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 .

Hi, I'm Carlos.

So blessed with the UVI Cooperative Extension Service and welcome to Home Grown.

Today, we're going to talk about tire gardening.

That's right, tire gardening.

In this era of go green.

And with the issues we have with tires and the landfill, what better way to get to go green and get involved in the Go Green movement than to use tires in gardening?

Today, we at the home of Mr. Elmo Rabsatt here in Cruz Bay Saint John.

Mr. Rabsatt Good afternoon sir welcome to home grown.

You have put a lot of work into this little space so it's obvious that you love to do gardening.

I see some things here that I don't see normally in a garden, like a mommy tree.

I see your baby tree overhead.

You've got to a banana trees.

But the most intriguing thing and I think the most important thing for those of us who live in the Virgin Islands that I see that you have here is that you've done a lot to try to control erosion.

I see you have a tin in.

Is that that was your idea.

What was what was the reason for doing that then?

And in that, because I was built on a step and it was a steep slope.

Okay.

And speaking of steep slopes, he also has a tire wall.

And when you look at this tire, while you are going to be impressed, this wall is helping to keep the soil from running off into the street.

And again, we're talking about reducing reuse of products.

Recycling tires in his garden are being used to help us create a retaining wall.

But today, we're actually here to talk more about actually gardening.

Have you done a lot of gardening in this part?

Foods, but vegetables, other things that about over the years?

Over the years, yes.

Okay.

And what has been your challenge in growing in this area, trying to keep it moist, keep the guano out of the chicken?

Oh, you got one.

Does that chickens?

Do I hear that?

I've been hearing that quite a bit by today.

But even besides that, have you been able to successfully grow some things?

Just basically tomatoes and a few pumpkins every once in a while?

Okay, well, then we have this challenge then that we looking forward to then in growing in tires and we're glad you're willing to participate in this program and do the tires, the tire gardening and get the people of the Virgin Islands and the people of the willing opportunity to see how we do gardening here in the Virgin Islands.

You ready to get started?

Right.

Okay, so let's look at the ties we've gotten.

Sometimes we're genuine when we do tire gardening.

I would recommend that people use tires, entire gardening.

We ask them to get sizes 13 to 15.

What they say is that we have here we have 15.

We have size 15 tires.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and begin to lay them out.

Now, generally, if we're doing things like tomatoes and peppers, we usually stack them to high.

So I know that tomatoes and peppers are one of the crops that you're going to grow.

So let's go ahead and stack them to high.

Okay?

Now you will you may want to notice that there are some holes in these tires when tires are being stored.

If they're not being ground into the landfill or used reused, people are encouraged to put a hole in them because generally way them or because they suck up more than a mosquito's with the standing water.

Okay.

Yeah.

To reduce the incidence of standing water for mosquitoes.

So we'll go ahead and ladies to go with that one there.

All right.

Well, I noticed you put this one with a hole down.

Okay.

All right.

The reason why I put that one with the hole down is that even though we want some moisture in the tire, we don't want it to sit in the tire very long.

So we want some of it to actually run out because some plants, even though they don't mind moist soil, they don't like it sopping wet or soggy.

So it's better to allow some water to drain off.

And then again, one of the things that you have going for us is you have broken shade.

You don't have dense shade, but you don't have you don't have full sun.

So a lot of evaporation is not going to take place in this area simply because you have two tires.

And that's one of the benefits of growing in tires.

It retains the moisture in the soil a lot longer.

Okay.

I noticed you have a plastic here and it was good that you you brought a piece of this plastic.

And here's a reason why we're recommending that you put something in the bottom recently.

And I would tell your gardener, the university, we encountered a problem in our tire garden.

We had a couple of trees that you have going next to the tires, and there was nothing there was a barrier there.

But it was it was porous, right?

ROOTS Well, growing up through the porous fabric and into the tires.

And so we are growing tomatoes and other things, but they weren't growing very big.

The tree roots are actually grown under the weed barrier and up through the tire and was consuming all the food and nutrients that we had put in the tire.

So what this will do is would also help to retain moisture.

But any roots that may come up through your nice weed barrier that you have here would have to come up against this and we'll be able to get up inside the tire.

So let's go ahead and put them inside the tires.

Okay.

Now let's start.

By the next step is to begin filling the tire with the soil that's going to go into it.

Generally, any potting soil can do any commercial potting soil, but before we like the ones that the professional use.

So when you go to your garden center where you get potting soil, get the biggest bags at 3 to 3.8 cubic yard bags of potting soil, it's compressed and it has a lot more potting soil for the money in it and it's generally ready to go.

The only thing about it is, is that it's sterile.

Sterile meaning there's no fertilizer or anything in it.

And in order for the plants to continue in their biological activity as they're growing, they're going to need to have some fertilizer into the soil.

So what we're going to do with this soil, this potting soil, is we're going to mix it with some manure and add a little bit of time release fertilizer.

And I'll talk about it as we get a little later on into the soil.

And we'll go through that process right now.

So know we need one of the big bags.

Okay.

Okay.

Now, safety caution for those of you that have respiratory problems, you might want to get yourself a dust mask because the potting soil usually comes dry.

And when you open it up, it creates a lot of dust.

So I'm just wearing this as a means of showing you that again, you need to protect yourself if you have respiratory problems or any kind of dust mask, something to cover your face.

We have water.

Yes.

Okay.

What are we going to do now if some of this potting soil into the tires and then wet it?

Okay, let's go ahead.

Okay.

Let's go ahead and get what's in there.

So as you throw in some some water, you wet it down a little bit as you go up.

Okay.

All right.

Let's hear it.

Spread it out.

Okay.

Storing some more.

As we can see, as we said, it's compressed.

Okay.

So some water in there and that could stay since the majority of the roots are going to be going down in that area, there might want to add some manure, cover your sheep and your dried composted manure.

Okay.

How much do you add?

Three large hands full just for now.

That would settle in, turn some water in and mix that in a bit.

Okay, so now the soil is wet already.

You wouldn't need to add water to this anytime soon, but we still need to fill it up a little bit higher.

We actually have some water in here.

Get mixed in.

We have enough of it outstanding.

Some of it is rolling off to the sides.

Even though you do that sometimes, you still have some clumps in there.

But as the water gets in and the air comes out, all of that will eventually shrink.

I'm going to the soil again.

This is a 15 inch diameter, so it's going to take up quite a bit of soil container gardening, especially gardening and any type of container gardening.

You can customize your soil and by customizing your soil, you can bring in the best ingredients that you can find for your garden.

I put them all in the tire.

We're just hoping to be using potting soil here.

You can use regular soil from around your yard.

Go outside.

If you have a neighbor that has go to ship or chicken, you could get the manure from them, mix them all together.

You could even incorporate some potting soil into your mix in a one in a 1 to 1 third to one third ratio, one third manure, one third potting soil, one third regular good soil.

Or you might just want a 100% or two thirds regular soil and some potting, a little bit of potting soil and some manure.

Those combinations will work.

If you can see the soil has already shrunk.

So we need to go ahead and put some more in and you can see some of the water is already leaking out.

Again, you don't want it sopping wet.

You want to be able to have it in a way where it's just moist enough for the plants just to let a handful of dressing like manure on the top.

Okay.

And turn some water on and good enough to be full blast.

Good.

A nice spray here.

That's good.

Mix that in.

We've got our tire just about full.

It may settle a little bit more, but now this tire is ready to be planted.

There's one additional thing, since we know the fact that the the soil is sterile, it has no natural fertilizers in it.

You may want to add some fertilizer as well.

Commercial fertilizer.

So we've done the organic manure.

We've also added the soil.

Now we have what we call time to release fertilizers.

These are fertilizers that respond to watering.

There's a coating over each droplet that you see here.

Each speck of fertilizer.

And whenever it water, it releases the fertilizer into the soil.

If there's no moisture, if there's no rain, these just sit there.

These work.

Well, because they don't, would they release the fertilizer slowly as opposed to all at once if these weren't quoted as time released fertilizers, whenever you water, you will be having a whole lot of water going in and fertilizer going into the soil all at once.

The plant may not be able to use it right away.

All right.

So with the timed release, it takes a lot longer for it, but the plant gets it right.

Go ahead and sprinkle it in and the time the plant gets it over a longer period of time and it's available to them.

And you just sprinkle it right on top of the soil.

That's about three tablespoons for that amount.

And that should be adequate for now.

And as we go along, you look at the plant and see how it's responding and we'll see that as we get into later shows.

But generally that is how you do.

You stack up two tire got a two tire per garden with the potting soil.

Again, there may be some shrinkage later on and then you want to come back and add some more soil.

Okay.

I know we finished putting the tires together, at least some examples of of the tires, how we fill them with soil, how we make them with a little manure.

We add in some of the time release fertilizer.

What do you think?

Looks good to me.

Okay.

All right.

Looks like we're ready to plant.

Yes, we are.

Okay.

We do have a couple more tires to fill, but right now we're going to go to another site where we'll be doing, again, small space gardening, container, gardening using pots.

Hi, we're in Saint John, beautiful U.S. Virgin Islands, and we're up in the area known as Clarksburg.

We're at the home of Eddie and Martha Bruce.

And today we're going to be looking at containers and preparing our containers for our gardening.

We're in an ideal location for a challenge because we're always looking for a challenge here at home.

Going and here at the home of the Bruces is a challenge.

If you notice around this place, it's kind of shaded.

And generally when you're growing vegetables, you need as much sun as possible.

If you had to make a choice whether morning or afternoon sun, you want to have morning sun first morning sun, the first couple of hours, the morning sun.

But here up in Clarksburg, here are the Bruce Bruces.

You don't have that.

You have lots of trees around, but we're going to still figure a way how to grow our lettuce or tomatoes and the other things that we're going to grow in pots here are the Bruces.

And I'd like to introduce to you Eddie Bruce.

Eddie, welcome to home grown downtown.

Yeah, it's been a while.

It's been a while.

And I'm glad that the opportunity to at least come here and do some food with you.

Happy to grow some food?

I am.

All right.

What we're going to do, as you all know that we've been doing several kinds of gardens.

We've been doing raised beds, we've been doing traditional.

We're going to be doing containers.

And so today, Eddie, we're going to show the folks one we are mixing soil now, if you don't have regular soil to mix in a container, what we're going to be using today are commercial potting soil.

It's sterile.

It has no fertilizer in it.

It's just peat moss, vermiculite, things that have been gathered out of the earth.

And in fact, peat moss comes from lakes in bogs in Canada and things like that.

So it's 100% natural, but it doesn't have any fertility in it.

And we're going to mix it with some cow manure.

And in doing containers, depending on what you want to use, you can use we're going to use these containers here for tomatoes and we're going to use this one to grow a pepper plant.

And we have other containers, but these are the kind of size that you want to use if you're going to grow significant perimeter.

This is about a five gallon.

This is about a three gallon or maybe a four gallon sized container.

And so one of the things you want to first make sure you have is water.

Now, when you get potting soil like this, Eddy, it's already dry.

So one way people normally do it is that they just pick it up, put it in the pot and then throw the water in afterwards.

But what I'm going to show you today is another way of doing it.

And this will help with retaining the moisture after the plants go in.

So we're going to take some of the potting soil and throw it in the water and get it wet.

So let's go ahead and start doing that and soak it in here.

And one of the good things about container gardening is that it is easier to manage and when you don't have a whole lot of time and you don't and you and you want a garden, this is one of the best ways of doing it because everything is in the container.

We're going to have to put in some more.

But let's gather up this.

Okay, so this is what is going into a soil wet going into the container wet.

And this is a nice deep container.

Let's just go ahead and dump our whole lot into it.

And again, if you're doing container gardening, you can do a container on a porch.

You could do it on concrete.

You can do it anywhere.

There's not soil because you're not worried about the soil on the outside or worrying about the soil on the inside of the pot.

And that's where you're going to do it.

You're going, okay, let's dump it in so much.

We get okay, I think we're going to have to lean over the whole bag or most of the bag to get enough.

Nothing.

Yeah.

So you already got drainage coming out.

Okay.

But you don't want why you need drainage holes on containers is because you don't want to have your plants sitting in water.

Most of our vegetables don't want to be sitting in water or have their feet wet, as we say in the tree.

Eventually, what will happen is that it will begin to rotten and it would begin to smell like rotten onions, right?

If you start smelling rotten onions in your container, that means the soil is too wet.

And at this point we're kind of halfway up.

Go ahead for let up if you're going to go organic in terms of growing and you don't want to use, then whether you're going organic or not, it would be good to add some animal manure, cow manure, sheep manure, gourd manure, chicken manure, or a combination thereof dried.

You can get it commercially composted.

We have composted cow manure that we're going to add to this mix.

So it's about give or take half we know.

So I'm going to put some black cow cow manure into the into the mix.

And so we put about that much sprinkling.

That's to big heaping hands full so that the roots will grow right into it and it'll be a source of nutrients.

Okay, we are about right there.

Let's put the rest of this in.

Okay.

We wrote about the proper soil line.

Now, what's going to happen with this is that this is going to shrink a little bit as the water runs out and the space is beginning to collapse.

So it may go down about an inch or two, but this is a good height to have the soil in the container.

One of the benefits of wetting the soil like this in advance is that you now have the entire root bar when the plants begins to grow saturated with water.

No question.

Yeah.

So when it comes out and it starts to grow after it's transplanted, it will just grow because it has the ideal environment and it hasn't it doesn't dry out because generally what happens at times with potting soil like this in the way that we normally do it, which is put the soil, the dry soil into the container, you end up with a situation where the outside of the bottle is wet by the water runs out.

Yeah.

And the inside of the bottle is dry.

This way you don't have that problem and this water all the way through.

And so when it comes now to watering, once your plants are in, they have already access the water that's already there.

And so it's just one of those things that's beneficial.

No, picking up the pot is another issue.

It's a little bit heavy because it's saturated with water.

And then like I said, you guys get your plants, you see, you put it in the middle, puts it in, and you're good to go.

For those of you that already have plants in pots and one to to water more effectively and use up your water more efficiently.

Here's another way of watering the plants.

We're going to start by just joining the dry mix here for this one to start with, and then I'll show you how it works.

You take the container and put it down in the water.

Okay.

If you remember your biology, the water will go in and by osmosis transfer all the way across to the other side.

You come in all through the holes and will come up to the center and all the soil below that is is absorbing the water.

Right.

So now it's going to drain out all of that excess water that is going to keep enough around the plant.

BROWN The soil itself.

But all the excess water will drain off.

And now under these conditions, with not a whole lot of sunlight, this plan, this pipe and any plan that's going in this pot will have water available to it a lot longer.

So you wouldn't have to even come in and water for probably another week, maybe two weeks.

Gotcha.

So we now want to move on to another another home here in Coos Bay in Saint John, where we're going to show you another type of container in which you can grow vegetables in.

So stay tuned.

We're here again in Saint John in the pastoral area at the home of Sally Brown.

We're going to continue with our types of containers that you could use to grow your vegetable in.

Sally, welcome to Home Grown.

Thank you.

Good.

And we're glad.

Good.

We're glad that we could have you here first, I want to show the audience some of the containers, self-watering containers, and we're going to explain what that means that Sally has here, that we're going to grow some of the vegetables in in her garden.

This one TAP How long have you had these kind of container?

Sally Oh, probably 6 to 8 years.

6 to 8 years.

And I've started with two and then I've expanded about eight or nine of them now.

Okay.

And you found them convenient?

Very, very convenient.

Especially with the water situation.

Okay.

And one of the reasons why they are convenient, as you mentioned, and we use the term self-watering containers is because this I'll start with this one.

That's right here.

A container like this, when you say Self-watering has a reservoir at the bottom that collects the water, you can pour the water in through a hose.

And in this particular instance, you can either pour it into the top or if you want to, you can put it in through this hole.

This is the measure that prevents you from overwatering or getting too much water in the container.

So the water sits, the containers on the ground, the water goes into the container either through the top or through here.

And when it has reached its maximum, it will spill over and let you know that it has enough.

And so then that's it.

There will be water sitting in the bottom of this container and the roots then will grow down into the soil and into the into the roots, into the water reservoir.

And now the water would act as a wick and come up through the soil and keep the soil moist, not not saturated and moist.

And again, as we were talking earlier about convenience and if you want to do gardening but don't have the time to go out and do it on a terrace or do it in a regular soil containers is a, would you say, easy approach?

Very much, very much easy and very much convenient for those of you that are on the run, but also want to do gardening.

And if you also live in a condominium or an apartment where again you have no soil, containers are an ideal way to grow plants.

We're going to look at these other serve watering containers.

And again, we have four of them here.

Now, in this particular type of container, you want, you get the water into the reservoir through this hole.

And again, the water sits at about three inches below here.

And when you water it and it gets filled, there's a hole right here that the water spills out that lets you know, okay, you don't have to water anymore.

That's it.

You've met the demands of water for this at a given time.

And if you take a look on the inside, we have some water already standing in this container in all of the containers, but you have some water already there.

And that is the height that you want to have the water in.

Again, it's self-regulated.

You know, when you've over water or you put too much weight in because it leaks out through the hole.

And then so slowly, what happens next?

The soil goes on top of this.

The soil goes on top.

Yes.

Okay.

And then you put your plants in and you only have to water about every two days.

Every two days.

Okay.

Really hot.

Okay.

But if it's you know, we've been getting a little bit of rain lately.

You don't go longer than that.

Okay.

And so, again, that's in this container.

Again, you have a similar situation where you have a like a platform in here where you the soil goes in and sits on top of this.

Some of it goes in between there.

But that's used kind of like a drain to drain right into the reservoir that's below this.

And again, these are your self-watering containers and you can find these and catalog some of the hardware stores that are carrying them.

And so now we have other options for going in containers.

All right.

Let's go ahead and fill one of these self-contained boxes.

We're going to use our potting soil and our cow manure, as we did in the previous presentation.

Now that we've had the soil wet, we're going to add our timed release fertilizer.

As we said, this also is a fertilizer that releases whenever it's it's watered.

But in this case, since the soil is already moist, it will just release on its own.

This should last about six months.

And in this can these conditions in May last about three months because this is generally made for winter, but because we don't have winter here and that's a good thing, right, Ali?

Okay.

We will use this will last about three months.

So we're going to spread it down the middle.

And it's a broad spectrum.

Fertilizer.

These are okay, not more than that much.

And the plant roots will grow right into to that and the fertilizer will spread by osmosis across the soil and into it.

We're going to continue filling some boxes here at Sally Brown's place.

And again, we we've just seen how we can grow in containers, self-watering containers, boxes and other means of creating the soil base for which your plants are going to grow.

And we'll see you next time on home grown.

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.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,