Just want to give you guys a quick reminder if you guys love my videos and want to support me, check out compassion-tees com link is at the end of the video. All right. This is John Kohler with growing your greens.com today we have another exciting episode for you. And today I’m here in southern California, Orange County. It’s a beautiful day. I swear it’s still January now. You’re probably seeing this maybe February and lusher when you, when this will air, but it’s currently January in southern California and it’s 80 degrees. I’m like in a short sleeve shirt. Looks you guys are still freezing. Anyways, aside from how the weather is, the reason for today’s episode is that I’m here just in the standard residential home, you know, attract home and one I want to share in this episode is a two main things, you know, uh, one is that I want to share the story of how this gardener basically turned his gardening hobby into a full fledged business. We’re actually, he is licensed actually from the state, which we’ll talk about later. Um, as a nursery to actually sell plants starts or, and specifically edible plant starts and that’s how I found him actually.
I’ve found his ad on craigslist and he’s selling some of my favorite plants actually in the whole wide world. He sells, propagates cells in the local area, but then he also has it on etsy and sells it online and will ship to you guys out there. So if you guys are looking for some of my favorite plants, the purple tree collards and you know that January bands or the longevity spinach, also the Okinawan spinach. Actually I liked better than the longevity is finished because of our deep purple leaves. He grows these and he sends them out to you guys, you know, not only making a side income for him, but also more importantly teaching his kids. I think they’re like eight and 10 or something. Eight and 12. I’m about business about like how to run a business, how to like, you know, not work for the man. I mean he’s worked for the man his whole life as an entity, as a full time job, but as a part time thing. He wants to spread the, spread the plant, diversity out the people that make a little bit of money on the side because he’s going to be retiring soon and he’s going to probably get into this business in a bigger scale once he retires from his regular Gig and uh, and basically his garden style. We’ll, we’ll go back in the back and share with you guys how’s garden style got brought about.
Anyways, this is his front yard, which, you know, doesn’t really have anything edible. And I walked up and I’m like, well this is odd because most places I walk up to you to make a video where they’re selling perennial vegetables and they usually all food forest in their front yard. There was like none of that. I’m like, wait, do I got the right house? Am I missing something? The challenge with that is if you’ve got a wife, right, you’ve got to do what the wife wants, right? The white gave them, you know, rain of the backyard. But the front yard, it’s got to stay how she wants it because she doesn’t want any animals. You know, I like to encourage everybody to, you know, grow some, grow, some edibles that don’t look like edibles in your front yard if you don’t want to like look too weird like them hippies that are down the street that have all the fruit trees in the front, right roast of non edibles. There’s plenty of things that fill in some of the bald spots along the bottom, like some purple sweet potatoes, purple sweet potato vine, or is amazing. You can plant some purple sweet potatoes or even like, um, you know, other plants and they’re just gonna grow and they’re going to make a nice ground cover. You’d never know there an edible and they look amazing and they’re beautiful.
Then when you get hungry, just come out to the front yard and dig them up and you’ve got an instant meal. Oh, and also you could eat, eat the Greens. Oh, and the extra bonus credit, if you could find this one a, there is actually an edible sweet potato, a vine that’s actually grown for the leaves, for edible leaves. And actually it doesn’t really make roots. It just makes common roots. I found that in once in Texas had cuttings and I lost it, so that’d be kind of fun to grow up front anyways, not much to see in the front and actually let’s go to the backyard. Should the guys more about this gardener and how he turned his hobby literally into a business and also at the same time teaching these kids about making money. All right, so I’m just about to head into the backyard, but before I do, I want to let you guys know what you’re going to see before you see it so that you’re not shocked. Right? Because I know there’s a lot of shock sometimes. I mean if you walk into my back yard, you see a full on garden. It’s just solid. All my raised beds this time of year are totally planted out. Fill it up. It looks lush. It looks like it’s growing. It’s great. That’s because I work at home, right? I’m home all the time. You know, I, I spent several hours as long as the weather’s nice in my garden every day doing this, doing that pruning stuff, planting new stuff. Like I’m always there. Taking care of it, and unfortunately not all of you guys have a work at home job where you could be home a lot and take care of your garden.
Maybe you’re retired, maybe you guys could do that and that’s great, but for the rest of you guys, which is probably most of you guys honestly watching, you guys have a real job and you’re trying to like fit in gardening time on the weekends, maybe a little bit. If you come back, come home after work and you will feel tired and you and you want to do something, you might do a little bit of time there and then your garden reflects on you and how much time you put into it. You know if you put a little bit of time into it, it’s going to look all right. If you don’t put any time into it, let’s go into terrible. If you look, put a lot of time in it, it could look amazing. You know, and it’s important to me into my garden always looks nice. Not only because it a beat us because it’s also more beautiful to me and I don’t do it just because the videos, because I don’t like seeing when I got yellow leaves, I’m like treat college and I got to pick them off and they got to go in the compost because they’re going to do more good in the compost, breaking down and turned into more so than me looking at it and be like, oh, I’m not doing good because my plans got yellow leaves. Well that’s because it’s winter time. They’re getting old and it’s been cold and whatnot.
Anyways, so I wanted to give you guys a heads up. You know, this guy has a full time job. He travels a lot for work so he’s not here and so what he tried to do as he tried to build some raised beds and put in Pumpkins and squash and just all the normal things like the annual crops that most people grow that most people, you go down to the nursery and you buy annual crops to plant out. You grow them for a season. The season’s done, poof, they’re gone. And then guess what, you got to pull up the dead stuff and you’ve got to replant the new stuff for the next season. He doesn’t have the time to do all that stuff. So he found, actually he’s been watching me now for seven years. He found some of my videos where I talk about perennial vegetables and he saw specifically the one about the Purple Tree College, which is my favorite plants to grow in my whole garden. He started growing that and that’s when I got him to catch the perennial vegetable bug. Oh my God, I want you guys to catch the perennial vegetable bug. Perennial vegetables are the most amazing festivals and I will say that they work better or worse in some location. So zone nine, you’re good with perennial vegetables, right? Um, I mean I visited a, you know, a lady’s House and in Utah in Salt Lake City area that had also perennial vegetables will, she got shows most be plenty of fruit trees in her front yard that just keeps coming back every year. But in general, perennial vegetable, you playing at once and it just keeps living multiple years or just keep living and living might even outlive you and you have to do anything you have to like tend to, you don’t have to harvest it, they’re pretty much hardy, you don’t have to take care of it.
And then you’re basically going to have food. So you interview if you’re gone as long as your stuff’s on the irrigation system and getting water, you could be gone for two weeks. You come back, it’s still growing, you know you don’t have to do much to. And so that’s how this garden that I’m going to show you guys, and this is the winter season, so a lot of his fruit trees and the dormant stage and it hasn’t been, even though it’s 80 degrees today, that got some rain couple of weeks ago and it’s getting colder. Pride didn’t really freeze here because it doesn’t really freeze. We’re kind of have a nice ocean influence, a warm southern California surf weather. So yeah. Anyways, without further ado, let’s go ahead and show you guys the backyard. All right, so this is the backyard. I just walked down the alleyway and this is when we entered into the back yard. You could see their things to bring huge trampoline, right? And if you got kids, you guys should probably have a trampoline for your kids. Just make sure they’re safe on it. There are lots of accidents happen on trampolines. Anyway, they got the netting up and I’m sure the kids have tons of fun on this and you know, always wanna let you guys know there’s, you know, there’s always a way if you don’t have a lot of space because you’ve got kids and you’ve got a trampoline or whether you’ve got a small yard, like a lot of new homes these days have small yards and two story homes.
You have a lot of square footage. You know there’s always a way to grow some food and I want you guys to think carefully, especially if you don’t have a lot of room to grow with us because of trampolines or because of other reasons, is to grow the most valuable crops to you. The most valuable crops, you may not be the most valuable ones to me, right? Maybe you love mangoes. He actually has a non docked my mango and those guys didn’t. No mangoes. Well no non dogma there. One of my favorite mangoes and the entire world. They’re like, they taste like you’re eating perfume. I’m not joking. The mayors in the store that we get here, even in southern California, list of the local grown mangoes, which are usually the Keats, um, they taste horrible compared to a non knock mine and you guys are in Florida or are lucky to have those guys, but you know, that could be important to him because he wants to have those good mangoes that he, he got as a kid or that he, that he loves the flavor of, you know, you might want to grow annual vegetables because you love eating your lettuce and your homegrown letters. Nothing tastes better. That’s like your favorite food in the entire world for your favorite thing. But to me, what also really overlays into, you know, growing my favorite food and the most Bible food for me are perennials. Because literally you could plant them once and without much work as you guys will see, they could just grow a lot of food for you without doing really much of anything. So you guys are in zone nine, you know, South Texas, south Florida, Louisiana, some when those places down there by the golf, you know, this video is for you.
If you’re in like many parts of southern California, northern California, where don’t get freezes, this is going to be for you. Some of the crops that I’m going to go over today, um, will die. They’ll lose their lives and are free in a freeze frost. Um, so you will have to grow those like indoors or even a heated greenhouse, you know, especially in the wintertime. So you don’t lose your plants. The other amazing thing is like this guy started a nursery literally in his backyard with the plants that he’s growing in his backyard, that he harvests and eats and dries, will make patterns and heat that when he travels and whatnot. That’s what uses for a stock to basically literally this guy is printing money in his backyard and not really bringing money, but he’s growing plants, taking cuttings, ruining them, and then selling them for five to $10 a pop. So you know, that adds up and it’s super simple when you’ll see some of the explosive growth when he has on some of these plants. Anyway. So without further ado, let’s go ahead and take a look at his best growing crop and the crop you guys definitely want to grow. If you guys live in anywhere in southern California, you know, and it’s, and it’s stays warmer, doesn’t like freeze. And this plant can handle down to like 33 degrees, 32. You need to protect it and cover it, but 33, it’s fine. And even through the wintertime here it is amazing. So let me go ahead and show you guys that flint nips. Alright, so now we’re gonna. Shoot.
The guy is actually the one amazing plant that you guys should definitely grow in southern California. That’s a perennial. It’ll grow year round if you guys are lucky enough to live in Hawaii or South Florida, you know, you should definitely be having this plant and it’s right behind me. You guys could see, I mean basically the whole screen for the most part, it’s just all those green plants. And then maybe you see a tree here, a tree over there. The kids got a loquat and he’s got an apricot or whatever and he’s got random fruit trees around. Um, but the main plant is right here. And actually this is a, he told me this, he says, John, that’s two plants I planted. Two plans basically took over this whole area, right? This plant is called [inaudible] and Ben’s also called longevity spinach. Right? And that’s because if you eat it, you’re going to live a long, healthy life and hopefully you’re going to eat this and also exclude other things that you heard would normally be eating processed foods, junk foods and animal foods and excess. Right? This is, I think, believed to be called the cholesterol lowering plants. Um, that being said, I wouldn’t eat just for lowering my cholesterol, would not include foods that contain cholesterol to help lower my cholesterol, you know, my opinion is that I like to, you know, try to eat the healthiest foods in the planet that have a lot of healing properties and this is definitely one of them.
And look at this two plants, I don’t know how long this has been planted here, but this is creeping out over into his knights, rocked in area that I’m standing on and he’s just taking over. And the other cool thing is not only does he have literally an endless supply of food to eat, he also didn’t do much, right? I mean he planted this one, see, probably waters it to be on an irrigation system and then basically just grows and he doesn’t do anything and so he has food to eat. But more importantly, number two, he’s printing his own money because here’s the thing, right? Each one of these growth basically stems. You can just come do it and basically snap this guy off, right? He snaps this off and as you guys will see the process that a little bit, he basically just grows this little snapped off piece into a whole new plant with roots. He sells it in a pot and then he sells them between five and $10 depending on the plans and all this kind of stuff. Right? You also could just send these guys out, just the cuttings out the people fresh and the people could route them themselves and actually that even it sells for less money and all he has to do is literally come to the backyard, step these up, put them in an envelope and pay the post office which recently raised their rates to ship these people and literally like, you know, people are trading money for this. Which I think this personally, the generic programs is more valuable than money. Right? And I’m going to eat it. They’re, I’m eating a profit. So.
But here’s the amazing thing, like a lot of the perennial vegetables and even some of the fruit trees, you know, you can take cuttings from, you can let them go to seed. You could harvest their seeds and sell their seeds. There’s so many different ways you guys could actually turn your hobby of gardening into a business. What do you want to do with like a full fledged business? Like he’s here. We’re actually, he got licensed with a business license and licensed by the state as a nursery, which also means other regulations come into play where he has to answer to the Department of Agriculture with, you know, uh, making sure his sisters, he can’t sell citrus because that’s quarantine and they have to do all these inspections and tests on stuff which is actually a lot of red tape. So you know, if you’re not going to be big, you know, might not be good to, you know, if you’re just doing something on the side, sell a few plants here and there, you know, I probably would just do it, you know, there’s plenty of people selling plants on the side on, on craigslist. But yeah, you could definitely make an extra income by offering some other plants that you guys are growing right now. I know you guys. A lot of you guys are watching me a lot, are growing some of these plants and it’s really easy to propagate these as you guys will see in just a little bit, so stay tuned anyway, don’t want to cover some more of the plants that actually he really loves and I love that.
Easily propagates through his methods that he’s using here. So the next plant I want to shoot the guys is actually one that could handle the frost, so maybe down to like zone eight, zone seven, depends how cold it gets me because this is actually in the cruciferous family of plants and unlike standard cruciferous family of plants which are known as annual is, that means you could grow them for maybe like a season, whether that’s a, you know, six months or a year, you know, then the plant basically goes into its reproductive cycle, will produce a flowers that seeds and then basically be at the end of its life. And um, and then you have to start over again, right? And plant the seeds. These guys right here are known as the Purple Tree College. This is probably my single most favorite plant that I’m growing actually, and these are the special ones. These are purple one, so purple ones are known to be like in the northern California Bay area and actually these tree collards are a tree collards. He originally purchased from Berkeley as cuttings. He got them implanted. Actually there’s one plant here which is just sprawling. It like comes up, it falls over, comes over. I mean some of the tall ones are like maybe up to 12 feet tall, but this plant is literally also literally growing him money, not only because he now has really never have to buy any kind of Kale or cards because he’s can harvest these tree collards here. The nice large leaves can be used as rap, so then you have to buy tortilla shells, but the smaller green zero can be put into a green smoothies or juices or actually you know what, especially in the wintertime, I just like eating them plain. Wow. These are so sweet.
As I said, these can handle the cold weather, a mine this year, it got down to 26 and I’m sure it could go even a bit colder than that. And aside from reducing just the leaves that you, you will eat, you can basically just take a cutting so he could take the tip cutting like on the generic, just like break it off right here. He has a lot of like ops shooting from the main brands that he could basically just clip off and then route these. He’s been experimenting with just like little small cutting, like not even that large that will then grow roots and then he’ll be able to sell the plants. And uh, you know, this is important for a few reasons. Number one, for the money, yes, people like to do things for money, but number two, more importantly for me is spreading that genetic diversity of this, of the tree collars out to other people. You know, I mean if you’re in southern California also, I mean the tree collards are no brainer.
You should definitely be growing the tree collards because it literally, it’s a year or year round food source that you guys could have that is so easy. I mean, these guys might get David’s once in a while if your soil practices aren’t good and you know, you’re not taking care of it and watching after plants. But for the most part, these, these plants are like pretty tolerant of a lot of conditions. I mean this, these are the plants that have been broken even though he’s traveled around a lot. So the next perennial vegetable that Jason grows here is this guy right here. This is known as the, uh, okay, now and spinach, also known as [inaudible] or by color. So this one’s related to the longevity, spinach, but a little bit different. This in my experience, and Jason’s also a bruise a lot slower, so it just doesn’t make as many leaves to eat as fast, but you’ll be rewarded because the leaves actually are a lot more nutritious because if we pick one of these leaves, as you guys could see, it’s green and that’s what most leaves are. But on the back, look at the back, the back is actually a purplish colors. These are basically pigments that make it purple, that are Anthocyanins, give this extra healing potential. Extra antioxidants which are good for us to eat is quite good.
The junior pokemons generally will do well in the full sun, the longevity it’s finished. But this guy I found pretty much likes it in the shade. And consequently, um, I think, uh, Jason’s found this out too because it’s actually underneath one of these trees here. Uh, you know, that provides us some shade. But this guy actually looks quite healthy. And once again, this plant, literally he just takes cuttings off of it and literally sticks them in dirt and then they grow more. And these are probably the three main plants that he’s focusing on, like propagating in a big way by cuttings and selling cuttings and actually hold plants with roots on them already. If you guys are buying these, I would encourage you guys to get them already pre rerouted because you will have a lot higher probability success of succeeding with them. You know, once a rooted there pretty much established plans, but if you guys are getting a cutting, your job then is to get the cutting with no roots to get them to have roots, which then can be more difficult, although you will save more money by buying them as cuttings. And these are the three points that I want you guys to grow. Once again, this one doesn’t like the frost either. You know, I don’t have direct experiences with this.
Actually I have, I still have some growing, but it grows in my greenhouse year round at Arbor. Take it out. It doesn’t like the full sun of Las Vegas by any means, but in the greenhouse it’s shaded, gets some nice light. It does fine, but slow growing. Now, aside from that, he also has many other basically perennial style crops that basically he plants once and they grow year round. So I want to cover some of those. Some of, of these actually he will sell seeds and some of which he doesn’t actually anyways, and maybe some of them, he will start selling seeds. So let’s go ahead and share it with you guys, some of you that are perennial plants that he’s growing in his yard that you might also want to grow if you’re in a similar climate. So we are here in southern California, so are there, were anywhere in southern California or even like a south Florida and even South Texas. Um, you guys could get away with growing some of these plants. All right, so now the next plant is a plant. You guys is a perennial plant. You guys could grow basically wherever you live, even if freezes and you’re in Wisconsin or Michigan. This is one I definitely want you guys to grow.
This is actually known as the French sorrel. So the French sorrel, as you guys can see in southern California when it’s 80 degrees and it’s been probably in the sixties, seventies and the wintertime, it’s doing amazing. Um, these leaves, I mean this is a nice big outcropping. Like this thing is like maybe at three feet by three feet mass of green, Zapier this is what they look like and when you eat them, wow, that’s quite good actually. Okay. It’s like, reminds me of like a lemony spin it so it tastes like lemonade kind of has that oxalic Aleke quite good. And now this guy will grow year round here, but in other places right here will go dormant in the winter, but the roots will still alive so that come spring right when it warms up. This will be the first thing that’s coming out of the ground. So you will have the freshest greens to eat in the springtime. That’s why I like it so much. Plus it’s also, I’m really nutritious. So of course meant yes. Another perennial, depending on where you live. I mean in general the roots will stay alive year round by the top. Growth may not have you lived somewhere where it gets too cold, but men does an amazing plant. It, you know, it’s highly beneficial. Plan can flavor things really nice. Uh, but also quite nutritious for us because of all the essential oils in the mint. And also for him.
I mean, once again meant for him is like printing money because literally you could take, you know, a dig up some of their root, the roots off the mince and replant them. You could probably just dig up little pieces right here with ruth on them, plant them, and then grow them out, you know, to sell people mid plants and yeah, you might think it’s kind of crazy if you grown mint ones, you have so much you can’t even know what to do it, but people still don’t have men so they could buy their mint and he could route him and he gets on the plants and this is basically his mother stocks. So he has all these mothers that he’ll be to take cuttings off of and you know, sell their babies. Is that like a prostitution? So the next plant, I want you guys to grow up. You guys live in southern California or maybe like South Florida or Hawaii. Um, other, other than that, this tree may not live that well or that long because it doesn’t like the frost. This one is actually known as the pigeon pea. So that pigeon pea is commonly used in like permaculture is a chop and drop or as a nitrogen fixer because it is in the pea family, it’ll basically fix nitrogen in the root and literally make your soil more fertile. So this is often planted like next to you know, a fruit trees when they’re young because these guys go really fast to shade them out but also provide nutrients to the adjacent trees. But the other thing that you don’t know is that actually it also makes it flowers and actually it’s in flower right now. So let me go ahead and pluck a flower here for you guys. Did you guys what it looks like? So this is a pigeon pea flour. The front is just kind of look a yellow but at the back we’ll get it back. Man. That’s kind of pretty.
And now I do eat the flowers, right? Hmm. I’d know if I eat a lot of flowers but I can eat the flowers by basically he’ll let these peas grow and heal. Harvest them and he’ll harvest and when they’re young and eat them, like edit Nami. And then also if they get older, he’ll harvest them for the, for the beans themselves, removed the beans and basically make it, make it like a re fried beans. So cook them up and mash them down. And he also actually sells a seeds for people that want to grow their own pigeon Petri. So this is like, you know, once again, and this, this tree is amazing. Oh, let me show you guys. It’s been two years. There’s a lot on here. So this is dry beans from last year and we could crack this open self driving so that you don’t have to do then you just come out here and you guys could just a harvest out the seeds. And that’s what the pigeon pcs looked like. They just look like little beans are. These must be cooked in order to be eaten. Although, you know, I have a, I did visit my friend Chris who said you could eat the young pods like raw. Um, but yeah, I would be wary of eating a bean family plants raw. They should mostly be cooked. All right. But yeah, one amazing tree. Um, yeah, southern California. Doing quite well actually I think it’s the first tree I really like. I mean this thing is like 12 feet tall and maybe like, I don’t even know like eight feet wide, like looking super good. Like this to me would be a really nice tree to put in the front yard because it doesn’t look like it’s edible. It just looks like a tree with some nice pretty flowers. But then also he could be growing more beans in the front yard too. Alright, so the next plant, I want you guys to grow up.
You guys live in like a southern California area where you don’t get any true freezes. Like I’m able to grow this year round in my unheated greenhouse. But if you live somewhere where it’s freezing, this guy is not gonna make it. No, this is related to the tomato. So this, you can think of this as like a perennial, a tomato in quotes because of fruits or liked tomatoes, but they’re totally not. I’m, I love this fruit. So amazing. This is known as the Cape Gooseberry, also Paul Highbury, also Golden Berry, and that these are actually quite popular now at health food stores to get them dried golden berries and if you want the seeds just go to your local health food store. A good health food stores will have the dried golden berries get the dried golden berries. You could eat them, dried, they taste amazing, but then open them up, open a few dried ones up and take out the seeds and plant those, and you could have this very plants. You can grow this as an annual and in climates that frost and in climates that don’t frost, you’ll be blessed like he is here to basically have a four foot by eight foot raised bed. You guys could see this as a raised bed. This is where it used to do as animals, but then he planned this once and then you got busy and it does grow and basically took over the whole thing. It’s like a Golden Berry and a a mulberry in here. Maybe a few other plants, but basically he has just one huge Bush which will provide him, you know, not maybe not quite year round, but you know, most of the year some fruit.
So it actually goes into the flower. The flower kind of looks like, um, you know, like, like a little bit like tomato flower is a little bit different. And then they wanted to get pollinated. They turn into little, a little, uh, like berries. So this is kind of like Chinese lantern. I basically there’s a husky branded or Tomatillo and uh, you know, one of the things that Gartner talk to me about is that, you know, guarding teaches patients and unfortunately in our, in our lives, how we’re living today in this modern age of 2000 in year 2019. And you know, we, we don’t have a life of patients. You know, we live in an environment of instant gratification and we want things now, you know, if you want, if you’re hungry, you go to a fast food joint, you order your food and they give it to you right then and there. You don’t have to wait and you know, I think a lesson that can be taught to kids and adults alike is, you know, patients, right? We need to have patients with other people and more employee, especially with our plants. You know, as soon as one of these a pull out berries come out and you see it and it like makes a nice little like, you know, a lancer and you’re like, okay, I got one man, I’m going to eat it. And you open it up and you see like there’s a little green bury inside there and then you eat it and you’re like, oh God. I mean I’m not joking. That really tasted bad. Then you eat it. You’re like, man, that thing is terrible. Well that’s because you just picked it and it wasn’t done growing.
It wasn’t done. Ripening. Right? So then you gotta wait for them to ripen and you’re only going to know if they’re ripe. They taste good. If you grow the plants and you harvest it at different stages and you could see and you know, have you listened to my videos? I try to shoot the guys my experiences and hopefully you listened to them and if you don’t, that’s your problem. I’m the best way to harvest your poll. Hobbies. It’s actually not harvest them at all. There’s still like, let them drop onto the ground when the plant, when the fruits are ripe on this plant and with many but not all plants. Um, it’ll drop the fruits. So luckily as luck would have it, there’s one here on the ground and if we open this guy up, so number one, this guy looks dried in number two to open this on the camera for you guys when we opened it up looking at. Oh my God, look at that thing like, so this one? No, there’s some defect on this side. Maybe some bugs got in there, but look at that. That’s the color. It should be. Not Green. It should be like nice bright orange man. And now we’re going to eat this on camera. Oh my God. That’s one of the best golden berries ever, ever had like, seriously, make sure I’m not eating a bug here because there’s a bug hole or something. Wow. Golden Berries in January. Wow. I mean it’s so sweet. It’s so delicious. It is so good. And actually there’s some research that says these guys can can contain b 12.
I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but nonetheless, you know, fruits and vegetables are reaching different phytonutrients and phytochemicals that make us healthier and at the same time they taste great and fruits and vegetables are so similar to grow in your backyard, you guys should only be grown some golden berries, whether annually or perennially, if such a climate because I mean literally by doing nothing, he has a lot of food and you know, of course you could harvest is a fruits, eat them fresh. You could freeze them, you could freeze dry them, you can dehydrate them. And also, you know, he has all the fruits. He could actually also harvest the seeds out of them and send those seeds out to people so that they could grow their own golden berries to inexperience. The patients of having a fruit or vegetables are ripe into perfection before you get to eat them. All right, so this plant doesn’t look like much now. And if you guys live in a place that frost, this plant is looking like nothing right now, mine totally frosted out, um, you know, after the weather cooled down, this plant really doesn’t like it too much below 40 degrees. It’s really not like in life. This is known as the Malabar Spinach. And this is the red stem Malabar spinach. The one I prefer. It kind of makes it more deeper, uh, you know, red veined leaves and uh, this guy, uh, you know, grows if you live in like, um, you know, the tropics, like south Florida or Florida where they don’t freeze or rarely ever freezes in Florida, but, um, this can grow year round. Um, so the cool thing I learned is that this guy could be propagated by cuttings, so he will propagate this in season, in the spring, summer when it’s nice and warm just by taking cuttings and propagating in the methodology guys just in a little bit. So stay tuned for that. But then in the wintertime, he harvests the seed.
So right now there’s all these dry seeds and the seeds that you guys are seeing right here that are just hanging. Let me go ahead and pull that off. You can see a little cluster of seeds right there. I mean this is money. He’ll sell the seeds, you know, for cash. And then now you could actually grow these guys out yourself. Um, you know, in the, in the, in the summer season, you know, when it’s quite warm, doesn’t like frost and have your own plants. And these guys grow up pretty fast once they get established, like I swear the first several weeks or maybe even the month, they’re growing really slow. Like they may be like, might move my grill like one millimeter a day of that. But once they get up to leak at least a foot, then their credit growing by leaps and bounds. We’re literally, I think the main thing with Malabar is that if you’re starting from seed, you need to have a heat map that they’d like a nice warm germination. Um, evidently it’s been warm here because they are germinating in his yard. Let me go ahead and talk more about a germinating your Malabar spinach and uh, watching all his, uh, just coming up on their own. All right, so as you guys could see behind me, right, like here is Malvar spinach growing and all these guys back here, they’re kind of looking at Jack Dump because there’s, there are sprouting a, but they’re kind of looking like a little bit, having a little bit of a hard time. Um, our Malabar spinach and how he grew this is basically they fill up this whole fence behind that. He grows them up some trellises and then at the end of the season they basically just drop all the seeds because he harvest is as many as he can, but there’s always extra seeds.
Nature always provides abundance and I love that about nature. And then you harvest them, then the rest drop and then the basically they now really grow for next season’s crop. So this is like literally he had to plant this plant once he, it grow for a season, it drops seeds and now every year it cycles like, you know, drop seeds at the end of the year and then starts new ones and they pop out and they just grow on their own. That challenge I have had, we’re in a climate where it gets pretty cold, is that the soil doesn’t warm up and then my seeds don’t germinate until it’s well into the season and then they’re never really established to well in wwe and then it gets super hot. So I have to actually start from transplants grown early and put out so that they are, have a nice size by the time that he comes on so that they can handle 100 plus degrees. Whether that being said, these guys can easily handle 100 plus degree weather, you know, provide. They’re nice in established plants. Um, you know. So that’s another one that I would encourage you guys to grow. The Malabar Spinach, one that I like. It’s a heat tolerant, leafy green. Soon another plant that he grows here that also is a perennial vegetable that can be grown year round depending on your specific climate. Like Phoenix, it’s no problem to grow year round. Southern California shouldn’t, shouldn’t be really much of an issue, but they have had a lot of rain. Maybe it’ll get cold to a. This is known as the Moringa and you guys can see he’s got nice green growth. I couldn’t keep my green growth on my plants. Even the ones that I brought in my greenhouse still got a bit too cold for them.
They dropped off, but the root ball will stay alive. So if you live in a place where it does get cold, hopefully not too cold, you could cut this tree off of the base. Mulch heavy. Keep the root alive. It’s basically like Kinda like, almost like a big radish root, like on the bottom. And that’ll stay alive and then come spring. Actually it’ll pop out new growth. Right? But here in southern California, he’s keeping the green growth, uh, you know, around. And this one, he also likes to sell seeds for it. So his big trees, some of them went to man, I don’t know, 15 feet tall, he’ll grow them out and he’ll have seeds that he then will sell for you guys so that you guys to the Marina Marina, also known as the drumstick tree. Some arena is a tree that I would encourage you guys to grow. Actually this one, this one might not be too bad growing them in the front yard too because these guys actually can get quite big. And to me they look kind of ornamental. They don’t look like you’re growing something edible in the front yard. All right, so the next plant I want to show the guys actually want to haven’t seen outside like Florida or Hawaii. I think it’s kind of unique that he’s even grown it here at all and it’s actually doing quite well. This is known as CSO, spinach and I’m not really familiar with it actually too much. I know it’s from I think South America originally and this one doesn’t like freezes either. Uh, he says you can probably get it by cuttings and it actually does, uh, you know, roots fairly easily.
That being said, I haven’t grown up myself so I don’t really don’t know, but I’m glad he’s grown. He’s basically grown in an elevated a container and it looks like it’s growing pretty well despite like the cold temperatures here, which I don’t think it’s froze here yet. Um, you know, having a little bit of challenges isn’t like the super cold weather. It might be good to maybe put it in a little bit warmer place, but you know, come the spring and summer. I’m sure this guy is gonna do really well. He actually got these plants originally from Florida and got shipped to him and now he’s throwing them out. So that’s amazing. And the other thing I wanted to show you guys in this, this is like extra credit. If you guys are like super plant nerd geeks and you want to take a chance on something, this, I would only grow if you have a frost replaced, are going to definitely grow that inside because this will not take a fraud. Now the other thing that’s really cool is this guy right here, you’re like, John, that’s not really cool, man. That’s just treat college man. That’s just pretty normal.
So if you guys know why this plant is unique is because this is not from a cutting, these are not college from cuttings. His tree college will go to seed a every year or some years and produce seed and then this is actually a tree collared from his seeds. So normally when tree collards go to flower and set seed, right, they’re promiscuous like I would like to be or maybe I, I wish I was when I was a kid. Um, and they will basically a cross pollinate with other brassica family plants. So for example, the tree colleges that I grow in my backyard, they’ll cross pollinate with dinosaur Kale, they’ll cross pollinate with ornamental cabbage, they’ll cross pollinated with ornamental Kale, they’ll cross pollinate with my Broccoli, don’t cross pollinate with, you know, any other Brassica family plant that I had to be grown. Actually a cool crosby, like a rubella. I don’t know about our cross pollinate and tree collards. That’ll be interesting. So my, my tree collards seeds will have properties of the traits of the tree college, meaning like grow tree ish, but also sometimes have like leaves looking more like the Dinosaur Kale. So actually those are kind of cool. But the unique thing about Jason hears that because he basically goes perennials and he doesn’t have time for annuals and he’s working too much. He doesn’t grow any other Kales here. He only grows the tree color or tree collards. So basically the seeds that he’s producing and one of his neighbors in a, in a local area has some kind of other cruciferous vegetable growing. He has his tree collards are treated seed because they’re only meeting with other purple tree collards.
And you know, as evidenced by looking at these, these, this tree color that’s from seed. It looks exactly like a tree color for me. So I don’t do DNA testing, but if I did, I’d put definitely money on it. This was like 99 percent, you know, I’m just like the other one because it’s not getting cross pontis. That’s actually quite cool that he, he’s the only guy that I know of that has like true to seed treat columns. And then even if you’re one of them plant geneticists and you’re like, John, you’re wrong. There’s like point. Oh, oh, one probability that it’s not totally true because it’s a little bit different. Well then I’m wrong. All right, so aside from a lot of the vegetables, uh, Jason also is grilling some trees here, so he has different, you know, uh, trees like Suriname Cherry trees and fig trees and citrus trees. And actually here is a Kumquat tree. He has a loquat tree, a feijoa or pineapple guava tree. But uh, this is a Kumquat tree. And the cool thing about this Kumquat is look at this. This is just like in a little plastic pot. This is like smaller than a wine barrel.
So I won’t let you guys know unit if you’re renting, you know, if you don’t have a lot of space and you just have a little patio, right? You could just draw a little tree in a pot. I would encourage you guys to try to get the largest pot size do you guys can and after a few years and one size pot, you definitely want to pot the plant and pull it out of the current pot and put it in a bigger one so it can’t spread its roots more because actually restricting root growth will, can restrict the size of the tree. It can also hurt the production, you know, in the long run. If you do want to end up moving one day and then planted actually in the ground, it’s not going to be good if it’s like totally root bound. But yes, even in a small space you guys could see that a tree can actually be quite productive. All right, so another really cool thing that Jason is doing here is that along this fence line here, he’s basically growing up his fence. So this is just the wood fence that he basically put some, uh, some baling wire on and some little eyeballs to basically create a structure so that this plant could grow up the fence. And actually what he’s growing here is the passion fruits.
So he has one passenger in the front and some passion fruit here and he looks like he’s going to be growing in a lot along the fence and this fence line could get totally filled with green. So I think, you know, a green fence would look a lot better than just a wood picket fence or whatever. Um, and also he’s grown a lot of food and it’s going to look beautiful. And also he does also sell some of the passion fruit plants as well. Now down below here, I don’t know if you guys could see this, but right here this could hook. So it took another perennial vegetable that in southern California, I haven’t really ever seen it do like super good maybe in the spring and maybe fall when it’s like kind of rainy season, a little bit warm, not super cold. It’ll be humid. I’m not exactly sure really likes when it’s like not super humid personally, but my research is out. But in Hawaii it grows beautifully. And likewise, south Florida grows beautifully, but they have nice weather and humidity. Sometimes in California may get dry depending on where you are. But yeah, this took years, definitely not like in the winter it looks like it’s still alive, but definitely has dropped all its leaves and for me personally, um, I was going outside in the fall and it did great. And then when, once it started getting too cold, like under 60, I brought him inside.
So Mike took is currently in my bathroom, so hopefully I don’t get raided by the police for going to, took in my bathroom with led lights that people normally use for growing cannabis. Okay. So I wanted to stop here and talk about two things real quick. Number one is, uh, you know, growing in pots so you can grow in containers. I mean this is literally a half of a plastic barrel that was been cutting half filled half with dirt, pop some holes in the bottom and now you can have an instant pot garden. I mean I could literally pick this up and carried away and they actually didn’t have my own nice junior procon bands. It’s a nice well rooted in here. This could be actually another mother plant for him. So even if you don’t own space, you can grow these plants in containers, you could take cuttings off this and still propagate more and there’s a lot of offshoots happening. This actually looks like one of his health healthiest plants here on the property.
So yeah, container gardening, super easy. You could even start a nursery, you veer renting and that’d be really cool. Episode to make. The other thing I want to talk about while I’m sitting here is hurt his fertility practices. So he uses organic fertility practice here. He grows using organic methods. He doesn’t use chemicals and all this kind of stuff here. And even over that, you know, adjacent to a surfer and he makes use of the, of the resources of the ocean, right? Because he loves riding the waves and he loves some of the ocean nutrients that can have a positive effect in the garden. So one of the things he does is he collects seaweeds, he’ll collect the seaweed, he’ll let it dry, and then he’ll basically add it into his soil to add different trace minerals and plant oxygens and growth factors that will help the land plants grow even better. And so this could be a waste product. I mean, in the state of California as an individual, not a business you are, you can go down to the ocean and the harvest seaweed and collected up to a certain point, I think I forget the exact amount. Maybe it’s like 10 pounds per person per day. So take your whole family and they get each collect 10 pounds and then use that in your garden of course, if you don’t want it. And I would encourage you guys to do that in a, in a place where it’s clean and safety gets this up from Monterrey area. So there’s a lot cleaner than here in southern California where there’s lots of people and what not. And then the other thing he likes to do, he uses official motion. So fish process, fish waste, um, he’ll use that to grow his plants and these are some of the, some of the best things to use in my opinion.
You know, I’d rather use fish waste or fisher motion over, like, you know, cow manure from a factory farm or that’s being sold at home depot. Now the other thing, aside from just those products from the ocean, he also uses land based nutrients. So as you guys can see here, I could pick up and there’s like a bunch of leaves on the ground. Like you’re John is places messy. Manny’s not like raking up as leave. No, he’s leaving the leaves to basically compost in place to add and create further fertility to the soil. Furthermore, he was like bringing in shredded wood chips and, and you know, dropping pieces of wood on the ground that then over time we’ll break down and feed the soil to make the nice fungal dominant. You know, a soil that I liked so much. And so, you know, the fertility practice does it have to be super hard? Oh, he also uses the rock dust as well as the worm castings that we talked about, you know, I’d encourage him to also, you know, a spray compost teas, you know, on some of his nursery plants as well as around his whole space here just to get that soil microbial engine running even stronger. All right, so the next part of this episode, since I’ve gone around the yard and showed you guys a lot of the plants, he has more and I can’t go over all of them. He has some really cool, unique things like that I don’t even know the names of or whatever, but I really want to kind of get into the meat of this episode and it’s basically his, his nursery, you know.
So this is a commercial, you know, licensed nurtures from the states. Once again, pros and cons of doing, um, you know, getting licensed and everything, you know, there’s a book think everything I want to do with illegal and he’s has definitely had jumped through some hurdles dealing with the state of California Agriculture Department and growing to some of the things that he wants to make available to people, uh, due to red tape or laws that are there for many reasons. All right. And I’m not going to get into that or my views on those. But anyways, I mean literally this is his nursery business right here. It’s contained in a greenhouse. That’s what is it, I don’t even know. 10 by 10 or something like that. Um, and this is where he’s growing plants and literally printing his own money technically is not printing money, but he’s, he’s duplicating plants legally and selling them for money. So it’s like literally printing money. Anyways. Let’s go ahead and take a look at the plants he’s growing and more specifically how he does it. All right? So how it propagates these plants or basically roots them from cuttings is not rocket science guys. I mean, literally he goes to home depot and he buys some clean wash sand with us like playground sand or kind of build our sand. Um, he basically just gets the sand. He cuts off the plant like you guys saw me do earlier. You cut off plants and here’s the junior, uh, by color or the Okinawa and spinach you guys saw.
And actually down here in this bin here, he has the, uh, junior pro bands and what he does, he takes one of these plastic mixing totes, you know, for concrete, the smallest size or even here I’ll use just these, these simple like oil drain pans. Of course you’ve got to put holes in the bottom of this or holes in the bottom of this hill, filled with sand. And then basically once a day, you know, most of the year, except in the summer when it’s hot, a twice a day, he’ll come out and are in water. The sand and any excess water will drain out the bottom of a holes on the bottom. But otherwise it has a nice moist environment. Um, and also well draining environment without any nutrients. Because you know, the plants don’t really need nutrients at this point and I’m just stuck in here. These plants, even without rooting hormone, although rooting hormone may increase your level of success doing this, but he found rooting hormone was expensive and you just found by doing without, without buying and putting on reading more minutes, he’s still successful. Um, these guys will basically roots, um, the agenda, a pro com bends or junior by color. He says it takes maybe two to three weeks of Nice roost until I moved up to the next stage. And how they’ll tell you it’s just, she’ll just gently tug and see if there’s any resistance to know if there’s, you know, that did strike or roots and he has a very high probability of them getting to a route. And, you know, in this bin here, these are actually all the tree colored cuttings that he’s done.
And some of these are really thin cuttings. And uh, you know, they’re not even that tall. I would estimate this to be like maybe three, maybe four inches max on some of these guys. And some of these guys maybe even two inches tall. And as you guys can see, they’re growing the leaves out now. One of the things that’s important to him when I’m doing the routing here, he tries to remove as many leads as possible. So he’ll basically just maybe like two or three leaves up top because the more leaves on here, the more the plant has to actually keep the leaves, the leaves alive instead of sending nutrients down to make the roots is what he wants. So he said he’s, even if he has like a half a leaf on the top, it’s still where route, you know, I prefer to maybe keep like two small leaves on top. But as they roots, uh, you know, he’ll let them to grow more leads. But on the initial stage they’ll try to like strip. Actually almost all the leaves out, oh, what’s it grown here for two weeks. Then he moves them up to the next stage. And let me go ahead and show you guys that. All right. So as you guys can see, here is the next stage. Once they are on rubric. And here’s another tub, just have a genuine being rooted in sand and he raises sand actually, so you just have to buy the standard ones pretty much. And um, they just root out and then he’ll basically pop those up into the neck size, which basically he has these four inch size pots that he’ll basically fill with some local potting soil here. And uh, once they, we’ll put them in there and then he’ll basically just grow them out. Now he will let these guys, since they have roots still let them grow more leads and to actually get nice healthy and established a to a good size until he sells them. So you mentioned just put these in and then just ship them out like, you know, I could tell by coming in here and looking at all these plants, these plants actually look quite healthy. Uh, even more so. Like he did have a recently an aphid outbreak.
And actually I did see earlier, like a lady bug that was floating around here. So he released actually lady bugs inside here to keep ETA is instead of having to spray some kind of toxic pesticides. So he’s doing things as naturally as possible here. And look at this plant. This is like a giant Neeraj bicolor. Okay, now it’s finished. This is one nice plant like that. And the cool thing is, you know, he has some amazing prices. I’m not going to quote price online because it’s prices are stuff to change, but he had actually quite affordable prices for the plants and you know, these are actually quite healthy plants too. Now, aside from the ones that he does a cuttings off of, which are the, uh, junior or broken bands, a John Deere or by color and the tree collards, he also has many other plants have elbow for sale. So let me go ahead and shoot the guys, some of those. So aside from the ones that he started himself, he also makes other plants available, whether he starting seeds like these guys over here. So he will have ringa trees available sometimes. Right now he doesn’t have a whole lot. He’ll have the Ashwagandha that he starts from seeds, sometimes they’ll have things like this, which is the a passion fruit bond that he’s grown. He’s grown also some mulberries and also some kind of like a Kiwis and have those available so he has. Then he has actually two more greenhouses outside and you had like baby bananas out front and some other plants. So there’s a lots of different things. They basically he nurses up to health, you know, in these four inch pots in really nice environment here in the sun and growing some healthy stuff from what I can see. And actually today I’m even going to be taken home. So in his January by color in January pro commends for my garden. Alright. So my time has come to an end here at Jason’s plant nursery. As you guys can see, I’m taking a bunch of plants for myself and got three of that giant procon bands that he started and grew from cuttings himself here.
These are nice healthy plants that I will now be growing in my garden because I lost a lot of my plants. Totally. They might come back because of the frost, but I’ll protect these guys and only plant them out after frost is passed. And then also now I’m going to get more. I have a few growing already, but I’m going to get more actually nice healthy of that. John Nehra bicolor. These are the favorite plants actually that he’s growing up. I’m not, I, I have tree collards and all this kind of stuff come to my Kazoo, but these guys always could use more. Just like a plant nerd there. The thing I want to mention is that actually A. Jason has a really nice, um, food for his package, so he’ll have plants or cuttings with seeds of some of the best plants that perform well for him in his southern California climate. And if you guys live in a similar climates, then I would recommend his food forest package to get started on some of these really valuable crops. You guys grow your son, of course, no matter where you live, you guys should definitely get those purple tree collards as well as these guys and doing your procon bins and the junior a bike color. I mean, I would actually favor more than junior by color just because of the purple leaves, but these guys grow a lot slower.
These are better in a shady spot, but these guys are better than a sunny spot. And if you want one that’s more productive, you’ve got to get the uh, gender, uh, uh, procon bands or the longevity is finished. They grow a lot faster. We’re going to provide you a lot more food than these guys at tend to grow a lot slower. But I’m getting a both. Alright. So I will put a link down below to Jason’s etsy store. You guys could see all the different plants and seeds and everything he has available so you guys could support him and his business and hopefully one day he will retire soon. I’m from his real job. And then basically kickup is basically back your nursery up in a full speed. Oh, he also propagates like Goji Berries. So he has true Goji Berries. It propagates. He sell them to local nurseries. They’ll sell them to you guys as well. I mean he’s doing a lot of cool stuff. So I hope to come back at a future point and once he gets there, he retired from his real job and then even gets, takes this into the next level. I can’t wait to see what he’s going to do and I want to encourage you guys, if you guys thought about turning your hobby into business, start doing it, you know, start small, start propagating some cuttings and selling them on craigslist or selling them on Ebay or treat your own etsy store to sell it, you know, start creating an income for yourself that’s independent from working for the man or somebody else because you know, it is so rewarding.
One of the best things you guys could do is to work for yourself because you’re your own boss. And the other thing is if you’re your own boss, hopefully you’re going to work harder than you ever did before. Then you work for somebody else because you know when you work for yourself, if you don’t perform, you don’t have any money and then you can’t pay your bills. So yeah, got to work harder. But I will say, you know, having the time of the free time to do with what you want is one of the most valuable things that I like, uh, you know, because I do work for myself. So anyways, if you guys enjoyed this episode here at Jason’s, learning about his backyard, literally nursery, that he started literally out of his, out of his passion for gardening and starting with annuals and then getting into perennials and seeing how valuable they are and nobody’s really probably getting perennials and making them available. Um, that’s how he started it. And that, you know, he’s basically filling a need. He’s, he has a passion for this. You love seeing plants grown. He literally got the gardening bug and hopefully after this video, maybe just a little bit more, you guys will have the gardening bug too, like I have as well. So once again, the link is down below for Jason’s etsy store. A thumbs this video. You guys liked it, you always want me to come back next time I’m here in southern California, visit him. Maybe he’ll get to be in an interview one of these days. Also, be sure to click that subscribe button down below so you don’t miss out on my upcoming episodes and make sure you click the little bell so you get notified of new videos that I have coming out about every three to four days. You never know. Worship. Oh, what are you learning on my youtube channel? And finally be sure to check my past episodes about past episodes, our wealth of knowledge over 14 or episodes that this time did you guys all aspects of growing your own food at home. So, uh, with that, my name is John Kohler with growing your greens.com. We’ll see you next time. And until then, remember, keep on growing.
