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 Robles from the Cooperative Extension Service and welcome to Home Grown.

Today we're in Saint Thomas on the east side of Saint Thomas, all within the Sweet Bay area with Mr. C.S.

Lewis.

Mr. Lewis, welcome to Home Grown.

Thank you, Mr. Roberts.

Good.

Glad to have you back.

We've been back.

The last time we were here, we were showing people how a terrace was built, Right?

Okay.

And we had the terrace built.

And actually, since we've last been here in Mr. Lewis's place, he has built two terraces on his own from the lessons that we learned using John B as a teacher at the last time.

So we've got a chance to see the other two and show you that you could do the same thing once you learn the techniques.

But what we wanted to do today was to follow up with Mr. Lewis to see what has happened since.

We've got the irrigation system and got an appliance in.

He had the terrace built and one of the other challenges that we had in this area was iguanas.

And we'll see today how we were able to handle the iguanas.

For Lewis, this looks fabulous.

Tell me what's happened since we last.

We were last here with the terrace.

Well, I planted a crops and December 27 oak and everything.

Been going good.

Like I say, you know, you have to have water and you have to have a commitment to keeping made up.

Repeat that again.

Water commitment.

Okay.

What I'm telling me why, since in your experience, why you see that water and that commitment is necessary?

Well, I see that once you give the plants water, they're going to grow.

But then too, you have to stay with them, commit yourself to come every day and make sure you absorb the changes, the different effects that is taking place as you go along with this project.

Good.

That's an excellent point that because again, if you're going to be into gardening, what is has to be consistent and you have to be observant and committed to the project because there are some things that could occur like pests, for example, that could occur in your garden that you don't necessarily have to spray any pesticide, whether it be manmade or natural.

You may be able to correct it by just removing that one leaf that's infected and while you don't have an explosion of a particular insect or particular disease because you were there early on observing, as he said, and and looking at the plants as they grow, watching them going in the various stages and speaking at various stages.

I know when we started, we had given you lettuce.

Yeah.

And they were in that space there.

What happened to them?

They will remember them and they will get eaten there.

Yeah.

All right, that's good.

So we look at in the garden here today and we see what's left, because the reason why he doesn't have any lettuce left is because lettuce, the particular variety of lettuce that we gave him was a black seeded Simpson and that is a leaf lettuce that has been going in the Virgin Islands for a number of years.

And they've now improved on that particular variety of lettuce.

Colby Simpson the lead.

And there are the types on canes as well, but it grows fairly rapidly.

Within 21 days we had the transplants and I would say within how long after we planted you were eating it.

I wait in them.

Like I said, we planted them for December 27 and by February 11 we waited to see.

So that's fairly quick.

And what we hope to do before this is over with is get him another crop of lettuce.

And right now we have tomatoes coming in.

We have a nice head of basil here.

We also have sweet pepper.

And he planted another type of pepper, which we'll talk about later on.

And there's a particular disease that's happening with them that we'll talk about as well.

Here's a table.

When we gave them to him, though, maybe like six inches and now they've grown and they've actually began to double.

So he won't need to to to get any more table.

He could actually subdivide them in cells and continue to split them off and divide.

And I noticed on the other end of the terrace you've added, what was that?

Parsley okay, so you've added parsley and he still has some beets going down there.

We How many cucumber vines did we start with in here?

We started off with about probably 40 would follow them and you left out four basil.

And as a result, how many cucumbers do I read about?

I got 12 cucumbers out there.

Okay.

And I've noticed no, that you're having a particular issue with things.

Either eating the leaves and I'm going to show you the culprit because he is in here.

And one of the things that, you know, that is a cucumber, it's it's a different type called by different types of names, but it's a cucumber cucumber, caterpillar, a cucumber worm.

One of the things that, you know, that he's around, I see the leaves tend to be eaten up.

Right.

That's one and two.

There he is.

Droppings or little black.

Oh, that's right.

Those are the droppings that come from that, from that particular work.

And generally they may be in a leaf that's folded or put two leaves together.

So we look for a leaves that stuck together or folded and see if we find any the culprits.

Ah ha.

There are more droppings.

Okay, so let's see.

We have a fold right here.

Right.

Oh, there he is.

There he is.

That's right.

There's a carpet.

Those are the kinds of things that you have to be observant about with cucumbers, watermelons, Any of that family are most melons any time.

Any of those.

Even the pumpkins that calabarzon, they they get the same type of warm and they can be treated with a powder called dipole or bacilli.

Astringent is one of the things I wanted to point out here to you is that we have a cucumber here, but it's a little bit on the deformed side, right?

Generally, one of the reasons.

No, this is still edible.

Right.

Okay.

But if you are selling it to market, you've giving it to somebody, they'll ask you why.

Sometimes this is as a result of poor pollination.

The bee didn't drop enough pollen off into this particular flower, so it didn't fully develop.

One of the reasons may have been that it may have been an in an area that was restricting the growth rate around here.

All right.

And this is a nice, healthy cucumber.

And looking back through the vine, you have a couple more in there.

Okay.

To there.

So but you have them at various stages.

So if you want to come by, as you probably have cucumbers here for the next several weeks.

And you said there were four veins in here.

Yes.

And all four veins are probably going to be produced in a whole lot of veins as we go along.

And they're going to be running out to see them coming through there.

And the one good thing about it, though, is that even though they may run through here, one of the benefits that they add to this to this garden is that they're able to at least shade out the sun and keep whatever moisture that you have in here.

All right.

There's a bee coming in.

You have to show it, right?

Yes.

Okay.

And this is a sweet pepper plant.

He has a couple of sweet peppers.

I think I saw one somewhere, you know, for the one.

Okay.

Yeah.

And look at to say that his sweet peppers, I mean, nice and healthy.

Okay.

And there are at least couple more flowers on here.

So again, production has already started and it's nice base that you put this basil in here.

Yeah, okay.

That was one of those that you gave me.

Okay.

And then, I mean, look at the size at each base of these are absolutely gorgeous.

Now, one of the things that's beginning to happen, you see this spot here, right?

This is a leaf minor.

And generally there's nothing really that you could do about it because there's nothing that you can spray on top of it or underneath it, because the leaf main itself, it's a little worm of lilies, it's egg in there and it stays in between the leaf right.

And they will eventually continue to boil around in there until they get big enough and then they'll come out and start over.

Now, if you could live with this, fine.

You don't need to do any spraying.

But what if you harvest?

Would that stop from carrying on to the rest?

Will Yeah.

Eventually these will will is again is generally a fly that lays the eggs.

So if harvesting them off you would at least stop the worm that's in here from keeping the life cycle going.

So you may want to just rip these and throw them away.

I think I said I know people who use them even though they have the the scar tissue on them from the worms.

Now, one little tip that you could do in order to make this a little bit more bushy, right.

It's getting ready to go to sea.

So it just pays off all the way back here.

And generally you recommend that you pinch it off and these two now will become the ones.

Right?

Right.

Okay.

Right.

So you could that's another thing that you can add to your growing, growing principles.

No, that's a sweet pepper.

And we have another type of pepper growing here.

That's a longer one.

There are some types they call the Cubanos.

We're not sure what this one is, but this is one that Mr. Lopez planted in here on his own, and that's doing fairly well.

But next to it, this is about the same age.

Yes.

Okay, Same age.

Okay.

But it's beginning to show symptoms of some kind of a problem that is generally referred to as a virus.

It's called a Gemini virus.

It's a number of different viruses that attack sweet peppers and it's all across the country.

And so he's been affected?

No, the thing about it is and one of the things that we've learned over the years is that it if you can get the plant up to a certain stage of growth, as you did with this one, the plant will hold its own and sort of they fight it off and be able to give you some peppers until it it just completely succumbs to the virus.

And that's what's happening with those two, even though it's flowering.

And I think one of them is beginning to put out of fruit, it's not going to get as big as those.

So that's just one of the things about science that we have to learn.

And then the tomatoes.

No tomatoes yet.

Yeah, we got some.

We haven't reap any as yet, but there aren't a whole lot of tomatoes.

Okay, let's see here.

Okay.

Yeah, I see.

There's that one back there.

Right.

Okay.

And yeah, see, you got a couple here and I need help with small ones.

And you got a cucumber.

Very run in between here, too.

And there's a small cucumber in there.

Okay, good.

And then next to it, we had the b of some beets.

Good.

And these beets look good.

Yeah.

Haven't had any problem with it.

No problem with beets.

Okay.

All right.

Another tip you got, Lila, One day, something's happening here.

Any time you see a leaf all it over.

I mean, you got to quit.

Yeah, We got something in here.

We need to find out what it is.

Is that.

Will we be able to control it easily?

Okay, So far, I don't see anything.

I see droppings.

That's droppings there, but I don't see anything.

Sometimes something in nature would take care of it.

But we'll be coming by and spotted.

Okay.

We.

Okay.

This is falling together now.

These two are falling together.

Let's see.

Something is happening in here.

They grab her as a grub.

It's actually a cool corn.

Yeah, it's getting ready to change over from whatever caterpillar it was into it.

A moth or a butterfly.

Okay, Again, see if you see leaves.

Fold it together.

Close together.

Yeah.

And good size beets.

In fact, these are just about ready to harvest any time.

Yeah, Okay.

Yeah.

Really?

I want to come in.

Okay.

Yeah, it's a little bit young one day, and you added in these baskets on your own.

Good.

So how do you how did it feel for you to actually eat from here?

Feel good, man.

It felt good.

You know?

You know what you eaten is natural.

No chemical, nothing.

Okay, We read some lettuce and we went away for five days and came back.

And a wife was like, Wow, You think what I had is with all the stuff you bought from the store, Right?

And they were still looking like we just picked them out a garden.

There's a good feeling, you know, That's good.

This is a water and a commitment to staying on top of it.

You hear that?

Yep.

And that's the key.

If you're going to have a successful garden, you need to have that water and that stick to itiveness and that commitment to to doing the to doing the garden.

And we talked about protection, as we said early on when we when we started this project here, one of our issues is how are we going to take care of the iguanas?

And if you can see behind us, the Louis has erected a barrier.

Okay, Has it work?

Perfect.

Perfect.

I wouldn't have had these without this barrier.

Because if you remember from the last taping we had iguanas all through the bushes, just looking and planning strategy as to how they're going to get in here.

And so far we've been able to thwart them.

And so again, there are ways of being able to combat problems with and be able to coexist with the challenges of nature and wanting to grow.

And we are as much as path as nature as a iguanas.

Yep.

And so we work together.

They have their space.

We have our space, and we live happily ever after.

And Silloth has been able to create a barrier for himself so that he could save his and not have to deal with the iguanas and let's take a look at the other terrorist.

As I said, he took the example that somebody had given him with building a terrorist watch, became a very good student, and now he has made two additional terraces of his own over on the other side.

So let's take a look at those terraces now.

We're here outside the protective zone to the non protected zone where an area that Mr. Lewis has just created or at least created after we finished the first terrace on his own, he became a quick student, quick study, and here we are.

How long did it take you to build this terrace?

Took me a a day to put to do the two area did.

Yeah, he's right.

It is.

Before I started, I went out and got rocks from all over.

Okay.

And brought demand and I started it.

Okay, so.

And in this one you have time.

Time and time.

Parsley.

Okay.

What are you going to do?

What I ask me Well, my them up.

Give some to the neighbors, okay?

Yeah.

No, that's good.

That's good.

But again, follow the teachings again to as we are giving you them in in previous shows and here this is an example of the spin off and he has another terrace.

He's working.

What are you putting across the top there?

That looks like a a mesh to keep the grass down.

Okay.

That's one of those weed blocks made by a type of things.

Okay.

And again, in managing your garden, we didn't have a whole lot of weeds to deal with here in this garden because the plants are all grown.

But weeds are a natural part of gardening.

And one way to minimize the amount of time that you have to use for for weeding your garden is using something, some type of mulch.

And you can find these black mulch is at various hardware stores and various width and length.

And one of the benefits of this.

No, Let me ask you, Mr. Lewis, about this particular weed Black does this one, is this solid plastic or does this one have holes?

This one has holes in it.

Okay.

All right.

Guess this one, this particular one has holes in it.

And it what this does is that it allows for water to go right through, but it doesn't allow the weeds to grow up through it.

And then you will just cut a hole or burn a hole and then put the plants that you want to plant right in it.

It helps control you from weeding up as often as you would if it wasn't any weed blackening to save in time.

That's good.

Yep.

And these came with it is I bought separate that goes along with it to keep it down.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, good.

All right, so then there's another time and labor saving device that you can use in your garden and this is.

This is good.

This is excellent.

And this is what home grown is about, Helping people to be able to grow their own food, grow healthy food, save some money.

And, you know, it would be it's it's one of those things that we at UVA extension service, along with our partners at the Department of Agriculture and that's why this program is here.

We want to thank you for spending some time with us today.

Mr. Lewis, we'll probably get back to you before this is over with.

And thank you for your time and for all the good work that you've done.

Thank you for your participation in all of this.

Good.

We're on Saint Thomas today in West Carrot.

Be at the home, I'm sorry.

East Carrot B, West Carrot Bay is the other direction at the home of Lewis Laufer.

Initially when we came here, we looked at this site and we were wondering how it was going to work out because on the north northwest side of the island, where at certain times of year the sun is on the south side and it gets a little bit dark.

But today you're going to be surprised at what you see.

Louise, welcome to Home Grown.

Thank you very much.

I'm delighted to be part of the program.

How has it been?

It's been great.

We've had a little too much rain starting out and but as you've seen recently, everything is really flourishing.

I've picked out a lettuce already.

Okay.

This is lettuce that is grown here from this lettuce and beautiful tomatoes.

And there's some larger ones on there.

I pick those before the birds got them.

So my husband and I built a frame out of recycled tubing and it took us about 15 minutes.

It was very easy to do.

And then we bought bird netting.

It's actually called deer netting and started over to keep the thrushes out because that's.

Oh yes, that was always a problem.

Yeah.

For for gardeners in the Virgin Islands for years.

And you found a way to combat it.

Right.

Did this cost you a whole lot just to put this together?

No, I'm okay.

No, this was all recycled from old project building.

Our house, and I think we bought a few connectors, and that was it.

Okay, well, the knitting was not expensive.

All right?

And then you've also used some different kinds of steaks, metal, steaks, whatever.

Whatever.

I have recycling, everything do.

Yeah, We put this back in here, But this is a gorgeous head of Simpson Lettuce.

This is this is beautiful.

This is exactly what we're talking about.

When you can grow your own.

How does it taste?

Oh, it's delicious.

Most of it's gone.

This is the last of it.

So we've.

We've picked it and eaten all of it except for just that.

Okay, great.

Holy smoke.

Hey, did you see this?

That is incredible.

This is a calypso variety of cucumber that all the participants have.

Has have you ever grown a cucumber?

That's just never, ever.

I've tried it.

I've always had the worms.

Eat them up, the leaves up.

And then everything shrivels.

I've had cucumbers that look like little basketballs.

Okay, so this is.

I'm looking forward to carrying that and eating this tonight.

All right.

We put that in the basket as well.

Okay.

Oh, heavy.

Good.

I mean, that's a two pounder and then plenty more going on the vines all around.

Okay.

And how many vines that we have in here?

One or two are there are two here.

And then there's some volunteers that dropped in.

We ended up with two more vines down there.

So those are later and they're just flowering right now.

So but these two vines have cucumbers all throughout the growing on the fence.

Okay.

And yeah, we do have to protect because we're beginning to see the second go around of symptoms of this of the caterpillar worm.

In fact, there is a cocoon right there of one that has already grown to its size and now has created its cocoon and it has left its cocoon and become a moth.

I believe the metaphor when it comes to metamorphosis into something else, it comes into a moth.

So we'll have to get our next round of BT product to take care of this and get this on and get this under control.

But again, and again, it's important to get it under control very quickly because this can devastate your vine overnight and they proliferate quite quickly.

I could see it because this was fine two days ago, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

And so again, this is the way how the garden grows.

This is your first set of sweet pepper peppers.

Yes.

And we've been picking them already and eating them, too, so.

Wow.

So, yeah, we've had one larger than that that we've already picked and eaten.

And these are just come in.

This one's in the shade.

More so it hasn't done as well.

Good point and glad you brought up shade because some of our participants have their tomatoes in areas that are a little bit more shaded than this area.

But you and they don't have as much leaf mass as possible, but yours has leaves from the bottom all the way to the top.

And you said you have to remove some of the leaves from them because they begin to show symptoms of disease.

Okay.

You were talking about this.

For one thing, the show that was given to us by the program was very thick clay soil.

And what we did is we added a whole bag of of manure right through the manure.

But in addition to that, I have a compost been over there, which is all my kitchen waste and peppers and things like that.

And we added probably a third of this is compost, and I think that also made everything more healthy.

That's great, chopped up little corks and anything that would give some looseness to the soil.

When we worked it in and raked it in and let that sit for a couple of weeks before we actually planted.

And I think that really helped.

That's great because that again, bed preparation is something that's important, getting the bed prepared and as you did putting in the additional compost along with the black hole manure that was called manure that we added also help to prepare the soil when the plants came in and the roots began to expand.

They weren't stressed before for fertilizer, right?

It was already there.

It was already broken down into a place where it could be readily used by the plant and hear the results of it.

You've also used the newspaper, right?

The paper couple is Give it to me.

Okay, every couple of weeks.

So I always put that in on top.

And actually that was mixed in okay first, but I mixed in probably three bags of paper shreds.

Okay.

People gave me.

And just in case you're concerned about the dust, the ink in the papers, the majority of newspapers, in fact, the more I would see.

But probably 100% of all newspapers have now gone to soy based ink.

And so whereas once upon a time we had to worry about lead based ink, we don't have to worry about that anymore.

So the newspapers are perfectly fine to use as mulch to add bulk to the soil and to help improve the quality of the soil over time.

And I put an old Christmas tree.

I mean, whatever I have, it looks like it might help I put in.

That's great.

And with clay soils, yeah, you need to constantly type things to improve the quality of the soil and eventually get to a place where you'll be able to stick your hand right into it and don't even have to use any tools.

But this is great.

I like the idea of the netting to protect your investment because it's a lot of investment.

Too many of us have to, so we have them around for the trees and cities.

I find one tomato.

That's it.

Yes.

So great.

Now that's that's been really helpful.

And it actually keeps them out of the peppers, too.

And initially when we told you about the drip irrigation, you were excited.

Are you still excited about the trip?

Yes.

I mean, I haven't needed it in the pouring rain for a few days, but it's wonderful.

On dry, sunny days.

We had one week.

I just came out in the morning, turned it on walk.

The dogs came back, turned it off.

You know, it's perfect.

Good.

And I'm going to incorporate it into my home garden.

Great.

Have other garden beds that I'm also growing things in.

So I thought it was going to be some difficult system, right?

It's so easy.

You just load on the pipes, put a connector, punch the holes with the is how easy it is.

Yeah, So I'm really excited about that and I'm going to put that, as I said in the rest of my garden.

Great.

And you do a good job here with the rest of your gardens.

And I see you really love gardening.

You have a lot of other beds and and raised beds and other things that do try and beings and.

And that's good.

Yeah.

You have the baby ladies there.

And I notice you try some beans, but it looks like they didn't make it work.

Well, okay.

And then that's good.

It's trial and error.

Some things work well in the trap in tropics.

Others don't work well in the tropics.

That line my being Bush works well in the tropics.

Well, I don't know.

This came from a second grader at school.

He gave me a science project to plant and here we go.

It's it.

It's taken over.

I had to cut it back three times because it was taking over my tomatoes and all the plants over here.

It's taken over this whole fence.

We've had hundreds of beans out of it.

And I told the kids and I took pictures for them and I told them it's Jack and the Beanstalk Gone, Gone Wild.

So that is one Lima bean that started from one of my second graders.

Jordan, if you're watching, there's your plant, your little to inspire.

So the tip is when you're looking at beans or any other plant, you need to find out if they have the potential to be a vine or a bush.

Yeah, I didn't know when he gave it to me.

Okay.

He didn't say.

Now, normally there are limited beans that are bought and you growing them.

Okay?

And this one turns out to be a vine.

And again, she wasn't totally prepared for what is going to come.

I mean, you get lots of beans, but you end up with something that you had to this I mean, it took over everything on this.

Okay.

And I see you've got a nice, nice okra that's ready to be picked there as well.

Wow.

And yes.

Oh, my gosh.

I swear at okra, okra grows very fast.

And that okra probably grew there last night between this morning and like these little ones tomorrow they'll be this one.

No one is leaving the frying of okra every night.

It's great.

Yeah.

And okra is something that grows very fast.

Very fast.

And if you have more than one plant, I hope you have lots of hands to pick them.

Because as fast as the flower, they grow and they grow rapidly.

So you have quite a bit of things here in your garden to eat.

In fact, you've got some stuff for you here for a salad tonight.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

And this is what we're encouraging at the Homegrown project with our partners, the Department of Agriculture, the Cooperative Extension Service and W, TJX.

We encourage you to continue to grow your own home grown products.

And so until next time on Home grown.

We thank you for having us here today.

Very welcome.

Well, thank you for having me.

And we look forward to seeing you at our next homegrown food program come that we planted plant to plant.

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

I said, we food , we 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.

From the earth to the dirt, come let we till up the soil, till up the soil, from the earth to the dirt,