Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, we food , we food, come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

From the earth to the dirt, come let we till up the soil, till up the soil, from the earth to the dirt, come let we keep planting on a while.

You see the homegrown I said it come from earth.

I say the good food come make me plant me we own.

I say the good food, good food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said I food, I food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, Your food, your food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

Hi, I'm Carlos Solis with the UPI Cooperative Extension Service.

And welcome to Home Grown.

We're here in Saint John and in a pond at the home of Elmo Rabsatt to do a follow up visit from our previous visit in a preview show.

Elmo, welcome to Home Grown Morning.

Good and good to have you back here.

Elmo, you've harvested stuff.

It's obvious because I've noticed where we had plants at one time.

There's nothing there.

Right.

So you've obviously harvested some cucumbers.

They kind of look like they're on their way out.

But you've harvested cucumbers before?

Yes, I have about 10 to 12 or 10 to 12.

Okay.

And I notice I'm stepping in here a little bit and your basil is one of the loveliest Basil's in the program.

It doesn't even have any leaf mine.

And I wonder if it has to do with the protection.

I don't know, but it is lovely.

Have you use any of it yet?

Yes, I have.

It's been very good luck.

Nice.

Really nice.

Nice and clean.

And why are yours has grown so big is because you use the double parts.

Even if you had used a single case, I don't think it would have come this far.

This Basil is about almost two feet just by itself.

It's about two feet, maybe a little more than two feet tall and almost as wide here at the base.

But but that's good.

You've got plenty of bees.

You do Italian cooking.

Yes, I do.

Yeah, I know you cook.

All right.

And your peppers.

And I notice that the you still got some symptoms of blossom in, right?

Where you're able to harvest any tomatoes at all.

I've gotten one or two off of the tree.

Okay.

Right now I'm happy getting most of the peppers off the pepper tree and work on both.

Okay.

And the lettuce And the lettuce.

Okay, so you still have one left, but this one would probably be is probably better right now.

But unless you like better stuff, it's not going to not going to taste good.

And I've had much luck with the with the bees.

Okay.

What happened?

They they just shrivel up and die all of a sudden.

Oh, okay.

Maybe it might have been one of those things.

Got some of the participants encountered a problem with the beets where there was a caterpillar that was eating it and they weren't able to get to it in time.

Or it may just have been one of those things where that particular plant was not strong enough like we did.

You know, sometimes a plant looks good, but then when you put it in the ground, things change.

But that's good.

And I notice that your iguana trap has it still standing.

Have you succeeded in keeping the iguanas out?

Well, I try my best.

I thought it was iguanas at first, but then I.

Later on, I found out that it was the chickens.

No kidding.

Yep.

The chickens are doing me in the air up a lot of the pepper seeds and whatnot.

You know, the pepper is down, but I've been able to catch them in traps and take them to other people that want wanted chicken.

Okay.

All right, That's good.

So we were here blaming the iguanas.

I mean, I remember when we were putting this together, the garden growing up, all around with it, and it wasn't them.

It happened to be the chicken.

So at least now you was able to.

So that's the way you ended up.

Because initially you didn't have you had some of this stuff here, Right.

But you had to eventually chop them apart from right here to get to the thing.

That's good.

All right.

I noticed even though the tomatoes are here, that you still had a little bit of like some whiteflies and some other scale insects.

Right.

And it.

Had you seen that before?

No, not recently.

But then in the past couple of weeks, I noticed that it started getting real.

Okay.

Well, as you see it now is it's best to take care of it now, Right?

So they don't get the don't get too far field and ruin the eventual crop because right now you have at least one, two, three, four, five, maybe six.

And some new flowers on there that will bring you good fruit, you know, after a while.

So it's it's been an interesting right for you, hasn't it?

Yes, it has been a good experience.

What has been the flavor of the product that you've eaten?

Very good.

I enjoy them When you grow your own fruits and vegetables, the taste, the taste, a whole lot better than buying them in the store.

I hear you.

And I notice even even with this, you've expanded a little bit more to to you have a couple of other things that you wanted to try Growing interest.

What else did you try?

I tried cassava and the cassava is doing good.

I did, Rosemary.

My rosemary is doing good.

I did the figs, the things they even doing even better.

Figs, like not fig bananas, No figs.

Figs.

The fruit.

Like in Fig Newton, the ones that.

Oh, interesting.

Well, most people don't know that you can grow figs in the Virgin Islands, and that's what almost referring to the actual figs that you grow in Fig Newtons can grow here.

And he started some of them in tires.

And we'll catch up with him in the future to see how those are grown.

But that's that's good.

So your experience, even with the tires, has been has been good, excellent and growing.

You've grown in the grown before.

Yes, I have.

And comparing it to the tires, I think the tires, it has less grass and weeds.

You have a better control of the system this way.

Okay.

It's a little more expensive, but yeah, it's.

You have a better control of the weeds.

Okay.

You know, if you notice, there's only one little inviting tree in this whole set, right?

Because this tree is right over overhead, but it's controlled.

Okay, that's good.

And that is one of the benefits of doing container gardening.

It reduces your labor time, it reduces your weeding time, it reduces the watering time.

And in some instances, the amount of water that you have to put on your plant because it's convenient.

And right there and again, because you're able to customize the soil and not have to bring in soil from the outside, you don't have all that weed, weed seeds that come along with it, because in this particular instance we use 100% potting soil in the tires.

You could choose to use your regular soil and mix it half, half or a third regular soil, a third manure and a third potting soil.

And again, the process will still work.

The ideal thing is for you to customize your soil in the tires, and that gives you sort of like the best idea of growing medium for most of your plants.

And as you could see, this base of plant is growing phenomenally large, and that's due to the fact that it has a nice, customized soil and it has a very deep root system and it doesn't have any competition from weeds.

And that's what we does.

A weed plant will will just compete for all the minerals, the water and everything that you put in there for the plant that you want.

They will cope, they will compete and take that away from your plant.

So I know this is this has been good.

I was glad that we had the opportunity to to introduce this to you and to help keep you going out, to continue to keep you inspired in doing your gardening.

You'd like to continue?

Yes, I do.

Okay.

And one of the things we did learn is that we put a base at the bottom of all your tires and thick enough mats so that the fruits, the other plants in the vicinity don't root up and get into your tires are good, but that was one thing that we did learn from this whole experiment.

Okay, that's good, because we've had some experience where people growing in tires planted them right on their on the on the soil itself.

And the roots from a tree next door grew right up into it and did not allow the plants that are in the tire to grow and flourish because again, root competition.

So putting them out on the ground was another way of, again, reducing the competition from any plant that you have.

Now.

If you're growing on concrete, there's no competition.

If you're growing on solid ground, there's no competition.

But if you're doing it on the spot, on the soil and it's in an environment where there are other trees growing, then you have to think about the fact that those roots may grow right up into the bottom of the tire and compete with the plants that you want.

And we want to thank you for participating in a home grown project.

We hope that your neighbors get inspired and other people get inspired to continue this.

Would you encourage them?

Have you seen anybody who has gone on to have seen this and have gone on to try it as well?

Some people have done it.

There's a few people out in Coral Bay that have taken up the project and doing their cooking.

Their tomatoes look a lot better than mine.

Okay.

So I was like, You are good teacher.

Let me.

The students picked up the process.

So again, Elmo really want to thank you for participating in the ongoing project.

And to those of you that are still thinking about gardening, we hope that you've been inspired by Elmo and we hope to get you energized and involved in growing your own food because growing homegrown is quite beneficial, both economically and for your overall health, both physical and psychological.

Have you gotten a lot of exercise with this, Elmo?

Yes, I do.

Going back up and down quite a bit.

Now we're going to go from Elmo and go visit some other participants and see how their gardening project has been has come along over the last several weeks.

So stay tuned.

I like to say thank you to Debbie, TJX and UVA Extension program and a homegrown program for Debbie TJX.

Thank you very much.

We're here at the home of Mr. David Baugh on the southeast side of Saint John in the state John's Valley.

And we're going to be looking at his new garden.

David is just getting started in the gardening and we will now begin to look at the process of how David is going to get his garden going.

David, welcome to Home Grown.

Thank you, Carlos.

It's great to be here and to be a part of this project.

I really am excited about it.

Great.

And you're just getting started, but that's no big thing.

We wanted to see how it's going to work because you have a unique situation.

You're on the southeast side of Saint John and one of the things about your place that's unique is that the ocean is not far from here.

In fact, the ocean, we can hear it as we speak.

That gives a couple of scenarios that gardeners would have to take into consideration on this side of the island.

First thing is salt air.

And I'm sure you probably have your issues with rust.

Absolutely.

And other.

Yeah, just with the salt air.

So that's something as a homeowner, home gardener, if you're going to be growing near the beach, you have to take into consideration and I'm sure if you were to sink a well here, he would probably have salt intrusion, brackish water and watering it brackish water is not good for most of the plants that we're going to grow.

So he has to have his own water source to grow his vegetables in.

David, describe what we have in front of us here today.

I see blocks.

We have blocks.

We I dug out the soil on the on the natural ground to make it so it would be more level.

Okay.

And then we brought in topsoil from the agriculture station here on Saint John and proceeded to fill it all in with that.

And then I raked in some some cow manure and fertilizer, and now we're ready to plant.

Good.

How deep then?

Because I know the blocks are about eight inches, but you actually went a little deeper than that, didn't you?

Yeah.

And this end of the garden, it's probably another eight inches deeper than the bottom of the block.

Okay.

And on that corner over there, it's the ground is at the bottom of the block.

Okay.

And it kind of slopes this way to four or five inches and then works its way down to this.

So, yeah, it's dug out a bit on the inside, so it's a decent amount of dirt.

Okay.

So we notice that we use some plastic to line this in.

This will work probably to help with competition because as opposed to some of the areas, this is a little bit shaded.

It has broken sun all day, but it has a little bit of shade and that means it has other plants around it.

And generally, if you have a garden like this, you're going to have intrusion from the roots from the other, especially the timber tamarind trees right where I am, rotation into there.

So yeah, I kind of line that I knocked holes in it with the pick.

So if it does rain so much I don't want to just turn into a mud that, that and that's right.

And that's a good point because if you ever do laying it, you have to be very careful with water settling in there and staying at the bottom and not having an opportunity to drain out.

And so that's that's a good point.

You don't have to use the plastic, but this is something he chose to do for his particular situation.

And every garden situation is going to be unique.

So we are going to that's a point that you need to take into mind when you're locating your garden and getting your garden infrastructure built And in place.

We have our drip irrigation system in place.

We've tested it and you happen to be in a nice flat area and you've done your best to kind of level out this area.

Would you even consider because one of the other things that you could do as a home gardener to maximize the space that you have, you have still a lot of holes in those blocks.

Do you think we could possibly grow some things in those in those holes?

Yeah, easily.

I mean, it's deep enough and whether it's flowers or, I don't know, more lettuce or whatever, it can grow and tighter situations.

Yeah.

Even scallions can grow in small spaces like those that would, that would work great.

Great.

So you can even maximize you're not only getting inside, but you're additionally adding space.

There for another growing area.

You have a hole.

This is about four by 12 that another 48 inches or so of just growing area that can use in addition to this area.

All right.

So we have our irrigation in place, We have our spacing.

As we noted, we've got two foot spacings in between each of the mirrors where we're going to put our tomato plants and our pepper plants.

And after this is over with, if you wanted to try some of the crop, you could do eggplant or cabbage or collards, things that kind of require a little bit more spacing.

Or we can try different varieties of tomatoes, different varieties of peppers, different varieties of eggplants, cabbage.

He has enough space here to do quite a number of things.

And then we have our one foot spacing where we put our small things that require less spacing in between.

And if you notice, we try to make enough space within the rules.

It's about two feet and between rows.

It's about 18 inches.

And again, that's just for this particular space.

Maybe if we had a wider area, we would have made it two feet, had a one foot walk space, and then another wrote a row out here so that these can grow.

But again, in a small space like this, this is a space that we want to get it and we're going to be maximizing this space as much as possible.

The soil looks gorgeous.

It's wonderful.

It was very impressed when it arrived.

It is gorgeous.

This is absolute gorgeous soil.

And when you can do that to soil and it sticks together, but it doesn't and it just crumbles like that, that is very, very good soil.

And as Dave each year adds more manure or more compost, this soil is only going to get better over time.

This soil is so loose.

David, I would even consider trying some carrots at some point in time in the future because it is that loose.

There are very few stones in here and so you may get some real good carrots in it.

All right.

So let's go ahead and start planting.

I will start with the tomatoes, David.

And these lovely seedlings are compliments of the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture.

And.

Good.

That's gorgeous.

Let's see how that one is.

Make sure it's not okay.

Even though it's at a right angle.

It isn't cracked.

Sometimes it looks like this and it's cracked in there and it doesn't grow up well.

Okay, now you have the option of planting them on this side or this side.

The plant is going to eventually grow out there anyway, so let's plant it on its side.

Okay, So sit down.

Yeah.

And bury it as high as we can get it.

Press the soil in around and there's number one.

And so, David, let's go ahead and plant the rest of them as we go on down in that.

Should you plan it a little deeper than what they were sprouted?

Yes.

For tomatoes, Yes.

You can bury them because they'll develop roots a little bit higher up in the plant.

You can't do the same, however, with the peppers, because they don't have roots.

They don't have adventitious roots, as we call them, coming that would come out from those air.

Right?

Gotcha.

Okay.

True.

Now this one's broken, so we've got a problem with this one.

So again, if you ever get some seedlings and find a situation where it's this one is actually broken, you can't use this.

If it were a little bit bigger or if it had snapped off above this, we might have been able to rescue it.

It would have put out another bud and kept growing.

So, all right, this one is a lost cause.

Maybe we'll just take this off.

Go ahead and plant that one and bury this in here.

Just make compost out of it.

Don't how you have any idea what you're going to do with all the tomatoes that you get off of this year, David Oh, I'm not going to have any problem with tomatoes.

They're one of my favorite fruit.

And down here, $6 a pound sometimes.

That's right.

You're going to get a good savings.

Now this is got to double sprouts.

Okay, then let's see how we can surgically and carefully take those two apart.

And you can do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You go.

Hey, growing in, I haven't tried to grow in the ground here at this property, but.

Okay.

The place I lived before, I tried to grow in the ground and dug it out and added topsoil and everything.

And that was more in the flat part of coral Bay.

And I just had the worst problem with insects.

Okay, that's that's my main fear.

All right, Caterpillar, pay attention.

Okay.

And we there are some products on the market for caterpillars and some of the participants in the program have had issues with caterpillars as well.

And there's a several products, Betty, is the actual name of the product.

And there are several other products that have that name in it for worms and caterpillars that could be used on it.

It comes in either a form, liquid form that's called third side or it comes in a dust, and it's called either dye pill or worm dust.

Those are things that you can use.

Now, hopefully it hasn't been on the store shelves for long because those products, most natural products, their shelf life is not very, very long at all.

They don't go for years on the shelf.

So you need to pay attention to the date.

Okay.

So when it was not actually you wouldn't know when it's purchased, but sometimes there are the dates with the manufacturers date on there.

Yeah, you would want to check that and see how old it is.

And you want to get it as current as possible.

And if it's more than a year, I would try and see if I can get some.

That was made a little earlier than that date.

Look in.

Great.

We're going to get our pepper plants gone.

Just drop them on the inside.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chopped onions right there.

No, Again, with peppers.

You don't want to bury them halfway up.

You just go at the soy line.

Okay?

At which the seedlings and leaves are at the root system.

The there.

Okay.

And while David is lining out those, I'm going to go ahead and put out the lettuce, the beets and the basil plants in the one foot spaced irrigation line.

One Occasionally when you're sowing seeds of lettuce, you end up with multiples.

Yeah, these are really small.

So what you can actually do with this is divide it and you can get more out of them and probably you may be able to get it down to one.

Once the plants grow up, you can send these out by clipping them off, throwing them in a salad and eating them as the plant gets bigger.

Mm hmm.

Okay.

So these have quite a number of multiples, but there's a single one.

And what we'll do since we have basil beets and basil beets and lettuce to put in that long row, let's do four lettuce, four beets, and then the rest we will do with basil.

Okay?

Okay.

See you perform some surgery on this one.

And I know someone in the audience may say, Oh, you're hurting the plants.

They're tough.

You go, See, I didn't just rip them open.

I delicately took them apart and planted them in.

All right.

Now, one of the things about beets is because of the amount of space that they take up when they're growing, you can actually double the amount of beets that you can put in a given area.

So what we'll do with the beets, as we've done in the past, is put one on either side of the tape.

So rather than having four beets, we'll end up with eight.

All right.

And in this one, I'm going to save that emitter.

Okay.

Just to put a cucumber running there, because that could eventually run out and run there.

Now, I know there's a bunch of different different varieties of basil.

Do you know what type basil these are?

This is, I believe, the Genovese basil, the large leaf type basil.

Okay, okay.

And with the two made with the cucumbers, what we'll do is plant two of them right on the edge here.

Okay?

And hopefully one or both would be successful and both come out.

One will have to go.

Okay.

And I'll leave you and your wife to decide which one goes.

Okay.

So we find it on this side, but the other one on that side, are they naturally pink?

Are they died?

No.

There.

That's something to keep the bacteria off of them when they're in storage.

So really shallow.

Yes, very shallow.

Okay.

All right.

And now.

Excellent.

Our garden is planted in a couple of minutes.

We have an instant garden.

We've got tomatoes, we've got sweet peppers, we've got lettuce on one in beets in the middle basil on this.

And.

And a cucumber vine on this in enough for a salad, you know, for the neighbors to get salads.

What do you think, David, so far?

Oh, I'm loving it.

I think it's great.

And I'm excited to see how it does.

And glad to have you guys around.

If I got to have questions on anything.

So it's more of a team effort trying to do what I've always tried to do it on my own and I've never had really any formal training on gardening, but I've always been growing stuff since I was a little kid.

So.

So yeah, this is really exciting for me, this great good.

And we're glad to have helped you along with this process.

And so folks, this is what another type of raised bed.

We've looked at box gardens, now we're looking at one with with blocks.

This one happens to be much larger than the one that we'd seen before.

This one is unmonitored, so it's not stuck together.

If he decides to move this and go someplace else, he can move the entire thing and go with it.

He also has the option of planting within the holes because the holes are large enough and he could add other things that he could grow in those holes.

Some of the herbs or some of the small crops as well.

And now we have a garden.

They've it's been exciting just looking at this that we were really looking forward to see how this is going to grow.

Because again, you're in an environment where the salt air is there and I know occasionally some of the past participants in the program have had issues with chickens and iguanas, but you don't have either of those.

What do you have?

We have donkeys have been the main thing that have actually made it down here.

And and I'm going to probably buy some more fencing and just fence off the area I have around the other part of the yard.

There's fencing and and I've just made gates and stuff out of driftwood that I've gotten off to off the shore and to keep those out and haven't had any any goats.

And there are some chickens, but we'll see if they stay out of it.

I haven't Mr..

In my other plans.

Okay, That's great, folks.

That's it From John's Folly here in Saint John, we're wrapping up another home grown program.

Have a great Virgin Islands Day.

And remember, home grown taste great.

Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, we food , we food, come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

From the earth to the dirt, come let we till up the soil, till up the soil, from the earth to the dirt, come let we keep planting on a while.

You see the homegrown