The Lost Secret to Growing PrehistooricSized Vegetables

What's going on, growers? It's James Pergione coming to you live from Jersey. Today, I'm going to take you through my garden and show you some prehistoric-sized veggies. We'll also grab some fresh fruits as I share with you how I went from just an ordinary garden to an abundant food forest. Let's go! I started my first garden about 15 years ago. When I began, I just planted directly into the ground and I got some decent production. But over the years, I have refined my gardening style. Now, the veggies I grow are so big. My garden is so productive, you have to see it to believe it. If seeing is believing, then let's get to it. Check out the size of this lettuce. I'm going to grab a harvest of it. But before we even do that, take a step back. Look at this whole raised bed. Look at this level of production. Look how huge the veggies are in here. And look how well everything is growing together. I don't even have a mulch down, but you can't even tell because there's barely any light hitting the soil. This is what we call a living mulch. Let's grab this lettuce right here. We'll move on and grab some other stuff. This is one head of lettuce I'm going to show you here. You will be absolutely amazed by the size of this thing. Look at this. Oh my gosh! How many salads do you think you can make with just one head of lettuce when you grow veggies just like this? Throughout the video, I'm going to share with you how I just turned my normal garden and how I just went from growing normal sized veggies to food like this. Again, you almost got to see it to believe it. There's even more though. Let's keep moving. I'll just place this down for now. Swing over here. I want to grab this cabbage too. This is ready. This is my earliest variety of cabbage that's ready. This is the fareo cabbage. Dense, ready to be harvested. Before we do that though, you got to check this out over here. You won't believe what happened to me just the other day. I mean, the size of the leaves on these veggies is so big. I feel like there's someone playing tricks on me or something. I'm out here, right? Chilling. Come inside. Come over here. I'm out here chilling and look at this in here. Look at all the water that's caught. I'm out here working. The strawberries are ready. I'll show you those in a second. I'm grabbing some strawberries. All of a sudden, I bump into this cabbage. The thing pours out just like that. A whole thing of water down my shirt. I'm like, I thought someone dumped water on me like from somewhere. I look back. It's because so much water got caught in this cabbage. It's really cool if you come in. What the cabbage does is like when the sun's out too or it rains, it kind of lifts these up and then it takes all the water and pushes it down by the base. It's pretty incredible. And you know what else is pretty incredible? The size of these leaves. Look at this. I got pretty big hands. Look at that. I mean, it just blows me away. Nature is so incredible. Let's grab this cabbage right here though. This thing is ready. The first cabbage of the season. Ripe. Ready to go. This is living. This is real food. Unbelievable. I've got a few more things to show you. Let's check this out over here. Swing over this way. You think we're done harvesting from just this bed? Nah, nah, nah. We're just getting started. Come over here. Check out this broccoli. Look how beautiful that is. Look at the droplets of water on there. Oh my gosh. I always say it, nature paints the most beautiful pictures. So nice and dense. Let's get a harvest of this right now. I'm just gonna grab it from the bottom because we'll plant something after. Grab this baby. Look at this broccoli. I feel like a kid in a candy store running around grabbing these veggies. One of the reasons we love making these videos and videos in general, we want everybody to have this opportunity to grow some of their own food in their backyard. It's a absolute blast. Right next to me here, let's grab something else. Bam. Celery. Check this. Look how beautiful this celery is. When you grow celery yourself at home, it's not even bitter. It's delicious. It tastes fantastic. Let me snap this off. This smell is incredible. Let me see. So dang good. Swing over here. Let's grab a few strawberries. This right here is my favorite variety of strawberry. These are the shuckson strawberries. And I'll tell you, there's nothing like them. We're peak strawberry right now. The best ones are the ones that are hanging at the top like this. Oh my gosh, look at that. There are so many fresh ripe strawberries. It's an absolute blast to be able to come out here. And I'm not worried about sprays because we're doing this stuff organic. I'm not worried about bugs because we had this covered with insect netting. All I'm worried about is grabbing a delicious taste of this real food. Nothing like it. We are just getting started here. There's still so much to show and a lot of stuff to grab. I want to get into a quote that I heard years ago that has always stuck with me that I think can encompass a lot of what I'm talking about right here. The quote goes like this. It says, To be successful, it's not about doing extraordinary things. It's about doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. It's really about refining the simple things. Those are the powerful things that will make a massive difference for you. I'm going to go into a lot of the simple things that I made adjustments on that went, that made all the difference. Look at these plants. I mean, it speaks for itself. Look how beautiful and how packed and how dense this bed is. And there's even more beauty hidden below. Come in here. Look at the color of these Swiss chard leaves. Let me pull this out. This thing looks fake. Look at the pinks. Look at the beauty. This is food. This is organic. And it's picturesque. Absolutely blows me away. Hidden back here too. Coming a little further. Check it out. We just moved some of these Swiss chard leaves, flowers, marigolds in there. We're always thinking companion planting. We're always thinking how plants can help support one another. So we have to do less work. And actually, sorry, let me bring you in one more time in here. Check this. All the water. This is what I was talking about. With the cabbage sitting in here. I'm going to make sure I don't bend down too close to this because I don't want to get soaked again. Swing over to my right. Another bed. This is the self-watering Bego bed. This thing's great because it's good in the summer. It holds its own water down there. It has some wicking cells. We've got some carrots planted densely here. Let's grab a carrot and see if they're ready to harvest. Let's grab this one here. Still small. Still tiny, but I bet pretty sweet. I'm not going to actually taste this one because I would need to hose it off just a little bit. But the carrots are looking great. They'll soon be really getting fatter. And also, if you look in here, we've got some beets looking really nice. Pretty good stuff. Let's swing over and take a look at some of the tomatoes that were growing along the trellis. If you come over here, we've got 20 tomatoes in 20 square feet. I just put out a video where I showed you guys how I sprayed this row of tomatoes with aspirin. You might be thinking, aspirin? Are you serious? Yep, aspirin. If you are interested in that, go check out the video. But as you see, things are growing tremendously. The color, the health of the plants. It's, it's encouraging. And then the other row I didn't spray aspirin on. The plants are still doing relatively well. Not as good as this row, but still, they're setting up for a fantastic harvest. And we'll just continue to grow these up the strings. This makes growing tomatoes so convenient because it's easy to come out here, grab the fruits, grab the harvest, prune the tomatoes, manage them. It's just nice when you're not like on your hands and knees or you're not like 10 foot up trying to work on the tomatoes. This whole system of lowering and leaning and tying the tomatoes to the string, it's super effective and it's super convenient. Right here is something I'm excited to share with you in the future. This is an experiment. I'm in this, this tomato right here and also the one over there. I'm doing an experiment. You guys will never guess what this experiment is about. It's a, I mean, you'll never guess. I'm super excited about it. I can't wait to bring it to you later in the year. Make sure you hit that subscribe button so you can follow along and you'll get to see this experiment in the future. But you're also going to see a lot of cool things coming up in this video. There's so much to show it like, I mean, I don't even know where to start sometimes. Come over here. Check out the pears along here. We'll come back after and then check out down here. This is a flower I didn't even know I planted. I must've planted it years ago but I'm always just sticking stuff in the ground. Look how beautiful it is. Look how many of the heads are opening. Having these different flowers in the garden not only improves the color and the look of the garden and it also just makes it have a better feel when you come out here. It also brings in so many different pollinators. So flowers are actually so beneficial for the garden. They can't be something that you overlook simply because we might not grab an edible harvest from them. That doesn't mean they don't add to the overall garden and help improve our production. Right over here, we've got an apple. Look at this. Beautiful apples on it. Really nice stuff hidden in the back corner. You guys may have never even seen this apple before but yeah, we're growing apples back here. Then check out these pears right here. Loaded with pears. Last year we got insane harvest from them. We're setting up for a good harvest this year as well. You're probably thinking, James, what are the simple things that you did that took your garden from average to abundant? Your veggies from small to large. Your harvests from regular to irregular. Well, it started with soil. I knew that soil was a foundation for healthy plants. Like we mentioned, it's the simple things that make the big difference. So what I did was years ago, I started to try to make my own soil. The first year I did it, I grew plants in containers. I got some decent results but over the years, I have refined my soil. Now I have my soil mix, my own version that, I mean, it's everything that I wished it could be. I realized that soil, the importance of it is really about the structure. That's what it comes down to. You need to provide the perfect environment for your roots. So my soil has incredible soil structure. What this does is it allows the plant, the roots of the plants to have the access to both oxygen and water. Since the structure of my soil is so good and it's packed with so much organic matter, there are open pockets of air where if roots need a little bit of air, they can kind of move into those pockets. If they need some water, they can tap into the organic matter that's surrounding them to grab some water from it. So I started with soil. I honed in on that. I perfected my soil and the structure. Then I moved over to the next thing. We'll get into that in just a little bit. First, let me show you the results of good soil structure. Look at these plants over here. Look how healthy everything is growing. All I do is I stick the plants in, take a step back and let them do their thing. Besides some of the other simple things we're going to get into as we move through this video. Look at the parsley. You'll love to see some fresh parsley in a garden. Look at the size of the kale leaves. The beauty. This is the scarlet kale. I just love this. The curl, the color, it's got it all. Check out the broccoli back here. Another head of broccoli ready to be harvested. So dang good. Another cabbage here. Look at this one. Looks pretty nice, right? It looks okay compared to the other cabbage over here. Before I get to that though, I want to show you some of these green beans. And you got to swing back just a little bit. Check out this bed over here. I switched things up. In the previous year, this bed, I grew a lot of similar veggies to the other bed I just showed you. But we're trying something different. We loaded this thing with potatoes. A whole raised bed. 10 foot by 4 foot, all potatoes. The harvests are going to be... I can't even think of an adjective for it. They're going to be that though. Whatever a crazy adjective is. Come over here. I told you we had a beautiful cabbage. Tell me you can get a better looking cabbage than that. This thing looks like it's right out of a picture book. The new Brunswick cabbage. Perfect. Ready to harvest. You'll love to see it. Don't forget behind me. You know we got the grapes growing along the fence line. Check those grapes out. In the future, we're going to have some wicked harvests. With my new soil mix locked in, I knew my roots would be happy. Next, it was time to transition to the next simple thing that would make a massive difference for my harvests. I had an understanding that plants would only grow as well as their most limiting factor. So I was thinking, what could really limit my plants from taking off to the next level? Well, it was nutrition. So what I decided to do was to create my own fertilizer that I knew would give my plants exactly what they need to not grow well, to not survive, but to absolutely thrive. So that's what I did. Basically, if we want our plants to be really healthy, we need to make sure that before we actually even get them in the ground, that we're adding some nutrition to our soil. Like we said, we're focused on the soil for the structure. Then we could add in our own nutrition. Yes, I know we're going to get some nutrition from adding things like compost to build our soil, but we need that extra boost to give our plants to make sure that they continue to grow well and that they produce well. So before we get our plants in the ground, we need to make sure we're giving them some fertilizer. Then as they start to head into production, we need to make sure we go out there and top dress them again so they have enough food to just really keep crushing it. Essentially, we need to make sure that our plants aren't lacking so we can stay snacking. Let's take a look at what we have growing around me and actually just grab a snack. Grab some of these peas right here. Yellow peas. Absolutely delicious. Look over here. We've got even more peas flowering, setting up, about to start producing. And you know we got the grapes hanging above, looking beautiful. Look at the level of production on these grapes. I mean, I just love it. The arch trellis. It's a good feeling chilling under the trellis surrounded by food. Swing down here. I want to show you another celery looking fantastic. You may be thinking, James, I don't want to eat any celery. So show me some fruits. Let's get into the fruits. Right next to me here, we've got some white currants. I love these currants. They're delicious. They perform well. Look how cool they look in these trusses. Look at the color of them. They're like translucent. They taste great. I'm not going to snack on them right now because let's be honest, this whole video could just be me walking around eating stuff. I don't want to do that to you guys. I know I may be making you a little jealous by some of these fruits and some of these veggies, but that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just trying to maybe, you know, con you into growing your own garden. That's the idea. We want you out there growing some of your own food. But you might be thinking currants, those are pretty good, but I mean, I don't really like currants that much. Well, do you like fresh, sweet cherries? Rainier ones? Let's move over here. Check this out. Look at the beauty. Look at that. Fresh, rainier cherries. I mean, right off the tree. Organic. The only thing we spray these with is the surround kaolin clay. You can see a little bit of the clay. Organic, just kaolin clay. Look at the color of these. Look at this. And if you take a step back, this whole tree is loaded. This is one of the first trees I ever planted and it was one of my greatest investments ever. Every year provides me with so much food and so much joy just to be able to see the absolute beauty of it. Now, let's move over to the next thing I made a big change on. And you can see we're getting some good results. Look at the size of this dino kale. Look at the color of it. Look at that. It almost looks fake. It just looks too dang good. It's so green it almost looks blue. It's incredible. So, another change that I made was I switched from just growing in the ground to growing in raised beds. One of the reasons I did that is because in the spring, these beds heat up quicker and it allows me to build a nice, deep, 12 to 14 inch area of good quality soil. This way my roots have that great soil structure we talked about. We mix in the fertilizer. They have all the fertilizer they need. They have the space to grow. And if I want to grow something like carrots, we don't have a lot of obstructions of things like rocks and sticks blocking my, blocking them and my soil. We can grow great tap roots on everything we have growing here. Swing around over here. Check this out. So, my parsley is actually starting to flower, which isn't fantastic. And actually, yeah, you're right. Let's go back over there. Let's take a look at this bed. Look, look at this. Look at the, look at the Swiss chard in here. The color on that one. I miss some of these lettuces. Look, look, look at all that lettuce down there. I gotta harvest. Sometimes I just, I miss it. There's so much stuff growing. Another, uh, celery. We've got a lot of that growing, but I do love my celeries. And look at the peas. Look at the color of these flowers and the peas. You've got the light pink. You've got the dark purple. These peas are absolutely just beautiful. Incredible. Check out the size of some of these spinach leaves too. So much food here. And it's, it's wild. Come back on this side of the raised bed. We'll take a look at this one. More cabbages. Huge, huge leaves. Cabbages over here. And then you got to see the Swiss chard back here. Look at the color of this one. I grow all those different colors of Swiss chard. I just love seeing them. They almost, they're so beautiful. They look as good as flowers would. Incredible. So one of the next thing I did was, again, I got off the ground. I grew in these raised beds and it's made a huge difference for me. I think it's really taken things to the next level. One of the things that also helped me do was the next thing. If there's a, you know, a tier of four things, these are the most important, four important things. I went over those three. The fourth one was protection and proactively protecting my plants. I made sure that the raised beds have covers on them like this. A wooden raised bed, I built my own cover. These Vega ones, I got the covers for them. Now I don't have to worry about pests. So we eliminated, we kept the roots happy. So important by building good soil structure. We fed our plants by giving them nutrition. We put them in these raised beds to give the roots space to be able to spread out and have a lot. Then we protected them from the pests. I mean, what else is there? That's what has allowed me to grow veggies that look this dang good. And I'll tell you what, they actually taste better than they even look. Then I combined some other techniques like companion planting, growing vertical, and mixing in perennials, hence the food forest. And that's where we are today. Surrounded by food here, there, up everywhere. Check out some of the pallet raised bed. We built this one just out of pallets. Tomatoes are looking fantastic in here. They're really starting to hit their stride. This thing is going to be loaded with tomatoes. The thing is, you can't keep every single pest out. And when the food's this good, the whole backyard becomes a paradise. This is a paradise for everyone and everything. That's the greatest thing about it and the worst thing about it. The greatest is it feels like a paradise when I come out here. The worst thing about it is it's a paradise for all the chipmunks too. And I'll tell you what, they're hard to keep out. They go after a lot of my strawberries. Look at the strawberries down here. Look at all of them. Look at the size of them too. Look how ripe they are. You cannot get this from the food store. This whole section down here is covered in strawberries. You might think that's cool. Everyone goes strawberries. But look up. We've also got a apple tree loaded with apples. Always looking to get a double yield and get the most out of our space. This is the liberty apple. The most disease resistant apple tree on the planet. This thing is going to kick out so much food. It's insane. There's a few more things I want to show you before I let you leave. Let's first just get a pan of the food forest from the back corner. You can just see how large this appears to be. It's not even a big backyard. It's kind of funny. When it comes to a food forest and something like this, you would think the more you add, the smaller it feels. But when you add trees and you add so many different layers, that's one of the things about a food forest. There's seven different layers. It actually seems bigger. And there's just so much food back here. Swing over here. I want to show you some stuff. Check out these blackberries right here. Look how close they are. This thing is going to be absolutely loaded with blackberries. Just take a pan from here up to there to look how abundant the fruit is on here. When you prune things correctly, it makes a massive difference. And then right next to it, we have the Williams Pride apple. This is my earliest variety of apple. I have another one planted in the other food forest. I liked it so much. I had to plant another one. You guys might be thinking, James, all this stuff sounds good. Everything looks good. But to get a garden started like this, it can be a little expensive sometimes. And you would be right. This isn't the cheapest way to grow a garden. But I know that the investments I make, I'm going to get a good return on them because I've done it so many times before. And when you could see the promise, then that makes it a lot easier to pay the price. So we use that vision of the harvest to encourage us so that we keep getting out there. We keep making the investments. We keep doing the tasks, knowing that every day we're getting one step closer to that vision, to that harvest, to that promise. So let's keep swinging over here. Come this way. Asparagus down here. I mean, there's so much asparagus, I don't even know where to walk sometimes. If you guys didn't know, asparagus are actually ferns. So this is what they look like after they've been growing for a bit. You know, we got some comfrey in here. It's one of the staples when it comes to permaculture. It's an incredible plant. It actually works great as a fertilizer around your fruit trees. You can rip these leaves off, put them around. Really nice. I just want to bring you over really to the raspberries because they're ripe, they're ready, and boy, do they taste good. So delicate. This does not taste anything like a raspberry you can get from the store. These ones are something completely different. So sweet, so delicious, and I mean, words can't describe it. You have to try it yourself. That's why you have to get a garden going. Don't let another day to go by without you getting your hands in the ground, getting them dirty so you could have your opportunity to eat some of this delicious food. That's today's video, growers. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. I hope that after this video, you feel encouraged to get out there and do some work in your garden or if you've never had a garden, that you're encouraged to get out there and get a garden started. It's so important to start today. Like they say about fruit trees, the best time to plant a fruit tree is seven years ago. The second best time is today. So make the most of today. One of the reasons I'm able to grow stuff like this is because I started 15 years ago. That's so nice. And I have goals and a vision of the future. When we can combine these things together, when we could take all the knowledge and the experience that we have in the past, and then we could use the future vision to encourage us to work towards it, then what we do is we take our experience from the past, we take our vision of the future, and then we take our opportunity in the present to make the changes and build the thing that we always wanted, grow the garden we always wanted. The only way it happens is if we get out there and we get our hands dirty. So right now, today, get in the garden, get something done, get a step closer to your dream garden, to your future harvests, and to the opportunity to live, to walk, to harvest from an abundant garden just like this. It's so much fun. It brings me so much joy. And that's why it's so important for me to share that with all of you. If you guys notice, we've got some new merch that I just dropped. I'm really happy with it. Ties into the garden about using some raised beds to help us grow more food as a nice tool to help protect our stuff and help us get earlier harvests. So I love it. I think it came out fantastic. Check it out at teamgrove.us if you wanna grab a shirt. I really like it. I also wanted to mention that you guys need to check out the community over at teamgrove.us. It's free to join. We have over 2000 members on there, all coming together, just working as a unit, as a group to try to grow a better future together. That's the goal. That's the mission. Every day we're on there. Every day we're working hard. You gotta be a part of it. I also wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members, Thomas Heffernan. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. Give us one more little pan to just see how the garden is growing. It's actually the perfect day to get a look at the garden because it's not super sunny. So the lighting is good. The veggies are happy. And I'll tell you who's happier than anyone. That's the chipmunks. I mean, what a paradise for the chipmunks. And there's birds nests in the grapes, birds nests in the prigioni apple. The amount of life in the garden is so incredible. And it's a really fun to just be a part of the whole thing. Everything would be absolutely perfect. Except we do miss Tuck. I miss him a lot. I know you guys in the comments miss him a lot too. But I'm not sad. I'm so happy. This probably wouldn't have been here without Tuck. So we could, can everyone just spam some hearts down low for the king to thank him for giving us this opportunity. And that's why it's so important that we share it with other people so other people can have the opportunity to just taste some fruit from the seeds that Tuck planted. I had an absolute blast out here. I had a lot of fun. Make sure you guys hit that subscribe button to follow along for more of these videos. Some interesting experiment ideas and just follow along with us for having a blast in the garden. Also, the homestead is really setting up nice. We're still working on that place. We're going to bring you guys and show you some updates of it when we think it's a good time to. So again, make sure you subscribe to follow along. I'll be back at you with another one real soon. We out!