This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com.
Todaywe have another exciting episode for you, here in Irvine, CA, on a field trip at
the Orange Co.
Great Park and we're at the Great Park, Orange County Farm & Food Lab.
And whenever I come to Orange Co., I like to visit the Orange Co.
Great Park and check out the farm and food lab, 'cause they got so many different things
growing, and they're constantly bringing in new technologies as a demonstration garden,
to show you guys what you guys can do at home.
They also have classes and do education here, to teach you guys how to grow food.
I encourage you guys, if you live anywhere in Orange Co., or even the LA area, or San
Diego, come and check this garden out!
It's open 10AM to 3PM every day—awesome place!
What we're gonna check out today are some of the new things that have shown up since
I've last been here.
And some old things too, that I haven't really covered too much in some of my past videos
at the Orange County Great Park.
Be sure to check some of my past videos for the OC Great Park, where I talk about some
of the other things in the Farm & Food lab they have growin' on here.
Today, we're gonna cover mainly three things:
1) Some espalier-style fruit trees that you can grow pretty much anywhere, including your
front yard;
2) We're gonna talk about some of these guys over here: some vertical container gardens
that minimize the amount of space, but maximize the amount of plants you grow.
3) And also, the thing I'm most excited about is what's over there: they've got a self-contained
aquaponic system running off the sun.
So first, let's check out some espelier trees.
So the first thing I wanna show you guys today are some espalier trees; now “espalier,”
I think that's a fancy French word—and I don't exactly know what it means.
If you know what it means, post it down below.
But whatever it means, it means growing at a flat plane—two-dimensional instead of
three-dimensional.
So if we look down, you can see this whole wooden fence, we see these trees are planted
in a single plane; they're not spreading out—all three dimensions.
They do this for a very important reason:
1) The tree will take up less space.
So they're judiciously training these guys, and you can see the plant tape they're using
to tie these up, and they tie at every few inches, because they want these trees to grow
in a certain fashion along the plane.
Anything that shoots out in a direction they don't want, they'll just actually clip back,
and they'll encourage the growth in the direction they want.
One day they'll have this full, and basically this wire will be full of a tree—and just
like this: when this one's comin' out, it'scoming out really far, you know, about five feet,
and once this starts to bloom and fruit, you know, there literally could be a fruit hanging
every few inches along this whole line.
So what this does: this will save you space; also, some espalier-style trees can be more
productive than even a large tree, because you're growing in a smaller area, and because
a tree is smaller, it doesn't have to feed all of its massive trunks, limbs and leaves.
And they can actually live longer.
That being said, they're probably a bit more labor-intenive, because you do need to constantly
keep up with clipping back the branches you don't want—to keep 'em trained where you
want the tree to grow.
So especially in small, tight spaces, when you don't have acreage to grow a lot of fruit
trees---espalier style—May be a real good thing to do to grow some fruit trees on your
property.
Another benefit: if you orient them right, in the right location, you can actually grow
espalier-style trees and vegetables in a raised bed down below.
Let me show you guys an example of that next.
Next I wanna show you guys how you can grow a fruit tree in a raised bed garden and still
grow vegetables.
So the sun's over in this direciton, and you can see the fruit trees right here and it's
just all one line in the back, straight.
You can this amazing garden up in front—some collard greens and some leaves and some herbs
down below.
And because this is in a single plane and not branching over the whole thing, it still
allows light to penetrate so that you can grow some vegetables down below.
So I think this is a very good system to grow some fruit trees.
And you can see here, this one's got a whole lotta apples on it, ready to be harvested
very soon.
So the last thing I wanna share with you about the espalier—and here's another espalier
example, just going against the standard hurricane fencing here—is that certain fruit trees
are more conducive to be “espalier'd” than others—is that a word, “espalier'd”?--Have
you ever been “espalier'd”--up against the wall?
So certain fruit trees are better than others
So things like the stone fruits tend to work fairly well for this—also things like apples
and pears.
Maybe some of the other tropical trees may not work so well, and I haven't necessarily
seen that done.
So if you wanna “espalier” one of your trees, do a Google search and make sure it's
one of the ones that'll work well with the espalier style of growing.
Now we're gonna look at a new system that they didn't have here at the Orange County
Great Park that I showed before on other videos; when I was in Florida, this is a system they
use in Florida a lot: this is basically styrofoam containers that hold the soil, or the planting
medium.
I would consider this a soilous mix—it's mostly coconut core, maybe with some other
organic matter in there.
But for the most part, you can see they're growing four peppers to a container—that's
4, 8, 12, 16, 20—hey, I went to college, or somethin'--20 peppers and you can see that
this thing is completely loaded up!
I mean, what if you could take, literally, like, one square foot of space, grow vertically,
and grow 20 peppers like this?
So how this is watered, they top water this down; water and fertilizer goes down through
all these and drains into the bottom container here, and check it out: they got some humongous
beets growing down in the bottom.
So you can see this system is yielding pretty good.
Once again, they're putting in a water-fertilizer mixture, and it's fairly high in nutrients,
that they'll get this kind of growth, because there's not a lotta soil in there.
Plants need the soil to hold their roots, but also for the nutrition in the soil that
they also extract out; if there's things like rock dust, micro-risa and good organic matter
in your soil, that'll feed your plants, because they're using a soil-less system here—they
gotta actually add in the fertilizer to make the plants absorb it, so it can yield this
much.
What I'm gonna show you guys next is another system they have, actually another tower system,
where they're more relying on the soil and the nutrients in the soil instead of actually
feeding nutrients to the plants.
This is another tower growing system that they're using, and this one has more planting
spots: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I think the other one only had four spots.
Now this one relies more on the soil and getting nutrition in the soil to feed to the plants.
And the reason for this is, number one, they're a lot larger.
I like this material better, this is made out of plastic and the other one's a styrofoam.
Styrofoam, in my opinion, very bad for the environment.
I like this system a lot better and they've basically got a drip system on here, so this
basically waters all by drip.
So an example of just one of the containers is right here, and all these others are just
stacked up on top of each other to make all the different planting spots—so for example,
in this one system here, there's 6, 12, 18—I gotta use my math today—24, 30, 36!
All right!
I went to high school for somethin'!
So we've got 36 planting positions on these strawberries, and it's only like four feet
tall.
So you could really grow a lot of things.
Say you have a patio on your apartment—on your deck outside, you could grow in just—actually
this takes more space.
This probably takes about four square feet of space to grow 36 plants and this is what
the system looks like.
If you want more information on this, you wanna go to agrotower.com.
So I definitely like this a lot—this is nice and heavy duty and will probably last
you many years to come.
So grow your food now.
To grow something in these systems, I'd probabaly stick to growin' something like strawberries
or herbs, or maybe some lettuce.
You don't wanna grow things that are going to take a lot of nutrition out of the soil,
unless you're constantly feeding it with some nutrient solutions.
So definitely if you wanna grow vertically in a tower system, this is what I recommend—and
hopefully one of these days I'll have one on my show, to show you guys how they work,
specifically and how to set it up.
So the last thing I wanna show you today is the thing that I'm most excited about: a self-contained
solar-powered aquaponic system.
I've seen an aquaponic system in a raised bed garden at a community garden before, and
it was a small system and it appeared to work pretty good.
But this system looks like they got it pretty much diales in—and this is completely running
on batteries, so you could llve out in the forest, as long as you're getting good sun,
and having an aquaponic system like this, being able to harvest your own fish and actually
harvest your vegetables too!
So what I wanna show you guys next is how they got this system set up.
The first part of this aquaponic system starts with the solar panels up top; they have two
karo-sira(sp?) —and kara-sira knives are fairly good ceramic knives, but maybe they
make solar panels.
They've got two 130-watt solar panels up top, that actually have the wiring that goes down
below into this big box here, that I can't really show you guys.
And inside this locked box here, they have all the batteries—so all the batteries store
the elecricity from the sun so that the pumps can continue to work.
Once they store the electricity during the day, the pumps are constantly running, and
you can see down below here is a pump, and this actually is called a Marine lamp pump—they
probably use these for boating and whatnot; and actually this pump just goes inside the
tank to pump the water up to the aquaponics bed up top.
Movin' around further here, you can see they've got a little grate here, so that we don't
lose the fish and the fish don't jump out.
We can lift this up, and you can look very closely down in there; you can see some tilapia
in there, in addition.
Here's some of the drainage after the water is pumped in from this reservoir, because
the fishes in there are poopin' and peein' and that basically makes a nutrient-rich solution
that then they actually pump up to the top and then goes through the hydroton.
And then the plants, which absorb the nutrition from the poop and pee of the fish, and then
the plants absorb all the nutrition—and check it out!
In this little garden we've got some little lettuces that look really amazing, we've got
tomato plants and cabbages, some parsley and other herbs growing.
And it all looks like it's doing amazing.
So I definitely think this is the future of aquaponics.
If you wanna do it anywhere witthout using electricity, one of the inputs they need to
use here is actually some kind of fish food.
You can grow your own duckweed, or you can use some commercial fish food to feed your
fish so they can poop out that rich fertilizer.
Now another thing I wanna talk about is, you know, they're literally using fish waste as
fertilizer to feed the plants up top.
I wanna mention also is they're using the hydroton balls which is often used in the
aquaponics, and these are here just to hold the roots in place because they are basically
an inert substance.
You could also use something like rocks, but the hydroton is generally sterile, so that's
usually used more than some rocks out of a field, or something like that.
So are you guys not gonna be weirded out and not eat some stuff grown on fish pee and fish
poo, like your lettuces?
I mean, many people use manures-- cow manures, chicken manures or turkey manure all the time
and don't think twice, but what about using human manure and human pee, or urine to feed
your plants.
Now I'm not at a stage where I'm gonna put my own “No.2” and stuff on my plants,
but I think urine is a great addition—can be a great addition to your plants to add
nitrogen to your garden.
And I'll have an upcoming episode about that really soon.
But I think that's definitely a good way to use your pee instead of flushing it down the
toilet in some clean purified water to get rid of it.
So this solar-powered, self-contained aquaponic system here is in the prototype stage and
they've been getting better and better and hopefully soon, they'll have the smaller version
that they'll be offering to the public.
A local company here has actually designed, or building these, just off-site here, close
to the Great Park.
Well, I've had a lot of fun here at the Orange County Great Park, and the last thing I wanna
show you guys really fast is—you know what?
You can grow a tree literally anywhere—check it out!
I'm standing in between two orange trees here.
And these are literally in half-lined barrels—and as you can see, this guy's actually quite
productive.
So no matter where you live, you can grow a tree—and you gotta make sure you have
the right variety of dwarf tree—they're gonna do best in a small container because
the root system won't get so big, and even yield good fruit for you.
And especially in a place where you wanna grow a citrus tree, and it freezes outside,
you can actually leave it outside in the summertime, and pull it inside for the winter, so it doesn't
freeze its kajeebies off.
In any case, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode; I'm learning more about these new
technologies they have growin' on at the OC Great Park.
Once again, my name is John Kohler for growingyourgreens.com.
See ya next time, and remember: keep on growin'!