Start a Grow Bag Garden and Water It EASILY

It's June 16th and I'm here at the Epic Urban Homestead with what I guess is the very first garden for the Epic Urban Homestead. It doesn't look like much, but it's a bunch of different grow bags. And what I want to do is it's not going to be a permanent garden that I'm about to make. It's going to be a makeshift version two, let's call it because the permanent garden, there's a lot to do with that. But what I'm going to do here is we're going to move it back behind me over to where the shed is and I'm going to lay down some landscape fabric, lay down some mulch and we're going to get a very basic rudimentary drip irrigation system set up for this grow bag garden. So without further ado, cultivate that like button for 20,000 pounds of grow bag harvests and let's get into the video. So the first thing I have to do is get rid of some of this foxtail barley. I'm going to lay down landscape fabric, but it doesn't make sense to lay it down right on top of that weed. So we're going to use one of these bad boys, which is pretty cool product. It's an action hoe and it just comes along at a 45 degree angle and just scrapes the surface of the ground. So we should make pretty quick work of this foxtail barley. Okay, so I've cleared out some of the foxtail barley. Is it perfect? No. But does it have to be? No. So we're good. Now I'm just going to try to level it really quickly with a rake so that when I lay the landscape fabric down, it isn't all bumpy. Then we'll lay the grow bags down and some mulch and see if we can get a little makeshift, somewhat pretty garden here at the Epic Urban Homestead. Like I said, it's not going to look like much. I don't even have the right tools. We're going to have to cut this landscape fabric with some pruning snips, but just affix one to one side so it doesn't blow over. Put something else on the other side, cut it up and let's go. Well I underbought my bark and it doesn't look the prettiest, but it's a good stopping point for today. When we come back, I'm going to be planting out some more grow bags, rearranging them, setting up drip irrigation and basically just giving the whole thing a facelift. But remember, when you start out, things just don't look that good. You get better, they look better. That's just the way it works. So I'm excited to bring you along as we improve this space step by step. And remember, this isn't even probably going to be here in a couple months. We're going to pot a couple of these grow bags up actually. And I've got some cool multicolored ones. We've got this nice green, red and a brown one just to spice it up. Sometimes the all black look needs a little bit of visual appeal, but let's go ahead and plant some out. We're back again with the grow bag garden. As you can see, I've prettied it up a little bit. I put some really rough, non-level wooden beams across just to create a nice little grid, almost like a playground. And I put the wood chips inside and I've arranged the grow bags maybe like four by five. So it should be about 20 that can fit in here. But what I want to show you now, more interesting than the layout is the irrigation system because I know a lot of people get confused by that. And this is a pretty cool one that should work really well. So my hose line is coming around here and what we've got here is a splitter. So if I want to, I can put another hose here and just use an actual spray nozzle. So these have on off, oops, well, I guess you found out what they have. They've got on off valves, which is great. And then I've got a backflow preventer, a 25 or 15. Yeah, there it is. 15 PSI pressure regulator going into the one half inch mainline tubing. So here's your connector. So you have your thread and then this just jams in and that actually has a tight seal, which always has puzzled me, but it actually works. So then as we go over here, I've just taken some little stakes and roomed it slightly. And then as we go over here, what you have, so I have a T split going into a 90 elbow, which just runs down here like this. Now what I do is I punch in with a little hole punch, which you have right here. And then what you do is you take your quarter inch drip coming up into the middle of the grow bag, just like that. Oops. And here is an adjustable 360 degree spray nozzle. So I can turn this based on how much pressure I want to go out. So what I need to do now is set up the rest of these and then I can test it out. Alrighty. I got most of these set up and these are really nice. It's a 360 degree sprayer, basically just loosens and loosens. So the pressure can come through and so you can control the spray. So I can turn it all the way off or pretty close to all the way up if I want. So if I'm watering, I can come out and say, Oh hey, this okra wants a lot of water. These flowers though, they don't really need a lot. So I can shut that off for now. So I can do a little conditional if I want to, although that's still manual. But really what's nice is just all the way down the line, we have water coming out. So tomorrow we're going to put these on drip. So I'm pretty stoked about this. I have to put a lot more grow bags in here as well as connect them all to drip and then connect that all to an automatic solar timer. So sun's getting low. We're going to come back tomorrow and finish that job. So I popped in 20 grow bags into this garden, variety of colors, variety of grow bag styles and manufacturers, all of which will be linked in the video description. But what's really cool is I've tested out a bunch of things. You can see I have corn here. I have zinnias and salvia. I've got a pretty nice looking jalapeno plant over there. We even have a key lime tree in a grow bag. This is just one of many examples of quick, dirty and easy gardens that you can set up. I have many more on the channel that I encourage you to check out in some of these links that you'll see showing up. But until next time guys, I have a garden up and growing at the new homestead. I'm excited about it. Hope you are too. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.