DIY Garden Path Ideas and Build (+ Why I Started Epic Gardening)

What's up everyone. Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today we're actually talking about something a little different. I have built a new pathway in my yard because to be honest with you, I was using some old brick and it really just, it was not very good. I've almost tripped over it a million and one times and I rent, so I didn't want to do something extremely permanent, even though my landlord's very friendly towards me. She's done a lot for me actually. Shout out to you Olga. But I didn't want to do something super permanent. So thankfully this video is actually sponsored by the National Association of Landscape Professionals. So I thought, you know, what better to do a little landscaping project on my own? Certainly not a landscape professional over here. Although after talking with them, I learned a lot about the career options that are contained within landscaping. So for me, I used to think you've got your landscape designers, you've got lawn care technicians, you've got your arborist, and those are valid viable career paths that actually pay a lot more than you might think, especially as you work your way up the ladder. However, there's so much more to the landscaping career than that. So we're going to get into that, but we're also going to talk about what I've been doing in the front yard. So let's go ahead and get to that first. We'll just take you on a little tour of the before. So there's some kind of, I don't know, a little bit sloppy old brick that I just refashioned into this makeshift path. It's honestly a little bit off putting. It's just a little bit uneven. I think maybe slightly dangerous. Honestly, if I hit this one right here, sometimes with my foot I can trip on it. So obviously not a good thing. And I'd like to just tidy it up a little bit, do a little landscape design. And then over here, what we can see is I have my loquat tree with this little brick circle path. I'd like to spice that up a little bit, add a little more of a natural feel. So I have some rock pieces that you can just kind of put in like that and we'll see if that makes it look any better. And then we're going to do some basic touch up over here and just get a little bit of cleanliness as we move into the fall garden. So I also chopped out all the old brick here and tightened it up with some of these rock formations. I think you can get them at Home Depot. Pretty cheap. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 I think. And just to tighten that up because the walkway here was a little narrow when it was pushed maybe just a few inches against this bed. And then what we're going to be doing over here on a later video is creating a pollinator bed for the second time. We're going to amend all this soil over here, really fix that stuff up. I'm actually going to take this hibiscus out right here because honestly it's in the way. I'm going to give it to someone who needs it. And then the loquat tree, which is right there, the secondary loquat tree, which was a volunteer. This one I just don't need. I don't use that many loquats and it's throwing shade right there. And actually what happens is it passes from here down this way throughout the course of the day because the sun paths just like that. So this, which I don't use a lot of is basically ruining this, which is my leafy greens lettuce bed. So I don't want that to happen of course. So we have our final pathway everyone. Definitely ran into a couple of snafus right here. You can see I've split and gone straight with one single path because simply not level this side to this side. This side's higher than this side and not wide enough. So if I was to dig under one of these, I would have to dig very far under and this one I have to dig even further. So it'd be really weird looking. I decided to cut my losses and just go straight through some of the downsides of building all your beds before you design your path. There we have it guys. The yard is looking good. There's a lot more to do and honestly probably could have used the help of someone more experienced in the field, which actually brings us to today's sponsor. So I wanted to say a thank you to the National Association of Landscape Professionals because sponsors like them help me give you guys these videos as much as I possibly can for free, right? I mean the content comes out for free to you guys and sometimes I take a sponsor I really believe in and that would be the National Association of Landscape Professionals. And that is because, I don't know about you guys, but I grew up watching Mike Rowe's Dirty Jobs all the time. And that show where he goes out, he'll go to abalone farmers, to sewer technicians, all sorts of crazy jobs that you, maybe you knew existed in the back of your mind, but you didn't really think about a lot. And that is what the landscape field is to me. Being in it myself, just albeit in my own way, you know, Epic Gardening is kind of a gardening media platform. It's an educational platform for everyone where I just share what I'm up to and hopefully it's valuable to you guys. So a couple of misconceptions that people have about the landscape field is that it's all lawn care technicians or nursery professionals. And while those are certainly careers that are within the field and viable ones at that, I think lawn care technicians and nursery professionals start somewhere around $25,000 a year and scale up to about $80,000 a year as you go. There's no formal degree required. So if that's not your thing, and actually I think for many people a four year college degree in something that they're not going to put to economic use might really not be the best use of money, especially these days when everything is available on the internet, like this gardening channel. I learned everything on YouTube, which is why I love creating for YouTube. But that's another story. There are a lot of fields within landscaping that actually don't require outdoor work. So you can have a finance degree, a purchasing degree. There's a lot of different careers that either require no training whatsoever or require a four year degree and are more standard office job if that's more your thing. So shining a light on just the wide breadth of careers. You have, like I said, your lawn care technicians, you have your arborists. And even within arborists, there are arborists for like a corporate campus. So let's say like the people who do Facebook's campus. And then you have freelance arborists, someone who's running a small business, who, you know, the income potential really depends on your level of grind, your level of work and entrepreneurship skills. There's two paths even within that small little career, which is crazy to me. And where am I really going with this? Why am I even so interested in this? Why am I so passionate about this? Well I don't think that the standard career path is really for most people. That's my personal opinion. People I keep around as, as friends, right? And so a lot of these people just tend not to be 100% fulfilled doing the job that they're doing. And a lot of the times that's something in, in business, in marketing, in insurance sales, whatever the case may be, there are a lot of alternative pathways that I think in the 21st century and onwards, especially with how technology is working, there's so much opportunity to do either your own thing or go your own way in a field that offers a much better quality of life. So for me, Epic Gardening allows me to be outside. It allows me to be in the garden. It allows me to travel around, meet other farmers. You guys remember my video with Stephen Cornett? I mean, it is such a, an important part of my personal life and the way I choose to live that I really felt it was important to shine a little light on it. And what's awesome is the National Association of Landscape Professionals actually has a career site where they have these really cool breakdowns. Let's say you want to be an arborist, right? They'll have a breakdown of what an arborist does and then the typical requirements that you might need for that job for your degree, not for your degree. If so, what type of degree, that sort of thing. And then they actually go into a bunch of different things about the salary range, the quality of life, what types of tasks you're doing, the environment that you're working in. So you can kind of go there and be like, Hey, I know I want to work in landscaping in general. And that really just broaden your mind about that. We're talking landscape architects, landscape designers. We're talking people in the C suite, the executive suites, uh, the people with, with raw business acumen that want to put that to work just in a field that maybe is a little bit more speaking to them. If that's something that's interesting to you, feel free to check it out. I highly recommend it. I've been browsing the site. Link will be in the description. And I want to thank you guys for watching the channel. You know, you guys are why I'm able to do what I do and hopefully I'm giving you guys the value that you want out of the channel too. So if there's anything you want to see more of on the channel, anything you want to see less of on the channel, I'm always experimenting. So you know, sometimes I'm putting up videos that I'm not even, I'm not really sure if they're going to do that well, but they're interesting to me and you know, you never know what might hit. So let me know what you would absolutely love to see in the comments and I will do that as best as possible. And I did want to give you some updates, kind of like a little garden vlog, the fall garden in the front yard. We're going to be doing a lot about soil remediation. I have some bad soil in the front yard and what I want to do is show you guys how to remediate that soil, fix it up, bring the life back into the soil, maybe some soil inoculants, maybe some cover crops, all that stuff in the fall garden in the front yard. And then what we're going to do is we're going to plant it. And most of what we're planting will be some root crops. It's going to be actually a lot of root crops. We're growing carrots, turnips, parsnips, uh, onions and garlic, I think all those. But then also, another update, travel update is Epic Gardening is going to New York for the end of the month. I'm going to be there. I'm seeing some awesome, awesome farms out there. I'm going to be seeing Square Roots grow, which is this hydroponic setup. I'm going to be seeing Homestead Brooklyn. This is a woman who has 500 houseplants in her Brooklyn apartment and also lives with a chicken, I guess. Uh, so we're going to see how that goes. And then I'm actually also going to go see Gotham Greens, which has one of the coolest names ever, but at the same time is one of the first sky rise hydroponic operations that services tons and tons of restaurants and grocery stores, but also produces something like 20 million heads of lettuce a year. That's freaking crazy. So all that's coming up. And again, if you want to see some potential landscape careers, check that out in the video description. Thanks again to the NALP for sponsoring the video. Hope you guys enjoyed it and leave a comment. Uh, I know it sounds a little weird on YouTube, you know, type in the comments to people on the internet, but I respond to every single one. I've connected with so many of you just by doing that. So it's pretty awesome and I'll see you in the next video guys. Good luck in the garden and keep on growing.