The best gardening & homesteading channels on Youtube
During my trip to NYC, I visited Jonathan Sumner, the Farm Manager at Riverpark Farm, one of the most unusual urban farms I’ve ever visited. He grows in 3,200 individual milk creates on real estate that’s probably some of the most expensive in the city. All of the produce goes to Riverpark, a celebrity chef-owned…
Build your soil…feed your plants. It’s a mantra that all gardeners should know. Your soil is the #1 factor in the health of your plants, and it’s a living thing! Well…it houses billions of living things, all of which work together to help you get truly EPIC harvests. 1. Use Dynamic Accumulators 2. Compost, Compost,…
As fall slowly makes its way to San Diego (Zone 10b), I find myself in a gardening lull, making some improvements to the front yard rather than actively cultivating the plot right now. The end of summer always leaves me a little drained in the garden, and I like to take some time, reset, and…
Pea shoots are dead-simple to grow, provided you follow just a few best practices. They’re a large seed and require soaking before you actually plant them. For best results, you’ll want to follow this guide carefully – a lot can go wrong! I’ve noticed that with peas, you’ll want to go a bit lower than…
Microgreens are a nutritional powerhouse that just happen to be one of the easiest types of plants to grow in ANY living space. Even if you’re in a tiny New York apartment, you can grow microgreens. Today we’re growing a spicy lettuce salad mix…a simple mix to grow due to fast and easy germination and…
Well, this weekend got a little crazy…John Kohler from Growing Your Greens sent me a random Facebook message letting me know he’d be out in San Diego, CA this weekend and that he wanted to do a tour of the Epic Gardening headquarters. My jaw dropped…I ‘grew up’ as a gardener watching his videos! He…
Buy the raised beds I use in my garden: https://shop.epicgardening.com/ If you’re like me and don’t have a lot of space to grow, it REALLY matters how you use the little space you have. Enter high-density planting. You can use methods like Square Foot Gardening for your spacing, but the general idea is to cram…
Fall 2018 is coming soon, and the garden is looking a bit worse for the wear. I’ve pulled all of my lingering summer crops and am in a planning phase for the next season. Part of that planning is clearing out some of my loquat tree vegetation to let more sun through to the back…
In my last video on vermicomposting, I went through a simple setup of a single-tote worm bin from Uncle Jim’s Worm Farm. Pretty soon, that bin was full and it was time to redesign the system to be more scalable and easier to work with. A 3-tote stackable system has a few advantages: – Bottom…
Self watering planters, also known as sub-irrigated systems, make watering easy by using wicking action to water your soil from below. They keep soil evenly moist, especially when combined with some mulch on the soil surface and are perfect for finicky plants that love consistent watering. This design is not only cheap, but it’s easy…
The mental image of a lush, green plant overtaking the old brick wall of a centuries-old cottage is enough to make any gardener start a new English ivy plant in their home. English ivy is a fantastic climber, using its tiny roots to grab on to any surface. It can be used to cover any…
Today we’re taking a look at my friend Marco’s system, the Aponix vertical barrel growing system. It can be either soil or hydroponic, but you’ll see me set it up as a hydroponic system in this video. Vertical hydroponics is one of the THE MOST PRODUCTIVE ways to grow in small, urban spaces due to…
Today we’re looking at mid-tier LED grow lights in detail. This is a section of the market that’s highly competitive as new growers get into hydroponics and indoor gardening. In this video we’ll talk about the Mars Hydro Reflector-Series 480w LED grow light, with toggle-able switches for vegetative and flowering lighting modes. Is it a…
California Gardening is one of the biggest channels in the gardening space here on YouTube. I’ve learned SO much from his channel over the years. A few days ago I left a comment on his channel to see if he’d be open to a full tour of the garden, and to my surprise he said…YES!…
Boy do I have a surprise for you! I was messaged on Instagram (go follow https://www.instagram.com/epicgardening/ if you haven’t already) by a company to see if I wanted to test out a bed. Usually I say no to these types of requests, but curiosity got the best of me in this case. Jim from Eco…
Vermicomposting, or composting with worms, is one of the best ways to integrate food scraps into your garden. Worms make short work of most food scraps and create wonderful BLACK GOLD, or worm castings. Castings are one of the best soil amendments you can ask for, and better yet…worms are easy to care for! In…
Interested in growing microgreens, but not sure what you need to get started? In this guide, I’ll talk about growing trays, seeds, soil, and a basic overview of how microgreens grow. We’ll cover some of the problems you’ll run into as well. I used to grow and sell microgreens commercially to high-end restaurants in my…
Today we take our seed potato sections from a previous video and plant them in our buckets! I’m using 5 gallon buckets from Ace Hardware, but you can use whatever container you’ve got lying around the house. I mixed up some compost, peat moss, and perlite, along with a handful of worm castings for the…
The Spider Plant, or Chlorophytum Comosum, is an extremely popular houseplant, and for good reason. It’s gorgeous, easy to care for, and spider plant babies sprout from it non-stop, making it easy to propagate. Along with learning how to water spider plants (it’s a bit different than most houseplants), you’ll learn how to grow spider…
When learning how to grow potatoes, you’ll hear about “seed potatoes” and you might wonder what they are. Unlike many other plants, we grow our potatoes from…other potatoes! However, there’s a process that our seed potatoes need to undergo to make sure they have the best chance of survival. This is what we’re talking about…
Growing thyme is one of the joys of having an herb garden. It spices up so many dishes that it’s a staple…but what if you want more of it? In this video I go over a dead-simple method for propagating an endless amount of thyme from cuttings. No rooting hormone, no special tools. Simply dirt,…
We put a lot of time into our gardens…so when it comes time to harvest and store our produce, let’s make sure we do it right! Here’s my method for harvesting and storing leafy greens to get their shelf life to a week or longer. There are three steps: 1. Harvest the full root ball…
Learning how to grow beets is pretty easy, but a common questions is when to harvest them. Because they grow under ground, we often can’t see their progress. We don’t want to risk taking our beets out too early as they won’t have formed solid beetroots, but if we take them out too late they’ll…
Ah, basil…the “Kingly” herb. If you want a never-ending supply of basil, you need to learn how to grow basil from cuttings. In this video we’ll go over the technique I use every time I clone basil. There are other methods, such as rooting in water, but I find this one has the highest success…
We put a lot of time into our gardens, so let’s make sure we get the most out of our greens! Lettuce, spinach, mustard greens, and many other leafy veggies can be harvested many times over using the cut and come again method. As long as you don’t damage the growing tip or “crown” of…
See my favorite new raised beds here: https://shop.epicgardening.com/ Two of my good friends recently asked me to help them set up a DIY raised garden bed in their suburban backyard. I jumped at the chance, because they’d never wanted to garden before! What a great opportunity. In today’s video, we’re going to walk them through…
Learning how to compost can be a tricky process. There are a lot of steps in making compost at home, and many problems you can run into along the way. In today’s video, I’m troubleshooting a compost pile that wasn’t heating up anymore. What could be the problem? Usually it’s one of these things: -…
If I had to create an award for the best houseplant for beginners, the humble snake plant or “Mother-In-Law’s Tongue” would win it. You can pretty much ignore this plant for a month and it will be fine. They have a beautiful and striking appearance in your home, and even remove toxins (benzene, formaldehyde) from…
Sometimes you need finer soil for starting seeds, growing carrots, or growing microgreens. Instead of going to the garden center and spending a bunch of cash on fancy soil mixes that are “perfect” for starting seeds, why not make your own with a soil screen? All you need is: – 2×4″ plywood – 1/4″ chicken…
Buy the raised beds I have in my garden: https://shop.epicgardening.com/ Spring is coming! And that means it’s time to either replant or prepare your raised beds for the coming season. In this video we talk about: – How to harvest out old growth from your bed – My recipe for top-dressing your bed to add…
