amazing grass green superfood

alright! this is john kohler with growingyourgreens.comthrough another exciting episode for you! i’m here on a field trip in houston, texas,actually—probably like in one of the ghettos of the city… not maybe the nicest neighborhood,kinda near downtown, kinda near i-10 and 59. and they closed down i-10, so it was likean extra half hour to get here today… but i’m here and i want to show you guys actuallywhat they’re doing here. we’re actually at an organic farm, and itmight not look like a farm to you cause behind me, what you’re seeing is piles of woodchips.and this is about a two-acre property that was formerly a parking lot. so this is allover concrete slap or asphalt and they basically built is up using the majority of free localresources that i know many of you guys may

have in course city that i do want you topay attention to and what that is simply behind me. piles and piles of woodchips. i’m abig believer in the power of woodchips and using organic matter to create soil so thatyou can grow in because the problem in this day and age is that we are losing top soil,we are losing soil fertility. and the answer to this is not putting on some chemical fertilizerfrom the big box stores, some miracle crap, some whatever stuff you’re buying. but it’screating your own fertility on site like they’re doing here with an available free local resourcethat’s coming from the city or tree trimmers or, you know, people that are trimming thetrees under the power lines. they chip it up and instead of going to the landfill whichi believe is a waste of resources, the woodchips

are coming here. they’re using it to basically—asa foundation of their garden to grow in, to line the earth below it, the concrete slabyou couldn’t grow on. but when you build soil up…you can think of concrete slab ashardpan or rock. and i know some of you guys might live over hardpan or rock where youjust don’t have any soil you can grow in. but it you start piling up organic matteron top, you can have some of the most nutritious soil.so anyways, without further ado, let’s go over to the farm and share with you guys whatthey’re growing and, more importantly, how they’re growing it.so where i’m at today is last organic outpost community farm and this is where the communityis coming together through basically the leadership

of joe, who’s actually been on this propertyfor the last seven years farming it and has been involved with growing foods for the lastfifteen years on various projects throughout the city. now, joe’s a really cool guy,right. we walked around—he doesn’t know a lot about the science and i don’t knowa lot of the science of gardening, but i know a lot because i’ve read and experienceda lot. but he’s a cool guy because he’s learned by doing. and i know most of you guyswatching me don’t have any kind of degrees in biology or plants and all this kind ofstuff…and to be a good gardener, actually, i would recommend you guys don’t get thatstuff! they’re not gonna be helpful… but i just learned by doing and that’s whatjoe’s doing over all these years and i was

talking to him about the fungus and the bacterialdominated compost and how he’s making both of them here and he didn’t really know aboutall this stuff and he was really excited, so i really wanna share that for you guysin this episode. so i guess without further ado, let’s go ahead and go into the farmand share with you guys how joe and the community here has been growing food on this farm herefor the last seven years and successfully, primarily using a lot of the woodchips.alright so what we’re looking at now is just part of the farm and this is pretty muchhow they set it up. i mean, this was an empty parking lot when they got the property. theystarted up by bringing in the woodchips and making a nice, deep base of the woodchipsand then bringing on some of the more finished

compost, adding it on top, and then literallyplanting in it. that’s what was done here. and as you guys can see, just some of thegreenery things growing, it’s doing really well. now that’s the overall basics, butit’s a little more complex than just bringing in the woodchips and making some soil, soi want to go ahead and show you guys specifically how it’s done. because it’s a really goodexample because they’re just starting to set up brand new beds now that’re just gettingplanted out, so i have the opportunity to show you guys the specifics. seriously, thisstuff started out as woodchips and the woodchips overtime break down into a rich, black fungal-dominatedsoil when done without heat. i talked about that a little bit earlier,there’s two kinds of compost that is being

primarily—actually three kinds that’sprimarily being using here. number one, the fungal dominated compost which is sourcedprimarily out of a hundred percent woodchips. number two, the thermal based compost, whichi’ll also show you guys in a little bit, made under standard heat. and that’s thecompost most people think of when they think of compost. they don’t think about the fungal-dominatedcompost, which in my opinion is super critical. the other kind of compost they’re using,actually, and creating here is actually they have many different bins with red wigglerworms. so they’re making worm casting, or vermicompost, which is a really another importantsource of compost for your soil. so let’s go ahead and show you guys the demonstrationon how they put one of these beds together.

so here’s an example of how they’re puttingthe beds together. look, i mean, right here, i’m just literally sitting on all thesewoodchips here and i kind of think this looks really cool. they got all the woodchips hereand it’s basically about eighteen inches high off the ground. now, if this is yourfront yard, i don’t know that i’d want to do this in your front yard, cause for mostpeople walking by this, it would look kind of weird and most people aren’t gonna likehow it looks. i personally like how this looks. i don’t know that i’d still put it inmy front yard because i don’t want to draw attention to my place. i’d maybe have anice garden in the front and in the backyard, yeah, i’d do this. wow!—and it’s actuallyquite warm just on here. but yeah, they got

the woodchips piled up like a little hill,then on top of the woodchips, they’ve put some finished compost that actually just startedto seed out some kind of beets and whatnot in there that are already popping up. andthis is probably a good eight to ten inches tall.so—oh and in the top compost, they also add the worm castings as well. these are thetwo main resources, and these are two very important resources, that i want you guysto use in your garden. once again, if you’re a gardener, if you’re a farmer, you knowyour job is not growing vegetables, your job is really about growing soil, and that’sliterally what they’re doing here. so i want to go ahead and show you—i mean thewoodchips are self-explanatory. they get dumped

there, these basically move them over, linethem up, but i do want to show you guys how they make that soil real quick and it’sa really quick and easy hands off approach for you guys that are lazy to make some compostwith minimal effort. so what we’re looking at behind me is theircompost pile here and this compost pile is probably about twenty feet long, maybe about—idon’t know—almost ten feet…eight to ten feet tall, in a nice pile. and they basicallyjust mixed up the woodchips with food scraps from a local grocery store that when theygot old produce that’s going bad, or all the clippings, they send it here and theybasically mix those two together and then they aerate the pile. this is very importantfor compost to have—i know many of you guys

may have compost piles in your backyard. you’relike “yeah, john, i bought that compost piler which don’t i just dump all my foodwaste in there!” well besides the food waste, which is the nitrogen source, you need a carbonsource, which is the woodchips or shredded up paper or sawdust or leaves, something likethat. and you need a good ratio. you need to mix those two together which is one aspect.you also need the right moisture level, so they’re in there check the moisture, makingsure it’s the right moisture level. and then you also need another thing, veryimportant for compost that most people miss. it’s the air. it’s the aeration. thisis why, like a tumbling compost, when you tumble it, it aerates it. some people likethe fork, the pitchfork and fork over their

compost—i don’t like forking compost…so i just tumble it. but even easier than that is what they’re doing here. they’reaerating it. aerating, i’ve seen this at other commercial establishment, and most peopleat the home may not be aerating their compost but they do it here because they don’t wantto sit here and turn the compost. takes a lot of time. so what they got is they gotall these pvc tubes, you can see it on the ground there. they’ve got a big distributionsystem where the pipe comes in and distributes up into four different pipes and runs allthe way through the bottom of this big huge pile—once again about twenty feet long—andthey got all these holes perforated in there and they basically turn on a blower everytwenty minutes to blow air through there,

which then puts the oxygen in there and thathelps aerate the pile and create the right microbe balance that the microbes start breakingdown and work on breaking down all the organic matter and turning it into the most nutritioussoil. if you look closely, i don’t know if youguys can see that, but the pile way in the back there and this pile even to some extent,there’s like steam coming off! this is another excellent way to have—like if you want tohave a garden inside, where it’s cold. you could have an aerated pile with good organicmatter breaking down inside like a hoop house and that’ll keep it that much warmer soyour plants can grow without you having to heat them in the winter. and i’ve been toseveral places that do do that successfully.

any case, besides this kind of soil, whichonce again was on the top layer to actually grow, cause they’re not growing directlyinto the woodchips—don’t recommend that. recommend growing in compost that’s on topof the woodchips. they’re adding something else very important, and that’s the vermicompost.so let’s go ahead and check out their set up here where they make their vermicompost.so besides making the standard soil, another very important aspect of gardening, in myopinion, is making the vermicompost or basically the worm castings or worm manure. i mean,this is often overlooking in gardening and how important the worm castings are. i mean,one of the things that i like to do in my gardening style is model nature. and in anatural system, there would naturally be worms

in the ground to basically help break downsome of that organic matter and make it into nutrients for your plants. now whether youwant to distribute worms in the different raised beds in your growing areas so theycould so that there, i think that’s actually excellent, another way to do it is to basicallyhave a worm bin like this make out of some wood, very simple, and they basically putthe food scraps in here and they turn it into the rich, dark worm castings. once the wormseat the organic matter, they turn into castings and the benefit of the castings is it’sbasically predigested organic matter, but the main addition that the worms are addingthat you really can’t get from anywhere else is special microbes, the bacteria, thefungi, you could get kitinase digesters, silase

digesters in there that are gonna help yourgarden be even more productive without them. now if you really want to supercharge yourworm castings, most people will feed worms cow manure or chicken manure and differentthings, which i don’t think worms show be eating that as the majority of their diet.i believe the worms should be eating what they would eat naturally in nature, whichis mostly decayed plant matter, so feeding them like…even a finished compost or plantscraps, garden clippings, you know, broken down. even things that are really importantto feed your worms that i learned from some worm experts are things like cardboard orshredded cardboard or cardboard slurry that you make up in the blender with some cardboardand some water. and then another thing that’s

very important is kitin rich source of nutrientsfor the worms, such as nail clippings, hair clippings, if you get shrimp sells or crabshells from a seafood restaurant, that’d be excellent to feed to your worms to makea very high quality worm casting. now, if you don’t want to keep your own worms likethey’re doing here, that’s alright. you can buy your worm castings like i like tobecause i don’t want to take the time to make all my worm castings. i buy this stuffcalled worm gold plus worm castings, but in addition, of course i have plenty of wormsin my raised beds despite me not having a worm home like this.now the other thing they just started doing here, which is really cool, is they’re gonnabe starting to use bsf. that stands for black

soldier flies. and black soldier flies arebasically a little creature that digest organic matter to make basically a concentrated nutriencefor your garden. so they just build one of those black soldier fly houses today and they’regonna get that up and running real soon to add nutrition to their garden.what i want to do next is take you guys around and show you guys some of the crops that’sgrowing here, some of my favorite things just before it gets too dark and maybe share withyou guys actually a cool phenomenon that’s happening while growing in their woodchips.alright, now i’m walking through the maringa forest here in houston and this is basicallyall these trees they planted. maringa for those of you guys that don’t know if basicallya tree. now this is a tropical tree, if you

live where it frosts and if they get a rarefrost here, this tree will not make it, and these guys, you can literally just pick theleaves like i just picked there and eat them. mm. now this is definitely a flavor you’regonna have to get used to. i prefer kale over maringa, kale to me tastes better. but thereare certain varieties of maringa that tastes a little bit better than others. but thatbeing said, maringa’s probably the most nutritious leafy greens that you could eatin life. you go to health food stores for example, they take the maringa leaves, theydry it, they powder it up, and they’ll sell it to you for like fifty dollars like a poundof dried maringa leaves, but better than dried, better than buying things in packages, bottles,and jars, is growing your own. if you live

here in houston, you definitely want to havemaringa tree. if you get that frost, or frost warning, you will want to protect your treesso that they don’t succumb to the frost—and the amazing thing is, this section here wasplanted in july, that was about five months ago, and in five months these guys are alreadytaller than me, they’re probably pushing ten feet tall. they have another tree overthere that’s been planted since last january so that’s about eleven months old, and manthat thing’s like twenty feet tall now. it’s amazing. the cool thing about the maringais once they get tall, you have just chop it off, and you can take the part you choppedoff, stick it in the ground, and it’ll actually re-root into a new plant as well the partyou cut will actually re-chute and grow anew.

i’ve heard when they harvest maringa commercially,they’ll just let them grow so tall, they’ll whack them back, use all the leaves and they’lljust basically keep letting them grow up and keep whacking them back to continually havea continual harvest. in addition, these also make what indians called drumsticks, whichare also edible, and they also—the seeds can be used to purify water from what i hear.so this is one of the most beneficial and nutritious crops that you might want to grow.now of course, besides the maringa, they grow a full spectrum of other crops including lettuces,kale, collards, turnips, chards, herbs… i don’t have a lot of time to go over allthe different areas with you. maybe i’ll share a different cool crops and unique thingsthey’re doing. and then i want to share

with you some cool stuff about what’s happeningwith their soil here to maybe encourage you guys and motivate you guys about how you canliterally take a parking lot, which is what this was, and grow all kinds of food for thecommunity as well as yourself. alright, so i got this sifting table, andthis is where they sift the soil in, the guy joe was giving me a tour here and he said“john, you know, i was like sifting soil from like three days to put in these new raisedbeds that we’re building…” he’s like “the weirdest thing happened, after threedays of just sifting soil and smelling dirt, smelling the soil”—wow that smells likesome good stuff—“i felt real good, like almost euphoric!” and yes, you don’t needany kind of drugs to feel euphoric. all you

really need to do is be out in nature andmore importantly, smell the compost. there are actually studies, believe it or not, thatsay there’s components in the compost that after we smell it, we feel good. maybe that’swhy i like going out to my compost tumblers and digging my hands in there and sniffingthe stuff, cause you just feel good. i think in this day and age, we all need to get backto nature and have natural smells in our world. i mean, so many times people go in and useall these chemical air fresheners, which i think are really not too healthy, when allwe need really, is some nature. and being downwind of all the woodchip piles, it’sjust real nice and pleasant to smell them as the smells waft over, as the compost waftover. i just feel a lot better in nature,

and i think you might too.so this has to be one of my favorite areas of the whole garden. they have a whole sectionof just herbs. they have like an herb spiral and a place with mint growing, and all differentkinds of herbs growing, but my favorite herb that they’re growing here is right in here.alright, which one of use guys know what it is? alright, if you guys look closely—goahead and pick a sprig here—look at that. yes! this is cilantro! mm. cilantro’s reallydelicious, i love using sometimes just salads of only cilantro, maybe with some mashed upavocados, some sprouted buckwheat groats, some crushed garlic in there. one of my favoriterecipes ever. and this whole big bed of cilantro, it was planted literally two months ago! andi mean, i know many of you guys out there

may not have gardened before, and some ofyou guys have, but it’s just amazing to me how you can literally just start out withseeds and have—while yeah, you could eat cilantro seeds, which are known as coriander—inliterally two months of just some proper care, having some good soil, you could have morecilantro than you could eat in a month. and so i would encourage you guys, like they’redoing here, is to have different sections. so this section, they got cilantro. that raisedbed, they got broccoli. that raised bed, they got beets. that raised bed, they got carrots.and you can do this in your back yard. have different sections with different food cropsso you could start eliminating having to buy certain produce items from the store. likei never have to buy any collard greens or

kale, cause they’re just constantly growingyear round in my garden. and if i had this much cilantro, we wouldn’t have to buy cilantroeither. for me, cilantro is one of those crops youdo not want to grow in the middle of summer. they grew it, sewing about two months agoin october, and that’s definitely a good time when it starts to cool down, becausecilantro, if you’re growing it in the superhot heat, it bolts really fast and you’re notgonna have it. so some hot whether cilantro substitutes that you can use that i’d definitelybe growing here, one is called popolo, which i love. i started growing it this year, doesamazing, and i like the flavor even better than cilantro. and number two, is anotheryou can grow for hot weather, cilantro substitute

that actually tastes really like cilantro,is actually called kulantro. i want to encourage you all to eat a good quantity of cilantroin your diet. from the research i have seen, it’s actually good for cleansing and detoxification,especially with some of the heavy metals, which is what i’ve read before.so another thing you guys should definitely grow if you live here in houston or placeswhere you don’t get a frost, or very rarely get a frost, are these guys right here. lookat this. this thing is loaded up with probably over a dozen papayas on this tree. now papayas,they’re not really trees cause they don’t have the rings like a real tree would, butfor a practical purposes, we’ll call it an honorary tree. it’s really kind of aherbatious plant, but papaya’s definitely

one of my favorite fruits to be eating. plusthey grow and make fruits relatively fast as compared to other trees. plus they’reso delicious and it’s quite unfortunate that most papayas that are being importedare picked far too early and never fully flavor and ripen up properly. so to have the bestpapayas, you got to grow them yourself. in addition, i want to encourage you guys tobuy organic papaya seeds, or gmo tested papaya seeds, because papayas are one of the cropsthat are being genetically modified in this day and age, so i want to ensure that youguys are not growing any papayas that may have some genetic contamination.so the last shot of this video that i want to share with you guys today is just thisraised bed area that was put in. once again,

it was sitting on top of the woodchips here,and if we dig where these woodchips were, because they were thick, if we just dig downlike a foot, we hit dark rich black soil. now, once again, joe’s aware that he’snot growing vegetables, he’s growing soil. and he told me that what he’s doing, he’snot putting money in his bank, he’s basically creating soil because the soil that you makeis like money in your bank. if you have good soil, you will have good fertility and beable to produce healthy, abundant crops that are gonna be more pest and disease resistant,yield higher, and also taste best. so that’s where he’s putting his—investing his timeto make good soil. and i want you guys to do that as well.now, when you garden, you’re always gonna

see and learn new things, and this is somethingthat i’ve had to learn over the years, because we’re taught in our society… we want thingsneat, clean, orderly. when things aren’t looking good, just pull it out and discardit. and i try to remind them in nature there’s always checks and balances. nature’s theultimate check and balance. when in a natural system, if there’s too much rats in a placethen the cats will come and eat all the rats to take care of that problem and likewise,in nature’s system there’s always checks and balances. if one thing is too high inthe soil, bacteria, creatures, microbes, fungi will come to eat that stuff to basically createhomeostasis or balance, and that’s what’s happening here. i don’t know if you guyscan see that, but here we’ve got some baby

beet green that’s coming up. if you lookright here, it’s like—i’ll do a close up for you guys…and it looks like we’vegot the blob attacking the beets and the little baby beet greens. and you might think “john,man! what’s that, man! it’s got some kind of disease or something, let’s pull thatout, let’s not eat it.” ok, so number one, i don’t necessarily recommendeating the beets that are growing in the blob stuff, but i wouldn’t know that i’d necessarilywant to remove the blob because basically what the blob is is some kind of fungus that’sbasically living there because it wants to. because it’s been raining a lot recentlyand with the rain and the woodchips, it’s giving it a good home. the fungus is basicallywhat breaks down the woodchips or the salos

in the woodchips and that creates good healthysoil. so that’s just nature at work and if you get mushrooms, or this kind of stuffon your woodchip pile that’s to be encouraged actually. what you might want to do is takethis and spread it to other woodchip piles to inoculate that with these spores and helpthat further break down. and that’s what i recommended here, they take some of thisstuff and maybe they have a section of the garden where you just put the woodchips down,put a bunch of fungi on there and if you want to buy the right mushroom to compost downyour woodchips, it’s called king stropharia. that’s the right kind of mushroom that mayappear natural, but you can actually seed it in there yourself to break that stuff down.so yeah they’ve got that kind of mushroom,

they’ve got that kinda weird stuff here.look at that. this mushroom is literally on this piece of wood. we want to embrace natureand if it’s in a place like this where it’s not the most good for you cause it’s nextto your beets, that’s alright. scoop it out, put it somewhere else or let it grow.this is what we want to do. we want to get back to natural farming. this is part of nature.spraying chemicals and pesticides, that’s not a part of nature and we don’t want tobe doing those things. so i’m glad that he’s basically go throughthe whole learning process of learning how to grow in this environment, and he’s ableto share that with the community, so if you do live here in the houston area, they will—theygive workshops if you come down here. you

know, volunteer, you can learn about gardening,you can work for a day, you can get on the job experience because for me there’s nosubstitute for on the job training or having experienced getting your hands dirty in thedirt. you could read as much as you want about gardening in books, watch my videos online,but until you start getting your hands dirty, until you start sniffing up—mm—this delicioussmelling compost, you’re just not gonna get the full benefits of knowing or learninghow to do it. so yeah, you can come out and volunteer. they also need financial supportto keep this going. they have been done this on literally a shoestring budget. they geta lot of things donated, like the woodchips and all this kind of stuff, the food waste.but there’s always some need for things

like wheelbarrows and other things on thefarm. so if you are in a position to help donate, i’ll go ahead and put a link downbelow to the facebook page so you can contact joe and offer support in terms of volunteerhelp onsite or donation. in addition, if you do live in the houstonarea and are looking for a good, local source of clean food, i can definitely recommendthat you come to the last outpost community farm here, drop by any day of the week duringnormal hours, and they’ll be able to sell you some fresh, naturally grown food here.and that’s really cool because they always got some growing. and make sure you get someof that maringa if you’ve never tried it. one of the most nutritious leafy greens inthe whole wide world.

probably my last few tips i’d like to giveto the farm here, because they’re doing a lot of good stuff and—me, you know, mygardening style, my gardening practice, i’ve visited a lot of different farms, seen a lotof different things. i have my own gardens and grow my own food, and i’ve seen howto do it and they’ve got a big part of the puzzle solved here and i’m glad they’redoing it. they’ve got the woodchips. they’ve got the fungal-dominated compost. they’veof the thermal-dominated compost. they’ve got the worm castings, or vermiculture goingon, very important. but the one thing that is missing to some extent, in my opinion,at the farm are the trace minerals. trace minerals are critical to gardening, even moreimportant than what is commonly believed.

there’s not a lot of research on trace mineralsin the garden, but i have experienced a difference using the trace minerals in my garden so mybiggest recommendation for here would be get some rock dust, almost known as gravel dust,you can visit the local rock and stone quarry, hopefully ones that get rocks out of a riverbed, like basalt style rocks, or volcanic rocks, and you want to get the finest particlesize, as must as they’re broken down as almost a dust power or flour consistency.and the best thing to do would be to take some cheap inexpensive rock—they sometimescan be bought for like twenty, thirty dollars, a load. some places are just trying to getrid of it. and mix that in to the woodchips as they’re breaking down and also mix thatinto the thermally aerated compost piles that

i showed you and that’ll just from the levelfrom here on up to here and really improve production, improve crops’ resistance tothe weather, to the heat, and to other external stresses.another very important, inexpensive thing that i would do if this was my farm is, youknow, they are collecting rainwater off the roof, which i didn’t get a chance to showyou guys that. they also got an auqaponics system going in. they also got chickens. imean there’s so much, so many more things i could have showed up in this video withso little time because the sun’s going down. but the other component that really is criticalis when they’re overhead watering, it’s very important to do two things. number one,i would do a compost tea on a weekly basis.

basically an aerated, brewed compost tea fromthe worm castings. aerate the worm castings with a bubbler and spray that on foliar theirfeed and soil, drench that in. this’ll multiply the beneficial effect of the worm castingsand the other foliar spray that i highly recommend is some kind of trace mineral supplementation.so the easiest way to do with would be to get a product such as the oceansolution oceangrownor a product called the sea-90 which you will dilute in the proper ratio according to thelabel and this will add ninety trace minerals to the plants, to the leaves, because theleaves can absorb nutrients as well as the soil, to really step the level up here.now if you don’t want to get the agricultural sea-90 salt, basically, you want to do itthe cheap and dirty inexpensive way, you go

to a local health foods store and you wantto get a real unprocessed gray sea salt. you want to get the gray one, don’t get thewhite crystalline one. you can you take that gray seas salt that’s nice and dirty color.you might have to go to a couple of health food stores to get the good quality salt,and just buy a pound of that stuff. then you’re gonna take one teaspoon of that good quality,high end sea salt that has trace minerals in it—you’re gonna dilute one teaspoonto one gallon of water and the foliar feed that on your plants, whether that’s witha spray bottle, whether that’s’ with the pump spray, and i’d probably see that inlike once every two weeks and just foliar spray everything.andin my opinion, if they do those two ways

to bring the trace minerals back in throughthe rock dust and the sea mineral spray on, they’re only gonna ramp up their production.the plants are gonna be healthier, and more importantly, they’re gonna be putting moremoney into the back and that’s not into the bank of america or the chase manhattanbank, that’s into the soil bank. and that’s what they are truly growing here, the soil,and there’s easy ways and inexpensive ways to build your soil up so that it’ll keepfeed you, your family and the community for many years to come.i hope you guys enjoyed this quick episode today at the last organic outpost communityfarm. once again, my name is john kohler with growingyourgreens.com. we’ll see you nexttime and until then, keep on growing.