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This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com that have another exciting episode for you.
We’re here in Irvine California and we’re here at the Orange County Great Park here
at Irvine, California. Now I did come to the Great Park prior about a year ago to make
an episode on their demonstration gardens here and today we’re back to show you of
what’s growing on here. So besides the carousel, which is actually free, and the hot air balloon
ride that you can go on that is also free, which is actually closed today due to high
winds, which you may be hearing in the mike, they have an edible garden section. So if
you come here, you not only want to visit those attractions, but also be sure to visit
the gardening area where they will teach you how to grow your own food at home.
Anyways, next, let’s head over to the gardening area to show you how they’re growing food,
and how you can do it, too. Now we’re here at the farm and food lab
at the Orange County Great Park, and this is where they have their demonstration, raised
bed gardens and also show a variety of techniques that you can grow some food at home. In addition
to what they’re showing here, they also have regular classes where they teach the
public for free how to grow food. And actually, they had a class just this morning on planting
out the summer crop, because now it’s just about past the official frost date for Southern
California, and you can start planting out your tomatoes and peppers and other crops.
Now, Northern California and other parts of the US are definitely soon to follow, so I’m
really excited about that. To learn more about the classes here at the
Orange County Great Park, visit their website: ocgp.org.
Now, what we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna go into the farm area and I’m gonna show
you some techniques that they’re doing that may be able to help you grow more food at
home. This is the farm and food lab, and it’s
growing the farm from 2 acres to 100 acres. This farm and food lab is currently 2 acres,
but they have the plan to expand this to 100 acres. And it says here that they “celebrate
the agricultural heritage by bringing food production back to this land”. Now, think
about it: Orange County back in the was like all orange groves and a lot of farmers here,
but now the farmers have moved and the big cities, and people, and Disney Land has moved
in now. So this area is teaching people how to their food, and they’re going to expand
this. They’re gonna have a lot of “demonstration gardens, agricultural fields” and even a
tree farm. I think I saw some fruit trees planted in an area in the drive up.
This is my second visit to the Great Park, and actually maybe an episode about a year
ago I showed it. But we’re gonna show you some new things that I didn’t cover in the
last episode, that’s new since I last visited, and also some other cool techniques that are
gonna help you grow more food at home. So first, let’s go over here and check out
some of their raised beds. In this raised bed, what they’re teaching is what I teach:
this square foot garden method. Now, this is an oversized square foot garden. It’s
probably, like, 8 feet by 16 feet. I recommend, definitely usually, like, starting out with
a 4 foot by 4 foot, or a 4 foot by 6 foot. So, 4 foot by 6, 4 by 10, 4 by 12. I like
to make my beds 4 feet wide, because if you’re on either side of the 4 foot wide, you could
reach in and reach in two feet, so you don’t have to get into the bed, and step on and
compact the soil. In the Square Foot Gardening method, we planting
things closer together than what’s recommended on the back of the seed packet, so you can
grow as much food as possible. And that’s what I’m really into, you know. I teach
production, home gardening. Not like, you know, a garden for a hobby. I’m teaching
gardening so that you can actually eat out of it and eat every day from, like the episode
just a few times ago where I’m teaching you how to grow sprouts that you can eat and
harvest on it every single day to have easily one pound of sprouts a day in your own home,
even if it’s not spring time where you live. In any case, in this raised bed garden, looks
like they have some great things growing. Look like they got some broccoli, cauliflower,
some celery, some cabbage, some different colored chards here. Oh, here’s a neon glow
chard. Actually I wonder if that glows in the dark. Some fennel, and other things. Oh,
and another thing I want to cover today is the unique, trellising ways that they’re
showing here. Especially if you’re growing the square foot method, you’re gonna pack
the plants in really tight and close. So that means you want to let them grow up because
you have a lot of air space and you may not have a lot of real estate to let the plants
sprawl out like they would like to if they were growing in a field.
So, here’s a really easy trellis system you can use. They basically sunk just two
sticks in the ground, one on either side, and they’re using some concrete remesh.
The remesh is very inexpensive at your local Big Box hardware store, and they got the remesh
fashioned to the stakes with just some simple zip ties. So this makes a very quick and easy
trellis that you can put up to support your plants at actually relatively low costs.
Let’s move on and check out some other trellises they’re using here.
So here’s yet another trellis system they’re using to trellis up their grapes, but you
could easily use a system like this to trellis up your tomatoes, or even cucumbers. Once
again, they’re using your standard stakes. They got them sunk into the ground, probably
about, I don’t know, 6 foot spacing, or 5 foot spacing between them. And around the
end here, they’ve got a hole basically drilled though the middle here and they basically
put some bailing wire through it and they run it all the way down probably about every
foot, and right here once again they drilled a hole right through the stake and they feed
the wire through the hole all the way to another one where they drilled yet another hole and
then finally they go round and feed it through the hole and wrap it around. So in this way,
you can make a very simple and affordable trellis to grow your produce items vertically
with some stakes and only some bailing wire. If you want to take it a notch up, you can
go ahead and get something like this. This is, like, the galvanized piping. They would
use this kind of pipe for, you know, plumbing and whatnot. The piping is definitely going
to cost you a bit more money, but it’s definitely a lot more durable. As you can see here, they’re
just using some eyehooks, with some holes in there to hold the wire. The top has, you
know, just some connectors with a real pipe to hold this a lot more stable. So on this
one, they have an apple tree growing espalier style. So, you know, the apples may get a
bit heavier than the grapes, so this is a more heavy-duty construction.
What you chose to do at your house is completely up to you. If you have a lot of money, if
you want to look it nicer, more maintenance free, then use the metal. If you don’t have
quite as much money and want it more temporary – so you’re renting a place – hey, just
do the stakes and the bailing wire. That’ll definitely last a long time, too.
In this raised bed, they’re currently planting out for the summer time, because, you know,
now it’s past the frost date, so they’re planting things like peppers, eggplants, and
tomatoes. But what we’re gonna look at is over by this bed. This is the ethnic garden.
So the two points I want to let you guys know about is, you know, number one is, you want
to grow ethnic foods, or different varieties than what you’re used to. You know, if you
wanna get iceberg lettuce, you can go to the grocery and buy iceberg lettuce. But what
about deer tongue lettuce, or red speckled lettuce, or, you know, all the different kinds
of lettuces? They’re over, over a hundred varieties, and probably even more varieties
of lettuce that you can grow. And every plant is like that. There’s many
different varieties of peppers, tomatoes, and other things, and even ethnic varieties
of crops. So in this area they have some of those. See, here’s one called Sierre red
lettuce, here’s some cauliflower, here’s one of my favorites, that prickly pear cactus.
These have some nice spikes, you can use these spike as toothpicks. But I like this plant
for the cactus right there. The cactus fruits, they’re rich in antioxidants and are really
good. Some people say they may be good for diabetes and things like that. Here’s some
lemon grass,(unknown), here’s ginger. That’s amazing. This ginger has probably been in
the ground over the winter here in Southern California. Dwarf Greek oregano, even a pomegranate
tree growing in a container inside this raised bed as well.
The other thing I really want to touch on is this fencing around it. So, you know, even
if you have a raised bed, you have cats, you know, or rabbits or other small little vermin
that would get into your raised bed and eat your crops. All it takes is this, you know,
some chicken wire. This is about two feet tall, and some stakes. And, once again, they
got the handy-dandy zip ties to tie it together and just to put a fence around it so that
cats and other small animals won’t get into your raised bed to eat the food you’re growing.
Besides the regular raised beds in the ground, right, they have easy access gardens. And
I like easy access things. These happen to be easy access raised bed gardens. So these
are literally elevated off the ground, you can see they built them with some four by
four posts and they got the bottoms on these. So this is a nice height, so, like, if you’re
in a wheelchair, can’t bend over, you know, these will take a bit more time and energy
in materials to build than a raised bed in the ground, but these can be beneficial if
you don’t wanna bend or have things like animals or, you know, bugs and pests get into
your raised bed. So, once again, this is about maybe three
feet, four feet wide and have a variety of things planted in here. And it’s about a
foot deep. So, in general, I recommend you make your raised beds a foot deep on average.
Could be less but it could be more, but in general 12 inches is definitely deep enough.
So, I like that they’re showing, you know, all these different ways of growing food.
Next, let’s show you one of the most unique ways they’re growing food here at the Orange
County Great Park. One of the coolest they’re doing here is
they’re using these guys to grow strawberries. These are literally planting towers. Now they’re
growing strawberries in here but I see that these could also be used for other crops such
as herbs or lettuce. I wouldn’t grow any like tomatoes in here, but maybe even some
small peppers would do well in a system like this.
Basically, this is growing smart. This system will allow you to put literally 30 plants
in just a, you know, few square feet of space by using this setup. You know, I’ve shown
other systems like this made out of Styrofoam when I was in Florida, but I like this one,
cause it’s made out of plastic, and they have some nice holes here that you can actually
run your drip tubing into. And you basically mount all this to a standard pipe that you
could get at your local home improving store. So, it looks like they’re growing two varieties
of strawberries. They’ve got the San Andreas variety and the Benicia variety of strawberries,
and just check out all these plants. And some of these plants loaded up with strawberries.
So, if you want to have a strawberry garden, this is definitely an excellent way to do
it. And here’s what one of these containers
look like. They’re just like this. They’re a pot that you could basically stagger and
stack. So, as you stack them up, you have more growing space. And I’d probably go
maybe six or seven tall to have 36 or 42 growing sites. To learn more about this product, that
I’ve seen for the first time, you could visit their website: eggrotower.com. They’re
in Paso Robles, California, 88866253-48. So yes, like these a lot, and maybe they’ll
even sponsor me and send me a couple kits. So here’s another garden I want to show
you guys. It’s called the hay bale garden. It’s very simple to make a hay bale garden.
All you simply do is, you take some hay, you basically make it into a square, you fill
up the center with some hay or some compost. Then you water it, you water it good for about
10 days. It’ll start breaking down and decaying. Then, what I would do is, I would throw some
additional compost on top and then plant in that compost. And as you can see, in this
garden here, they have a variety of crops from broccoli, chard, marigolds, oregano,
spinach, onions, and it looks really great. And they have just a soaker hose in there,
all just soaking the area, to water all the plants. And in addition to the animal protection,
they put some stakes, once again, with some chicken wire, some zip ties, and over the
top, they put some standard bird netting to keep all the animals out so that their crops
will remain safe. They have some nestersions in little containers
here, and then they have a little trellis that it grows up, and then onto this big,
larger frame with the, built by 2 by 4 and 4 by 4 posts and some remesh. Once again,
remesh is very cheap and an easy way to give you the rustic look if you wanna grow vertically
in your garden. Now, I’d highly encourage you to grow something like the nestersions.
Not only will it attract the beneficial insects, like the bees, but these are also edible.
You could pick the flowers, are great to dress up on salad. They have a nice spicy flavour,
and what many people don’t know is that you can also harvest the leaves. If you’re
gonna harvest the leaves, I would encourage you to harvest the young baby leaves, and
they’re actually a lot more spicier than the flowers themselves. Wow, and it’s actually
an incredible scent down here. And there’s many varieties of nestersions to meet all
your colour specifications. So I’ve saved the best for last, and that’s
their container garden area. This area lets you know that you can grow even in small spaces.
Say you have a patio, or you rent an apartment, you don’t have a lot of space, you can still
grow food in small spaces. And I’m gonna show you next how you can do that. Here’s
just a standard wine barrel, or half whiskey barrel. And this is a Valencia orange tree
planted in the half barrel here. And you can see, I mean, this is Orange County, after
all. This thing is loaded up with a whole bunch of oranges.
So, while container culture is not optimal for trees, certain trees will do well in small
containers. So you wanna check with your local tree farmer or nurseryman to ask them what
trees are gonna grow best for you in a container if that’s what you need to do.
Anyways, let’s move on, and check out some other containers they’re growing in over
here. Even something as simple as a little bucket, you know, that you’re maybe gonna
wash your car with, whether it’s metal or plastic, you can grow some food. I mean, this
is like, almost like one square foot of space. And in here we have some lemon balm. The lemon
balm is growing really well, and if you are growing in small containers like this, I would
generally recommend something like herbs. Herbs are pretty much gonna do well wherever
you put them. And also, don’t forget, you need to pop some holes in the bottom for drainage.
But, I wouldn’t necessarily put any rocks at the bottom, but I may put some kind of
fabric so that it, the holes don’t get clogged up.
In addition, here’s just another galvanized pail or bucket here, a lot larger, maybe a
smaller, like, watering trough, or something, for animals. But they got a little, mini garden
in here. They got sorrel in here. Now once again, this sorrel is delicious, has a nice
lemony flavor. Besides the sorrel, they got some lemon thyme, some sage, and some onion
chives. And this is only a small container. So remember, you can grow a lot in even a
small container. Over in this side, they’re showing how you
can just grow a few strawberry plants in a similar sized container. In addition, they’re
showing some animal protection. So this thing they made very simply out of some welded wire,
and they strapped on some, like, bird netting on top with some tie wraps, form this to the
shape of the container, and they can easily put this over the container so that the animals
can’t get in, or the birds can’t get in to eat the crops. So if you have cats or other
animals, you could always make something really easy like this to keep the animals out so
that you’ll get to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Normally, I’d talk about a raised bed garden as a four foot by four foot, but maybe you
don’t have four feet by four feet, which I would recommend. Say you only got three
feet by three feet. Well, hey, that’s alright. You can build a three by three garden, and
that’s what they’re showing right here. This is a three foot by three foot garden.
And these are just using, like, fence boards, you know, to build a fence out of. And they
got some two by two as the corner brackets. So, very easy and simple construction, very
easy to do. And they have this sectioned off in this square foot gardening style, so they
got these little pieces of wood here to denote each square. They got nine squares in this
garden. And in each square they planted something different.
Here’s they have terracotta. It looks like it didn’t do too good. Lemon thyme, garlic
chives, oregano, sweet marjoram, sage, and hopefully these purple oregano. Actually,
I grew that one. It took over. Here’s one rosemary. So say you don’t want to in the
raised bed. You could actually just put a pot in your raised bed and use the same drip
irrigation that feeds the rest of your crops. In addition, they have a nice large pot in
the middle to make this look real pretty, and they’re growing some yellow calendulas
in here for looks, and also to give this garden some depth. They’ve also added some accent
on the side, like some little fence posts just for decoration.
What we’re looking at now is a blueberry orchard. Yes, and the blueberry orchard is
all in pots. These pots are eighteen inches by eighteen inches by eighteen inches deep
and that’s a minimum width and dimensions I would recommend if you wanna grow blueberries
in a container. Now the reason why they are growing blueberries
in a container is because here in Orange County and here in this spot, they have alkaline
soil, and the blueberries like acidic soil. So if you, if you have to grow something that
needs a different soil type than what you are, you could basically put that soil type
in a container. So, you could keep it acidic so these blueberries will thrive. These blueberries
look really nice. They’re pushing out lots of flowers and are probably gonna have lots
of fruit on them. But the big problem with blueberries is the birds, so I’m sure later
this year they’re gonna come up with some cool bird netting setup to keep the birds
out so that they’ll be able to enjoy their blueberries this year.
But here are the last two raised beds I want to show you guys. And this here, this could
be considered a raised bed garden, but also a container garden. You could easily build
something like this and put a bottom on it to grow it in your patio if you can’t grow
it in the ground, or even just put it over concrete if you have enough soil depth. This
is basically a two by six garden made out of some two by sixes. Stacked up, one on top
of the other, so we got a depth of 12 inches, and with some two by two posts on the edge,
and really, this is a two foot by four foot bed.
In addition, over by this raised bed, once again, this is a two foot by four foot raised
bed. This is showing an easy way to keep the animals out, from whether it’s cats or skunks
or rabbits. You know, you can easily build a framing out of the two by two with some
standard bird netting and staple it all together. And when you want to work on your raised bed
you could literally just move this off. And, you know, you could build one two by two,
or even, you could build one four by four if you’re having problems with animals getting
into your raised bed. And when you’re done working on your bed, guess what? Just put
it back down to cover your raised bed to keep it all safe so that you’ll be enjoying your
food, and not your local wallaby. There are many things you can grow food in,
one of which is just an old wheelbarrow. So, this wheelbarrow has a flat tire. So, maybe
they got another wheelbarrow, maybe this was going to be thrown out as garbage, but guess
what? The wheelbarrow, once you pop a few holes in the bottom, is a great space to grow
plants in. In this one, they’re actually growing a whole heap of onions. The onions
are doing really well in this wheelbarrow, and I want to encourage you to always literally
think outside the box, outside the raised bed box, and use things around your house
that will hold soil that you can grow food in, whether it’s an old laundry tub, whether
it’s an old dish tub, whether it’s an old igloo, or, you know, old storage thing
that you’d store your clothes in underneath your bed. Basically, as long as it will hold
soil, you put some holes in it, it’ll grow some food as well for you.
The last thing I’m going to show you guys today at the Great Park is what they’re
growing against their hurricane fencing that leads to the outside, to the parking lot,
actually. And what they’re growing along their hurricane fencing are some, this is
apricot trees. They’re growing these espalier style on a single plane. So instead of the
trees branching out in this direction, they’re having them all go one direction. And I always
wanna encourage you to use all the available space in your garden whether it’s your fence
space, or whether it’s your space inside your garden, you could always grow something.
And fruit trees are excellent to grow. They’re relatively much lower maintainence than planting
a vegetable garden, and you could also train them how you want them. But it does some work
to train them properly to make them grow up this fence.
Now, if you do have fencing, I would encourage you to put up some kind of fencing that has
holes in it, because that lets the light through. Solid wood doesn’t let the light through
and things might not grow quite as well. In any case, I hope you’ve enjoyed this
episode here at the Orange County Great Park, and you’ve learned a few things that will
help you grow more food at home. Once again, my name is John Kohler with GrowingYourGreens.com.
We’ll see you next time, and keep on growing!