One Year Garden and Homestead Update!

This time last year, the house that I'm living in now had just bare dirt, 13,000 square feet of it. And now it's a pretty decent epic homestead. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening, where it is my goal to help you grow a greener thumb. So last year I moved from my small front yard garden that many of you remember to this sprawling, at least to me, a little over quarter acre house here in San Diego. And so what I'm going to do today is go back in time. I'll show you my plans for this space, or at least what I thought they would be back then. And then we'll zoom forward and I'll show you what I've done so far in just a year. So cultivate that Like button for a truly epic tour. And let's get into the video. So here in the front yard garden, I actually think I've done a pretty good job. It looks more or less the same as the old Epic Garden, but it's way less cramped in here. And I have way more beds. In the old garden, I wouldn't even be able to stand right here because there'd be another bed lined up right about here. So I want to take you around bed by bed really quickly and just show you what we have going on right now. Here in the raised bed front yard, let's start out with probably the best bed. We actually had a big problem with soil on the initial delivery. There was a calcium deficiency, which caused a phosphorus deficiency. And we've been correcting that ever since. But this bed here, take a look, it looks really solid. This is our salsa bed. And so I have some peppers here going all down this front row. Jalapeno, we have tequila sunrise. This one right here is a variegated bell pepper. So it's actually striped, or at least it will be, but you can see a little remnant of that on the leaves themselves, which is really interesting. We've got purple and green tomatillos. We have some carrots and onions peppered in here and then cilantro in the back. And now let's move on back to another sort of weird combination bed, which is dwarf corn and squash. This is in the round tall bed. And so what you can see here already is this corn is not more than two feet tall, I would say. And it's already tasseling and it's already producing silks. And the silks have this interesting sort of reddish magenta color, which I hadn't seen before on a silk, which is really interesting. Then what we have here is a little kabocha squash and you can actually see one little kabocha guy hanging out here. So we'll see how he sizes up. But squash and corn is a classic combination. And then the thing about Epic Gardening is it's still about growing food in as many different ways as possible. So you'll see raised beds, but you'll also see things like this grow bag. And here I kind of want to show you things that don't do that well. So I don't know what exactly happened in this grow bag. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I think this tomato just maybe got started a little bit too early, got hit with some sort of disease or it looks like it might be some spider mites or something, but it just did not do that well. Still here in the front yard. And the first thing you notice really are these pathways. I can walk through my beds. In my old garden, I would probably have maybe 10, 12 inches, and I'd be cramming myself in between each path just to get enough space. Now I can get a wheelbarrow through any structure that I'm growing in. And speaking of structures, this is a great one. This is the green stock garden that's growing all sorts of different things. So up top here, I want to show you that you can grow tomatoes in any situation. These are tiny Tim tomatoes and they live up to the name because they can grow in about a gallon's worth of soil and they're doing quite well here. But I've filled this up with all sorts of different things. The green stock, for me, I want it to be all about bringing in pollinators and bringing color. So I have some strawberries, I've got some marigolds, all sorts of various annuals and perennials in here. And then up here, this bed used to be my alternative greens bed. I was growing arugula and all sorts of different non-lettuce greens. And it's flipped. It's now squash. So I actually harvested a couple of these squash yesterday, but they're doing pretty well. We've got a couple baby little zephyr squash right here. These ones will typically have a little bit of a green right there, sort of a bifurcated color pattern. Under here, let's see if we can find one. Yeah, I think I see one in here. This is a boulam squash, also known as an avocado squash. And we've found that they're quite productive and quite tasty. You harvest them when they're about the size of maybe a softball or so. So things are going pretty well in the squash bed. And then let's switch over here to the second green stalk. This one, I've got lemongrass in it. I've got, I was growing poppies. Poppies were doing really well actually. Cosmos, I did amaranth. It's not here anymore, but that was a fantastic one. Red garnet amaranth. But these green stalks are just really good if you're a small space gardener and you want to cram, what, 42 plants over there, 30 plants over here in the square footage of two by two, right? And then you just go up about five feet. Now there is one sadness that I do have to share with you guys. I think if you remember from my spring tour, I was going to grow a giant cabbage here. It's still here. It's just not doing that well. So I have lovingly named it San Juan cabbage strano. It's kind of a silly name, but I've really come to connect with this cabbage here and it's, it's really been suffering. I mean, you can tell from the leaves, you can just see how much cabbage looper damage, cabbage moth damage there's been. We've tried to control it by hitting it with all sorts of different things. Insecticidal soaps, neem cake fertilizer. We've done BT. And it just couldn't get past the point of really thriving, unfortunately. It still is going to head up. It's still actually going to look quite nice. But I mean, this cabbage, the head of it should have been this big. And instead the head is this big. Over here, we're still in the raised bed portion of the homestead, guys. This is crazy that I actually have this much to show you. But here is the subpod system. So this is an in bed or in ground worm composting system. So if we were to open this up, you could kind of see how this thing would work. What you've got is two chambers. You'll fill this one up. Look, I have a couple of slugs right there. Wow. You can actually see through that guy. Interesting. Um, you could put, you could put a couple of worms in there. You'd manage that bin. Once this filled up, you'd start filling this side up and they'd migrate in. But there's also holes in the side here. So they'll be able to get into this bed. And so what I noticed is in the subpod bed, I've got nasturtium, I've got some marigolds, some African blue basil, which is a fantastic pollinator basil. One of the best ones you'll ever find. This was a very productive bed for me, I think because a lot of the worms have crawled into the actual soil itself and started to improve it, loosen it, add their castings and thus nutrition. So subpod review will come soon on the channel, but I've been really pleased with it. Over here in this raised bed, this is one of the weirder plantings that I've ever done, I think. This was sunflowers, cosmos and alyssum. And the sunflowers have done really well. This one obviously has been spent, but I did it in like a stadium seating style. So I had the taller ones back here. And then as you move up front, you get the golden bear, really short dwarf ones, which look very interesting. It's hard to see because most of them are spent now, but they've got almost no blackness to the interior. It's flowers all the way through. Then you have these beautiful sort of pale yellow ones up top that are still flowering and still looking amazing. So these have done really, really well. The last part of the front yard garden proper is the no-dig bed in the grow bag garden. So we're finally out of the raised beds. And this no-dig bed for those of you who've been following for a long time, this is the one that I made with Charles Dowding. And I have to admit, I've made some mistakes in this bed. I like to show you what I've done right and I like to show you what I've done wrong. And there's a lot that I've done wrong in the garden. And this is one of the things that didn't go so well the first time around. I used probably too much straight up compost and it just sat there sopping wet and the plants weren't doing that well. So some of this stuff has done well. Look at the lemongrass over there. Look at the cabbage over there. That's all looking really nice. This is probably the pride and joy. This is the best thing so far. So I put in what's called the Titan A-Frame from Gardener's Supply Company. We have various different types of pickling cucumbers on here. As soon as we pruned off the lower growth here and actually got them up on a trellis, they really started to take off. Before that we were seeing some leaf miner damage. We were seeing some weird mildewy or blight type of things going on. And we got them off the ground. They're doing really fine. So it took a while for that soil to sort of loosen up and really let the plant breathe. But I think it's finally working now, which I'm really excited about. And then over here, of course, we know I'm into the grow bags. So we have all sorts of different grow bags here growing, honestly, sometimes a hybrid crop. So here I have what was supposed to be lemongrass. I think a tomato seed made its way in here somehow. So now I have this sort of weird pear cherry type of tomato that quite honestly doesn't even taste that good, but it's still there. Right here we have a black cobra pepper. This is one that I overwintered. I do have a whole video on that, but it's a really easy way to grow peppers. I think from now on, what I'm going to do is grow a ton of peppers on year one, figure out the ones that I like, and then just overwinter them for the next year. And you can do it in any zone provided you either take it indoors or in my zone, just leave it out. But we got a lot of other stuff growing on. Bell peppers, another tomato. I've got this moshua here, which is a relative of nasturtium and it grows underground as a tuber. And you actually dig the tuber up and you can eat the tuber. So pretty interesting there. These eggplants, I'll tell you, Japanese eggplants, prolific. So maybe I'll do an eggplant guide pretty soon. And then finally the big bag, this is the a hundred gallon bag. This one's got ginger and turmeric. Took a little bit of time to come up. You can see it's a little bit spotty, but we have dug down in and we do know that the other ones are still rooting up. So I thought I kind of got a bad batch of ginger, but it turns out it's just patience, right? In the garden. So that's it for this entire front yard. Let's go ahead and take a look at the orchard. So when I first pulled up to this house way back a year ago, this was the first thing I saw. I said, Oh, I think there's a lemon tree on the property. And it turns out I was right. And I was also wrong. This isn't a lemon tree. This little sprig back here, come take a look, is. So I think what happened is we had some wild rootstock, whatever it was grafted onto, ended up shooting out. And I do have some lemons here. I don't know exactly the variety. There's no way for me to really know that. But right here is a grapefruit. I had a couple last year. I was actually pretty surprised with how good they tasted compared to how bad the tree looked. I gave it a really aggressive prune when I first moved in last year. I mean, look, these are coming in like crazy. They're going to have some serious grapefruit this year. So I was thinking about removing the tree cause I don't know the variety. It wasn't well taken care of. It's a weird shape. At least for one season I'm going to let it go. But what I have going on over here is probably the thing I'm the most excited about. These are the first orchard trees I've put in here at the homestead. It's just a straight up hedge of citrus. So I have a Washington navel right here. Nigami kumquat right here. This is a pink lemonade lemon. This is a variegated lemon. You can see the leaves have a little bit of a funky pattern on them. Kind of like a, they almost look like a houseplant type of leaf to me. Really interesting. Then you have, what was this one? I think this is the caracara. Yep. This is the caracara navel. We have a blood orange right here. We have a satsuma. We have a lime. This is a bear's lime. Then I've got a Valencia orange. I've got, what is this one? This is why you always have to label your plants cause you'll never remember. Oh, that's the gold nugget mandarin. And then I have a yuzu. So the question you're probably wondering now is like, why would you ever plant 10 citrus four feet apart from one another? Well the plan for this area is to let them get to about my height. So like six, seven feet or so, maybe eight feet. So maybe up to here max and then prune them very delicately so that they become a hedge. They're going to block off the viewpoint from this area of the property so you can't see in. And it's an evergreen so it's always going to be there. I think that's going to be a really nice look. This is on the north side. Eventually you're just going to see fruit just dropping everywhere on this whole property. And the really cool part is almost all of the citrus is fed by water from my shower. Yeah, you heard that right. It's water from my shower. On my Homesteading channel you can actually see the full install. But basically what happens is a tube of water will come out right through here. There's a trench. This is a mulch trench right here. You can see these irrigation control valves right here. Water will come out right there and right down there. And all that water will water four citrus trees each. So these four and then those four. I hadn't had enough water to set up the other hedge over there. But this is just one way to be more sustainable. Here in San Diego, we had one of the lowest years of rain that we've had in recent years. We're supposed to get like 12 inches on average. We didn't even come close to that this year and that's a low amount already. And so whatever I can do to use more water, the gray water, which is what this is called when you're using water from inside your home twice, either with the laundry or the shower, is a great way to reuse. But there's still a couple more trees that I want to show you. So with the old Epic Garden, I actually did have a fruit tree weirdly enough in that property. It was one loquat tree. And now I'm sitting under the shade of actually two loquat trees right here. So take a look upwards. This just finished the fruiting cycle. So we've been eating loquats for about two months straight. My family, my friends, Jacques, everyone has been eating loquats. I did some pruning last year that made it look this way. Some pretty heavy pruning of the under canopy, any sort of crossing branches in there. And then I started planting new stuff. So here we have a beautiful fig. This is the yellow long neck fig. It's from my friend Richard over at Grafting Dragon Fruit. A lot of you know him from our dragon fruit videos that we've done, but he's also a, just a fruit grower in general. So he gave me this start. I think we put this in maybe two months ago, I would say now. And when we put it in, it was no taller than about here. And so it's put on this much growth in two months and all of these fruit. Take a look. You can see they're not quite ripe yet. They're getting close, but I'm going to get a handful of figs just off of this tiny, tiny little plant. Figs, a classic California plant, grows really well here. There are some varieties that grow well in colder zones like the Chicago hardy figs. So don't think you can't grow them, but I'm really pleased. Now this is kind of the weird thing. The way I planted it, because the way this, this stem was sort of angling out like this, that allowed me to get it a little closer into this loquat. I have a little branch here for a rock here for support and it'll come out this way. And then the plan, I'm going to stand up here is to just sort of sculpt it to about a six by six by six. I don't need it much bigger than that. I'm not going to have that many figs. So I'll have it be about here and it'll take up this space and really kind of look nice, almost like a little forested approach. This section here when I moved in was brown dyed mulch, which I really hate. It's like a dyed wood chip mulch. Not a great thing to put in the garden. And then nothing. I actually think someone had stuck pieces of jade in the ground to pretend like they had landscaped the place, but they hadn't, which was kind of silly. So I ripped those out. I did put in some semi-natives like this Mexican salvia, but I've slowly started to replace them with an edible perennial, which of course would be the artichoke. This is a green globe artichoke and these have been incredibly productive in this space. I'm letting most of them go to flower, mostly because I like the look of that. I think it looks really, really beautiful. And apparently it smells really good too. There's a couple of interesting things though in this part that informs the rest of the garden. The first is that little pipe that's sticking out of my wall. What is that pipe? That is my laundry water. So if I want to, I have a toggle in there, I can turn it on or off. But if I want to, I can toggle my laundry water to come out into this mulch basin and water these artichoke. For the most part, I don't water these anymore. I just do my laundry. The other thing I want you to notice here is this big honking thing. This is the 200 gallon rainwater tank. So that's collecting water off of that little terracotta patch of my roof, which is like disconnected from the rest of the whole house. It probably won't fill up too, too much. But even if it does, there's an overflow that'll go straight into this patch. So the idea with this whole patch is perennial edibles that do well with minimal care as long as they get enough water and they're getting enough water either through the rainwater system or through the graywater system. So it's really beautiful. And I'll just show you over here, the example of what an artichoke will start to look like once it goes to flower. So let's see if it's true that it smells really good. Honestly, it kind of smells like a sweet artichoke. So I'm into it. I'm digging it. Let's see. Yeah. I mean, it's a beautiful, beautiful plant. A lot of people don't know that it'll produce that, that beautiful color of a flower. But this is this bed. Let's go on over to the berry patch. So the last part of the front yard garden, there's been a lot I know is the berry patch or sort of like the weird fruit patch. So I've got my strawberries right here. They have seen better days. The problem we've been having with them is an armyworm or a cutworm problem or an earwig or both. So I've been putting some traps out. We've actually done some of this, which looks weird, but it's just a, it's neem cake fertilizer. So it's what you would press to get neem oil. This is the waste product. And apparently it has a repellent effect on earwigs. So we're testing that out just to see. But nevertheless, there's still some good strawberries here. So I'll show you. What we've got going on. There's probably like 20 in this patch right now. I could eat, but let's give this one a taste test. This is probably the seascape variety. It's so sweet. And it's weirdly one of those fruits that I kind of like slightly warm, like fresh out of the garden instead of nice and chilled. I'm having a great time with the strawberries. Very productive here. Behind me here are the dragonfruit though. So these have been doing pretty well. Some of the cuttings have failed to thrive until now, basically, until the weather warmed up again. But they're starting to shoot up. So I have some where I'm only halfway up. I have others where I'm all the way up. And then over here, I've got others where not only am I all the way up, but I'm all the way down almost. So they're starting to actually fall down the trellis, which is exactly what you want to see. So I'm thinking on that variety right there, which is Trisha. I may actually get a dragonfruit this year, which would be fantastic. Cause usually from cuttings, you're looking at more than a year unless you have like perfectly optimal conditions. The rest right here is just the berry patch, which we just did a video on. So I won't talk about that too much, but we will go through the new Epic fence, which also did not exist last year. I had a chain link fence. I had another type of chain link fence. I had another type of chain link fence and a weird wood fence. Now I just have one wood fence and I think it looks really nice. So let's pop on back through here and check out the backyard. So at my old house, I didn't really even have the opportunity to start seeds outdoors that well. I was starting them indoors just under lights, like many of you probably do. But now that I do have the opportunity, this is the seedling table. I built it. It's not a hard build at all. I actually got the idea from Laura over at Garden Answer, but it's an eight foot long table by three foot. And I've got chicken wire here so I can water through it if I want to. So if we take a look here, you can see some of the stuff that we're growing. I'm always trying to be sowing, always be sowing. So we have some squash coming through. We have some watermelon. I already actually have these planted, but I wanted some backups. We've got just some beautiful petunias here, some yard-long beans. So just stuff for summer, you know, stuff for summer. You can double this as a little drying rack. Sneak peek, guys, of some of the garlic that I've been growing and harvesting. I finally succeeded to my garlic. I would say this table probably cost about 200 bucks to make. We put it on wheels. I got a video on the Homestead channel, but I'm very pleased with it. One of the things I'm probably the most pleased about, you saw what the shed looked like, the existing shed on the property when I first moved in. That shed is gone. It has seen better days. This shed, the Epic shed, is here. So we built this closer towards the corner of the property, just so I didn't waste space putting it right in the middle of nothing back then. So this thing is huge. It's eight foot by 10 foot footprint. And then it goes from eight feet to 10 foot on the slope. And I actually put a gutter on it so I can collect rainwater with this 500 gallon rainwater tank, which I'm going to talk about the whole rainwater system in a second. And we're still talking about the shed here. I did a couple of cool things. The tools we use the most here at the Homestead, I want them easily accessible. These are all stainless steel tools from Corona. So what I did is I just mounted them to the side. Been putting a lot of work in on this manure fork. We put a lot of work in on this stirrup hoe right here and that potato fork. So I want to be able to come through and grab them. But why not take you inside and show you what's going on with the shed? So it is a mess in here, but I will take you in just as a sneak peek. I haven't done a whole lot with the actual shed itself. It's mostly just been a holding area. So we have some basic plastic tables in here. The one thing that I really do like is this little wall control unit. That's the company that makes it. This thing is really nice. I just mounted it on the studs for now. Still deciding if I want to actually finish the shed by putting some drywall up or something. But we've got our little hand tools you can easily access, all sorts of different repair things. And then on the tables themselves, it's not very organized. I gotta be honest. Just random stuff here, lights, pots, all sorts of things. Back here is all of our either single use. So like chicken manures or bone meals or mixed fertilizers from Espoma. And then over here, there's not really a whole lot to say. It's just a total mess. I've got all my hedge clippers and my loppers up here and some of the longer handled tools like a snow shovel and a post hole digger and stuff like that. But let's go ahead and actually get back outside and see the rest of the garden. So here we are in the backyard garden. This is almost exclusively in-ground, which isn't something I'd done a whole lot of. But I want to show you a couple of things that aren't in-ground first. I'm calling this sort of the unique garden. I don't know what else to call it. I've got my ginger from that famous ginger video that I made last year. Still haven't harvested a single piece of it. So maybe soon on the channel I will do an Epic Ginger Harvest. This right here is a red stripe sugar cane. So it actually started from just one little offshoot, just like this. And it's really started to divide and multiply. Really interesting. I had put in this one here, ginger and turmeric. It just didn't come up. I think I got a bad batch or something. So we've gone into the world of dahlias. I have three different dahlias in here. I'll show you those when they come up. I'm really excited. I've never grown dahlias before. And then as we get back here, these kind of look like they could be a sunflower and they are related, but it's a Jerusalem artichoke. They're somewhat tasty. I'm not quite sure. I haven't really eaten them yet myself. I've heard that they can cause some gas. I guess we'll find out. But they're pretty vigorous. It's a rhizome grower. So you're going to grow it and eat the rhizome of the plant. We'll see how that goes. I'm just excited to grow something kind of weird. And then back here, this one, it's not doing that well. Something about the soil. It's kind of the same problem as we had in the front beds with the soil, with the calcium and phosphorus. I used that soil in a lot of different places and it kind of bit me in the butt. But these are Chinese artichokes, also known as crones. So they look really weird. Maybe we'll put a photo up. They look kind of like little maggots, I have to be honest with you. But apparently they're nice little crunchy snacks. You can pickle them. You can do a lot of stuff with them. So that's what I have going on in these containers. But what I'll show you next is the corn patch. So this corn patch was the very first in-ground bed that I built here at the property. It was growing potatoes. What we did is we took all the straw and we folded that in for the potato harvest. So the potatoes were going to mess up the soil anyways. Not really a no-dig bed. Threw the straw in the ground, put the corn in, and it's only been about a month and a half. And this corn's up to this level already. So it's at my shoulder, which means it's probably about, I don't know, five foot tall or so. And it's tasseling and it's producing silks. So if we dig in here, I'm sure we can find an example of a silk going on. So this corn is coming on pretty fast and it's looking extremely, extremely vigorous. We also threw a couple squash down below, again, with that same idea of that living ground cover. So I'm excited about the corn tasseling early, which means it's producing these male pieces a little low in height, but I think it's going to catch up. I think just something weird with the weather patterns was going on and we'll see how that goes. Now, as we go over here, you did get a sneak peek on the seedling table, but this is the garlic patch. It doesn't look good right now only because it's actually almost ready to harvest. This was my weirdest experiment that I've done as far as growing anything in the Allium family where I'm trying to grow these hardneck garlic in a very warm climate. Hardneck garlic wants to grow in like a Zone 5, Zone 6, maybe up in Oregon or Washington. And I think I've made it happen here in San Diego, California, Zone 10b by putting all this garlic in the fridge for three months. 12 weeks straight of the fridge, planted in late February, which is extremely late for garlic. Typically you plant it in the fall and it's still doing well. You saw what they looked like. They're fully formed garlic. So I think we figured it out here in San Diego, California. Now this final patch over here in the front kind of just looks like something random. So come on in here and take a look. It's wheat. We're growing our own wheat, hopefully to use for flour and then thus maybe cookies or bread or who knows what I'm going to make with it. But it's actually doing pretty well. There's a couple of things I probably would have changed. I maybe would have broken up the soil more when I actually planted it. I would have watered it a little bit more deeply because there were some dry patches that ended up dying off. But I don't know. It looks pretty good to me. So stay tuned pretty soon for a wheat video on the channel. So here we are in the second part of the backyard garden. We seem to keep expanding the back garden, which I'm all for because I'm having a lot of fun with the in-ground. But this chair, and actually there's a chair right over there, these were built out of the material of the Epic fence, which I haven't even talked about yet. But someone who follows the Homesteading channel built these. And check this out, laser etched in Epic gardening right here. So I like to come out here and really relax all the time. I'll have my morning coffee out here, hang out with friends. Right here I have a Buddha's hand. So this is one of the first potted citrus plants here at the property. But really in the garden, what we're talking about is all of this stuff over here. So right here I've got the only raised bed in this backyard. This was just leftover from something I had in the front yard. It probably would be in-ground if I could redo it today. But this is just an herb bed. There used to be chamomile right here. We have all sorts of different herbs, some flowers, some lemongrass, more of that African blue basil. So a lot of you are probably wondering what this is. This is basically just a trellis. It's a pyramid style trellis. It's got a little mason beehive up top. We've been growing peas in this. But as we move on down here, this bed was really interesting. We basically didn't dig it in at all. And we just decided to grow as many giant crops as we could. So up front here, and it's not even close to giant yet, we have what will be a giant English cucumber. This is one of the healthiest cucumbers in the garden right now. No signs of any sort of mosaic or disease or blemishes or anything like that. So I'm very excited about that. Back here though, this plant is the biggest bean I've ever grown. I'm going to give you guys a sneak peek here. Take a look at this. Oh, that's not even the biggest one. Take a look at this. I mean, come on. And it's still edible at this stage, which is the craziest part of it. It's still edible. Over here though, we have what's called Kevin's super tomato. This isn't named after me. This is named after my friend Kevin Forty who came up with the genetics of this. His family has grown giant vegetables for many generations. So this is one plant that just has gone absolutely insane. And the thing that makes it super is actually what happens on the truss. So take a look at this truss. This is just one of the trusses. You have one here, one here, one here, one here, one here. There's five separate. You can get upwards of a hundred cherry tomatoes on a single truss of this plant. It's a really impressive one. And now let's wrap around and take a quick look at the only fruit tree here on the property. This is when I first moved in. I think I had said I need to figure out what kind of tree this is. Well, it turns out it's a royal apricot. I did some strategic pruning over the off season and it really has come in nicely. I mean, nice bushy growth. We'll probably do a summer prune at some point in time, but take a look. I mean, we're getting some beautiful apricots. They'll ripen up in the next month or so and I'm going to have a pretty bountiful harvest off of this first fruit tree. So I can't give up my number one love, which is potatoes. I did harvest out of that corn patch, but now I've decided to grow even more in grow bags back here. These are some of the best seed potatoes I've ever purchased. So these are from Wood Prairie Farms. Jacques, who's actually behind the camera right now, turned me onto them. I had heard of them before, had never purchased from them. I saw him grow them and I said, I need to grow them too. And so I have five different varieties, maybe six. And what I've done here is maybe the last way I'll ever grow potatoes. I've tried almost every method on earth. So if you're in a container, to me, what seems like the best idea is to fill your soil almost all the way up. Plant your potato about there, maybe three inches above the ground. Fill it all the way up and then just don't do anything ever again. So all we've done is water. You might say, Oh, you buried it 15 inches deep. It's not going to come up. Well, look what happened. They've all come up. Even the ones buried extremely deep over there have come up. And these are fantastically productive. I mean, there's no blemishes, no issues with any of these. And we've put one potato or two per five gallon. I would say my usual rule of thumb is about one potato per five gallons. Sometimes we've squeezed in two, but we're going to get a lot of production out of this. I think maybe a hundred to 150 individual potatoes off of a planting of about maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, maybe like 25. So we'll get like an 8X multiplier off these potatoes. But the biggest bed, the most exciting bed, especially when it fills in is this bed right here. So this one is like six foot wide by maybe 24 feet long. So this is the pepper and tomato bed or the summer bed. I have 43 different peppers just planted directly in ground over here. And then I've got those tomatoes that we did a video on a little bit ago, Florida weave, conduit style, conduit style with a lower end lean. And so I'm going to walk around the back and I'll kind of show you some weird stuff we've been doing with these tomatoes. So over here on the lower end lean, we actually did run into a little bit of like a May-Gray-June gloom that caused some early blights on these particular ones over here. So that's why these are looking a little sadder. Nevertheless, they are still coming through. I mean, this is nothing to complain about. These tomatoes right here look pretty solid if you ask me. Over here though, these are the beefsteaks. So I wanted to put the beefsteak style on a bigger, taller trellis, allow them a little bit more support and a little bit more room. These guys are coming in really nicely. What we've done though is I've pruned off the bottom, maybe 12 to 15 inches of growth. Just because as soon as you start seeing these bottom leaves yellow, it's really kind of time for them to go. You don't want disease to spread up the plant. So I may have to prune a little bit more off. But I mean, just look at the fruit set on here. Very productive. And it's going to do really well once the season really starts to kick in. Over here on the lower end lean style, they're getting close to the point where we're actually going to have to lower and lean them, which is the name of the trellis. So what we would have done is we'll take this and just drop it one and you can see how it'll start to lean. So I'm not going to do it cause I don't need to yet. But that's just an example of how it would work. And now I got to get it on there again. There we go. So let me show you a couple of these. Oh, here's a funny thing. This tomato right here, this one right here, is the same tomato that I showed you, Kevin's super tomato. This is one that I pruned to what we call a single liter or one main stem. So this is an example of how different it is when you don't prune a tomato versus when you do. Let's see if we can get a little taste test down here. There we go. I see one. Oh, that's not quite right. I messed that up. Let's try to find one. Here's one over here. This one is the brown berry tomato. Not my favorite flavor, but certainly if it's ripe, it's ripe. It's actually a lot sweeter than it was last time. So I'm pretty pleased with it. But these tomatoes are starting to come in and I'm very, very pleased about what we're going to see as the summer progresses. So this is the biggest and most aggressive thing I've done as far as saving water. This is my 5,000 gallon rainwater cistern. I have that 500 gallon one over by the shed. I have the 200 gallon one in front, but a hundred percent of the rainwater from my house off of my house is actually going to be collected in here. So we dug a trench that goes right here, the gutter system connects to it, and then water will run up in here and drop in and I can use a pump to get it out. Now, have I even gotten to use it yet? No, cause it hasn't rained. But I figured better to get it in the dry season than need it in the wet season. So I put this in. We actually did this in partnership with the local water authority here. So they were, they were really, really kind. They gave us some grants to be able to get this done. But it's just one of those things, like, is it cost effective? Honestly, it's not cost effective compared to how much tap water costs. It's way cheaper to use tap water. But if you need it, it doesn't really matter how much it costs. So that's kind of the reasoning for it. And then here you can just kind of see another look at the fence. It's nice to not be able to see everything going on in the backyard from over there. And then the property line this way is also nice and controlled. Up here on the roof, this is one of the first things that I did to the property. This is a 100-ish year old house. And so we had multiple layers of like a torched down tar style roof that were deteriorating. So I decided to go with what's called a TPO roof, which is why it's white like this. It's great, especially if you want to collect rainwater because it'll run straight down. You don't have to worry about any sort of weird tar running into that water. But then I also put solar up because San Diego, no rain, but lots of sun. And so why not take advantage of that and put solar on? So I put 14 solar panels on the roof, which equates to I think about 4.75 kilowatts for a system. And my electricity bill was anywhere in the 100 to 200 range, depending on the month and what was going on. I maxed it out at about 200 bucks a month trying to use as much energy as I could to see how much I would actually use. And as soon as I put these on, I pay $10 a month. And I've always paid $10 a month since because I produce so much more than I use. Some months I'm producing twice as much energy as I'm using. So I only pay a $10 connection fee. So that's one of the biggest things that I did for this property. My energy has now gone to zero over the course of maybe six or seven years because that's the payback period. But that was fantastic. And that really sort of wraps up what's going on at the Epic Homestead right now. So let's just kind of take a little quick look from above and see how it looks. So we're up on the roof taking a look at what we've built over the course of a year. It feels like a lot and it also feels like not much all at the same time. But the raised beds, I have to say, pretty pleased with how that looks. It'll fill in a lot more once we replant out the summer crops. We've got the orchard over there. We've got the little berry zone down here. The artichokes are looking nice and at home. As we move over this way, see how much space there's just not being used at all still. Rainwater collection, the massive Epic mulch pile. And then of course we have the backyard garden. Here in the garage, I haven't really done a whole lot. The only thing I did is I changed the floor. I've been obsessed with this ever since I skateboarded as a kid. A really nice and smooth floor to work off of. The floor that was here before, I swear, the remodelers, I should do a video sometime on everything that these flippers did wrong on this house. Cause it was a lot. But one of the things they did the most wrong is instead of like properly cleaning the garage, all they did was take like painted concrete slurry and just dump it on the ground and spread it very sloppily over. And so we had to chip that off and then grind this whole thing to put on this epoxy floor. But this is eventually going to be the workshop where I build a lot of projects for the homestead. I just haven't done a whole lot with it. Obviously I've been busy doing some other stuff. So last year I said that it would look really cool to walk out and open this window and see something growing. So let's see if I did my job here. Ooh, what a view. I'm pretty pleased with that, my friends. Look at that. Let's check out the other view from the kitchen. Okay. Here in the kitchen, obviously potatoes and books. What else would a gardener have in his kitchen? Let's see what the view looks like from here. Okay. So now we can see a fence and some berries. And over here we get some trash and a mulch pile. So we still have some work to do on these views. Well there's been a lot of progress over the last year. And honestly it's only been nine months since I moved in in September, not June when I actually purchased the house. A lot's been going on. I don't know. I'm the type of person that I can see a lot of things that have changed and then really not think I did that much. And so now when I look at everything I've actually done from a bare plot of land, quite literally, it's pretty cool. I like to see it. And hopefully it gives you some inspiration and some ideas for what you can do with your space, no matter how big or small. So if there's anything you want me to kind of zoom in on in a future video, just let me know. But for now I'm going to go grab a coffee and enjoy it out here in the garden. I'll talk to you next time. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.