't have to put it in the planting hole.
It'll save us a lot of time. We're planting out all eight of these beds.
So right now I'm taking a bag of Bio-tone and scooping it in and mixing it in.
We're filled up, we're amended. Now begins the great hydration.
You've got to get this massive bit of soil wet.
You'll have the water it way less if you get it wet one time really deeply.
You'll be good to go. So we're just leveling the beds out,
watering it in and onto the next. Okay, we have a visitor here.
This is Amy, Kehlani's friend. She's a gardener extraordinaire.
So she's going to help us lay out some of the plants that we picked out,
just so that when it comes time to plant it gets really, really nice and easy.
All right, we are going to mount the Hoselink now. In this spot,
we're going to use a four by four with some Quikrete, just make life easy.
We have the plants in roughly where we want them to be.
We'll see if anything changes once Kehlani gets back.
We've got our little watering post hardening up over there.
We're going to take a lunch break and be back in just a second.
We're going to put some finishing touches here on the arbor.
Since the wind whips through here like crazy,
we're going to dig it down a couple inches and then put the footlong bolts in.
Okay, the plant is going in. So we chose the passion fruit on this side.
Once it establishes itself it'll just chill.
And it'll go all the way up over this. We have kind of a long one.
So we're going to get it in. I'll throw some fertilizer down in the bottom.
You don't need to really do this, but I like to do it as a matter of course,
fitting it exactly to there. And then we just backfill around.
Easy, easy. Oh, yo, surprise!
I can't tell you how satisfying it was in two days to go from nothing to
something. I have to be honest, even at my own garden,
I didn't work at that aggressive of a pace because there's just so much going on
here at the house. So it was so fun! Kehlani's one of the most genuine,
nice, like genuinely nice people that I've met.
It was a really unique experience for myself and for Jacques.
We had an absolute blast!
I hope you guys all learned a lot from the experience and had some fun doing it.
It's just so cool to be able to build a garden for someone who used to garden as
a kid, wants to get back into it.
And then you saw everyone just light up as soon as you started planting things.
So.
We're done, we're done. Two hard days. Props to Jacques behind the camera.
We got a little treat. We got a straw hat for Kehlani.
We got a little special something. So let's see how the garden looks, for real.
And it turned out so good.
And I got you this, the book that I wrote. Wow, thanks, this is so exciting!
Let's walk through, let's see it. Sometimes, you just got to admire.
Epic Garden.
And I saw some pictures from after the fact of how things were going. Just so,
so cool! So hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Drop a Comment.
Who should I collaborate with next? Tag them in the Comments. Let me know.
Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.