this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.comtoday we have a very exciting episode for you today. what we're going to do today'swe're going to show you a friend's place that's really into gardening. you might be sayinghey john, if he is really into gardening how come there's like nothing growing in the frontyard? well in some cases if you do have a homeowner's association or live in a smallhome. you maybe don't have a lot of space in your front yard or backyard to grow. sothat's what today's videos is about garage growing or growing food in your garage whichyou can easily do. now that set up today i’m going to forewarn you guys is like super-duperproduction set up for growing food, this guy his major hobby is how to point at gardeningand in most cases people think hydroponic
gardening and they think medicinal herbs orgrowing medicinal herbs. but you can also grow fruits and vegetables inside your garagewith some elaborate set ups that we're going to see today. so with the advent of new homespopping up all over the new thing with home builders is building high end building multiplestories to pack in the square footage and making that lot size as small as possiblebecause real estate's really valuable. and if you're a home gardener and a home grower,i would encourage you to buy the largest lots or a large property you can with the smallesthouse you can. so that you have as enough space to grow as much food as you want inany case let's see how my friend today is growing food inside his garage. so let's headinside.
now we are inside the house and this is thedoor leading to the garage which is a gardener's plain land inside man so let's check it outin a single car garage or just several different areas where things growing and things goingon and overall stockpile of different nutrients and things like that. but the two the areasi want to show you guys today is number one. this basically this is a compose tea brewing,compose tea is very important nutrition for your plants and over to the next big thingwe’ll show you in a minute is literally the grow room. so right here we have the belltea brew. this is a four gallon kit and what's going on here is inside you can see this bubblingup and this is basically a super high power air stone that's basically adding micro bubblesto the compost. now the micro bubbles or bubbling
your compost tea is very important becauseyou know just like fish need oxygen to breathe that's dissolved inside the water and we needoxygen to breathe. the bacteria also needs the oxygen to basically replicate and reproduce.so the more oxygen you could pack in the water, the better the bacteria is going to grow.my friend here is like the indoor gardening expert, he knows far more than all i everknow so he was actually schooling me on some of this stuff. so well let me show you guysof the differences. so you've got this super duty bubble whichactually i’m really happy he gave me one today, so i’m so privileged to get one.this is called the single micro-poor oxygen diffuser, now the difference between thisbubbler and a standard bubbler that you can
get in an aquarium shop practically. justthe other day i was at the ninety nine cent store and i got this bubbler and i was likeyeah i’ve got a bottle for ninety nine cents and you know this will work. this is madefor aquariums and this disperses bubble to keep the tank oxygenated. but all those thiswill also work for brewing compost you know don't get one of those small little bubblersthat's not going to do a lot but this is the size i’d recommend and once again i thoughti was doing pretty good for ninety nine cents for this guy. now these guys will wear outover time. so if you want to step up. you can get the more industrial version and thatis this guy right here. but even better than this guy is the one i was just showing youthat i just got. is this guy and all the package
here you can see the bubble size. so the bubblesize for a cheap air stone which is maybe like this guy, a cheap air stone is twentymillimeters and it's a large bubble. maybe going to an oxygen shield. it makes a threemillimeter bubble. but going to micro-poor oxygen diffuser in this box it will open upit's a 0.25 mm bubbler. so by far this is the best bubbler money could buy to oxygenateyour compost. now that being said you know you don't need to invest in the one most expensivebubbler to get the smallest bubbles to get the most oxygen unless you're really fanaticallike my gardener friend here, but he just goes to the max just to do everything right.but you know so i’m glad i have one otherwise because i would just have the ninety ninecents one. nothing wrong with the ninety nine
cents one once again and just like in gardeningyou'll see all different levels you know you can garden literally throw some seeds outtwenty cent seeds you get at wal-mart and you can pretty much garden for nothing yougo collect wild seeds you can get wild dandelion seeds for free and plant those out start agardening for nothing. so once again ninety nine cents per garden or i don't know howmuch these guys run, but their prior pretty penny. but it all depends on how much moneyyou've got and how much money and time you want to invest into your gardening life stock. besides oxygenated your compost, it is veryimportant that you monitor the temperature where the microbes and the water is goingto hold the most oxygen and be the best. so
he has a thermometer here which basicallyshows about sixty six point five degrees fahrenheit currently inside here. now the optimal temperaturefor these guys are maybe like sixty five degrees to seventy degrees to allow for their proliferation.if it gets too cold or too hot they're not going to reproduce as well so you don't wantto be like brew a compost tea outside in the middle of winter or if you don't want to bedoing that in the middle of summer when it's too hot. maybe like inside your house in thegarage is actually a really good place to brew some compose tea so that the bacteriacan flourish. so remember oxygenation and temperature supercritical. so the composttea is literally what he is feeding his plants in this barrel here and basically he got anotherbubbler in this barrel and he is oxygenating
his water and in this barrel he does a reverseosmosis system to take all the minerals out and all the bad things such as chloraminechlorine and possibly fluoride, it foreignate here from the city water to basically putinto this grow room. now i always encourage all my viewers to filter their water wheneverpossible or even better yet just use rainwater that doesn't have all the chemical like thechlorine. but in addition he has good stuff, good organic stuff to grow with especiallythe neem oil, now i definitely recommend the neem oil this is worked really well for me.you know for preventing (7:12) and other small bugs on my crop bites by diluting it downand literally spraying it on my plate and once again this is organic and omri listedso it's very important to look for omri
relisted products that would be able to beused on organic produce because hopefully you're also going to want to grow organicallyin home and not spray those toxic chemicals on your plants that little you're going toeat because then guess what you're going to end up eating those toxic chemicals too. sothat's not too good. before we get into the main event here inthe garage. we're going to show you this right here, this is literally had paint can filledwith organic heirloom seeds and this is from baker creek seed company. and i don't evenhave one of these but, once again a paint can is an excellent place to store your seedyou want to make sure that paint can is sealed tight. so no air gets in there, no moisturegets in there and you might want to put some
of those desiccant pack in there because moistureis actually the enemy of seeds. but in any case bigger creek seeds or rearseeds.com sellthis package. this is pack two thousand and twelve this is a large heirloom package andthis paint can have over twenty five types of vegetables and sixty varieties in here.basically these are the seeds you'll need if you're trying to be a prepped or storeseeds just in case something happens you'll have a full supply of a wide variety of seeds,now these seeds are also available for your geographic region. these are actually thesouthern large packages they also have a northern large package, so you want to be preparedjust in case highly recommend getting their seed package. not only is this a good deal.but it has many varieties contained within
it so that you'll be able to grow the foodif you need to. this is the main event right here behind methis is a four and a half foot by nine foot grow room. now you know this is probably overand above what some people can't afford or want to do. my friend here has a major hobbyof growing things, hydroponically or even just growing things soil with mediums. becausethat's what he does for fun, many people have old cars and invest thousands of dollars init. he must have spent his money on growing indoors and i see nothing wrong with that.i keep telling him to grow some stuff outside but inside you mean literally what he's doingis he researching the technology to emulate nature because i mean that is what this growroom does, he have temperature controls, humidity
controls co2 monitors a lighting, basicallyhe can control all the variables that would be in nature. so we're in january right nowoutside right now tomatoes are not going to be growing but he has tomato plants and heliterally started over a month ago that is flowering and he is going to be soon gettingfruits, so him and his family will be only eating fresh tomatoes very soon. in any casemotherly nature is what he's trying to do but all of us if you're an outdoor gardenerwe could easily model nature at work with nature because we're going outside so we don'tneed all this kind of set up. that being said i’m going to mention some tips to you thatyou may be able to use if you do want to grow things inside in the winter under supplemental lighting.
and now we're going to enter the grow roomwhere there's basically these zippers on here, we are going to go ahead and unzip this andit is bright in here. normally a set up like this is used to grow medicinal herbs insidebut guess what, you could also grow your vegetables inside. now for many people once again thisis going to be like an overkill, a set up like this is definitely not needed. this islike the ultimate setup. but i’m making this video once again to show you guys whatis possible. and once again i’m going to give you some tips to show you what you coulddo very easily without even an expenses like this. so inside here you can see he have allkinds of plants growing these are literally seedling tomato plants that he started andover there he has some tomatoes, heirloom
tomatoes that are setting flowers, soon tobe set fruit, over here is goji berry plants growing inside. here are some basal plantsand actually here's a large basal they have actually been harvested from looks nice andhealthy man way better than the ones i’ve been growing outside in the summertime. andhere is even a pomegranate tree started from seed. next let's talk about some of the equipmentthat is in here that he's using to emulate nature. number one. nothing is going to growwithout lights, he has hps high pressure sodium lights, these guys are super bright and theselights have a controller up here that's hanging from above to control the light output. basicallyto preheat them and get them running right
and he totally like doused in the lightingto make it emulate nature so for example, in the middle of tomato season if you're growingthem outside, there's a long daylight hours it's like a twelve hour day. so that's whathe's trying to emulate when they are up and growing and once the season goes on longerthe days start to get shorter and the amount of light what helped to set one of the waysthat it signals a plant to actually start producing fruit, instead of being in the vegetatedgrow stage. so once again he's got the set up here for mother nature. up here of coursewe've got the sticky traps. so i would encourage you to use sticky traps i think using themindoors is especially smart, because you know they're not going to get wet and they're justgoing to work really good. another thing he
could do to emulate nature is actually doa ladybug release inside here the ladybugs wouldn't be able to escape. and they takecare of any bug problems if he had any. let's see oh man this thing is really cool so. i'vealways wondered if there's a thing like this but this is the home data directed by lacrosstechnology. and you can see here there was a little antenna on here and this antennais a remote sender it sends over to his wireless network. and what it does it sends him thetemperature to his email address or to his cell phone. so that he can monitor the temperaturein here if it goes above or below a certain range, it will message him to let him know.so i hope to get one of these soon. actually have these outside in my garden to post thetemperature in my garden online for my viewers
to see. if you want more info on these, itsweatherdirect.com is a web site. right here this little thing hanging, it doesn't looklike much this is like one of the latest and greatest led lights and i tried to look atthis earlier and it was literally blinding me, let's see if i could plug it in for youguys here. now this is one of the brightest led lights i mean, it is like a light clusterand this thing will like check it out. it blind the camera there for a second. now youcould notice this thing is putting out like a red and blue light because that's the colorof the spectrum that plants need to grow the best. that being said the spectrum and ledlights are optimal for vegetative growth. but they don't have like enough power or enoughlight to put out to basically get the plants
to flower or set fruit and set seeds. if that'swhat you're going for that's where you would need something like a more powerful hps ora high pressure sodium light. so how can this be useful to you and to mewell? the leds or some fluorescent tube lights would be excellent once again for vegetativegrowth. what’s vegetative growth? that's when the plants just grow on the leaves. thereare simple plants and they're not complex, complex plants are better with hps like tomatoesand peppers. but if you want to grow inside all you need is an led light or some fluorescenttube some t five, full spectrum lighting to get your lettuce and other wheat or greencrops such as herbs growing. if you want tomatoes and peppers to do well inside, you want toget something like a hps light that's going
to put a lot more output to provide the plantsenough photosynthesis and energy to literally set the fruit. in addition inside here youhave a controller. this controller here basically tells them the co2 percentage in here andthe temperature and the humidity levels. now why is that important? well because insidehis garage you could be really cold it's not insulated garage. but with these lights, thelights actually produce heat as a byproduct. so with this controller he could control thefans that come on and you can see, he has the hps lighting vented to the outside soa lot of the heat is drawn out. but he might want to keep some of the heat in because onceagain you want to model nature inside this includes grow room. once again he has thereflective panels on the outside so it reflects
light so the plants can get the most lightand maintains the temperature, so it's maintaining the up most temperature of the outside andcurrently what temperature is it inside here, i don't know but i’m sweating. next let's go ahead and show you what he'sgrowing in and the containers he's using. so first off he is using these grow bags.now these grow bags the fabric pots i would encourage you to use, they're much smarterto use than the standard nursery parts. nursery pots are large big to store they take a lotof room these guys you could literally fold them flat, there easily shippable and plusthey have the benefit of being able to basically naturally root prune the plants which is goingto mean the plants are going to have a stronger
root system and when the plants have a strongerroot system. they're going to grow larger and produce more for you. so we have thatas a big plus these guys got handles on them, there are really simple and easy to move shouldyou want to reposition and change up ordering of the plants inside here. so in this growbag he has a basal plants. but also i want to talk about the mixture he’s using. nowthis mixture is a little bit different than the mixture i would use. he has kind of likemore of the hydroponic mentality, where he just want to just give the plant exactly whatit needs in the proportion it needs. so that you can do the best. and for me, what ii endto do is i tend to kind of model nature more, you know if i had to raise better plants weregoing in the forest. i want them to grow in
that same exact material, you know in soil.he's actually using a soil less medium although this looks like soil. what this is this isbasically a coconut core, (17:38) and some vermiculite and a few other minerals in thereto basically give it some good nutrients and the compost tea on here which is literallyjust the nutrients for the plant. everything it needs, so that it can be healthy and letme tell you these plants look amazing in here. so once again if you want to model naturethe most you can give the plant exactly what it needs, when it needs it but then you havea lot more calculations and you need be really on the ball in my opinion versus you kindof take the lazy man's approach which is my approach. you know just mix of compost andsome of this stuff to keep the moisture in
that's why i use the coconut core and the(18:16) and the perlite or (18:19) in my mixtures to keep it errated and nothing wrong withhis method of doing but it takes a lot more calculations and being precise. because imean literally. you know there's not a whole lot of margin for error if you're not growingin compost, if you're doing a soil list. if you're not providing enough nutrients or toomuch you could burn your plants damage your plants a lot, so definitely not too good todo if you're inexperience so keep it and stick to a soil base mixture, if you're not totallysure what you're doing. so i do use the coconut core for making light and the (18:52) intomy pot mixes that i grow inside my greenhouse to maintain moisture. but i also continuallydump more compost to feed the plants.
no matter which way you choose to grow whetheryou want to grow in the soil less or soil medium. you know that's totally up to youi’m just showing you all the options available you can use and you know which is better.well if you're really good on giving the plant exactly what it needs, you can delve intothat system that's just a pry that will out produce nature, because i mean you're basicallyemulating nature like we're doing in this whole grow room. so he's got it down to ascience but it takes a lot more time. check it out here he's got some tomatoes fruitingin january so unless you live in south florida or somewhere like the tropics i mean we arehere in california now. you're not going to have any fresh tomatoes any time soon andthat's why he's doing it so. he has a big
passion for gardening and learning about allthis stuff because that's what you love to do now once again, you may not be able toafford a set up like this. but you don't need to so what we can learn from my visit hereat my friend's place today that's like the master extraordinary in door gardener. but we can learn a few things, number one,you want to be making some compost tea and you want it to erate your compost tea verywell before the expensive air stone but if not a cheap air stone from aquarium shop isgoing to do you. number two the temperature of your compost is very important, he literallyfeeds his plants the compost tea to get them to look this lush, there is no reason whyyou can't do that for your outside plants
as well. in addition you can't foil or feedyour compost tea which means, you spray the compost tea on the leaves, and the leaveshave some receptors to absorb nutrients through their skin. just like we can absorb nutrientsthrough our skin actually sometimes you might see with a little patch on my neck. and i’vehad a few people say john what’s that patch on your neck or you like a chain smoker beforeand have a nicotine patch no, no, no that's a b12 pack so that i could absorb b12 to myskin instead of through my digestive system. so once again plants can absorb nutrientsthrough their leaves and not just their root system. what else can we learn? well we learnedtoday that if you want to grow fruit and crops then you need high power hps lights so thatyou can grow them to production, now if you
don't have high power lights, you can stillgrow them. they're just not going to yield optimally and do as well. so i’d say waituntil the weather is right you know to grow outside it's a lot easier. but that beingsaid on the same token. you can grow with an led light or fluorescent lights or evenjust an incandescent light that lights up your house. you can easily grow leafy greencrops such as lettuce, and kales and herbs and things that don't actually fruit out becauseyou want to eat the leaves and this is trip i will also encourage them to grow a lot moreleafy greens because those are immediately pick able and eatable, he has some basal,actually, and we do the taste test on the basal here. wow that's a nice strong, i couldreally taste aromatics on that's actually
a high quality. so in any case i hope you remember those twothings compost tea and if you are or want to grow inside during the winter time. focuson the leafy greens. i mean if you want to grow some of the fruit crops, it's going tobe a lot harder i would encourage you to grow the fruit crops inside to keep them goingand then plant them out when the season is right. because growing them indoors you'rejust probably not going to yield a lot unless you have some high power lights that the plantcould make all the photosynthesis it needs to produce offspring. so once again this isjohn kohler with growningyourgreens.com encouraging you to grow any way you can, whether you cangrow outside of the winter or inside with
lighting to grow some leafy greens or evenin your kitchen and i’ll have another episode on this soon. to grow some sprout withoutsupplemental lighting. you can do it and i’m here to help. we'll see you next time andkeep on growing.