What better way to kick off this week's blog than with the most makeshift
rainwater collection. It's starting to rain. It's midnight right now.
I ran outside and I was like, let's do this!
We've got the green waste bin collecting a trickle of water right there.
And this one's going off, actually, look at that.
Because my gutters do not really,
they're not really set up. And so I'm just going to go into these buckets.
The gutter actually splits over here. See.
There's a gutter join that they didn't even put like a proper.
Joining mark. So it starts to fall off.
And this was starting to spill into here. So I said, you know what?
I'm going to come out. It's midnight. Who cares? I heard it, I'm capturing it.
So we'll see how much we get. This is Epic Homesteading,
Episode 10. How's it going, everyone? It is raining.
We'll see my makeshift rainwater collection.
It's working, I'll tell you that, it's working! It's not optimal though.
Pretty soon I'm going to be putting in some cisterns.
The roof needs to get reroofed. Solar needs to go up.
And only at that point will I really be able to confidently add the new
guttering system up here. But man,
I think given that we don't get rain that often here in San Diego,
it's going to be great to have a large system so that I'm able to just capture
a ton. Because I mean look, look what's running off free.
That's just running right off there. That's a complete disgrace,
complete disgrace. So that needs to be captured.
Today we have the GardenStraw coming in.
The first hundred units of GardenStraw,
my favorite straw mulch of all time, right in there.
Probably by the time you're watching this, they are sold out.
But this is a test batch so we'll see how they do. My favorite straw.
Let me show you.
It's this straw right here that I've been talking about a lot on the channel.
Beautiful, beautiful product. Get it unloaded and let's see what it looks like.
I got a delivery.
Of GardenStraw. The straw mulch that I use from Canada.
And then I shipped out to about a hundred Epic Gardeners.
So hopefully some of you were able to get your hands on that.
Now here is the time lapse of the pepper tree,
and the rest of the trees down that line, getting more or less deleted.
But what's amazing is I did save all of this mulch.
So don't worry it wasn't wasted, but it is weird to see it gone.
You can see we have the HVAC guys here today,
but at the same time I wanted to get those logs, baby.
You know I needed those logs to fill up the bottom of my raised beds.
So I asked them to haul it over.
And then I also asked them to just directly mulch right into my yard.
And they were a little skeptical at the start, but I have to say,
this saved me so much time. And it's absolutely amazing.
So this wasteland is where the shed used to be, the old shed.
Here's the new shed. Old shed's gone.
A lot of the wood we are going to repurpose,
but a lot of it was just like rotted out, messed up, rusted.
This section here is eventually where the coop will be.
So a new fence will go right there. Coop will be right here.
I'm thinking composting bins right there, greenhouse/glasshouse right here.
I have a lot of dreams and hopes.
We'll see how fast some of this stuff can get done. But, um, yeah, I'm excited!
We got a couple things going on over here as well. Let me show you.
The little awning right there is going to get removed. As you can see,
it's getting removed right now because you just can't get anything reasonable
through there and it doesn't, it doesn't fit with the house.
It just doesn't look good and it doesn't perform good.
So we are going to fix that as well.
So we're back to an almost Spanish-style garage.
Let me show you what's going on here though.
So it looks like whoever put this little awning on just sort of
attached it to the old construction,
which has clearly left a little bit wanting.
So I've got a guy coming over to restucco and put some edging
here and repatch and stucco and seal all that up. But take a look at this.
The entryway is now significant.
I can actually get through here with larger gear. We can come on out this way.
So what I'm thinking about doing is putting a gate for security across here,
because part of the Epic Homesteading mission is the best of the modern world
and the best of the ancient world.
And the best of the modern world is network security.
And I do want that on this property. Because, why not? I mean,
I'm trying to showcase what I feel to be the way of the future.
And I think that is one of them, to protect yourself, to protect your family.
So that's going to go on here. The gate for protection. But man,
things are looking really good. Let me show you what we've got cleared out now,
here in the back. So the shed's gone completely.
There's still a lot of debris back here, but.
So now the coop is going to go right there, right there, right there.
And then maybe a glasshouse. I could not be more excited about this guys.
I got a lot more to do. I'm going to go out in the front yard and do something.
We've got some mulch here in the back, starting to take over.
We got some amazing soil right there. I'll talk about that in a later video.
But, dragon alley looking good. Mini-splits in. Life's good, baby! Life's good.
All right, I'll see you guys. The soil is here, baby. Let's do this.
We've got my friend Andy here as well to help out, drop off some compost.
All these beds are going to be full.
Look at these totes. Each tote is like 1200 pounds. Yeah, the two big ones are.
Yeah, yeah. The other one's a one yard tote. Okay.
It's been a long time coming. We've got Andy here.
I'll put the link in the description for you guys.
But it's time to start shoveling this into the,
into the actual garden and get going.
My friend,
Andy decided to come down out of the kindness of his heart and deliver some
soil. This isn't Andy right here,
this is one of the guys over at the soil company.
Well you can see we've had some snafus here.
It was supposed to come via freight,
but the freight company just didn't really show up.
And so Andy took it upon himself to drive down and deliver some of this
incredible soil.
You can see it crumbles just at that perfect amount.
So we've got some perlite in there,
some peat and some other special ingredients that I'm sure you'll be hearing
quite a bit more about soon.
But I was so excited to get this because it'd been such a long time coming.
And you can see here,
this is how we had to get it out because there really wasn't a good way to do
it. So we ended up just pulling forward. Again,
this should have been coming out of a freight truck on a forklift and just
palleted out and directly dumped. But hey, you gotta do what you gotta do.
I needed the soil. I got about five cubic yards worth of soil,
which is more than enough to fill all the raised beds in my front yard garden.
So at this point I was very much ready to start shoveling and getting it in.
All right, everyone's gone.
But the mask is still on cause of the soil particulates. But I've got,
look at this. I mean, this is some quality, look at that. Hold on.
You want it to squeeze.
You want it to stay together and then you want it to break apart and that's
exactly what happens here. So we got some amazing soil.
Gonna fill up these front beds, we'll see how much we get done today. All right,
we're moving along. I got that one filled up.
I got that one filled up and planted out.
And then that one right there is almost done. We've got to put a round one,
which is that guy right there.
And I'll probably fill this one up too and probably call it a day.
Cause I don't have any more beds built.
It's been a long time coming, I will admit. Thank you for your patience,
but I finally have the front yard Epic Garden re-creation planted out.
So what I want to do is hop behind the camera and show you everything that's
going on inside the beds. And just a freeform of some of the changes I made.
For those of you who've been watching Epic Gardening for a long time,
you know I was in a cramped front yard garden.
Now clearly there's a lot more space and there's a lot more going on.
First things first, we have the actual spacing here in-between the fence line,
as I step over it, and the garden. So it's about two foot,
24 inches or so, of spacing running all the way down, which is really,
really nice.
And then I've also spaced out about 30 inches between beds which gives me way
more room to deal with what's going on in these beds.
I can work with them easily. I can come in and harvest from any side,
which is just so absolutely handy.
So what we have going on here is some very simple kale.
We have some stunted cabbage and cauliflower. Look at this,
I have one tiny little floret here. Very pathetic, I will admit,
this one got neglected a little bit.
But the soil that we recently put in has been planted out.
So I have some arugula here, we have some spinach,
we have some leafy greens and then I have some onions right here.
As we move over into the round bed, you can see I have some very thin leeks.
These ones just went in. I've got celery, four of those coming in right there.
Up in front here again, more cabbages, more onions, more brassicas.
Similar over here, onions, lettuce, brassicas.
Back here we have onions,
lettuce and cabbage and some bunching onions as well.
But another big change is the grow bag garden.
So the grow bag garden now exists here in the front yard. Take a look at that,
that view. So a lot of this stuff needs to be replanted.
You can see still have some peppers that are hanging on.
We have some new stuff in here. As you can see,
onions are going to be a mainstay.
This is sort of some holding area stuff that's going to eventually go over there
in the orchard.
So you can see I've been making my way through some of this mulch.
This entire section right here used to be a huge pile, much like this one.
And there used to be a pile all the way back there as well.
For those of you with hawk eyes,
you'll notice that I have my very first no dig inground bed here.
So this is about four foot by eight foot. It's a Charles Dowding style bed.
Really excited about that!
Stay tuned in the main channel for a video about that.
Over here we're testing out the sub pod system for the spring.
So this is an inbed worm composting system.
You can see how to actually feed it here. It's a tube in,
and then they can flow out through these holes here,
which is a great way to add extra fertility. I've got some herbs in that.
The GreenStalk is doing quite well over here with all of our leafy greens and
our root crops.
You can see we have some beets right here that are looking quite nice and ready
to go. So a lot of stuff is going down over here.
The tall 8-in-1 Birdie's bed. Again, as you can tell, it's fall guys,
we're doing some herbs, some leafy greens and some cabbage and such.
And then as we move over here in dragon alley, the arbor has moved to this area.
Dragon alley now has one hundred percent plant out.
So every single one of these sides has an actual cutting. Finally.
So we're going to start getting some really insane growth.
If you look over here at the red Jaina,
we can see that it actually already has made it all the way up top and we're
going to start seeing some of those stems start to come down. Now,
as we move back here, some of the mulch has been moved back.
This is a bit of a wasteland I will admit, but the shed has been demolished.
The new shed is here and, and, and,
and I want to show you the new stuccoing going down in the
Epic garage. So take a look. This awning is now gone.
This awning used to come out to about where that paint ends right there.
And now this looks a lot cleaner,
especially once I paint it up it's going to look absolutely.
Amazing. So it's been pretty hectic here at the Epic Homestead. In fact,
I actually have some roofers here today doing some roofing.
There's a lot going on. Stay tuned.
If there's anything you'd like to see on a more regular basis,
I know it takes me a while to get these vlog episodes out,
just let me know down in the Comments. Something a little more freeform,
some topics that I should really be touching on. And until next time,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.