#zone6 #learntogrow
Welcome to our latest video on urban gardening! In this episode, we delve into practical tips and tricks for maximizing your small gardening space in an urban setting. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just starting, these strategies will help you create a thriving no-dig permaculture garden.
What You’ll Learn:
Creating a Work Area: Organize your gardening space efficiently to streamline your tasks.
Using Trays Across Garden Beds: Utilize trays that fit across the sides of your garden beds to make planting and maintenance easier.
Rain Barrels: Implement rain barrels to collect and use rainwater, reducing your reliance on tap water and promoting sustainability.
Always Have Plants Ready: Keep plants ready to go in the ground to ensure continuous growth and productivity.
Vertical Gardening: Make the most of vertical space with trellises, hanging planters, and vertical garden structures.
And a lot more!
Our no-dig permaculture approach ensures minimal soil disruption, promoting healthier soil and reducing weeds. Join us on this journey to transform your urban space into a green oasis!
Books Recommended:
“The Autonomous Garden” by Jason Vivier (2025)
“Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
“The Art of Happiness” by the Dalai Lama
Connect with Us:
Amazon link to my poetry book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VPRQSYW
Music on YouTube: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCZ0OBMNoXBVvDDDCrI6bomA
Substack: https://1sttractor.substack.com/
Instagram: @vivier_Jason
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/UkrLrc_Jason
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/autonomousgardener/
Medium: https://medium.com/@jason.a.vivier
Tags:
UrbanGardening, SmallSpaceGardening, GardeningTips, NoDigGarden, Permaculture, SustainableLiving, RainBarrels, VerticalGardening, UrbanFarming, JasonVivier, TheAutonomousGarden, GreenLiving
#UrbanGardening #SmallSpaceGardening #GardeningTips #NoDigGarden #Permaculture #SustainableLiving #RainBarrels #VerticalGardening #UrbanFarming #JasonVivier #TheAutonomousGarden #GreenLiving
hey everybody I spent a couple weeks and I put together a bunch of tips for you um so watch all the way to the end because well I didn’t really structure them very well I just kind of went and did it one after another after another after another so um I hope you enjoy it I’m doing something out in the garden I thought you would want to see I think it’s kind of cool and I think it might actually help a lot of people with small spaces this is how you how you can have a seed bed Dual Purpose seed bed in a city in a small garden this is my take on a seed bed this year so I’m just using an old crate that I picked up from a uh from a grocery store and um you can see I’m growing leaks Bulgarian leaks um that will get planted out into the garden towards the end of the summer but until then they’re just going to grow on in this little seed bed which is lined with cardboard paper and uh egg cartons uh I almost forgot I got two uh Pro tips for you and also I need to start before they start grinding up all that wood from the tree down there so the first one is um I I went and put these um Dills in larger pots I’m going to grow them in the pots but I took them out of here all right Pro tip number one anytime you remove a plant from a module from a tray from a pot or something like that put something else in it I put corn in this and even if I don’t need it I at least got plants I got some choices so if I end up with the blank space or I’m like oh wait a second maybe I could grow something that there I’ve already got plants ready to go and also they’re a little bit behind the other ones I already seated so I might be able to kind of extend the season through this type of succession idea the other the other Pro tip is anytime you take a plant out of the ground if you don’t have a plant to put back in there put a seed in it so I took out a bunch of these um these radishes here right here and I I replanted radishes there always keep sewing keep planting always have new plants always have things ready to go in the ground you can’t have too many plants you can only have not enough yeah I got one more Pro tip for you here um every Edge is a place to plant PL plants every Edge is a place to plant plants so down here along the edge of the garden bed you put things you put things like aium if you want flowers or in my case I’m going to use parsley if you if you have parsley seed you have herb seed whatever it is use all the edges plant things there if you have the seed you might as well use it it might as well not go bad so it doesn’t matter and if it gets to be crazy you just eat it like it’s really not a big issue this is a new topic for me I’ve never really discussed this but infrastructure um the infrastructure that you need in a garden especially in an urban garden with the space so tight you have to be really careful about how you use your space so one of the main things that I found to be extremely useful is just having a bench this bench was made out of used wood sitting around the house nothing fancy literally just screwed some legs on it and this isn’t even attached this is just loose because um during the winter I take this silly thing and I bring it upstairs um and I uh grow I put plants that need to have some sunlight during the winter on there and and in a south facing window so that’s really important um another thing that is super important is the place to put your tools and that I have a sturup hoe up there and a metal rake and back here I just keep things like my my diber and uh my you know little hand shovels and Clippers and a and and a Sharpie for runting on things so you know keeping all of your tools around your workbench is a really smart thing to do because then you know where everything is and even in a small garden man I lose tools or I was losing tools a lot now that I got them all here I just come back here and I grab everything and and and life is good you don’t necessarily need anything with wheels I don’t actually wheel this around but you need a place to keep your potting soil and um my potting soil is compost and sand that’s that’s basically what I do I I have bags of sand I mix it 50/50 compost sand that’s what I use for a potting mix it’s not even really 50/50 I just throw it in there and I mix it up and when it looks right I I just roll with that and that’s what that batch looks like um the other reason that you have this is when you’re taking PL out of pots if you’ve got good compost in there and all that stuff you might as well just you know if you’re emptying the pot you might as well just dump the soil in there mix it all up and then reuse that potting mix and that way you’re adding fresh compost to your potting mix and um you know everything is better there’s shortterm storage of compost which is what this is and I have another Barrel up here which is where comp composted materials in the process of composting these stay up front because we have front doors here and if we’re working in the garden it’s really easy just to throw material in there when they get full I used to just kind of leave them there uh they used to all be in this area I used to leave them there now I just pull them out back and if I need another bin I’ll just spend the 20 bucks and buy another bin and stick it up here drill holes in the side and just leave that in the back and let it compost for the next 6 months until Autumn and then I’ll dump it all in the garden beds and then we have an overflow so this is all extra compost this is compost that’s like 80% finished and um I dumped it all in in in this Geo bin um I expected to get a better shape out of it but it kind of just fell over um dump it all in the Geo bin I comfy leaves if I have them just to throw it in there and keep things moving um but that’s where all the extra compost for the year goes and um it it’s going to sit there now this is just going to stay until the Autumn and there’s a bunch of plants growing out of it there’s sunflowers and tomatoes and and potatoes and all kinds of stuff um from compost materials that went in there and since I don’t do a really hot compost I do a really kind of uh a slow compost some of the seeds still survive so they’ll grow out of the edges of the Geo bin and then when it’s time to dump all this back on here I’ll probably just Harvest all the potatoes that are in there um and I’ll let the sunflowers grow the other thing of course is um water you need to concern yourself with water now in this Garden I’ll use City water it’s just faster it’s easier and it’s always there but I always keep rain barrels and I’ve got like maybe four or five of these they’re not all connected yet um they usually I’ll usually connect them all up by the summertime um and there are days when I just I just take water out of this instead of using the city especially if if I know it’s going to rain again or rain soon I I’ll take all the water out of this I’ve had no issues using city water here I know some people say don’t do it I’ve never experienced a problem with it myself so that and then of course you need the um watering cans two of those watering cans is enough to water everything in this garden and it takes about 30 minutes of some nice vigorous work to water the whole thing now we’ve recently been installing some irrigation um this stuff uh but I don’t rely on it um really the only reason I’m doing it is to make it so that the girls uh my daughters when they come home from school they don’t have to spend half an hour watering the garden and because they’re young it takes them longer so they could be out here for like 45 minutes just watering things and I feel bad so I bought two of those kits and I was hoping to get one kit to work in three beds but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen so I might need to buy another one and then that’ll just be on a timer when they come home from school they can just twist it to say 30 minutes or something like that or an hour whatever I decide it needs and um it’ll just take care of all the watering for them uh another thing you’re going to you probably want to have is a place to put your pots and stuff I keep all my pots and everything down there um and also I throw trash in there so when I go in there and it’s more trash trash and pots I take all the trash out and I throw it in the trash um but it’s mostly like plastic bags and things like that um some type of greenhouse so that’s what I use and it honestly doesn’t get a great deal of use for the most part lately I’ve just been putting plants under row covers in trays uh and growing them under the row covers um plastic row covers with fleece uh on top of them and that seems to have worked um but this year I’m actually going to use this to try to get uh some determinate tomatoes to like grow really fast um so I’ll crack the door make sure there’s a lot of heat in there I might use it for my Chili Peppers uh something like that so I can get a better yield from plants that really want really hot temperatures that are hotter than we can really provide here in New Hampshire consistently throughout the summer so um but it is great place to start plants and a little Greenhouse cabinet like that will only set you back a few hundred bucks um it won’t hurt to have a cold frame like this one right now the the top is off of it but that thing’s seen a whole lot of use this year uh that was a gift I don’t know what what that cost but it it was worth every penny absolutely every penny and if you’re doing this type of gardening with no dig gardening and you’re just kind of throwing soil on on the top and you’re kind of leaving nature to do its own thing a sturup hoe a sturup ho is extremely use useful um they’ll last a long time uh they’re generally inexpensive this is a sturup Poe and you basically just run it across the top of the garden bed see if I can do this with one hand and run it across the top of the garden bed like this and it separates the plant from the root base but you don’t have to go that deep uh so what you end up with is very undisturbed soil but all of your Weeds on top of the plant on top of the garden bed they’re all they’re all dead because now the plant tops have been severed from the root bodies fleece row covers in zone well now 6A used to be 5B but now we’re 6A in this Zone fleece row covers are extremely useful to keep your plants alive if you put them in really early and Hoops um these type of Hoops the metal ones are but these are the ones I can buy like this uh for covering everything with plastic especially during the winters because if you do it right here in New Hampshire you can grow all winter long uh we’ve done it a couple years in a row grow all your greens get all your Greens in early um in the winter uh early in ear get them in right as uh summer is turning in the Autumn and you will find that things like spinach Swiss chard KES lettuce uh there’s a specific variety I can’t remember what it’s called but it’s a a Norwegian lettuce and we grew it last year and we ate it last night it’s super good um we’ll survive all winter undercover so having some fleece roast row covers and some some um row cover plastic and hoops and stuff like that will just keep you gardening longer in at the end of the summer and beginning of autumn everybody’s cleaning up their Gardens all that stuff I’m still putting plants in the ground and I’m growing all winter long um and there’s really no no no reason not to uh we’re gardeners we want to grow things and if we can find a way to do it we should one more thing uh if you can buy trays that fit across your garden beds the open space in your garden beds especially early in the season you don’t need to get in there to harvest anything so you might as well use that space to start plants grow plants on all that stuff so pots and Trays that fit in between your garden beds on top like that are are really useful and kind of an underlooked area in the garden I’ve actually never heard of anybody talking about that um so I might be the first there which is happens sometimes um so yeah that’s worth doing and definitely consider it so where parsley is concerned and sorry about the light I can’t do anything about the sun um where parsley is concerned I grow it two ways I’ll grow it on a bed just kind of spaced out like you would normally expect and then I also just grab the seed and I throw it and anywhere it sprouts it sprouts and I get these big bags of parsley here’s an example of it just growing in the garden and if I were to keep that in for another year after the season is over it would come back and be really big um and I’d have a lot of really big parsley there um but as it is I’m actually going to grow cucumbers here so um these parsley will be here as long as they’re convenient and then I’ll fall back on the ones that are kind of growing off in other spaces and behind my peach tree if we take a look over there we’ll see a similar thing which is then a bunch of parsley growing up underneath this Humphrey and next to these broad beans so here’s another one these are growing right next to these ornamental onions here and way back here underneath my pear tree you see the exact same idea that is a big parsley plant another thing I’ve recently started doing and I can’t really talk about its usefulness cuz it’s the first year I’ve do done it is to actually build fertilizer in the pots that I’m growing things and I’ll show you what that looks like right now this here is a really small spoon tomato that I’m going to be growing in a pot and this here is a bucket of water and a bunch of stuff that I pick up from the garden and as this breaks down it’s going to create a mineral Rich anerobic stinky um fertilizer and since you know for the most part the bottom half of this tomato is going to be cleared of any leaves and there’s not going to be any fruit on it anyways what I’m going to do is I’m going to water this and it’s going to water the pot and as the water flows out of it and I mix it up uh it’s going to be a nutrient fertilizer that ends up in the pot instead of using like um any other type of fertilizer so I’m thinking that each big pot like this will will get one of these um some kind of food safe container that I can put water in and fill with organic material I mean the main thing that’s in here is a big comf root that uh we pulled out when we were moving around some plants and think was at least 2 or 3 ft long and I kind of just broke it up and put it in the bottom and so all the minerals in that root is going to be coming out but something like this you don’t want to get it on the fruit like you wouldn’t dump this on a tomato plant like watering from the top and then pick tomatoes and eat them that would be crazy You’ get sick this year I’ve been growing salad in a tray like this it’s worked out really well actually um and you see I got another little pot with salad greens right there but it’s not growing nearly as well now that one’s about a week older but we’ve harvested from this one I think four times already um and we add things from around the garden to make up the rest of the salad we divided up all of our uh strawberries and then we respaced them in this area and we cleaned out a bunch of the gooseberries and the hazelnuts and so we potted on those strawberries into other pots the extra ones that we had and we also made not one strawberry Tower but two strawberry Towers little this is a little guy uh and we’ve also put them into like hanging pots and stuff like that and then we hang those from the grape arbor and this is growing a pink grape and that plant is coming along just fine one thing I did as this was growing is I realized it wanted to grow down and so I let it follow this path here and then come up the other side of the arbor so now I have a loop of straw of uh now I have a loop of grapes and then I had the idea of well well well and I just grow it all the way down here just one and then I can just Harvest grapes from there too and so that’s probably going to happen now I’m growing more herbs in pots here’s an oregano and here is a thyme and I’ve got dill and there’s some Rosemary I’m hoping this will grow and in this pot from my compost came a peach tree so I’m thinking about doing a bonsai peach tree if that’s even possible at the beginning of the season I uh used my barbecue grill and I created a bunch of wood ash and it’s going to go around the base of my tomato plants now I learned this from uh World War II Britain and England has some of the best gardeners in the world so um I’m going to go ahead and try it this year um don’t neglect uh climbing plants um these are all beans and they’ll grow everywhere and anywhere I can find a place for them to climb up um they will produce a lot of beans you know this amount of plants will probably produce like two quart mason jars of beans not a great deal in a small space but it’s a great deal if you aren’t using that space um the vertical space that is so don’t neglect vertical space it’s it’s it’s an extremely important SP part in the garden grow crops in between other crops when you know those are going to come out so here we have cilantro um and it’s pretty small at the moment but that’s one meal of cilantro if we were to say cut it today and then on either end of this long pot I’ve got kale growing Kale’s the crop that’s going to come out of this pot but in the meantime I’m going to grow things in the middle now your potted plants clear out all the old leaves that’s what insects are going to want to be eating and cuz they’re weak and you can find yourself with a insect problem um just because you weren’t taking care of your plants well everybody that’s all the tips I’ve got for you today so uh if you enjoyed the video please like it you know do all that stuff if you’re not subscribed please go ahead and subscribe if you want to um I only want people around here that want to be around here so uh and I hope you all have a wonderful work week you know like I know Mondays suck for everybody and I know Monday is not tomorrow but I just hope that yours is spectacular I really do all right everybody see you later bye now
1 Comment
Good job papa!