they say that things take twice as long as you think they will to complete,
even when you take this rule into account.
I forgot what the name of that rule is,
but it certainly seems to be true as I juggle, you know,
different projects here at the Urban Homestead - the fence, the actual gardens,
the irrigation, the shed, all sorts of things.
And really this is just phase 0.1 to get everything off the ground here.
There's just so much space.
So what I thought I'd do today is show you a little bit of actual progress
that's been happening. Last episode we talked about planning,
today we'll talk about a little bit of progress.
We have some gardens in the ground.
We have some rudimentary systems in place here, so stay tuned,
enjoy the journey.
So the first thing to talk about is this massive delivery of soil that just came
in from my friends at this Espoma Organic, who are not sponsoring this video,
but I do work with extensively. So we've got some Land and Sea compost.
We have a raised bed mix. And then over there in the back corner,
we have their mushroom compost,
which is like remains of what comes from mushroom growers.
But I'm also collecting some natural inputs. So I'm raking leaves.
I'm raking weeds. Both of these will go either into the compost,
probably leaves into the compost or leaf mold.
The weeds will be turned into an anaerobic weed-style fertilizer,
which I'm excited to show you about.
So I know I've shown you guys the grow bag garden quite a few times.
So what I want to do is select a couple crops and just kind of show them off for
you. Crop one that's really been performing well is this black cobra pepper.
Now look at the stem, it's sort of fuzzy. It's a really interesting pepper.
And as you can see,
we've got quite a few coming out and just look at the structure of it.
Very interesting. You've got this nice Y and then they Y again. Boom, boom.
And it's just a beautiful, beautiful pepper. We have another,
Thai giant hot surrounded by some lettuce.
And then I want to show you the grow bag, the hundred gallon grow bag.
Now this is an interesting layout. I've got cucumbers in the middle,
which I'll be trellising pretty soon.
Some more of these Thai giant hots surrounding,
and then I have flowers surrounding all of these. So we have some cosmos here.
We have a bachelor button. I believe there's some zinnia in this mix as well.
And I also brought down the lemon.
So the Meyer lemon is down. This eventually will go into the ground.
But then another exciting development is this loofah.
So it's got a little bit of leafminer damage,
which is kind of annoying because I seem to always struggle with loofah,
but it's in this sub-irrigated planter here.
And what's really nice is there's like four or five different trellis tiers.
But on top of that, what I'm doing, it's a pro tip.
Instead of letting your loofah just climb up like this, that's wasting a lot.
What you should do is you should force it to spiral around each of these and
go all the way up that way. It'll fill it in.
You can rotate it every so often to get maximum exposure,
but I'm very excited about this loofah.
The next thing coming up is starting to increase my pollinator approach.
So I have a desert rose yarrow here, which is quite beautiful.
Here's a lantana that's struggling just a little bit,
much more so than when I bought it. Honestly, it's only been a day.
So something happened here.
But it's a variegated one with some yellow flowerheads, very beautiful.
This one right here is a plumbago,
which kind sounds like some sort of hybrid plum fruit. But clearly it is not.
There's a salvia there. If you're in Southern California,
salvia must be on your list, some kind of salvia.
And then we also have a lion's tail. Very beautiful,
probably a fantastic one for hummingbirds.
So I cleared a bunch of this weed out which,
man does this weed die fast. Once you pull it out,
all the color leaves it in like half a second,
but it is a gnarly one as you can see. It's all over here right now,
but we cleared it out of here to put in this beautiful little guy.
So this is actually a pallet that I took a circular saw and just cleaved right
in half.
So you have the middle piece of the pallet right here and then here's the other
edge. And then I was supposed to get more of a fabric-style landscape fabric,
but this one works okay. It's just a little bit flimsy.
But what you do is you sandwich.
So you staple it in on the front side and then you also staple in the
backside right here. So take a look at the back there. It's all contained.
And then you fill the top with soil.
So the soil is actually sitting in a landscape fabric sleeve if you will.
Then what you do is, you have, just cut a little X in,
stuff in some herbs and then water in the top.
And so you have this very efficient,
very slim and trim herb style planter which is going to fill in and grow quite
nicely once these guys get over their transplant shock. So when I moved in,
there was a jade in this and what was stupid about it was,
it was literally just a chunk of jade that the landscaper who remodeled the
house just stuck in. So it was just a dead branch basically,
but it looked alive. So it was kind of a trick.
So I took a cosmos from my garden. And as you can see,
we have to deadhead it a little bit to keep production up,
but it has transplanted in quite well. So we have a little cosmos here from my,
my dear friend,
Supannee and we want to clean this up every so often so it looks nice and trim.
And so that, see, look at these new flower buds here,
so that these guys keep on growing and producing.
So we'll just take all these off.
This will look nice and clean and I'll get onto the next section for our Epic
Homestead update.
This is probably the most substantial update as we sit here in the front yard in
an actual raised bed, or on an actual raised bed.
This is a four foot by eight foot by 12 inch tall red cedar raised
bed made out of single pieces. So the lumber, it's pretty pricey, but red cedar,
it's probably just one step below redwood as far as its longevity for raised bed
material. So very pleased with this.
And let me just show you kind of what we got going on,
as well as the interesting mulch that I decided to use.
So this time around I've actually given myself a little bit of room so I can
actually walk around here and deal with the bed, which is very handy.
But as you can see, the design is quite simple.
It's just individual pieces of lumber with one little four
by four corner to help snug them up.
But that's really all there is to it and very simple construction.
So take a look at this mulch.
It's actually a shredded redwood bark and it has almost a fuzziness to it.
I believe there's an unofficial term for this called gorilla hair,
but it's very interesting and it's quite flammable.
So you don't want to do this if you live in like a super hot area that could
catch a spark. Cause this, just look at the quality of it,
that could light up like crazy. But it keeps the soil dry or wet, excuse me,
like I've never seen before. I mean,
I haven't watered this in a few days and you can see that this soil here
very, very moist. And so I'm pretty pleased with it. Great insulator.
It seems like the soil overall is kind of hot, so it's warm,
but in general very pleased with this.
So we've got a lot of things going on in here. We've got some tomatoes,
we have a line of zinnias here.
Some of these cucumbers again have been hit with the leafminers,
which I'm not happy about, but it is what it is.
Built up some simple little bamboo trellises which I'll be talking about on the
Epic Gardening channel soon. But the most interesting thing is right here. So,
the inground bed.
I haven't had an inground bed since I grew potatoes in early
2019 for the Apocalypse Grow Challenge, my survival challenge.
So this is the first inground bed where I'm not growing potatoes in my gardening
career. And why? First of all, why would I do it? Well,
I have so much land that it makes a lot of sense to grow inground for a segment
of my crops. Now that's probably going to be production crops.
Like if I want to do production potatoes or pumpkins or cut flowers or,
you know, corn or grains, things like that.
Inground makes a lot more sense because I don't need to build structure around
it. But number two, it's just fun to experiment.
And I want to show you guys as many different methods of growing as I can,
of course still showing the small space stuff, but also, you know,
experimenting, having some fun. So let me just hop behind the camera.
I want to talk about how I amended the soil and formed this bed.
So what you can see here is a little tomato section.
We've got some peppers and we have some onions, green onions, et cetera,
and some habanero. So we have jalapenos, habaneros.
I've got a little lashed up bamboo system here that's got,
it's just going straight down.
And the only reason for this is these peppers don't need a ton of support,
but they might need just like one tie because there's actually quite a strong
coastal breeze that comes through this way.
And I think it might be smart to have one little tie here,
especially if I were to decide to perhaps overwinter these.
Eventually they get pretty big and perhaps it might need it.
Also just a cool thing to experiment with.
But what we're talking about really is the formation of the bed.
So the flippers put down these chips,
which thankfully they're natural wood chips.
They're not dyed or anything crappy like that. So I just moved the chips away.
And then the next thing to do, let's take a look at this soil.
See how hard this soil is. They just scraped off the sod.
And I mean this is like exceptionally hard clay, very compact.
And so I actually took a tiller,
rototiller and tilled up maybe four or five inches or so here.
So you can see that's right around where I started tilling it starts to go down
a little bit. So I worked maybe four to five inches down,
but I also built this bed up about four to five inches.
So I have maybe eight to 10 inches worth of growing space here in this bed.
And I just formed a 30 inch across bed.
So the reason I've chosen the 30 inch bed is because you can straddle it.
So I can just straddle it just like this and work in it really easily.
But also like all sorts of different garden implements work really well on a 30
inch spacing.
So it's just a really nice manageable size to work from.
And if I were to extend this bed and put another one on,
I would just leave maybe 18 inches or so between the two,
maybe 24 inches and then put another one right here.
And so I can see myself adding quite a few more inground beds,
but I don't have a rototiller anymore.
So we'll figure out other ways to improve the soil.
And really the goal here is till once, never till again.
I don't want to get into that habit,
but I did need to break up that soil and improve it just once.
So you're going to see a lot more inground stuff though I suspect it's going to
be over this way. So again, here's the orchard,
but I'm thinking at least in the interim, this area, this land back here,
it makes a lot of sense to do the inground beds.
So I could just do really long rows,
like going straight back and do corn, wheat,
cut flowers, potatoes, squash, sweet potatoes,
whatever back here while I'm managing and controlling these weeds.
Let me show you a couple of things that I've done here in the back to build a
stockpile of organic matter.
So back here I am using quite a bit of my old shipping materials as a
stockpile for sheet mulch,
which I will probably end up laying on top over here to smother this
out. We'll see how that works. Now,
another thing I noticed is the apricot tree over here is actually,
it seems like it was purposely cultivated.
It wasn't just something random because they've got one of these watering poles
here where you just dump the water down and it's subirrigates. And something,
look at this,
something has been eating these pits because some apricots fell to the ground.
Oh my goodness, these are all apricot pits.
So something has been coming into the yard and eating,
so I'm already getting a signal that I might have a problem with a fruit eating
pest. So there's a lot still left to do,
but surprisingly we've made some decent headway here on the property with the
installation of some actual new gardens.
I don't have the Birdies Beds back here at the property yet.
Actually I think the eventual future for this particular space will be
showcasing all the cool different Birdies models that I love to grow in.
And that's going to happen pretty soon.
But I've learned some interesting things.
I've been meeting some neighbors around here.
It turns out there's some cool neighbors around here.
I'm really excited about that, but some really friendly neighbors too.
And I've learned that technically,
I think I'm allowed to have a horse on this property.
I'm not sure if I'm ever going to do that, but it's nice to know that I can.
I also think there's a chance that I may be able to drill a well on this
property and if I could drill a well,
I believe the rule is that if I drill the well,
I cannot use that water for drinking, but I can use it for irrigation.
That's fine with me. I mean the orchard, the inground rows,
if I could do well water that would be absolutely magical.
That would save eventually tons and tons and tons of money and be a very smart
way to irrigate. And so there's that.
I just recently got a quote on the roof.
The roof is a flat roof and that's one of the few things that wasn't repaired
super well. I mean,
it was patched up but it wasn't completely repaired and brought to new.
And so if I wanted to do a new roof,
the only reason I would think about doing that,
it's probably at about half its useful life, is because to put on solar,
I kind of need a robust roof. And so it would be a package deal.
You put the roof on,
you put the solar on and maybe get like a power wall or something like that to
store energy. Because you know, it's more so than just gardening,
which of course I'm all about, obviously.
What I want this channel to be about is how do you take the best of modern life
- you know, electricity, the internet, automation, systems engineering,
all that kind of stuff. And also the best of just, you know,
sitting out here at 8:00 PM on a sunny summer evening, hanging out,
maybe harvesting some peppers, you know, making a little salad,
whatever the case may be. That's ancient life.
That's what we've done for thousands and thousands of years.
How do you do that in the society that we've now created, this modern world?
That's what I'm really interested in in this next phase of Epic Urban Homestead
and, you know, Epic Gardening. That's what I'm really gonna focus on.
I want to solve that problem for myself and hopefully in doing so,
solve it for many of you or at least provide some sort of pathway as I fumble in
the dark here. So there's a lot going on guys.
I'm going to try to do at least one update here on the blog per week,
but if it slows down a little bit, I apologize. Again,
we have the television show that we're filming.
So that can take up quite a bit of time over the next couple of weeks,
but I'm very excited about that and I'll be telling you all about that when it's
coming out. So until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.