Garden With Me: Watering, Transplanting, Multi-Sowing, & Dragon Fruit

Welcome back to the Epic Gardening channel, my friends. We are sitting in front of a ton of seedlings here. I figured I would do another garden with me episode. You know, it's been kind of a crazy week, kind of a crazy year. Let's just be honest with ourselves. And so, you know, most of the time here on Epic Gardening, it's a focused video on a specific type of plant or pest, but every so often I like to do a longer form video. And the goal is to just kind of get as much of my tips out to you guys as possible. While hopefully you also throw some headphones in and go out in the garden and do it yourself. So in today's video, we're talking about transplanting, some of these seedlings that we grew in the last garden with me episode. We'll talk about hardening off and fertilizing and all sorts of little tips that have to do with that. We'll probably do a little watering and maintenance. And at the very end, we just might talk a little bit about this shed back here and do some dragon fruit. So without further ado, cultivate that Like button. And I will personally bestow upon you an Epic amount of Garden Zen, which I think we all need. And let's get into the video. The first thing we are doing is taking this kale, taking some of these leftover starts here, as well as some starts that I picked up at a local nursery. And we're going to prep them for transplant. Now, the first thing you want to do, at least in my opinion, is give them a nice water. When you get them out of these cells here, if the soil's dry, it's just going to crumble and fall apart and expose the roots. And if you can, you might as well pull that block out. You might have to tease the roots out a little bit, but not too much. And that way it's just a whole lot easier to do. So I always come through, we'll grab our hose out a little bit further here. There we go. And I just give a nice amount of moisture to every single tray, just to make sure that that soil is nice and hydrated. So I just don't have any problems messing with the root system too much. I mean, they can take a little bit of abuse depending on the plant, but why, why risk it if you don't have to? You know, in a natural environment, these plants would have grown directly in the ground. They really wouldn't have been transplanted. So this is what I like to do. And now the other thing I'll say is you got to remember when you watch an Epic Gardening video, I'm in zone 10b and I'm always doing my best to adapt to just a multitude of different climates, different advice for different climates. What you do have to do when you're transplanting is a process called hardening off. Now in zone 10b, my daytime and nighttime temperatures are high enough that I really don't have to worry about this process. But let's just explain it really briefly. So let's say you're starting your seeds in the shed, in a greenhouse, indoors, and you then immediately take them when they're about, about this tall and you put them right into the garden. It's not a good recipe for success because you've effectively taken, let's just say a character from that movie WALL-E where they're like kind of floating around on these chairs and they get everything delivered right to them. It's that type of plant. And then when you put it in the garden, it's like saying, okay, run a hundred mile, a hundred yard dash as quickly as you possibly can. It's not a recipe for success. They're going to be shocked. They're not going to be used to that new environment or that new amount of stress as far as light, temperature, wind, sun, whatever. And so what you have to do again is a process called hardening off. And so let's imagine this over here is indoors and this section is outdoors. And I want to harden off this tray right here. What I would do is the first day I'd bring it outdoors about an hour, hour or two, bring it back indoors. Next day, two to three hours. Next day, three to four, four to five, five to six. So about a week or so is the hardening off period. Eventually you get to about eight to 10 hours worth of exposure to the outside temperatures in which it would actually be planted. And that plant or these seedlings could be considered hardened off seedlings, which means they are hardy to the environment that they're going in. So let's imagine I did that because again, I could start these seeds outdoors right now. It wouldn't be a big deal because I'm in such a warm climate. That's not the norm. Most of you are in colder climates. So you do have to consider that process. So now that we've watered these in, I've got my fertilizer, which I'll talk about in a second. I've got a little knife here just to pry them out. Let's go out into the front yard and plant them up. Out here in the front yard in one of the few raised beds that I have filled up. I have soil coming in pretty soon. Very excited to get this raised bed started. But before we transplant in, I do want to show you these lettuce right here and a little bit about thinning out some plants. If you look really carefully, you can see there's one, two, three, four lettuce plants just in this little cluster. And that's just simply too many lettuce. As you can see, I have a triangular spacing here, which is roughly one every four inches offset. And so there's about four inches between each of these. That's fine. That's perfect. It's just simply too much to have four emanating from one area. So what I do is you want to isolate the strongest one. So that would be this guy right here. And then you're going to come in and it can be painful, but you do have to clip these off. Now what's cool about lettuces, these are now little baby lettuce greens that I can take in for a little micro salad or something. But again, we've got one here. You can see, this one started out with one and look how much better it's growing compared to this one that was competing with four other seedlings. Likewise over here, I need to isolate which one is the best. Sometimes you can't really tell, but clearly this one's not that good. So that's going. We're going to take this guy out right here. Looks like we have two left. So I'm going to take the one out that does not have a damaged, that does have a damaged leaf. So this one goes cause this one had a little bit of damage on it. So I've hopefully left, Oh, there's actually even one more. So I'm going to remove this one here too. So now we're back down to one over there and we just repeat that process over here as well. So I'm going to go down the line here. One important tip when you're doing this is don't pull them out. You really do want to use some micro tip pruners or something like that. Cause if you pull them out and you're leaving a plant in, you have the chance that pulling those roots out upsets the root system of the plant that you've left in. Next up, let's get our seedlings into the ground. And so what I'm doing here is basically just trying to get them in without disturbing them as much as I possibly can. So the things that you're probably going to need, some sort of trowel. So I've got a little trowel here. I have a knife. I mean, this is just the style of tray I like to use. Many of you have seen it before. It's called the Grohe Starter Tray. It's from Gardener's Supply Company. And so it's got these nice blocks of soil here. But if I was to pull it out by the plant, that'd be a terrible idea. So what you want to do is I like to at least come in from the side, just like this, give it a little bit of a pressure move and pull it right out. And that you can see why you water, because if I didn't water, all that would have fallen away. And I really don't want that to happen. And so we have it out, right? You don't need to do too much with it. I'm going to select a spot for it. So we'll go right here, move some soil aside with our trowel. Now this has been an interesting experiment for me because this soil mix is actually a 50% compost mix, which is somewhat high, I would say. Now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to put some starter fertilizer in. This is a 433 from Espoma Organic. It's their biotone starter. So it's got some mycorrhizal fungal inoculants. It's got a lot of stuff in there that's going to help stave off that transplant shock. I don't get very precise with this. I just kind of like to sprinkle it in. And then what I'll do is I'll take my little plant, I'll snug it up. You can bury them slightly deeper than you would think for many plants. Oftentimes you can bury them to roughly around where the seed leaves come out. So I'll do that in closeup on the next one. Again, we want to move away a bit of soil here, just like that. We'll sprinkle a little bit of our biotone in there from Espoma. And this one I will put in, I think a kale. So off the camera right now, I'm just selecting a kale. This might be dazzling blue kale. It's a problem of not labeling. Total fool over here. But again, look, let me brush this aside. So we're going to drop it in. It's a little bit lower. That's fine. Cause remember, look at where these seed leaves start. Seed leaves starts right there and right there. It's okay from my experience and as well as Charles Dowding's. I learned this from Charles Dowding is you can bury it slightly deeper and not only do you get a little more rigidity if you have some wind, some rain, something like that, but you just get a bit more of a sturdy plant. So I'm not like slamming down on this soil, but I am giving it a little bit of a compress. Now I don't thin it out until I know if one of these fails to take. So if I was to thin it out, I'd be selecting this guy right here as the only one left. So I'd be taking this one and I'd be taking this one out right, or excuse me, this one out right here. I'll just give it a day or two, see if any of these start to look weird. And then from there I'll come in and thin it. One thing I will say as we transplant any seedlings here is this is an experimental soil mix. So this is 50% compost, 50% potting soil. I wanted to see if I could sort of just use some stuff that I had instead of creating my own mix. And to be honest with you, the results aren't as good as they seemed like they might be. Check out those, those roots on that lettuce. It's really nice. So that lettuce is going to go in right here and look beautiful. Now the reason why is because the compost I got, it's great compost. It's from the Miramar Greenery here in San Diego, which is just a municipality and you can go and load up compost. So I have that. Probably it's great compost, but it's very fine grained. And so it's not, it's definitely not soil. Soil you need a mixture of soil particles from clay to sand to silt. This is more in that silty range. So it's somewhat fine, not really clay, somewhere in the middle. And honestly, it just wasn't, it wasn't a great mixture with potting soil because it compacts a little bit too much. And so that's some of the struggle that I've run into in this bed. It was an experiment. Turns out the experiment didn't work out too well. Fortunately, it's not that hard to fix. If I have some struggles with these crops right here, all I'll do is add in maybe some rice hulls or some perlite, something that has a loosening effect into the first top six inches of soil and I'll be completely fine. Seeds are in. It is just time to water. Now a lot of you have asked in the past what this rain wand is and that's what it is. It's called a Dram One Touch. It puts out this highly satisfying spray pattern of water. Puts out a lot of water, so you have to be careful. Sometimes you want to come up a little higher, but I'm really pleased with it. I've got long arms. I want to be able to reach and access different parts of my garden easily. And I find that it does a pretty good job there. So again, the Dram One Touch, no sponsor or anything. It's just a nice little product here. Might as well get the rest of this garden. Some of these plants in the back here were transplanted in. This grape columnar basil has been on quite a journey. It's been transplanted four times. That's why you see a lot of dead leaves down here. But all in all I think it's been doing pretty well. I've been really pleased with it. The lemongrass didn't do so hot on a transplant. Again, that was a double transplant as I've been moving things around this year in the garden. But hopefully we'll have a lot of new stuff starting pretty soon here as the soil gets delivered for the rest of the front yard garden. Those of you who have been watching the channel for a while know this device right here. It's a nice little vertical planter called a green stalk, the green stalk garden. I used to grow beans in this all throughout the summer. I'd have beans and what you do is, let's say south is this way, that's the direction of the sun. You want to rotate it. So I'd come in and I'd just rotate it maybe once a day, 180 degrees, and every single side would get an amazing amount of sunlight and thus you'd have a huge bean harvest. Now beans, not in season right now. So we're doing what you can see here is beets and chard. And in fact, I'll show you in a second, but I want to talk a little bit about what's called multi-sowing. It's a technique that I learned again from Charles Dowding, one of my gardening mentors. But first let's water it in. I want to show you how that works. So the system is comprised of these horizontal rings. So you've got one and I have five of them down here. And if you look really closely, what you'll see, hopefully you can see is three, four and five up here. So you can put as many of these as you want up to five. So what I do is I just fill it up like this up until roughly about the four mark. Because in the center here, there's a little downspout. And what that does is that pulls water down through every single one of these at the same time so that you don't have an oversaturation up here and an undersaturation at the bottom, which is a really clever feature. And I think kind of like the killer feature of a system like this, that's really the weakness of a lot of vertical systems. And the GreenStalk seems to counter that. So look, I'm almost up at the five level here, just a little bit lower. So I'm going to go ahead and turn that off and we'll let this water down. While we're watering in, let me show you what I mean by this multi-sowing technique. So we have some beets here. Looks like I just broke that one off. That's okay. But take a look. You've got one, two, three beets right next to each other. Now what's wrong with that? Well, you might say that this is crowding out and these beets aren't going to survive. They're not going to do that well. They're not going to bulb up that well. That turns out really not to be the case. What you can start to do is see which one is starting to win the race. And this one seems to be the case, right? So if I was to pull this maybe in two weeks or so when it's bulbed up a little bit, I got a nice, decent beet bulb. And then these ones are going to start growing because they're not competing as much for nutrients, space, water, all that stuff. And so you can get a little bit more out of even just this one small little chamber right here on a single system. Now imagine if you were in a raised bed, that would be a lot different. You could get a lot more yield out of the same space with this multi-sowing technique. Now that our watering chores are done, I did want to show you a little bit about what's going on in Dragonfruit Alley here. So every single one of these six pots is a different variety, different cultivar. So here you can see we have Red Laverne, Big Juicy, Red Dragonfruit. And I finally have some new growth coming out right here and right here. So the goal then is to train that new growth to be going up into this system here and then coming over just like that. So pretty soon I'm going to have to use this nursery tape and tape it to about there and then I'll start training it. Now here I have a yellow variety. This one's called Ecuador Palora. You can just barely start to see some new growth coming out. That takes a little bit of time, but we're starting. Again, over here, another variety. We got a little bit of new growth. Now this one, this one seems to have a mind of its own. It's almost like a hydra. We've got Sour Patch Kit. This one is from my friend Richard over at Grafting Dragonfruit and this is actually his own cultivar. So I think I'm one of three people on planet earth to have this one. So I'm very, very grateful to Richard for sending this out. But this is quite prolific. It's putting a lot of side shoots. So the strategy here would actually be to remove some of these. I don't need all of these little side shoots. What you want to do is you're going to be putting four in. So I have all four of mine in, one on each side of my four by four. And then you're just going to straight up train them up until they get to there and fall over. So all these side shoots in fact are sort of wasted progress. We want one main shoot in a perfect world to get all the way up to the top and then you can let it branch out. Over here we have Trisha. This is one of the most incredible looking dragonfruit you're ever going to find. What's interesting about this one again is it has this sort of white powder. And you know, a lot of you as gardeners, you think, Oh no, it's powdery mildew, it's fungus. In fact, this is a protective mechanism that the Trisha cultivar has developed in which it sort of puts its sunblock on. This is sort of a blocking of the sun to protect this tropical cactus from really intense heat. So that's kind of an interesting little factoid. And then over here we have, I believe this is Sugar Dragon. And this one is almost up. This is the closest we've got. It's almost all the way up there. So I'm very, very happy about that. So I still have a few dragonfruit that are rooting up. They're getting ready to go into their dragonfruit homes. But I figured what I would do now is do a little sneak peek, a little teaser of the Epic Homestead shed. This machine, this beast, this monster and this beauty is 10 foot by 12 foot dimensions. And then it's about eight foot tall on the low side, 10 foot tall on the high side. I think it looks really nice. I'm really pleased with sort of how it is in this alcove under the tree. And I like the colors. Let me know what you guys think of the colors. But the reason why is because as I'm sitting here on this property, there's just so many different avenues that I can go with it, with the orchard, with having the front yard, raised bed, urban garden, container gardens for all of you guys growing in small spaces. I don't want to forget about you. I always want to be putting out good tips and tricks for how to grow no matter where you live. I needed this as sort of the brain of the operations. And so I painted the shed, but I did not build the shed. I'm going to be doing a lot of building projects for the garden here on the channel and on the Epic Homesteading channel. But I didn't want this massive basically mini house to be the first one that I built. So I figured I'd give you guys a little teaser on it. The full shed build guide is going to be up on the Epic Homesteading channel. And you know, it's looking like it might rain here in San Diego. So hopefully this Garden With Me episode gave you some solace, gave you a little bit of extra tips and info, and also just was a nice little companion as you get out and work in the garden or inside in your houseplant jungle. So until next time, stay tuned, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.