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[Applause] [Music] [Applause] it is time to get growing with Owen Owen how’s it going man great oh my gosh it’s been such a delight working with you this week and today we are talking about one of my favorite types of gardening Edibles edible gardening all the things that you can eat yes this is the stuff that I like taking care of cuz it it takes care of me that’s right to me this is maybe the most rewarding kind of gardening because you get to eat it at the end and I promise the stuff coming out your tastes better than what you’re getting anywhere else oh totally totally so the first thing you wanted to chat about when we’re talking about kind of these edible Gardens is spacing oh it’s so critical it’s more important with Edibles than anything else and again the most common mistake is over planting so you you go to the shop and you’re like oh here’s just a little pack of lettuce each of these gets quite a bit bigger than this over the course of the year so what we actually do is uh there’s a system called square foot gardening so if you just Google that there’s a lot of great information but the idea is that everything takes one square foot or more and that’s an easy way to plan it out you measure the size of the bed you’re like I got 10 square feet so I could divide that up one way or another so you know if you’ve got herbs that’s maybe like half a square foot you can tuck those in all kinds of places a head of lettuce takes up literally this much room wait a second so this little guy turns into that little guy smoker that’s a lot they they get way way bigger over the course of the year and then when we’re talking about our bigger plants well of course we got our carrots here too we got to talk carrots right look at this look at all that carrots we’re planting in a row and it’s that wide and it’s as long as the spaces you know if you’ve got a 4ft space it’s 4 feet 6ft space it’s 6 feet but you need that width for carrots so that’s about a foot wide exactly about a foot wide and then we’ve also got our bigger things like we’ve got our tomatoes so uh Tomatoes if you’re getting started you want to leave about this much space in the garden for tomatoes when you get better you can put them a little tighter but it makes it easier on the maintenance and something like bush beans or in our case we’ve got zucchini these are about the same size so these need more room you want to give them more space cuz they get big now if we don’t have a fancy Printing House to print all of our cool little squares can you just do this with string kind of figureing out with paper absolutely so we we’ve kind of got that a little bit here you can Mark out little lines in the bed but do measure it it makes a big difference uh and then that way you’re not going to end up with a crazy jungle that’s hard to maintain later on okay right on so we’re planning out this Garden how would you to plan this baby out so what so once we’ve figured out our size we also need to figure out the sun this is a really important consideration for the most part everything you eat wants to be in full sun but some things can take a little bit less so what we’ve got you need to understand uh so we got a great little diagram here so there’s the Sun the carrots the bush beans the tomatoes the Sun is going to hit them they’re getting Sun basically all day we’ve actually got the lettuce this is a tricky one tucked in behind the tomatoes yeah that’s confusing right so cuz they’re shorter but the tomatoes grow more slowly we start with them later in the season so by the time they’re big and making shade you’ve actually harvested the lettuce already it’s come out of the garden you’ve already eaten it so it’s okay to put these in a spot where you wouldn’t do this in August but if you’re doing it in May works perfectly which is exactly what we’re doing oh man that’s that’s awesome Okay cool so yeah this is how we’re going to do lay so why don’t we start sewing some carrots let’s oh okay so we’ve got our carrot seeds here and these are what we call Direct sew so use a string line this is like the oldest easiest trick it’s hard to do a straight line just in the garden yeah get some string put it in a line and then that way you can actually plant your carrots in a row and it’s not going to be like you know your all over the place so we’re just going to kind of sprinkle these into our little our little Gulch here this is that’s easy it’s this easy it is yeah now we’re overdoing it a little bit here see I already I already messed it up no it’s okay these are going to have to be thinned a little bit later on and then we just cover those over also keep in mind this is very squished this is very squished don’t lay your starting out like this um but then we’ve got our things that are bushy and I sorry I should say the shape of how the plant grows really important so our carrots pretty short a root vegetable they don’t get that big but then we’ve got something like zucchini they’re big and bushy so it’s about as wide as it is tall they take up a lot more room so in the same amount of space where we got a ton of carrots we’ve just got three zucchini so we can just pop these into the ground right and we’re going to plant them whatever the level of the soil in the pot that it comes in That’s How deep we want to plant it in the uh in our garden just like what do I do with this tag should I keep it should I check it away great question keep the tags this is something I think people throw it out just literally leave the tag right there because it’s got all kinds of Handy information in the case of tomatoes it’ll tell you the variety and if it’s a good variety you’ll want to remember if it’s a bad variety don’t do that one that’s true she G we’re not using that one anymore exactly so then we’ve also got things like herbs now herbs are little so we can actually kind of tuck them in amongst our other uh plants and they also we Harvest them relatively early mhm um so that’s going to be before our zucchini is really huge before our tomatoes are really huge so we’re just going to tuck that in there might be a little shallow listen though that smells real good I know I love anytime I walk by an herb garden if you ever see me in your neighborhood I do this just so I can smell it just to get the W so this is a little short thing we tuck it in between now we’ve got something tall but kind of skinny so this uh tomatoes and things like pole beans uh or uh what else is sort of a viny thing that we can grow up a lot of squash you can actually grow peas are peas vertical too absolutely peas so these ones if you can grow it upwards I would say that is a good idea it is recommended to grow it upwards the maintenance is easier uh it’s easier to keep uh an eye out for bugs maybe fungus and then picking the tomatoes later is a lot easier if you’re doing it upwards is this something you use like that classic tomato cage for definitely or or a steak or netting it really depends on the kind of plant but any of those work super well what I really like about this you just got your hands in there and I’m all protected and ready to go yeah you can tell the professional from the Newbie yeah oh it’s good clean dirt just good clean dirt um so we’ve got those so we’ve got tall vertical we’ve got our bushy zucchini the other thing other types of squash so we’re thinking winter squash they’re like a sprawly shape they spread out they take a lot of room so it’s really important to remember how much room that takes then we’ve got our lettuce this is a like a little bushy plant okay so we tuck these down in the back and we’re spacing these can see fairly close um but normally we would have these probably about a foot apart okay right on and we’re going to harvest this in like 35 days maybe is that all it takes to grow lettuce is quick yeah so is this something you could rotate so you continually have some lettuce definitely yeah so at least here in Ontario you can get more than one crop out of it in a season uh so you can definitely get one in the spring one in the fall colder parts of the country maybe not that’s where we go for The KES right exactly things like that so we’ve got all these complimentary shapes where we’ve got the tall skinny thing the bushy thing in behind another bushy thing and so this kind of layout where you can maximize the space by taking advantage of the sizes yeah and also the sun situation this is the best way to do it especially if you’re trying to do something compact oh I like that now when you were just chatting about soil in general and I know that compost is key compost now I’ve been keeping all my scraps all week all my vegetable scraps to work on my my compost pile compost is key for those vegetables every year every year we want to add compost to this bed so either top dress where you just sprinkle it on top and spread it out or even mix it in either way is fine but you need to get that organic matter in these take a lot of nutrients out of the soil every year and we want to make sure that the microbes and the living things in the soil are happy they pretty much are all eating compost we want to add compost every single year in the case of containers if you’re doing container gardens replace all or most of the soil every single year because by the end of that season there’s very little nutrients left in the soil and it gets really compacted so we need to switch that out pretty much entirely every year so essentially these little babies eat all the nutrients and then we eat it getting those nutrients so the soil needs it back absolutely compost is a great way to do it and you know fertilizer is good too but compost is the critical step oh fantastic Owen great tips I’m going to have the most delicious Garden ever this year hey Mary here what did you think drop your comments below and don’t forget to like And subscribe for more of the good stuff