rent apartment 2 months

this is john kohler at growing your greensdot com, we have another exciting episode for you and what we are going to do is weare going to unpack these two shipments that i actually just got in and the reason forthis episode is because these are some of the best commercial quality planters thatyou use at your business, in a parking lot or even in your home, on your patio, whereverto grow food at home. now the reason why i am featuring these guysis because these are some of the largest containers or pot sizes i found that’s going to letyou grow a lot of food but more importantly, these guys have massive reservoirs to holdwater, one of these guys actually holds twenty five gallons of water and the other one holdsabout twelve gallons of water so what does

this mean for you, this means you can setthis garden up, water it and you could go away for weeks and it’s going to self wateron it’s own without you having to show up, without you having to be there.this can especially be important for commercial establishments where people aren’t alwayson the watering duty and they forget or whether you like to travel a lot but you still wantto grow food at home, another thing i like about these containers here is that they havea nice large diameter, so what does that mean? the larger the diameter, the more stuff youcan plant in and the more food you can grow for yourself and for your family so withoutfurther ado, let’s open these guys up and i will introduce and explain what they are.first, we are going to open up this guy. one

large box for one large planter, check itout man, this thing looks really cool, let’s take this bag off, always best to reuse insteadof recycle, i’d probably use this to hold something pretty cool, this is one large bagand here it is right here, this thing… relatively light on the inside, this is what is calledthe oasis plant, it’s a self watering heavy duty planter for commercial use, let’s goahead and open up the next use. alright, let’s get that material off andyou can see these beauties here, this is actually the oasis planter, it’s actually got a twentyseven inch diameter between here and it looks to be about over twelve inches deep so that’sa perfect depth for growing vegetables in a little container or literally a miniatureraised bed, this would be the perfect height

for growing things like carrots, tomatoes,any leafy green is going to do great in this. the diameter on this one is about thirty inchesso that’s definitely a lot of planting space in it, definitely looks another twelve inchesof depth here. these are commercial quality that you couldbuy at home. now with the commercial quality also comes a commercial price, these guysare pricey, this guy is like a hundred and forty dollars plus and this guy is two hundreddollars plus so this is for the serious person that wants to grow some food and have it waterfor weeks on end without having to be there or if you have a commercial business, youwant some nice planters for outside your business, it’s going to self water and you will beable to grow some food crops to show off your

cool plants to your visitors.now i am ready to sit up the oclius planter by go don industries, once again, this isa heavy duty commercial planter, it will provide you with many years of use, this is made outof hdpe plastic which in my opinion is the safest plastic to use if you are growing agarden in plastic so i like that a lot, some of the features about this is that the [inaudible]board down here, it has a false bottom on there, the bottom is for about that much andit raises up a little bit and it holds twelve gallons of water, it’s less with the soilin here and saturated water and soil, it’s probably about another sixteen gallons.so these self watering plants will literally take care of themselves and water themselvesfor quite a long time, i like that a lot.

now this guy stands about eighteen inchesoff the ground so if you are sitting down, you will be able to work on your garden whichis really nice and it’s about twenty seven inches in diameter so a little bit over twofeet in diameter, it’s a nice large area to actually grow a substantial amount of foodin if you planted it right. for example, if i was planting tomatoes inhere, i’d probably plant no more than two or three tomatoes at the absolute most, pepper’s,i might be able to get four, maybe five peppers in here if i crunch them in pretty good andthis container really excels at growing leafy greens, you can plant a whole different bunchof bok choys like in one, two, three, four, five rows of bok choy, obviously the middlerow is going to have the most amount of plants,

maybe like one, two, three, four, five, theycould fit like a dozen or more plants in here if you are planting small, leafy greens thatare going to not get that big or if you are planting out like a masculine mix, you canplant a whole bunch of seeds and as it grows just [inaudible] it back and the amazing thingis you won’t have to take care of it or water it.so i like that a lot, the next step is we are going to go ahead and set this up, it’sreally easy to set up, there are only going to be a few things you are going to need todo. number one, you will need to feed the reservoir with water, so on the oclious herein the middle, it has a little cap that you are going to unscrew and then you are goingto basically take your hose and you are going

to fill it up with the water until it overflowsand there is an overflow port here on the front with a little hole so when water startscoming out of this, you are going to stop filling and then you are ready for the nextstep. now before filling, you want to find the perfectlocation for your oclious planter, that’s going to literally make or break your gardenand how successful you are in growing a container, you always want to try to get the area andplace your planter in the area with the most amount of sunlight possible, if it gets sunall day, that’s great, if it gets sun for two hours, not quite as good, you want toget as much sun as possible, plants need the sunlight to photosynthesize to make the nutrientsto make you the crops that you want to eat.

that being said, if you have a limited light,i’d much rather plant things like herbs or leafy greens, if you have a lot of light,that opens up more possibilities, if you have a lot of light and more hours of light duringthe day and it’s the summer time, you can plant things like fruiting crops, tomatoes,cucumbers, peppers, egg plants, [inaudible], what not.but if you don’t have a lot of sun, remember, herbs and leafy greens, you can still cangarden even in indirect sunlight for sure, they are just not going to grow as fast. sowhat i am going to do is i am not going to fill this up now because i am filming hereand i am going to move this to the place that i am going to put it so i am going to do ita little bit differently, i am actually going

to fill it. once i get it all planted out,i am just going to top water it, the water is going to seep down into these little holeinto the reservoir and i am going to continue to water all the plants until the water comesout of the front here. if you do need to move this and you do haveto fill it, you have a convenient drain plug here, you can unscrew to drain it out, tomake it moveable, so i like this set up. so if you are currently renting, this is definitelya piece you want to get because you can take this and move it with you and it’s probablygoing to last you a lifetime plus, this will make a great addition to any backyard or deckor anything, these are nice high quality units, they come in different colours, this is likethe granted style colour, they also come in

solid colour. so really, you only need twothings to set this guy up, you will need potting soil so i think you will need about two anda half cubic feet of potting soil to fill this container up and the other thing youwill need are some pee pebbles between three eighths of an inch and half an inch.so we actually have some pee pebbles or pee gravel right here, we are going to open thisbag up and these are nice small pebbles, what these do is they go in this little area here,there is a little depression down in there and this is the exchange reservoir and thisis how the water actually gets in to the soil from down below and we are going to go aheadand fill this up with some pebbles so we have got the last handful of pebbles we are goingto put in, these channels are filled up, it

took approximately about five pounds or soof the pebbles depending on the size and another thing you can use, if you have it laying around,you can [inaudible], it’s like some kind of hydro ton balls or whatever from hydroponics that also work nicely, i was thinking about that as i was filling this up.the next thing we are going to need is some potting soil so soil is the key to growinga successful container garden, if you just used dirt out of the yard and just dug upsome dirt, it’s probably not going to work so well because you don’t know what’sin the dirt, the dirt’s not [inaudible] properly and it’s going to get heavy andyour plants won’t do optimally. next, we are going to fill this puppy up with somepotting soil, so today, we have, as an example,

here, doctor earth’s natural inorganic pottingsoil, i definitely like the pot in the potting soil if you know what i mean but it’s importantwhen buying soil to fill your container garden with, you get potting soil, potting soil andgarden soil are definitely not the same thing. potting soil has been designed with specificingredients to go in a pot and to work appropriately and work properly in a pot situation whichis a lot different than in a raised bed or in a garden situation, you are going to needdifferent things in there, so if you are not into gardening, you don’t know what youare doing, i’d recommend just going to good store, good nursery, local nursery and gettingsome good potting soil, i like the doctor earth brand but there are many other brandsof potting soil.

one of the things that you want to look forwhen buying potting soil is you want to, somewhere on the package, read organic or more specifically,omri certified, this means that this is all derived from natural ingredients and it couldbe used in organic agriculture to produce organic crops and that’s how i want youguys to grow so that’s very important. i don’t like to use pre bagged potting soilas much as i like doctor earth and it’s some really good stuff, i like to actuallymake my own potting soil, we are not going to get into that in this video but if youwant to learn how to make your own potting soil, be sure to subscribe to my youtube channel,i will have a video really soon on how to make your own kick ass potting soil for usein containers or even in raised beds so here

is the potting soil i am going to use andi just put it into a five gallon bucket because it makes it easy to transport and carry, imixed in my wheel barrow over there, it’s like four and a half cubic feet so this isonly going to take maybe half of that and as i pour this out, i will talk about whati put in my potting soil here. as you can see, it’s nice and dark, that’ssomething that you really want to look for when buying potting soil or making your own,basically with this potting soil, i started out with some coconut core and perl lightsand in addition, i added things like compost and earthworm castings, in addition, i addedfour different kinds of rock dust, some bio char and a whole bunch of other good stuffincluding insect frass and you are going to

have to check the other video but the mainthing to remember is that most potting soils are light, they are not just hundred percentcompost although you could grow in compost, i don’t recommend it, you want to get somefluff, something like the coconut core that’s going to hold the water, something like theperl light that’s going to provide some aeration and also the compost and the earthwormcastings that are going to provide some of the nutrition along with the rock dust orazemite or other rock dust that’s going to add trace minerals, if you’re not familiarwith it, be sure to check out my other videos on youtube regarding rock dust, it’s reallyone of the most important things you can put in your garden, i’ll just leave it at that,so next let’s go ahead and fill this guy

up, here’s bucket number two, alright sofar it’s taken about two buckets worth a potting soil.we’re going to spread this out, now one of the things i want to encourage you guysis you don’t want filling your pot or container even your raised beds, you don’t want to get on hereand start stomping on and compressing all of the soil down really hard, i like to patit down a little bit because if you don’t pat it down just a little bit, then you’regoing to fill it up to the top and then actually it’s going to sink down over time so i don’twant to sink down that much but i don’t want to pack it in there super hard and getas much in there because if you do that, your plants aren’t going to do as well becausethe plants don’t actually grow through the

soil, they grow through the air space in thesoil. so we want to pack it down just to get a littlebit more soil so it won’t settle as much but we’re not going to like sit and stompit down super hardcore, so here’s the third and final bucket, we’re going to dump ithere. so it’s very important when filling this guy that you don’t overfill it, thereis actually a small little hole here which the overflow hole which you don’t want tofill up to cause you fill up to then the soil is going to actually go in there and clogit up, not a good thing so we’re going to want to fill right below it.there are three buckets worth, think we’re just about there, we’re just going to getone more bucket load and then let’s go ahead

and take our last bucket here, bucket numberfour, unload some potting soil, we unload about half or so , going to scooch thisstuff around here, get it about leveled off, alright so looks like that’ll do it, asyou guys can see i got the [inaudible] filled up with the potting soil and we got it allplanted out, i planted it in an outer row here of lettuce, mostly romaine with one butterhead lettuce in there about eight point two five inches facing between them so this willgive them a nice spread so they can actually spread the leaves out, once they are goinginto production, i’ll start picking out the outer leaves leaving only the inner onesto keep making me food, on the inside ring here, probably about i don’t know four inch,five inch spacing, we got some bunching onions

or green onions in there so they are goingto be nice chive like onions that we’ll be able to harvest.in the middle here, we got a really cool plant, actually this is a new plant, i’ve neverseen it, i think it’s like a kaleidoscope kale or something, it’s a cross betweenkale and brussels sprouts, so go figure that one out, it’s going to get tall like a brusselssprouts, but make these like kale like leaves, now leaves are a little bit hard tasted, ifyou know what i mean, it kinds of has a nice brackish taste but it’s going to be coolcause it’s a first time, i’ve grown it in an instant to see if it goes to seed andflower and everything. cause actually look, similar to my purpletree collards, now that we’ve got the aqueous

planter all set up, we’re going to go aheadand set up the oasis, i definitely like the oasis plant better than the aqueous, nowyes it does cost a little bit more money but the other thing is that it’s a lot widerso this is more like a circlular raised bed, it’s like thirty inches in diameter,i think this one is like twenty seven less, a little lip on it, plus it has a little bitdeeper planting area instead of being like a concave like this guy goes straight downso the lines are a lot cleaner and the other thing that’s really cool about this oneis that it holds twenty five gallons of water in the reservoir plus the water containedwithin your soul medium. which if you fill this up to the top, it wouldhold a total of fifty gallons man, that’s

a lot of water, so i mean really the mainreason to buy these guys if you travel for long periods of time, you’re not there toattend to your garden or you simply don’t want to attend your garden, have to worryabout watering it and remembering to water because if you fill the reservoirs up, literallythese guys could…depending on where you live go like a month without watering plusbecause the water is basically a reservoir, it acts as a great thermo-mass so this willkeep your plants cooler in the summer and a little bit warmer in the winter providingyou know it’s getting some sunlight. the other thing is that these are high quality,these are commercial grade units made for commercial use but you’d also buy them ifyou are a home owner, so i mean these guys

are made of the hd pe plastic which is thesafest plastic to use plus it has the uv inhibition so these are probably around forever and theyare just super easy, i mean you could be saying, john, they look about the size of half a winebarrel or a whiskey barrel and absolutely you could totally grow in one of those.what i’ve learned from those guys is that, the soil tends to drought fairly quickly andit’s not self watering so you do need to regularly water it and maintain your garden,with this setup here, it’s pretty much good at taking care of itself, you make a goodsoil next to your plant, your plants…literally i could walk away from this guy from likethirty days at this point in the fall and i will not have to even water it or do nothingcause it’s going to take care of itself

the way it’s designed, it’s going to beself watering. so i like that a lot, i guess the next thingis that we’re just going to set this guy up once again, super simple, super easy, we’rejust going to go ahead and take our p pebbles and we’re just going to dump them in thebottom this time. i got dusted man, now we’re going to put them in this chamber here, thinki filled up a little bit too much and so we’re going to take our couple of handfuls. onceagain this is the optimal time to fill your reservoirs, if you have a location where you’regoing to put this guy, once again you want to put in a place with the most amount ofsunlight. you’re going to place it where you wantedand then fill it up with this stage, once

you got it like this you’re just going tofill the water up to the top and let it drain down and fill up the reservoirs, that’sthe best way to fill this guy, this guy actually has a plug where you actually take out andfill and then put it back in and then fill up all your dirt the way i’m going to doit because i’m not going to actually set these guys up here, i’m just going to plantthis out and then move it, it’s going to be a lot lighter without the twenty five gallonsof water in the bottom. i guess the next step is we’re just goingto fill the good potting soil next and be sure to check whether episode is an episodewhere i show how to make the very potting mix that i’m going to using here, that’sone of the key elements to your success, you

just use any old dirt out of your garden orsome potting soil from the store, you might not have the same level or results, i wantyou guys to be able to grow the highest quality food, the healthiest food and the highestquality healthiest food or else you’re going to produce more and be more bug and diseaseresistant so you don’t have to mess with the bug.in any case let’s go ahead and start filming this guy out, let’s see how many bucketfull’s this takes, a one, second bucket, two, three, here’s four, alright looks likewe’re just about filled, i might want to top this off about another half a budget,here’s the last bucket, [inaudible] a half a bucket full, so go ahead and dump this guyin there and it probably takes about another

half, the cool thing is i’m not noticingthat this one has a little overflow valve like that one so it looks like you could fillthis almost to the brim, that being said i discourage you from filling any containerto the brim when water in your container if you have the soil up to the brim, the extrawater is going to float over the top. and get your patio dirty or whatever,i like to fill it almost to the brim so i could hold as much soil cause that’s afterall where the roots are going to grow, so you could provide a larger home for your plants,but at the same time i don’t want it to overflow when i’m watering, one of my favoritethings to do to kind of get the soil to settle is shake…this’ll provide you some goodexercise, actually the soil went down quite

a bit there.i think we’re going to go ahead and dump the rest of the bucket. alright looks likeit’s nice and even, next thing we’re going to plant this baby, so as you guys can see,we got this ready to get planted out, now one of the things i like to do is arrangeall of my plants before i plant them out, another thing is very important to me is tomaximize the amount of plants that i can get in one container to grow the most amount offood, now this is like a pro and a con like if you like plant too little, you know thenyou’re not going to have as much food but you don’t want to plant things so tightlythat the plant’s crowd each other out, i feel confident with a good rich potting soil,there’s going to be enough nutrition for

the plants.so the root system won’t need to get that large, the challenge is when the plants grow,they’re just going to take up more space so one of my goals when always growing yourcontainers is more of a cut and grow garden, so what i mean by cut and grow, it’s likeas your hair grows, right? you cut it off and then if your hair gets too long, you getit cut off again right? and imagine if you’re eating your hair, don’t really do that butthat’s a technique i’m going to use in my garden, i’m going to grow and cut andgrow, so i’m going to plant these guys little bit closer that i normally would in a raisedbed right? and i’m going to come out and actively harvest up these guys regularly tokind of keep them trimmed back like you need

to trim back your hair and keep them smallerso that they are not going to crowd each other out, that’s very important.this’ll also be good because it’ll get you to eat more of the stuff you’re growingin your garden, cause you’re going to come out, oh my god, it’s growing, i better cutit and then let it grow and eat it, so what we got here is we got a couple of rings, wegot basically two rings on the outside, we got sorrel, cilantro , red veined sorrelsolontro, soral, solontro red bean soral and solontro so we kind of alternate between thesoral and the solontro, the soral will stay relatively low and kind of hangover to theside, the solontro will kind of get small and as long as i keep it trimmed back andwe’re going to the fall season.

so it’s not going to bulge too quickly,it’s going to stay relatively small plus we love solontro so we cut it back a lot andeat it before it gets, opportunity gets too big then in the next row inside here, we gotthe dinosaur kale, also known as tuscan kale or black kale, lacinato kale, theseguys actually will get kind of tall too and i love this kale because it’s one of thedarkest leafy greens you can eat, one of the most nutrient dense foods in the planet, thatmeans it has a lot of nutrients with very little calories so this is the plant that’llkeep you healthy and keep you wealthy and keep you strong and keep you fit and trimalso as long as you’re planting it and working it in your garden to get some extra size,alright so in the middle here we got this,

once again the kaleidoscope mix, this is thatkale slash brussels sprout hybrid mixture thing and i don’t know what the heck i’mgoing to get with that but i thought it would be cool to plant it in the middle cause it’salready kind of tall and established and i believe they are just going to get talleras time goes on so i’m actually going to be sure to stake them up early instead oflater. so well that’s what it is, next, i’m goingto go ahead and plant this guy out, as you guys can see, we’re back, this guy got allplanted out and actually, there has been a punitive time that has elapsed since i plantedthese guys out, it’s been about two months now and i didn’t want to make the endingof this video until actually i had some time

to test these guys out to see how well theyperform so that i can give my final analysis, you guys ever see that movie, final analysis,i think it was pretty good anyways, so during the time of the last two months, these guyshave been self watering just great, i barely had to water them, maybe like once a week,just kind of give them a pretty deep water and because of this self watering reservoirat the bottom, which is actually twenty five [inaudible] in this guy right here.it’s basically been watering itself, so if you live in a place that rains, a coupleof times a week, maybe even just once a week, you can consider these guys self wateringfor all practical purposes. now many of my plants in here have thrived and a few actuallydid not, john! are those things like don’t

work good cause some of your plans didn’tmake it? no, no, no we actually had a…actually a fairly deep freeze around these parts andthe solontro had some challenges and then over in this bit, i have some amazing lettucehappening until that pretty hard freeze and some of these plants have lost it.so the lettuces because it is warming up slowly or coming back, let’s see the chiveshave been doing alright and i’m actually happy to see that in here now we have somechickweed coming up on their own, i think i spotted even steam metals coming upover there, so that’s definitely really good but yeah, everything i planted it inhere aside from the weather influence negatively have done exceedingly well and i’m quiteimpressed, some of the plants that actually

have done the best in here are the dinosaurkales, the dinosaur kales, maybe it’s my preference to plant things with like moredeep roots and the dinosaur kale roots will kind of just go down deep and get the nutritionand as you guys can see they have significantly grown a lot more than anything else in herethen some of the other plants so i could imagine something like tomato’s or peppers, theyprobably do fabulous in here. but pretty much anything you planted hereas long as you have a good planting mix and once again a nice sunny spot, it’s probablygoing to do great, our final review of these guys is that i give my thumbs up, i definitelylike the oasis better than the aqueous just due to the shape and it allows you to havemore planting area, on the inside i’m about

a dozen edible plants growing in here andyou know it could make a small side salad couple of times a week for me but the downsideonce again is the price, these are commercial units and they cost a chuck of change butthey are going to last you a definitely long time, i think in the right situation, it canbe really good because then you leave and you’re really not at home that much.you could literally water these guys and go away for the week and not have to worry aboutwatering it, i’m interested to see how this would do in the desert summer when it doesget dry and most containers tend to drought really fast but because it has a twenty fivepound of water reservoir, that’s going to be really interesting to see how it keepsthe plant cool and also self waters throughout

the different seasons here, so to learn moreabout these guys, you want to visit the website godawn.com, be sure to check the links downbelow in the description for the link and also special discount codes so that if youare interested in getting one of these planters, you could definitely do it and once again,don’t just think you need to buy this plant to grow a garden, there are many ways to doit wether want to buy this plant and you have a nice self watering garden whether you wantto set up a standard raise bed kit with parts of craig’s list, there are all levels, youcould do it for free or you can spend a little bit of money if you don’t want to screwaround with setting up all of these systems cause this is an easy system to do, get it,fill it, plant it, water it and forget about

it, alright so hope you guys enjoyed thisepisode, once again my name is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com, we’ll see younext time and remember, keep on growing.