Grow Your Own Food At Home
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Hey guys. Thanks for being here. I just wanted to give you all a quick update on our home garden that hopefully educates and inspires you to grow your own food too. We’re going to go over just general maintenance on how to take care of these few types of plants, and what to do when you look in the garden week by week.
Let’s see what we’re working with!
Kale: Grow Your Own Food At Home
We’ve got four kale plants. They are doing excellent.
Honestly, there’s nothing to do to these. We’re going to cut these leaves off here, and make some salads and kale chips out of them. (Find the kale chip recipe here. Super tasty and healthy snack.) They’re in excellent health, really. Not much else to say. They’re really liking the environment.
Monitoring: Growing Your Own Food At Home
Speaking of the environment, let’s check that out real quick. We’re right around 70-75 degrees and humidity is at 40%.
That’s fine. I would prefer to be a little more around the 80 degrees for these plants. But, we have a lot of different varieties growing here, and the important thing to know is there’s a happy medium. We’ve got kale, peppers, cucumbers, basil, a lot of things growing here. They don’t need their own environment.
Now, if we wanted to go a more professional route, we’d have a room full of one crop that we’d perfect. Certainly in that case, we would find the absolute perfect temperature for that cultivar. We would then exploit that and find the perfect fertilizer recipe.
In our case, we’ve got a lot of plants here. So we’re just going to find a happy medium for them all.
If you don’t already have one, it’s important to monitor your indoor garden’s environment. Find what you need to do so, here.
So let’s talk about the next plant.
Jalapenos: Grow Your Own
Here we have a jalapeno pepper plant. We have three of these growing right now.
The plan is to make some pickled jalapeños and candied jalapeños, also known as cowboy candy. (Find that recipe here. They are delicious.)
These plants are in very good health. There does seem to be a little bit of a deficiency; the stem has a little bit of purple striping on it, which can sometimes indicate a magnesium deficiency or something similar. However, in this case, these plants are right below the center of the light. The lighting intensity is probably a little bit high for them.
You might be saying, “they’re pepper plants, they can grow in the desert”.
Well, that’s true, but I’ve got these lights on for 18 hours straight. That’s a lot of direct light, and these lights are not messing around. So, I dimmed the lights down probably about 5-10% just to see if that changes it. We’ll see in the new growth if it’s green or if it still has a little bit of that purple stem.
If you don’t already have a good light for your garden, you really need one. Here are some great options. For a deeper dive on lighting, check out this short video.
Overall, these guys are in good health. One fell over a little bit and some have fallen into the dirt, so we’re going to trim those off. We don’t want anything in the dirt.
If you don’t have a pair of plant trimmers, look no further. You can get them here.
Basil: Grow Your Own
Next, we have two different varieties of basil here, lemon drop and genovese.
The lemon drop is growing a little bit faster than the genovese. I have topped the lemon drop, meaning I have pruned the top growing branch, which has created more branching off the lateral lower branches.
The Genovese has not been topped at all. It’s just one main stock. What we can do here is cut the tip off at the top and let it grow out a little more to get more leaves.
As this heals, two will come up and the lower branch will push out more, to match the lemon drop a little bit better.
We make teas out of these, and they’re excellent. I highly recommend trying this, especially with the lemon drop basil. It’s amazing.
Cucumber: Grow Your Own
All right next we have a cucumber.
This one is growing as a cucumber should, a nice long vine. You can see a browning from the earlier problem we had, I think, with the coco having extra salt build up. But we can tell from the newer growth, that has gone away.
So we’re going to cut this old browning leaf off.
I see some flowers growing here.
Because we want to let this plant mature a little bit, we don’t want fruits growing yet. We’re going to cut those flowers off as well. Eventually, we’ll need a tray and trellis netting, and we’ll plant this into a larger pot.
If you need trellis netting, click here for some options.
Let’s move on to the next plant. We have another variety of cucumber.
Now, this is a variety that I have not grown yet, and it’s acting a little differently. It has not turned into a vine yet. It’s the same age as our other cucumber, both seven weeks from when I planted the seed. We have more of those brown leaves here so let’s trim those off.
This hasn’t pushed out yet, it’s just kind of beefed out, I would say. So we’re gonna also cut anything growing off the bottom. I’d like this to get a little bigger before we start getting fruits on it.
We’ll let this grow up a little bit more. We’re just going to see what happens with it. It’s all a big experiment, just having fun with it!
Update: – After we trimmed those large leaves off the bottom, this guy shot up quite a bit! It is officially a vine at this point, so it will be included in the area with the trellis net. You can see the success of just that little bit of trimming we did.
So let’s move on to the next plant, the dill plant.
Dill: Grow Your Own
The plan was to use this dill to make dill pickles. However, the dill is ready and the pickles are not. So, we’re going to have to use this for something else.
I’ll need to start some more seeds closer to the time of cucumber harvest so that we have fresh dill. But for this, I’m going to cut it down and use it for something else. (Maybe some soup!)
Arugula: Grow Your Own
Finally, we have this tray of arugula.
I’m waiting until it gets a few more inches tall. We have a couple of the true leaves coming out. It’s just right past the point of the cotyledon stage.
These taste really good. Great for salads, but there is not enough food here yet, so we’ll wait until it gets a little bigger before we mow this down and put it in our salads, with the kale and whatever else we might have at the time.
This is in mostly just coco, with a little bit of worm castings. I started to fertilize at this point, just to keep things green. The first few stages you don’t need much, especially with the worm castings in there. But after a certain point, there’s a lot of plants growing in here, a lot of green matter, so it’s going to need some fertilizer. So, we’ve started fertilizing this at this point. For best results, I highly suggest using the Masterblend 3-part Fertilizer Kit that you can purchase here.
Final Notes: Growing Your Own Food At Home
To make things easier for you guys, here are some links where you can find some of these products, like these bags, the heat mats I use, the fertilizer I use, all that good stuff.
Thanks for reading, guys. I hope you found it both educational and informative. I’d love to hear what you think! Feel free to comment below. We would love to hear from you.
For the video, click the link below:
Grow Your Own Food at Home – Garden Update 2, Daily Maintenance, Indoor Hydroponic or Soil Garden
Thank you for hanging out, and never stop growing!
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