Join us as we take you back 11 years to show you how we began our gardening journey and our march towards growing our own food for life.
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have you ever dreamed of growing your own food in your own backyard and felt overwhelmed by the challenges and costs well we did too until we discovered some simple and affordable ways to turn our small City lot into a productive and beautiful garden in this video we’re going to show you how we did it and how you can too join us for the story of how our garden has progressed and how you can install and grow your own food for next to nothing and [Music] [Music] [Music] cost [Music] [Music] [Music] in 2013 we purchased our our 3,000 ft home here in the city it sits on a quarter acre corner lot surrounded by other City dwellers in an older neighborhood when we purchased the property in March of that year we had plans to grow a garden but settling in was our priy and was time consuming so just as we had done at our last home that we were renting we tried container gardening that first year we struggled and had very little success with it we were using big box store soil and purchased Big Box store vegetable plants our results were dismal that year and led us to abandoning the whole project that fall I drew up a plan to build a small Greenhouse the greenhouse was designed to face the South so as to absorb as much sunlight as possible during the cooler months when I would have our plant starts in it we had a big ugly birch tree in the way however from the abandoned neighboring property so for a few hours during the middle of the day the greenhouse was shaded out nonetheless in November of that year I built the greenhouse with a budget of around $500 having no carpentry skills and never having attempted to build anything more than a shop table this was a fun challenge for me and to everyone’s surprise it worked now the back wall did Lean a little at an obtuse angle and it wasn’t exactly 90° and you could notice it from a distance but it was sturdy and the plants inside didn’t care one bit if it wasn’t perfect we did not supplement the greenhouse with heat the first year and just allowed the sun to do its part heating it I can remember on days where it was 30° Outside Inside was a warm 55° or more in late January 2014 we put our first seeds in the starter trays using the farmer Alman act to determine the last frost state for our Zone we followed the back of the seed packs to count back to the specific indoor seed start times I also began to look for a tiller around this time having a very small budget I searched Craigslist and came across a small front time tiller it had some years on it and was only two horsepower but I figured I could just go across the land multiple times if need be and get it all tilled up we hardly get ground freezing Winters in our area anymore so in early March I was able to tell a small 450t area for our first Garden when installing the garden I took the approach I had always seen in pictures and books and mounded dirt into long rows spaced the seeds and planted according to the packaging and put some water on it the first year we had an idea of what we wanted the garden to look like and plenty of inspiration from our web searches one of the more unique techniques we tried was building a vertical potato box the idea is to plant your spuds in the first layer of framing add soil and as the plant grows you add another layer of Framing and soil until you reach the top of your support arms this forces the plant to grow more potatoes in the area covered by the soil our box was about 3 ft tall it had four layers and it looked exactly how we pictured it the problem we encountered was that although the potatoes did grow there were very few and very small compared to the seed potatoes we used if there was one glaring failure to the Garden that year it was the potatoes because the rest of the garden produced what many would call a bumper crop we were not ready for the amount of squash zucchini tomatoes and cucumbers we had that Year Matt found a vegetable called kabi which appeared to be some sort of alien root vegetable and to our surprise it grew amazingly as we looked at our garden we could only imagine that because the soil had only been used to grow Turf only it had never really depleted any nutrients and the grass that was prominent in the yard in that area was Bermuda weed fighting that creeping invasive grass was a chore of its own the garden did get an adequate amount of sunlight in the summer and we did water in the early mornings it seemed like everything we had done that year really worked we grew Roma tomatoes which produced over 200 lb and forced me into learning how to can we had pickling cucumbers which seemed to grow overnight we would literally pick a whole basket and the next day it was as if we have never picked any that day before this abundance of cucumbers forced me into learning how to pickle and store them we even grew ornamental glass gem corn that year which we used for fall decorations and then sold many of the seeds the following spring the garden produced so well we were giving produce away to friends family and neighbors it was an amazing first Garden we did all this without the use of pesticides fertilizers or chemical elements added to the Garden we had purposed to grow the best food we could organically and not use chemicals this means that you have to stay on top of your garden you have to look at your plants every day flip the leaves check for evidence of tomato horn worms at the base of the plants inspect squash plants for Vine bores not water late in the afternoon to try to keep powdery mildew from forming all of this we did not know about that first year we learned as we grew when we found a problem we researched it and addressed it if the plant was too far gone we ripped it up we had a few trash cans that we were attempting to use for composting purposes and did not want to contaminate them so anything that was infested or diseased was either burned or tossed into the trash bin honestly the garden produced so well that first year we were both exhausted from harvesting we still had a one-year-old son to attend to and our three other older schoolage children to focus on as well Matt kept a running log of harvest weights and stopped recording When the totals were over 1,000 pounds and although we were very tired in the fall we began to plan for next year’s garden and to add to our small urban farm with [Music] chickens [Music]
42 Comments
A nice, tasty, inexpensive, rare, amazing grape variety developed in SE Texas for Southern growers that will thrive where others fail up to zone 5: "Mrs. Munson" by Fair Haven Vine Nursery. Saw a guy growing it in zone 8 and it was a great producer at two years old. We have Muscadines here in Louisiana but the wild ones here never seem to produce anymore or the squirrels get them while still green. They did this to our huge fig tree when I lived on the river in the NW region. There was no stopping them. Thankfully there are owl families living here and the squirrels do a lot of hiding. A big hoot owl woke me up at 2:58am. Must be nesting time.
just to dramatic FOR . i watch a lot of homestead cotent and the down to business ones ALWAYS seems to be the best
My yard was bulldozed down to hard red dirt. So It`s gonna take me years with physical issues to haul in forest soil. I`ve never encountered anything like this. People are ridiculous. It was my half sister`s mom who had it done. Now I know why she and her son don`t like fruit or vegetables and were horrified that I planned to grow fruit trees and offered them a tree because they might "attract bugs." My nephew only admitted to liking bell peppers but refused to eat the ones I grew because….."bugs might be on them." My Yankee cousins wouldn`t eat ANY fruit, berries or vegetables we grew but happily ate them from cans or from the store. Why? Because ours "came from the dirt." Welcome to America! LOL! We`re 100% DOOMED!
Love this!
Last year I planted 12 potatoes, they grew well and 3 months later, I harvested ONE potato the size of my thumb… I WILL do better this year, I can't believe I would have been better off eating the 12 I planted!
"Small" city lot ? U-huh.
Unsolicited advice: lose the stock images and videos. Makes your channel look like all the stupid bot channels on YouTube. Your original video and photos are good enough, you don’t need the stock media.
That’s no small back yard
deafenin music put me off
Need to make sure you’re planting the right potatoes. Newer varieties were created to grow shallow so they could be harvested with machinery. Heirloom varieties are better suited to mounding dirt on top of to increase yields.
How many square feet is your garden?
Awesome video thank
Extremely low voice volume then get BLASTED by music. Thanks
Haha, your home is 500 square feet smaller than my entire parcel when I was in Los Angeles.
Nice soil in the intro.
Wow great video. Where do you live? I am in FL and am starting on this journey now
great testimony of what we can do at home. thanks for sharing
Wow beautiful garden ❤Thanks for your wonderful video ❤❤❤ 8:39
Did you actually weigh all that?
Do not spit out random numbers. It makes you look fake. Like you BOUGHT the majority of what you claimed to have grown.
Well done! ❤
Waving at yall from East Texas! Enjoyed your video. I’m working on my “Asphalt Homestead”. Right now I have some buckets in a frame. lol l am 67 and need to use oxygen when doing exertive activities. Congrats on your 20 acres! Looking forward to watching your Journey
Well done
Most inspiring! Kudos! 👏👏👏
Congratulations! And thank you for the straight
toit content. I love that you didn't make this video with repetitive rumbling. I'm very encouraged that I can do this along with my mother's experience of gardening.I'm quite impressed with the thumbnails in your channel's videos, they look like something out of a fairy tale. It's great when you have a dreamy small garden. ❤
That’s a huge back garden.
Add on top of the soil. Don’t dig the he’ll out of it! Keep the microbes in and feed the microbes in the soil …
0:42 is what gardening is all about. Great and inspirational video. Well done.
Fabulous.
No need to be over productive and wasteful of resources of which Time being #1! I used to grow a lot of food and I could not give the excess away. I now have a small space, can what I desire and compost the "excess". Don't over plant!
“Small city lot”?! In most of the world’s cities that would be considered huge! Not undermining what you’ve achieved which is wonderful, but just to say in most cities people would give their right arm for a quarter of an acre so it can be frustrating to keep hearing how small it is 😉
Your place is not small. Where I live, I could put it three times in your place. That’s small.. you have a huge yard.
I just found your channel with this video popping in my feed. I really enjoyed watching your garden progress. It's dream for me to own a homestead, meanwhile I'm renting and patio gardening. I love kolrahbi!
Great Efforts!
lol small backyard
This is a great video, lots of info. My only complaint is about your editing not your content… your volume on your audio is so low that the music blasts you out of your chair when turned up enough to hear you talk. But again, love the content ❤
I want my front yard to look like this, but my wife wants grass instead….
vườn cây rất đẹp, bạn giỏi quá
Well done first year. So happy for you that you stuck with all the hard work and the joy of being able to contribute some of the joy to friends and neighbors even in the first year.
Good morning and Asalammualaikum. Wow just wow. I've always thought about having a graden. So i did containers gardening. So so results. But i was so happy. To hear and see you're stories of beginning and continue small garden. Mind blowing. I now have a 1/2 plot in a community garden. I dont have a plan, i just plant😅. Like reg. You dont have enough space for these plants 😅. Having fun. Hop i can share a pic with yall. Just maybe you'll give suggestions. God bless yall. May Almighty Allah bless you abundantly. Ameen
💓your garden is beautiful, thank you for sharing :))
You spelled large suburban yard wrong.