Learning to GROW OUR OWN FOOD With NO Garden Space

We bring in so many pounds of food from our garden every year, enough to store for the winter, and we don't buy any vegetables or berries from the grocery store. I've always wondered though how much food I could grow if I only had a porch or a balcony for growing space. Well, I do have a porch, so this year I'm going to expand my skills and see what I can do with it. We're trying a bunch of different types of containers to see what works best for us, and to give you an idea of what might work for you, and I want to get those set up today. Plus, I'm going to be planting some seedlings out in my raised beds, and I guess Cody decided this would be a good day to spray the fruit trees. It is an absolutely beautiful morning. It's a little bit chilly, but the sun is shining, and I really want to get my tree sprayed before it rains again. It's supposed to rain in like a couple days, so I think this would be a good time to get some spray on there. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the sprays that I'm using because I'm not terribly confident in the sprays that I'm using as far as how well it'll work with my timing and the things that I choose. I've talked to some people that I trust that are helping me out, but I don't really want to just give all that information because I really don't know if it's going to work yet, so I want to be confident before I do that, so maybe next year. I will tell you that I'm using some different stuff that's natural, organic approved. I want to be really careful about our health, about the health of our bees and our plants and everything on our homestead. I'm starting with a spray that came out of the book The Holistic Orchard by Michael Phillips. It's a health building spray. It's got like microbes, fish, seaweed, and stuff like that in it. I'm also going to be using some stuff like copper, an orchard spray, some sulfur. I know there are differing opinions out there about using certain sprays, especially in the organic and regenerative farming culture, and that's okay. For our fruit trees, we're staying away from the conventional sprays and going with what I'd call a manageable organic approach. You may not be as hardcore as Michael Phillips, but I'd take these homegrown apples over the organic apples we're getting from the grocery store right now any day. And now for the next part of our video, we need to go back in time one day. I don't start all of my own seedlings. We have a really small house and it just takes up too much space, so as soon as our local greenhouse opens, I like to go and pick up broccoli and cabbage plants to put out. I also need to get a whole bunch of potting soil for my container garden as well as some good quality fertilizer. It's important to fertilize container gardens because nutrients are lost with the water that drains out of the bottom of the containers after you water them. I'm not planning to buy anything else yet at this point because it's a little too early. May 11th is our last frost date here in Zone 6a, and I don't fight the weather. I just plant once it's safe. I could be planting potatoes and onions, but I really like to wait for those as long as possible so that I don't have to harvest them too early in the summer. The later that I harvest them, the cooler the cold room will be for them to be stored in, and then the longer into the winter they'll last. Michelle is ready to go out and plant her seedlings, but first I want to tell you about the sponsor of today's video, Element. Have you tried Element yet? I feel like we've talked about it often enough that you should have by now, but if you haven't, listen up. 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I got these beautiful, beautiful broccoli plants yesterday at the greenhouse, and I finally get to plant them today. I have my handy-dandy little map here, which is really awesome when you come to this phase of gardening, because I know exactly where to put things, and I don't have to question whether I'm putting them in the right place or not. So I'm going to be putting broccoli and cabbage in this bed, and then also three beds down. It's still pretty chilly out here this morning, it's like in the 40s, but it's nice and sunny, and it doesn't look like the temps are going to dip too low anymore, so this is the perfect time to be planting out cold weather crops like broccoli and cabbage. They really like that nice, cool weather, but they can get frozen. Last year I did have some get nipped a little bit because I put them out a little too early, so right now is about perfect. And the earlier you get them planted, the better, because the worms won't have a chance to take over before the broccoli is actually ready. This is the time of year when I just really, really love these raised beds. Look at this soil. It is absolutely perfect, but the soil out in the in-ground garden is still very wet, like way too wet to till, so this just makes so that we can get in the soil really early and effortlessly. I have 28 plants here. I might not quite plant all of those. I'll see once how many I can fit in each bed. I really like to get red cabbage because red cabbage does not attract worms and butterflies like the regular cabbage. I don't really know what it is about it, the worms just don't like it as much. This is Red Acre. My very favorite broccoli variety is Imperial. It has performed very well for me in the past. It is not the kind of broccoli that is as great with side shoots. What I like to go for is one nice big head. I just find that the side shoots of broccoli are normally coming in when it is warmer outside, and so they tend to be very wormy. I do not like to spray much, and spraying Bt is the only thing that helps me to control cabbage worms. So I really prefer to just have a nice huge head in the beginning, and then I don't really care so much about side shoots. One thing to think about when you are buying your broccoli plants from a greenhouse, if you decide to go that route, is be sure to find plants that aren't leggy, and if you see that the plants are already starting to have like a tiny little broccoli head on them, just leave those there. Those just don't tend to do very well. The heads just stay small. I like to get mine early and make sure that they have exactly what they need before they start putting that broccoli head on, otherwise they're just not going to do as well for you. Another thing I failed to mention is that if you go for broccoli varieties that are really good with side shoots, often those won't have quite as big of a head. So often it's either or. You either kind of go for the side shoots or you go for a big head. Okay so I got 14 plants in that bed down there, and in this one I'm gonna do 12. So I can space these a little, not quite as close together. I find that in raised beds for some reason you can plant things just a little bit closer. I still, I'm a big believer in giving my plants lots of space, but in the raised beds you can get away with planting them a little bit closer. Lots of earthworms in here. Sometimes when there is space at the end of a bed, I like to just fill that in with some flowers to just draw the pollinators in here. I am planting stonehead cabbage. That is my very, very favorite variety of cabbage. My family is just not huge cabbage eaters, but we do love a good coleslaw here and there. And the stonehead is like a very compact head, and it's not bitter, it's nice and sweet and juicy. My all-time favorite cabbage. And I'm pretty sure it's a heirloom. Always, always, always water in your seedlings. After I've watered these seedlings, I am going to put little buckets over these. We have buckets that we drilled holes in the top, and we just like to pop those over young seedlings because it really, really helps those seedlings to get established nice and quickly. And also it just protects them at night. If there are some freezing temps, it'll protect them at night. There's always that one little corner at the end of the garden that the hose barely reaches. I hate trying to get these apart. I like to put these buckets on, and then I come out here and I put leaves over the entire bed. It's really handy to have the buckets on the plants when you mulch because then the leaves you for sure won't like cover the plant or anything. Makes it really easy. Cabbage and broccoli especially really, really love leaves. I actually started out by just mulching my broccoli and cabbage with leaves because I read somewhere that they really love what the leaves have to offer. And they did so well that I just went from there. I just started mulching everything with leaves. The parcel services have been busy around here dropping off big boxes for us, big exciting boxes for us. Welcome to our new garden space. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. Michelle's excited about it. I'm excited about it. I think some of our children are going to get to be more involved with it up here than they are in the big garden sometimes. So I think that's going to be really cool. And just FYI, this here is a green stock garden that we're going to put together first. Then we've got a few other items. These were sent to us by these companies. I let them know what we were doing and I was just going to buy the stuff, but they offered to send it to us. So just full disclosure, this was sent to us for free from those companies to try out. This looks like the lid for the green stock. Oh, that's so cute. It's really cute. I handed off the camera so that I can help. We did a whole bunch of research before we, before we ordered this stuff because I really wanted stuff that was going to be self-watering and efficient because I have a feeling that the watering for a container garden is probably going to be the biggest chore. And also stuff that was movable. There should be wheels in here somewhere for it. This is on wheels and it spins so that it can be moved to the sunshine and also spun around to make it easier to get to. Yeah, this porch has a roof on it, which I feel like that's going to be one of my biggest obstacles is getting enough sun on this porch because it does have a roof. Depending on the amount of sunlight that we get, I may have to move the planters, some of them from one side of the porch to the other to make so that they can get enough light. I'm not sure how this is all going to work out yet. And this is not everything that we're getting to plant stuff on our porch either. We've got a couple more things in the house that we'll bring out and show you a little bit later and we still need to order some stuff. And then we also want to tell you how much this stuff costs. I can't think of all of it right off the top of my head, but we'll put a list in the description of everything in this video. But then we're not actually going to be planting in this stuff yet today. We're going to be filling it with soil and getting it all ready. It's too early to plant most of this stuff outside. We will be planting it later. So you'll be seeing at least a couple more videos of just getting this stuff ready, getting it planted and everything like that. They recommend like planting as you go, I guess, but they just lift off of each other. So for now, so we can just get it, set it up. I think we'll just pour soil in there and then stack them and we can plant later. I just basically wanted all of this stuff set up, wanted the soil in them, have them all assembled because planting season is always nuts. I'm also going to put some which is like a really nutritious compost. I'm also going to put some of that on top. So I don't want these like completely capped off. Take care to not get soil in the gray disc. Oh, because this is the water is going to run through and it drips through those holes. We're just going to put some tape over top here so that no dirt goes down in there because it'll get into that water cavity. As you can tell, the sun is going down. We got derailed this afternoon. We had something important come up. So we're just going to work until it gets dark and then we'll finish up tomorrow. So what I wanted to do with this container garden experiment was I really wanted to see, I wanted to try some more expensive options like this green stock. And then I also wanted to try some cheaper, kind of more DIY-ish things. I want to like have the best chance of success with this container garden, but then I also want to try out some budget-friendly stuff so that anybody can do this. So we are just doing a bunch of experiments here. We have different pots with different kinds of self-watering. Sometimes things like that work and sometimes they don't. I just really wanted this to be an experiment. I want to learn things. I've never done anything with container gardening before. So hopefully this will help you guys figure stuff out If you don't have muscles like Cody, I'm sure you could fill this down on the ground and then lift it up. But I've got muscles. It's more awkward than anything. Milk it. Kind of like milking a cow. Pushing on the udder to get her to let down the rest of the milk. So this last one here is just for water. We don't put any soil in here and that's why there's a lid. So this makes so nothing can get in here and clog these holes. See how it moves. That moves super easy. Wow that is super cool. All we need to do is add a little compost and plant the seeds once it's time. One thing that I am kind of concerned about is storms. Like the wind really whips through here. Hopefully we'll figure something out, I don't know, to try to shield this a little bit if we know a storm is coming. You hear kids screaming inside. Sorry. They're being crazy. So this one right here, this is Vigo Garden and it's a tomato, what do you call it? Planter. It's a it's a tomato planter with a trellis. I'm really excited about this one. And it's self-watering. Yes it's self-watering. I looked at quite a few of these and this is the one that I ended up with. It's definitely one of the more expensive ones which is also kind of why I wanted to try it out. I just really like to see if some of these more expensive items are worth the hype. And keep going. Are you breaking something? That was one of my biggest things with trying to grow things up in here in containers. I was like how's it going to work with trellising? Like if you want to grow peas or tomatoes or anything like that. This one has a trellis with it. It's like attached I'm really excited about this one. Pretty cool looking. It's very cool looking. Cute little wheels. Look at him and his wee little boots. You know how many cats can wear boots? That's gonna go. Yep that's where it goes. In the words of every great dad out there, this ain't going anywhere. Our porch is a little rough for these wheels. Schnazzy. It's not quite dark yet but things continue to get louder and louder inside so we are going to call it a day and we'll see you in the morning. Before we get back to putting those containers together I wanted to give a little update on our mini Hereford herd here. They are doing really well. I had them in that first paddock there for a little bit. They ate all the grass down so I've got them in this second paddock here. They're eating this down pretty fast too. The grass isn't just really growing yet but they're doing great and we decided on some names. Michelle got to name the mama cow Juniper. The kids voted and picked the name for the heifer that's Poppy and then for the little bull calf I've got a poll on YouTube right now to decide what we're going to name him and I'm going to wait to say which it is until we give some more time to get some more results for that. Hey mama cow. Hey Juniper. I do want to be clear. These cows are going to be for beef not for milk. That is a little disappointing and a cow does have an udder just like any other cow does but the difference between a beef cow and a dairy cow is very very different in udder size and how much milk they're going to give and stuff so it would not be even worth it to really try with these and I'm guessing she would probably try to kick me to the moon if I did try to milk her. Back to the containers now. This is a big one that needs to get put together and then Michelle has a couple more things that she wants to show you yet. There were a lot of nuts and bolts for this thing and it took a minute to put it together. The instructions were pretty clear though. What I like about all the nuts and bolts that need to get tightened down is that the final product is nice and sturdy. Check out this beautiful raised bed on wheels. I think this one is so so pretty. It's actually I think my favorite one. It's just really simple but yet it's really sturdy. I can I can like already imagine like lettuce and radishes and stuff growing in here. I was a little worried about this one draining but it has ridges in the bottom and so water can seep out if there's if you water it too much the water can seep out the bottom. This one obviously is not self-watering so this one is gonna have to be watered but I do have some ideas for it. This here is my idea for this raised bed. I've never tried these before. Like I said this is so much experimenting and I actually haven't even looked at these. They came in the mail. These were not given to us. This is just something I bought. Oh they're so cute. You fill them with water and then you bury them and just leave the top out and then you can refill them and they slowly these are terracotta it's like a clay and they will slowly like leach the water out so we shall see. So I ordered grow bags thinking that five gallon ones would be enough for potatoes. I'm gonna send these back and get bigger ones because I feel like I could only plant one potato in here. I want like two or three with white potatoes in them and then a couple with sweet potatoes just to see how that works. Obviously I'm not going to be harvesting the bulk of my potatoes off of my porch but I just want to just for the sake of you guys and just for myself I want to see how they do in containers. I'm also shopping around still for some hanging baskets. We have some hooks up here. I just thought it would be super fun to have like a hanging herb basket. So I think I'm gonna get like it's like a metal like a wire basket with like a coconut core filling that you put dirt in. I think I'm gonna get one of those maybe two. It's just gonna be like a whole thing going on here. I'm so excited. I have something for Michelle to make her container gardening easier. I'm excited about this one. This is the kind of thing that I get excited about. Tools to make things easier. I'll get this bracket on and I'll show you what it is. It is a hose reel from Vigo Garden. I'm really excited about this because this will just make so there's not always a messy pile of hoses around because the spigot she's going to be using she would be using this back there and so it'd have to go all the way up there have a mess of hoses and be annoying to get tangled and stuff. This will connect to that spigot back there and then she'll be able to just pull the hose out pull it up there use it and let it retract back inside. I think that's so cool. This is something that we should have had on our homestead for a long time now. So thank you Vigo for sending it to us. Let's see if this thing works. It's pretty sweet. I also use this thing actually to water my grapes and my tea. That was a big problem in the drought last year. Last summer is that I did not get the grapes watered. I think that's part of the reason they did so poorly is because I kept everything else watered but not those because it was such a pain to try to hook up hoses up here. I gave the on YouTube enough time to get a bunch of votes and a definitive overwhelming majority for a name for the little bull calf here. The options were Tank, Goliath, TNT, and Waffles. Overwhelming majority for the name is Waffles. So meet Waffles. I think that's a pretty cool name. It's fun. We talked today about the container gardening stuff that we're going to do but if you want to see how we plant all the stuff out in our garden you can watch this video next. I'm gonna lose my mind. My favorite flavor in the grape. Did I count wrong? Ah. Muy bueno.