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Alright! this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, and today we're in suburbia. Its summer time
here in California, as you can see. Here in the suburb a lot of people have lawns, and,
you know, even if you're out watering your lawn in the hot summer heat it turns brown
and doesn't look so nice, and, you know, lawns are pretty much a waste of resources here.
You can see a lot of other houses here in suburbia. Lawns are a waste of resources.
So, why don't you come on and I'll show you what I've done here. Lawns are pretty much
a waste of resources, you know. They waste a lot of water, especially water that waters
lawn, like overhead sprinklers. Sometimes people will put out their sprinklers, they'll
water, and by the time they come back and that waters running down the street which
is definitely wasting water, and, you know, we want to conserve the earths resources these
days. So, you know, let's show you what I got. I'm using drip irrigation so it's only
watering at the roots of each plant, and, you know, I want to show you some of the other
houses in my neighborhood here, and I want to show you what you can do with your front
yard and your front lawn. So come on, and I'll talk more about it. Why did I choose
to have a suburban home and grow my own food? There's a couple reasons. Number 1, I want
to save money. So, it's going to save money by growing my own food. The other thing is
that it's going to save resources. Now only am I saving water resources, you know, not
having to put chemicals or pesticides or herbicides or anything on my lawn, to keep, you know,
the weeds at bay. The other reason is for environmental reasons. So, I could eat local.
I mean, there's nothing more local than opening your front door, stepping out 5 feet, grabbing
some kale, and eating it. My kale does not have to travel thousands of miles. If you're
in New York or somewhere in the Midwest, a lot of the food is grown here in California.
So, it's picked, it's hydrocooled, it's shipped, and in that shipping process, you're losing
nutrition. You're also losing life force, or the quality of the food, you're losing
some of the taste, definitely, because guess what? When I taste old kale, it tastes really,
really bitter to me, and I think my kale, some of it is so sweet, it's as sweet as lettuce.
So, you can see we're coming up on my house here, and you can see in the front of my house
is all raised beds, and in the front here, I'm growing peppers, melba spinach, and then
we have (unclear) and tomatoes in the back, and I have a nice armor here that todays project
was we're hanging some planters form the top and we ran irrigation up there so we're maybe
going to hang strawberries or we're maybe going to try cucumbers or some kind of (unclear)
to vine off and hang down so that you can hang it and fill in. I'm really about maximizing
the use of the space to grow more food, you know. I mean, in the time of the world wars,
there were victory gardens, and I think we should get back that fact that we should have
victory gardens and we should have our own foods. I mean, not in the time of war, well,
I think we are in war, aren't we, I don't know, but in any case we should all be growing
our own food anytime. I mean, even to save carbon emissions. The food has to travel,
it takes resources to grow that food in California, you know, petroleum products, fuel, they need
to get picked, and then they acierated or trucked across the country. You're losing
nutrition, and you're also wasting a lot of, you know, environmental- there's a big environmental
impact on food that is not local. So, you can see in this front bed here I'm growing
a lot of what's called square-foot gardening methods. So, in square-foot gardening you
take, basically, a whole big area and then you just divide it off into 1 foot sections,
and then that 1 foot section you could grow a certain number of plants. So, for example,
in a 1-foot section I'm growing 1 tomato plant, or here's some arugula, and this wild arugula
actually took one whole square. When I planted it, it wasn't that big, but they definitely
fill out. I have basil in one square. I mean, back here we have 4 Bok chois in 1 square.
So, you can see some things you can plant more tightly than others. Why don't we come
back here a little bit and show you. So, if you want to get a look down the side of the
property you could see a whole bunch of the raised beds. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and
then the 8th one going in the underhand of my house, and I'm on approximately 1/10th
of and acre. So, this is what you could do in 1/10th of acre. I mean, I don't even have
a whole acre; I have 1/10th of an acre. So, you could grow a lot of food in 1/10th of
an acre. I mean, this is more than enough to feed a family of 4. Probably even more
than that. So, why don't you come on back and we'll show you what I got here. So, in
this bed we have, you know, it's basically a 4-foot bed, about 15 feet, and this is just
a melon patch. So, we have melons vining and in this bed I think we have 'em, probably,
there's about 70 melon plants. Every 1 square foot is a melon plant, and normally melons
like to vine out and be really long and take a lot of land space, but when you trellis
them up, you know, you could really save space and grow more tightly. So, you can see here
that's a crane melon, you know, that's going to be ripening up hopefully pretty soon. Here's
another kind of melon over here. They're all just hanging in there. It's really cool, and
this bed here, it's about 40 feet long by about 4 feet wide. I have a lot of dino kale,
and a lot of kale, and actually we're about to replant this. Actually, every 6 feet I
have some fruit trees. When we come up back here, this next bed is the green bed and we
have things like apola Navaho cabbage, and some lettuce, and we have some hoops on here
so we can put some cover over it so it won't get too hot. The next bed over here we basically
have some pepper plants and then some squash plants. The squash plant actually takes a
3x3 area, so you can't plant them as densely but they put on a lot of squash, plenty of
food, and here's a really cool one. Check this one out. This one's a banana squash and,
I mean, this one, this thing is so huge. I don't even know how much it weighs right now.
This thing's got to be- oh, man, like 30 pounds worth of banana squash there. So, we have
them on trellises, you know. Normally they would be viney type plant and they would like
to vine out and have a lot of space, but when you don't have a lot of space, like in this
situation I have 1/10th of an acre, you know, you have to grow on a trellis and grow vertical
to use the space wisely. This next bit here has been very successful. We have lots of
cucumber plants and the cucumber plats are planted every 6 inches, and you can see some.
They're all in here, and you know, once again we've trained them to go up and that's actually
working really well, and the last bed here we have is just our green bed. So, this is
just a mixed green bed. One of the things I really like to talk about right now is the
tree collards. I'm sorry, tree kale. So, the tree kale, basically I've had these for 3
years now and they've never gone to seed. So, they just keep putting off leaves indefinitely.
Some of the leaves get actually nice and big, and this is a sweeter variety of kale that
actually makes excellent eating. So, I have those planted along the edges to keep some
of the things in the middle of the bed cooler and shaded off, but, yea, really, I really,
really, really want you to know that you can grow, you know, your own food in even as little
as 1/10th of an acre, or even less. Just start out by some raised beds. I happen to have
filled my lawn, and, you know, it's saving me water, it's saving me money, it's having
my- I'm getting a higher quality of food than I could buy anywhere, it's less transportation,
less global impact, and, you know, everybody should do this. Most people's lawns just sit
there. Most people don't use their lawns; it's just for like a show. Lawns were, from,
you know, like in the olden days when there's royalty, and royalty in England had big lawns
to show their estate, that they were rich, and nowadays, like in the '50s that kind of
got transferred into houses and making lawns, and then your neighbor has a awn and you want
to have a lawn, too, but with all the resources they take these days, lawns are just plain
dumb. So, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens. Hopefully I've encouraged you to start growing
your own food, and you could definitely grow your own food. It's really easy.