Well, it's official. There's a heat wave here in San Diego, California,
and honestly, pretty much everywhere in the United States,
except for maybe New York. So if you're struggling in the heat,
I'm right there with you. This is Epic Urban Homestead - Episode Six.
Let's get some of the plant updates out of the way.
The growbag garden keeps morphing.
It keeps changing because I'm swapping things out, something dies, I harvest it,
I need to put something else new in. And honestly,
I'm liking the way it looks right now.
You can see I've done this sloping pattern.
So some of the low growers down here, we've got some marigolds, some lettuce,
some peppers.
And then back there it starts getting a little taller with the fruit trees and
then these trellises that I want to show you right now.
These are the Vertex Tall Tomato Cages from Gardener's Supply Company.
It's just such a cool design,
this sort of futuristic hexagonal type of layout,
but honestly they work absolutely fantastic. They're made out of aluminum.
So the metal isn't a hyper-strong metal,
but that makes them lightweight and it makes them very easy to maneuver.
And once you secure them down into the growbags or even in the ground,
they really do stay nice and sturdy. So I'm doing tomatoes,
I'm doing watermelon and I'm even doing some squash in these. And look,
we've got that evening sun coming through. So these are getting a lot of sun,
especially later on in the day.
So having them back here in the garden and the growbag garden works out really
well.
The rain gutter gardens are holding up a lot better than I would have thought.
Now I selected some herbs that don't mind drying out a decent amount.
So you've got some rosemary, some thyme and oregano.
But the basil you would imagine - it's a pretty decent sized purple ruffle,
a decent sized variegated basil here - you would imagine that those would
struggle in only about four inches of soil. But first of all,
the sloped watering system kind of helps. So if you water one,
you'll still get some runoff. That's pretty nice. And honestly,
the water retention in these little gutters here is a lot better than I would
have thought. It really does work. Now,
what I would do to improve this would be probably using a steel gutter and a
K-style gutter that's five inches.
So you'd get an extra inch and you'd be gardening in steel instead of this
PVC,
which is honestly not great to grow in after about a year or so I would say.
I would shy away from that,
but we just had some laying around so I wanted to rig this up.
And honestly it's doing a lot better than I thought.
It's kind of a weird part of the garden, but nevertheless it is important.
This is the cardboard stockpile that I've got right now.
I had some blinds delivered. First of all,
I didn't know houses did not come with blinds. So surprise, surprise,
an expense that I wasn't expecting.
But I finally got some blinds up in the house.
And with that came a ton of cardboard.
So this cardboard is going to be used to control the Bermuda grass that I'm
struggling with as well as just as a general sheet mulch.
And for a really quick primer on that,
what you would do is you would grab some cardboard - let's just pretend like
this is flat. Let's grab one like this,
you throw it down on the surface of your soil like this.
And then you'd put on some sort of compost and plant directly into that.
And the cardboard is going to keep the weeds down until it sort of smothers them
out. And then you're in a good spot to plant in some normal stuff.
The plant I've struggled with pretty much my whole gardening career, the luffa.
I'm actually getting some female flowers.
So of course the female flower would be this right here.
The fruit is forming behind, but this needs to get pollinated.
And I can't seem to get male flowers to open at the same time.
I think I did here, unless this falls off. So fingers crossed on this luffa.
So in an upgrade to some of the watering systems,
still haven't put in any significant irrigation projects.
I'm still working off of one hose bib that I've split one, two different times.
So I have three different streams of water coming out of that one hose bib.
But this, which I will do a full video on in the main channel,
is probably my favorite new watering tool that I've seen in a long time.
It's called a Hoselink. It's an 82 foot hose that's retractable.
So you can pull it out and it'll click like that,
then when you want to bring it back, you just click it back.
And so now from one point, wherever you can connect a water source,
you can throw out an 82 feet radius of hose and you can just water anything.
So it's so handy to come in and spot-water parts of the garden and the growbag
section,
or even around the corner where I've got all my dragon fruit propagations.
I am obsessed with this tool! I got a surprise visit from my cousin, Jonny,
who has a YouTube channel called Cast and Spear, all about fishing.
He had just gotten back across the border from a trip to Baja,
where he did a bunch of spearfishing and came to give me some absolutely
amazing fish. What you got for me Jon?
I got you some cabrilla that I spearfished.
I went down to Baja with a couple buddies.
Look at this guys, check it out.
So Johnny's got a - he's my cousin - and he has a fishing and spearfishing
channel called Cast and Spear. So we're trying to,
I guess me on the garden side, Jonny on the fishing side,
to like get as much of our own food as we can.
And so what is this like five or 10 pounds or something? That's about.
10 pounds, yeah. So 10 pounds of fish, fresh fish.
It's not going to get any better. It's local.
It's caught yourself from the ocean, from spearfishing.
If someone doesn't know what spearfishing is.
Yeah, spearfishing is the art of taking a,
almost like a crossbow and you go in and you're very selective.
So you pick the exact fish you want. You shoot it.
And it sounds a little bit maybe barbaric, but in theory,
a perfect shot would put the fish out instantly, no pain or suffering.
But if you do hit a fish and it kind of runs away,
the first thing that you're supposed to do is take your knife and pretty much
end it as quick as possible. Whereas other styles of fishing,
you might play with it for a long time. Stress the fish out.
So how would you cook this? What would be the way that you would do it?
One of my favorite things to do with grouper is to deep fry it.
Another way to do it is to cut the scales off Japanese style,
and then you leave the skin on and then you can fry that.
And it's almost like a crispy chicherone. I call it fish bacon.
Cool. Sweet. Well I'm gonna toss this in the freezer. Thank you, Jonny. Yeah.
Check out Cast and Spear if you guys are interested in fishing of any kind.
And you got to get home, so I'll see you later. Take care. Peace out.
The compost bin is already full. It's heated up. It's cooled down.
I've shifted it around a little bit.
Very soon I need to start drafting up plans for either a three or five bin
compost system.
And I think the bins will also be bigger than three by three by three,
which is what this one is. I might still keep this slatted design,
which I really like. I'm honestly pretty obsessed with that accessibility.
But some updates I might make would be throwing some chicken wire here.
Or if you think about it, if it's a three or five bin system,
they'll be butted up next to each other.
And so I almost want to have a removable slat here that I can pull the whole
side out and move one bin directly over to the next bin in just a
nice progression.
So we'll see how that design develops. It probably won't be located here.
I'm guessing it's going to be in the back fence next to that concrete cinder
fence,
where I have a little bit more room and I guarantee I'm not like going to put
something there in the future. So it's a good safe spot to build.
But compost doing well. The dragonfruit's actually doing really, really well.
It's starting to trail downwards,
which is the exact reason why I built that style of trellis.
Where it kind of creates the ability for it to trail down and throw out a ton,
a ton of new stem growth.
Exciting new update is that I've got a couple fruit trees in the ground.
In fact, we've got some avocados here. Now they're spaced very close together,
which I'll talk about in a second. But first of all, the varieties.
We've got the classic Hass avocado right here.
And then we have a bacon avocado right there. Now why two types? Number one,
because avocados have an A and a B type as far as the way their flowers open.
So you want to have both so that you get some good pollination when these
actually are in their fruiting season.
The other reason is because these both produce fruit at slightly different times
of year, even though they overlap. So if I just had one,
I'd have fruit for about five months out of the year. If I have two,
I'll have fruit for around 10 months out of the year and I can grow avocados
year round here in San Diego, it's one of our best crops.
And so that's the reason why I'm doing it.
Now why is it spaced very close together? It's about seven feet apart.
I'm using in this whole orchard, in the future at least,
is going to be a backyard orchard design style of culture.
Where you're planting quite close together and you're pruning very aggressively
to keep the vertical height of the plant down.
And so I'm going to be pruning to manage the canopy as well as to keep these
avocado trees to no higher than about, I would say, eight or nine feet or so.
Which means that they're not going to get big enough to really cause issues.
In fact, I could have put this much closer if I wanted to.
I could have put two in one hole, roughly about this far apart,
but I think for now, that's going to be perfectly fine.
Now the only other thing I'll say about this very important tip is you do have
to, or should,
paint your stems and even spray your leaves with a tree-safe paint. Now,
paint is not the right word. It's not actually a true paint.
I'm using something from IV Organics. This is their 3 in 1,
and it's a tree-safe,
organic paint that also has some pest and disease prevention.
Especially with something like avocado, you don't want to deal with sunburn.
You don't want to deal with pests for sure.
And you don't want to deal with disease.
And this is a way to mitigate all of those by protecting both the stems and the
leaves from sun. I've put in a few more in-ground beds here in the front yard.
And as you can see, mulched them pretty heavily with straw mulch. Like I said,
the heat is coming in like crazy.
Straw mulch is really nice because it's light colored so it's throwing heat back
off of the ground.
But also it breaks the water up really nicely when you do water.
And it just seems to really keep the soil nice and most. And better yet,
it breaks down very quickly. So this corn is doing well.
I'm seeing a little bit of sign of either some heat stress or some nitrogen
deficiency, one or the other, maybe both we'll see.
The beans being slightly light green also clues me in to potentially a little
bit of light nitrogen.
So probably gonna hit that with a little bit of fertilizer.
There's a bed behind me but, I think if you can see this back corner here,
something very special came to the Epic Urban Homestead this week. Here it is,
the first big piece, the statement arbor at the Epic Urban Homestead.
I'm obsessed with this thing.
It's called the Gracie Modern Arbor from Terra Sculpture. They sent it out.
We've been friends for a while and sort of as a housewarming gift they sent this
out, which is absolutely amazing. And man does this thing look cool or what?
There's little bits of wire here that you can trellis things up.
So thinking seasonally, I think some fall peas would look amazing here. Winter,
perhaps also going with those peas. But then as spring comes,
getting indeterminate tomatoes up here, getting cucumbers, melons.
All sorts of stuff like that will do really well.
And what's great is I'm six foot four. And I can actually walk under this,
which is like kind of a first for me in an arbor.
I'll probably hit my head on some cucumbers or some luffa or something, but man,
I really, really love it.
I think what is going to happen is I'm going to throw a path down in this area,
probably flagstone. I'm not quite sure yet.
But it'll come in and then this is where the original Epic Garden, "original",
all the raised beds are going to be.
So all the Birdies raised beds will eventually be here.
And then as you come through into this,
you're coming into the more natural landscaped planned orchard area.
Stoked about that arbor, baby!
And I really want to put in some pathways.
I'm getting this itch to just do home improvement projects, obviously, I guess.
But I've been marathoning episodes of This Old House,
all sorts of things on YouTube. If you have any good home improvement channels,
drop them down below.
But I wanted to give you guys some updates on just the general planning of the
whole space. So for electricity, I've got quotes out to get solar.
It probably is wrapping up with a new flat roof.
Cause this flat roof is 10 years old. They have a lifespan about 20,
it's patched up. There's like a hole in it still.
They didn't want to fix it when we were closing the deal on the house,
which made no sense to me, but it is what it is. And so I got some quotes out.
Lot of rebates here in California. So it's not going to be that bad.
And I think I'm looking to own it rather than loan it,
which just to me makes a little bit more sense,
especially given the way that things are going right now. So that's going on.
There are some sick rebates out there right now for, from SDG&E,
our local power company about electric heat pump water heaters.
And so there's a $400 rebate actually.
So I'm going to swap out my gas water heater for an electric heat pump one that
I can then power with the solar.
And the electric heat pump water heaters run really efficient. Like,
you pay off your energy cost on those in like a year and a half or so.
So the upfront cost is higher,
but the overall lifetime cost can be thousands lower over the course of five to
10 years. So it makes a lot of sense to do that. Now,
also on the rainwater collection. The well - done deal,
the well's not happening on this property, guys. I'm as bummed as you are.
But what I can do is I can get rebates from our water company for
rainwater barrels, cisterns. I can get rebates for the gutter system,
the downspout and something else. Something else in that world.
So all of that I can rebate out.
They're incentivized to help you use less water. I'm incentivized.
And I've also been researching greywater. What I would like to do,
in a perfect world the most easy one to do is your greywater for your laundry
system. There's a pretty standardized one that they also offer a rebate for.
But I'm thinking I want to do the kitchen sink and the shower, if possible.
I'm not certain how possible that is. My, in my invented world,
what I would like to do is have them all funnel into one main holding tank
that the rainwater mixes with and goes out into the yard in some fashion.
Now maybe I won't mix it. Maybe I'll have two separate holding tanks.
Those of you who know more than I do probably have some thoughts on that.
But I'm thinking why not collect it and install some pumps, if need be,
to get it all to one main holding area.
So most of the water that's going through from the city into my house,
is used in some way, and then goes back out. Most of that, if not all of that,
gets grey-watered out to water this budding landscape out here.
Perhaps the orchard or some sort of native pollinator patch,
something like that. So that's my thought on that.
And then the final thing I have for you in today's episode, sorry,
it's been going a little long, I'm a little jazzed right now,
is I ordered the shed. I got a 10 foot by 12 foot lean-to style shed.
The only problem is,
they're so backed up it's not going to get here until October 20th or something
like that. So it's like my Halloween surprise. The shed's ordered,
I'm stoked about it.
But really the focus now is building out some more gardens and quite frankly,
moving. I still haven't moved from the other place to this place here.
So I'm sleeping on an air mattress still.
So what I'm going to do now is probably head inside.
The mosquitoes are going to stop biting me. I'll clean up the house.
I'll start packing at the old house and pretty soon we'll be all moved in here.
Thank you so much for tuning in guys. Take care,
good luck in the garden and keep on growing.