THIS Worm Food Makes the Best Castings for Your Living Soil Garden

Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today we have another exciting episode for you here for the second update at Teal Garden and Farm here in the backyard of Super Seth. If you haven't seen the first video, check it down below, getting a lot of comments and a lot of views actually because it's an amazing video about Seth who's growing his cannabis plants along with his vegetables in his raised bed using living soil techniques. So in this episode, we're going to dive even deeper on how Seth makes this happen. So the first thing I want to do for you guys, actually we're going to go ahead and give you guys an update of how his plants are growing. I'm a bit saddened to see that he hasn't been keeping up with his vegetables and he's really getting into the cannabis this time of year, but of course it's a beautiful day here in May. So you can see some of his peas are coming out, you know, and the peas, you know, they're a legume and they can help fix nitrogen in the soil. And you can see this is a tomato that he had planted as a baby last time and it's growing a little bit bigger. Here he's actually, some of these were seedlings that he had inside last time and he didn't hard them off properly. And you guys can see even some of the best of us get some leaf burn and some problems. To me, like these are super dry, he needs maybe water them a little bit more, but otherwise they're looking good. So he's trying to nurse those back to health before he puts them in the ground. Alright, so to give you guys an update, this is the wine barrel and in here we showed last time the auto flower, this is the critical number two auto flower, doing quite well. It has really nice smell, buds are starting to form on there, so it's getting pretty close. The strawberries are growing even larger and you guys can see he's got some strawberries waiting to ripen up as well as he's got the mulch on here as well as the cover crop he's kind of letting some of it grow out, some of the wheat that he had. So this is all doing nice, forgot to mention last time right down here he's growing some tobacco plants and actually last time I tasted it, so like I thought when I tasted it last time like it was pretty good, so let's see how it tastes this time. Tobacco's normally known for smoking, but as you guys know I like eating stuff, you guys out there smoke. So to me, wow, last time this was a lot younger, this time it's going to flower. This time it's a lot stronger, not quite as mild as last time. And once again I want to encourage you guys, I wouldn't necessarily you guys recommend eating tobacco leaves, but I would recommend you guys eat your cannabis leaves, they're really healthy. Actually one of my viewers commented last time like these were originally brought over from Asia for edible uses and like a lot of you guys that are growers out there, you only grow for the bud. Every time you guys use your trim leaves, you know I mean, Seth will mulch with them, I encourage you guys to juice them, eat them or even blend them up into a smoothie. If you guys want to take your trim leaves and blend them into a smoothie with some bananas and coconut water, use frozen bananas, that's going to taste quite good. Have amazing food source of different nutrients, cannabinoids, yes even in the leaves, terpenes, vitamins and minerals. Get these greens into you, that's what my channel's called, Growing Your Greens. I want you guys to do more than just smoke them, I want you to eat them. So we're going to give you guys an update on this raised bed first off. So you can see his cannabis plants are growing out really nice, this is actually called the Thai Native Regular. And so you guys can see it has really long nodes, so this girl might get super tall. And you can see like how tall it is between the nodes, growing really nice, look at that, he's trimming them up to make them nice and fat and wide. The next cannabis plant he's growing is the Runtz Times Layer Cake. And this plant also looks really nice and stout. And he has some techniques here, so you guys can see, this is not straight up, it's kinked, right. And I'll show you guys this technique he uses to basically help get the branches to go out, to grow out, and like get them to grow even stronger. And then moving on back, oh I want to show you guys this, part of the program of having Living Soil is doing basically plants that are going to deter pests, and this is one of the ones he likes to use, this is the French Marigold, and you can see it's like literally planted just like, I don't know, maybe like 10 inches away from his cannabis, of course around the corner here he's got a squash here growing. And look at that, we got a friend crawling all over me, a little ladybug. He's got the local nicotine, a native nicotine growing in the bed. He's planted some arugula also, so he could be eating here pretty soon. He's got some sunflowers here and here. He's got the tomatoes, he's going to grow up this trellis there as well, and maybe some kind of broccoli leaves. And check this out, this is called the Freak Show Cannabis. I showed this in the last episode and it was like super baby, but I want you guys to look at the leaves on that. I love the leaves of this cannabis plant, look at that. This doesn't even look like a cannabis leaf, right? But yeah, this is supposed to create some good flowers, of course. So comparing the Freak Show leaves right there, I really love those, a lot more leaf material for me to eat too, than say a standard leaf on the cannabis that everybody knows and loves. Of course in the back here the sunflowers are getting taller, right out the back as well, pushing three and a half feet tall. So in the next bit he's got the Oregon Snow Peas too, still growing up this side pretty good, and one plant on this side. He's got the tomato here, some squash here, he's also got his French Marigold there, and then this guy doesn't look too good, like a cucumber from last time, really not loving it too much. And then his goal is to grow tomatoes, and he has a little tomato here, a tomato here, up and around the trellis. But then in the middle here, he's got a few lettuces coming up, his goal is to plant cannabis in here and then basically grow them in between the two trellises and have like a net here to let them grow up and fall over, so that's going to be quite interesting. Over the last bit here, probably the highlight of this bit for me, are his Plant Starts. So he's got some lupine, some milkweed, some kale mixes, but more importantly, this bit he has some ripe strawberries, check this out guys, ripe strawberries right here right now. Let me see if I can find a super ripe one to eat. Not quite as ripe as they could be, but they're getting there. And you can see the heat is doing some damage to his peas, so as these peas plants get all messed up, he gets rid of them, pulls them out, of course they're in the front of the bed, he's also got the French Marigolds, he's also got some Calendulas, and this is called the Full Gas, this is a feminized girl from seed, looking quite nice. It's going to be fun to see how he trains this over time and see if he gets them nice and fat and wide or tall or whatever he does, I don't really know. And then over on this side he's got the Purple Ghost Candy Femme as well. So yeah, his plants are looking quite nice, about two feet tall at this point here in May. Now his creme de la creme plant, he has one big fabric pot here, growing one huge plant, this is his biggest plant right now, this is the Red Hawk Cookies Femme, and you guys can see this is growing really nicely, filled out really nice, and he's going to be basically growing these branches out to the stakes. And I want to show you guys a little technique he uses, let's see, we're going to show you guys maybe this branch right here, you see how this branch kind of grows straight, and then it kind of doesn't go straight, it kind of curves down and then out, so it has a nice bend to it and you can see there's some damage there, like oh what's happening there man. So this is a technique that I haven't seen before that Seth uses here, and TD would basically just pull his plants, but I kind of like Seth's technique a little bit better, but what he does is he'll go to the branch, so say we'll go to the branch up here, so what he does is he does this low stress training to his plants, and you guys can see that, but what he does is he takes the branch, the stem is actually kind of round, and then he takes his fingers and he pinches the stem, instead of making it round he makes it kind of flat, so you can see he's basically flattened this. He flattens this a number of times and kind of just does some low stress training to kind of train it out to basically cause them to grow out. What happens is the plants like basically get stressed out because you're breaking some of the fibers, the cambium layer, but then it basically says I got messed up man, I got to heal, and then basically it heals stronger than it was before, and then now he's forcing it to grow out. He's also forcing it to grow more vigorously because he is putting it under stress, it's like you know if you want to have muscles, you can't just like do nothing, you got to like lift weights, lifting weights actually stresses your muscles causing them to get bigger, and that's what he's doing using low stress basically techniques to crush his plants to basically damage them slightly so that they'll grow stronger, and then also he can direct them the way he wants to grow them. So his goal is to grow them out to the different stakes here, so that he can spread these girls branches out nice and wide to have a nice thicker plant. So this is a lot cooler technique, of course he's still using his pipe cleaners to help kind of train them out and get them to where they need to be. So I really want to show you guys the advantage of the low stress training, so like normally a branch wants to kind of grow up and go tall, why does it want to grow tall? So that it can spread its pollen out further and it can spread the seeds out further once it does go to seed, if it does go to seed, hopefully these will not be going to seed because they're not going to get pollinated. But the low stress training allows the plant to basically grow out basically to the side and grow sideways. So you can see this branch is like really growing out sideways, and he's continuing to get it to go sideways, and look at the damage that he's done right here, like put a nice kink in it. So this is pretty much just recently done, but if we go back to the bottom here, if we show this branch where it's been done to and basically after it's been kinked it heals up, you can see like it basically kind of forms a knuckle. So the plant is basically having to repair that and it makes it stronger than it was before, kind of like when you break a bone, and now if you squeeze this, it's really nice and hard, so it's really gotten a lot more stronger, it's basically reinforced itself to be stronger due to the low stress training he's done. So how he determines when to do it is he'll feel along where he's done it, so like it's really firm right there at the knuckle that's been created, it's still pretty firm here because he's basically done it all along this stem, so I'm just kind of feeling to see where the stem's softest and it hasn't been damaged, actually right here is kind of soft. So what he does is he bends it in and he twists and turns at the same time, so like to me, this is like, this is like crazy because I'm kind of really like, I mean damaging, I can feel I'm just cranking the cells inside there and damaging, but he's like, man John I've done this so much, they always heal back. So we did it there a little bit, let's go up more, oh I can do it right there, twist and turn and crinkle it, man, we'll see maybe if I come back, oh and then up here he's already done it, so it's nice and firm, maybe if I even go up here, this is like getting pretty extreme, it's pretty firm up there too, but you know, twisting and turning while you're bending it, look at that, I just damaged that so much and most people would never even attempt to do this, and maybe like to learn if you're doing it right, do it on some lower branches that don't really matter anyways in case you mess it up, but I'm going to have to come back next month to see how this worked out and see if I killed it or it's growing more sideways now, it's insane, but yeah, you're going to always learn all these new special techniques on my channel, you guys aren't going to see anywhere else things that Seth actually does to produce a healthy crop of flower. So the next thing I want to show you guys is this stuff called avocado tech, right, it sounds kind of crazy tech stuff, I don't really know, but it's here in the garden, so you guys know you really want to encourage worm growth development and reproduction in your garden because the more worms you have, the healthier your soil is going to be, why? Because if you've got worms in your garden, they're basically eating and they're pooping and they're going to poop out the worm castings right where you need it for your plants in the soil right below your plants, right, so it's often said that like, hey, feed your worms watermelon and they're going to go nuts and they're going to go crazy, and I've fed my worms watermelon before and I've seen them go pretty crazy, but watermelons, they got nothing on avocados and this avocado tech, so let me show you guys what Seth is doing here. So we're going to go ahead and uncover this and we got basically an oyster shell which they normally ground up into oyster shell calcium, and what he did inside here, let's lift this up, he basically got some guacamole, or you could just put some mashed up avocados inside the shell, and look at this, there's a worm orgy inside there, look at all the worms that are just going nuts eating the avocado, eating that guacamole that was in there, just going crazy right below the cannabis plant, I mean this is literally within 3 inches of the stem of the cannabis, going nuts, we're going to cover those up so they'll be happy, but just to prove that this works, we got another one over here somewhere, let's go check out this guy, another oyster shell, look at that in there, more worms going nuts for the guacamole and the avocado, this is an attractant for worms guys, don't use this for fishing because you could have a lot of fish and worms, but use this to feed your worms so that they could reproduce, be happy and make the worm castings for you, literally look at this, this is just a few inches away from his cannabis, so this is really smart to do it right next to his plant because now guess where the worm poop's going to be, it's going to be right here next to where these feeder roots are going to soon hit and go nutso from the avocado tech, and creating nutrients in the soil and creating a living soil right where the plant needs it, right in the raised bed. Alright so this avocado tech stuff is insane you guys just saw, but I want to show you guys how you could up the avocado tech game and use more than just guacamole, so let's go ahead and show you guys how we set this up and how we're going to basically take it to the next level with a new product here from Boogie Brew and Josh. Alright so last episode you guys saw that I talked about this worm chow or the cast away organics worm feed, so this is basically made for worms, if you look at the ingredients in here, this has all the nutrients and vitamins that you might feed a dog or a pig or a cow right, vitamin D3 and vitamin B12 and different kinds of trace minerals and whatnot, now this is made to have healthy worms right, hey having healthy worms is great, I'll encourage you guys all to have healthy worms, but as gardeners do we want to have healthy worms, no as gardeners what we really want out of the worms is their poop, we want the worm castings, we want to make the highest quality castings that are going to produce the most bang for the buck that are going to get our plants to grow and flourish and create the resistance against the pests in the plants in the worm castings, we wanted to have cellulase degraders so that the cellulase degraders can basically break down the cellulose in the compost and then create nutrients for our plants, so this is not the ideal worm food to have good castings, what is the ideal worm food, well link down below to my video where I visited OGS and I talk about that because OGS castings are some of the best castings that I've ever tested in my garden, it doubled my pepper harvest just by having castings, but even better than putting in castings is have worms in your garden that are creating the castings right next to your plants where you need to do it, so how you're going to create healthy castings is you're going to get a supplement for your garden that you could add to compost, add to different coffee grounds, when you have a worm bin you could feed this, you could also top dress with this product, and this is a product with a product I've been telling Josh he should make for years now, he finally put it together, this is actually called the Calijuana Vermi-Chow, and it makes your worms dance because these are the ingredients in this Vermi-Chow that are going to create the high quality castings to confer the chitinase and chitin benefits of the plants to make them more pest resistant, this is going to allow the worm castings to have more different trace minerals and have the best castings for your plants that I'm aware of, maybe there'll be a better company coming out with one of these feeds one of these days, and this is a trial, so this is just the preliminary mock up, this product unfortunately is not available for you guys to buy it because Josh wants to make sure it actually works, he came up with this recipe based on my input, based on what he knows about worms and gardening and talking to worm farmers out there that grow high quality castings, and so this is his recipe, and I'll tell you guys what's in the recipe for now, and this is subject to change because basically what's going to happen is Seth is going to be testing this out in his garden doing trials to see does this feed his worms better than what he's doing, and does his plants perform better, so he's going to be doing some testing to see how well this stuff works, anyways currently in there there's high fiber hemp bran protein, much like us, worms need some protein to get healthy and strong, he also got brewer's yeast, it's a fungal source, nutrition, black soldier fly larvae frass, good source of chitin, he's got the neem seed meal in there, he's got the kelp meal, kelp meal is super good for different plant oxygens as well as trace minerals, he's got the crustacean meal, so that's a source of chitin for the worms, and when the worms eat the chitin, then they're going to have the chitinase produced in their little guts to basically poop out the high chitinase rich castings, it's going to have the comfrey leaf, probably for some different vitamins or minerals, probably some minerals, chamomile flowers and horsetail herb, very important for silica which is actually the backbone of the plants. So yeah we're going to be using this today to make an avocado tech, so to do that normally you take a rotten avocado, we got a half way good avocado because I wanted to show you guys what it looks like, we're going to go ahead and cut this in half, and you know go to your grocery stores, go to like Mexican markets and ask them at the Mexican market hey do you guys have any avocados going bad, and yeah actually you know what, this one is going bad, not looking super optimal, and so yeah when an avocado goes bad, hey I like to feed it to my dogs, but in this case we're going to feed it to the worms, so we're basically going to scoop this out and make like a little kind of guacamole-ish thing, alright so we got the avocado in there, now what we're going to do is we're going to supplement the avocado with some of this vermicau stuff, and of course there's also a good calcium source, Josh has his recommended uses but I never read the instructions on my guide, so we're just going to pour a little bit out in there right, we don't want to add too much because this is a supplement, this is not a food, and just because Seth's got this worm feed to have healthy worms, we're just going to put a little bit of this feed stuff in there too as well, wow that just looks like ground up basically grains like corn and maybe oats or whatever, and we're just going to mix this stuff up right, just like we're making a little guacamole, alright now on no other channel will you see somebody making guacamole for their worms other than my channel, showing you guys the advanced stuff you guys aren't going to see anywhere else right, this is super advanced because nobody ever showed it before, alright so we got some avocado guacamole here for the worms and how we're going to do this now is we're going to take the oyster shell, if you have abalone shells you can do that too, we're just going to take some of this guacamole stuff and put it in the shell, now why this works is because the shell is basically like a protection for the worms right, it doesn't allow, this will create a nice moisture pocket for the worms that they're just going to love this environment right, and we got some of the guacamole just mashed up in there for them, and we're just going to go ahead and bury this in the garden in a minute, now if you guys don't have oyster shells that's alright because you got the avocado shells which also creates a nice barrier for them too, so you could pack some of your guacamole back into your avocado shell as well to feed your worms also, so we're going to basically make three of these avocado techs with the guacamole that we just made and the shell of the avocado as well as the oyster shell, alright so now we got our avocado tech, let's go back to the garden and put them in there, alright so now we're going to go ahead and put in this avocado tech, now I can't take credit for this, neither can Steph, but we're going to credit this guy named Blue at Green Tank, you can do a search for him, BLU at Green Tank, who came up with the avocado tech of course he is not using Boogie Brew's Worm Chow because that's, Seth's the only guy that has in the world actually aside from me, I got two bags yesterday, alright so what we're going to do is we're just going to basically go to the nice cannabis plant right here, we're going to peel it aside a little bit, and look at that we already saw some worms so check this out, worms this is your lucky day man, because guess what you guys got, you guys got guacamole to feast on, we're just going to layer that in there and then cover it back up and we're going to come back in a month and see how that's going. Alright so the small little avocado tech we're going to put on the regular Thai native, couple inches away from the stem and check this out right, I mean anywhere in Seth's garden you're just going to uncover it and you're going to see worms, I saw a little guy moving down here somewhere, but we're just going to put this just a few inches away from the stem so we're just going to feed them where they need them and we're just going to do another one on this side and look at this, he's got the leaf mulch there, cannabis leaf mulch, I'd rather eat the leaves than mulch them but hey, alright so we're going to put this one right there and cover it back up. Alright so don't forget, feed your avocados and make the guacamole for your worms so that they can be happier but also your plants can have more disease resistance and get the fertilizer, the best fertilizer they need, the worm castings right where they need them, where they're growing. Alright so the next part of this episode actually I want to show you guys the different seeds and how Seth here, Super Seth stores his seeds, how Super Seth stores his seeds, that's like a tongue twister. Alright anyways he's got these nice little iris containers from Amazon and you guys can see this one outer container, you flip it open, you open it up and then basically he has them all labeled, you know, mild pepper, hot pepper, tomato, basil, cucumber, asparagus, like this dude's really organized right, I'm in unorganized order and Seth's in organized order so it makes all the difference if you're organized it's cool, if you're not organized it's not cool. But you guys can see he's got all his seeds labeled in here, really nice and this is the most fun part I think, you know, he's got some empties but also he's got his sunflower and carrot, berry, flower, peony, other cannabis seeds, autoflower cannabis seeds, feminized cannabis seeds and Sonoma cannabis seeds, we are here in Sonoma County, we will tell you that and actually these are some outdoor grown, non-feminized seeds and these are proven winners here in this county so I want to encourage you guys to grow cannabis seeds that are grown in your county where it is legal to do so, so that you know what's going to perform well because you could get seeds from the Netherlands or wherever you guys are ordering your seeds from and it's not, you know, climatized to your specific region, it may fail or find somebody that has grown specific varieties out and ask other farmers and growers in your area to find out what varieties grow the best because after all if you are following the law, which I encourage you guys to do, you can only grow six plants, you know, and look up the laws in your area because I'm not the lawyer by any means. So he's got the seeds here from Sonoma seeds, I got a little props there, so he's got all different varieties of seeds, this is actually called the Sus Runtz and this is Pink Runtz by Fruit Abuse and I have no ideas about cannabis seeds at all but I think it's cool that he has like locally grown cannabis seeds that he could be growing out in his garden, of course he's got feminized seeds, if you guys are noobs and beginners, you don't know how to sex your seeds, seriously guys, get some feminized seeds, link down below to the video I did with TB where he talks all about feminized and, you know, getting the right genetics and all this stuff but you want to get feminized seeds, so to make sure that you grow feminized or girls instead of growing the guys, they're going to pollinate the plants and then you're going to breed a lot of seed instead of a lot of the buds that you guys, many of you guys want to grow, he's got auto flower cannabis seeds in here, other kinds of cannabis seeds including the hemp and CBD styles which I like a lot, of course he's got all his other seeds like different kinds of corn seeds and edible flowers, actually let's open this one, I encourage you guys to grow edible flowers, not only are edible flowers amazingly pretty to look at but also they provide us a lot of nutrients, you could grow those along with your cannabis plants, he's got things like nasturtiums, bachelor buttons, calendulas, echinacea, wow, marijuana, chamomile, English lavender, chervil, borage, that's a weed in my garden, calendula, dill, johnny jump ups, more borage, nasturtiums, chamomile, bachelor buttons, my favorites to grow are actually the violas or johnny jump ups. So yeah, grow some edible flowers to eat along with looking pretty but more importantly also help out your local pollinators as well. Alright, so now I want to highlight insect grass in this episode for you guys because it's one of the essential ingredients in my opinion for every garden, especially a garden that wants to have living soil. Why is insect grass so important? Because it came on the scene and it basically makes your plants more pest resistant, actually a video down below, I'll put a link down below, every planting hole that I put transplant in gets partially some insect grass along of course with earthworm castings in every planting hole that I plant so that my plants can have more pest resistance than not. The main reason for this is the chitin content. Insect grass could be from different kind of mealworms. So in this case we have black mealworms for the down to earth grass that is available in like big sacks like this, you guys can see the sample right here, this is the down to earth grass. To me there's like a lot of other things besides the grass, you can see there's the shells of the black soldier flies in there as well, the pupae things, and then another grass that's out on the market now is the boogie black, this is the one I've been using, that being said the formulation has changed recently, normally he had some black insect grass from Canada that is no longer available which is quite unfortunate. So actually I turned Josh on to a new company, and this is the EnviroFlight company, and they basically make sustainable feed ingredients. So this is actually normally fed to like animals, to livestock animals, for nutrition, for protein and other nutrients for livestock animals, but of course it can be used for gardening as well, and look at this grass right, look at this grass, this grass has a lot of like foreign material, it's really light and if you blow on it, it like really blows away, but this is a lot more dense material, if you blow on this, you know it's a lot more fine, so it's not, it's quite a little bit more heavy, to me this looks a lot like nicer stuff, and actually I want to smell these, because these are not known for smelling good, wow you know what, that has a nice flavor, that has a really neutral smelling flavor, I have some frass actually from mealworms from LA, that stuff smells like ass, it smells like ammonia, and this, smell this down to earth stuff, has a little bit stronger more off-putting smell, so I really like the EnviroFlight, kind of smells more neutral, not as much smell to it. The cool stuff about the EnviroFlight is, this is basically the little bugs, so this is basically the black soldier fly larvae, that basically poop out this stuff right here, the frass, so that's fun, so then you can see, and then they take the frass, and then basically they squeeze it out and press it out, so then they get the meal, so this is basically de-oiled frass, and then you can see they got, they make an EnviroOil, so I'm not sure what these two are used for, maybe they'll be used in agriculture, but for now I'm just going to recommend you guys get the Boogie Black Frass, which is the EnviroFrass, if you guys want to get the hookup deal, link down below, boogiebrew.net slash GYG for the John Kohler growing your greens hookup price on the black frass, so you guys can get this stuff, of course the frass is the third ingredient in this worm chow by Boogie Brew that is not yet available, if it is available, it will be available one day at boogiebrew.net slash GYG with the GYG hookup price as well, but yeah, I want you guys to start using some black frass, you could sprinkle this on, you could top dress it next to your plants, you know, you could add this to the compost tea, maybe at the last few hours before you harvest the compost tea, you could mix this into your compost, mix this into a worm chow, mix it in to make some guacamole for your worms, right, the black frass is some amazing stuff and I think you guys should all start using it to create more pest resistance and have healthier plants. So last part of this episode, we're going to go ahead and interview Seth and get an update from his side to see what is new and have his comments on some of the frass and the seeds that he has and other things that he wants to share this month. Alright, so we got super Seth here, we're going to go ahead and give him an interview and share with you guys some of the things you learned in this episode and ask him some other questions. Alright, so first question is Seth, tell me more about that low stress training where I was cranking and bending the leaves, what do you want my viewers to know on how you do it here and why you do it, how long you've been doing it and how it's been working for you. Yeah, so I've been doing that for basically the whole time I've been growing cannabis and the reason you do it is because, like I had originally heard that when you put a little knot in the stem, then it would like put more nutrients through that knot or something but I don't even know if I believe that. I think what it really helps me with is that like as the flowers are growing, you know the buds get really heavy, like it's like a cola full of like water. Wow, so the plants don't bend and break. Yeah, exactly. Whoa. Yeah, so it really helps with strengthening of the stems because like if you feel the new growth on a cannabis plant, it's very like hollow and airy and light and tender and after you kind of crank it around a little bit and I would say to the new viewers who aren't used to doing this, take it slow. You don't want to just be breaking your plants in half and stuff, you know what I mean? Like so take it slow, try with just like a light pinch first and like you'll get a feel for it. You'll definitely get a feel for it after you've done it a few times but like I do it because not only does it train the plant out sideways, you know the cannabis plant wants to grow upwards. Most growers would like to have like a flat even canopy of colas, right? Like growing up out of a flat stem and so you can train the stem out sideways like that to create a flat stem that's parallel to the ground and the colas grow upwards to create an even canopy. So that's very helpful. So it's kind of like, it's like three things. One of them being the knot, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't for like putting more nutrients through the stem. The other thing it might help with is you know the buds falling over and then the third thing is the shape of the plant. Like you want the so-called candelabra, have you heard about that? So cannabis grows like a candelabra like it's like a bunch of little stems going all up and you can like create an even canopy when you're doing that LST, also known as low stress training. Wow, cool. Yeah, I mean I know I've been to a farm in Florida that actually used that same technique on star fruit trees to get them to produce fruits because it stressed them out like all year instead of just a couple times a year. So the question is what other plants could you do this with you know to make the branches stronger? Really because after you told, after you said like that makes the branches stronger and I felt those branches, I'm like whoa it's really knotty in here and it's really strong now. Yeah. So like I wonder if you could do that to like apple trees because apple trees and fruit trees are known to like just break literally because of the weight. So if you could just train them to grow stronger too, what other effects can it have? Wow, so thanks for showing that you know on this episode today. So that's amazing. So the next thing I showed in this episode was the guacamole for worms. Yes. And the avocado tech. So you want to talk more about avocado tech, give props out to the person you learned it from. Yeah, yeah. And what you've noticed when using it. Yeah, so there's two people on the internet that I see doing a lot with avocado tech. The first one is Blue of Green Tank, that's BLU of Green Tank. I think he's credited with kind of inventing the original avocado tech where you scoop out an avocado, you mix in your nutrients, you scoop it back into the avocado, you put it face down in your soil, maybe you bury it like a half an inch or so, put a little mulch over it. Then there's this other guy, his name is Rubber Ducky Isopods. He's also awesome. He works actually at the Future Canvas Project, which is a great organization for living soil growers to like check out all their videos and all the resources that they have. But yeah, Rubber Ducky Isopods, he also does a version of avocado tech that's a little bit different than Blue's version. And so yeah, I've been like, I've been experimenting with avocado tech. A lot of the time, I don't even need to like, like peel it or like I don't need to like scoop it out and like mix stuff in. Sometimes you just cut an avocado in half, put it face down on the soil and walk away and you come back to it like five days later and the worms are just going nuts. They create what's called a biofilm under the avocado and it's like where they'll reproduce. So they're all under there. You called it an orgy while we were filming, which is hilarious because it really is a worm orgy. Like they're like sliming up against each other and creating new worms right there. So it's like a breeding ground and a food oasis for your worms, you know what I mean? Wow, so making more worms and make more castings to have healthier plants in the end. Totally, man. Wow, amazing. Avocado tech guys, next time you guys got bad avocados, don't waste them. Bury them in your garden. Just cut them in half if you're lazy. You don't even have to mix it with other stuff. Hey, you can mix it with soldier fly frass or whatever. Hey, speaking of frass, let's talk about some of the frass. So Josh's new product. You want to share your thoughts on the Kalawana Vermi-Chow, third ingredient is the frass of course. I mean, Josh just dropped this off to Seth, Super Seth and me like literally yesterday. So we just got it. What do you think so far on this Kalawana Vermi-Chow? Well it smells like the worms are going to like it. I got it yesterday like you were saying, so I have no idea. But man, I mean, I've been begging Josh to come out with his product. I helped him come up with the ingredients list and I'm really hoping that the other worm farmers appreciate this the way I will because the worms are as good as the input, just like humans are. It's like you are as healthy as your inputs. The worms need all that chitinase and all these unique materials. I think one very underrated thing for the frass is that it does have the potential to drive pests away. So if I understand correctly, there are some pests when they smell the black soldier fly larva frass, they'll leave the area. So it's like there's some pests that would affect your cannabis plants that won't even show up if you've got the BSFL frass. So worms will eat it, they'll love it, and it'll drive evil pests away. I mean, it's pretty badass, it's good stuff. So I'm excited to use it. Josh hooked me up with this giant bag, I'm going to hook my worms up, I think they're going to be eating good. Well we'll see what happens and then you can see the difference between you do some testing with using it versus not using it and then doing it at different feed rates to see what difference it makes actually. And once again, this is a product not for just any standard worm farmer. Worm farmers are growing for other reasons, they're not growing for high quality castings. This product is specifically made for gardeners or people that want to have high quality castings to have all the beneficial effects of the castings. Some castings are not worth their weight at all because they're just made from the residual waste product of the fishing industry where they're making bait worms, which their goal, because I've talked to many of them, and God bless them for making bait worms so that we could actually get castings at an affordable price. And some castings are better than no castings, but the right castings are even more valuable. So for a lot of worm farmers this may not be applicable, like oh I don't even need to know why I need to feed my worms frass, it's not going to make the worm any healthier. It's definitely going to make the castings healthier and probably the worms by some level healthier as well. But yeah, for gardeners we need to think about how can we make the castings better and this product does just that. One thing I was going to say is a lot of these worm farms will go to paper shredding operations and they'll take all that paper that has been shredded and a lot of that is just bleached white paper. It's like if that is your main ingredient in your worms, you're probably killing bacteria in the worm's stomach from the freaking bleaching process and dioxins. And also white paper is totally innocuous, there's nothing to it, it's just pulp. And so if that's all your worms are eating, then they're not going to be nearly as healthy if they've got a diverse diet. A diverse diet of ingredients, yeah. So I'm thinking of some cellulose degraders because that's what's in paper, the cellulose that makes the paper up. But yeah, definitely a diversified food stock. And that's for us also, we want to eat a diversity of different foods. It's shown by proven scientific studies that the more types of plants you eat in a week, so they recommend at least minimum 30 kinds of different plants you guys are eating. And I know a lot of you guys aren't even eating cannabis leaves, actually we don't have any here in the shot. But you could eat marigold leaves, and you know, I want you guys to eat different kinds of fiber because not only do the worms need different foods, but we need different kinds of foods for our gut microbes so that we can be healthier, proven by science. Alright Super Seth, so your cannabis plants are looking really good this time of year, but I'm kind of saddened that your vegetables that you should be planting with your cannabis are really looking weak right now, man. You know, like come over here, and it's like, you got a few lettuce plants and a few babies coming up, but like, dude, we need to have some diversity to feed the soil, different soil exudates right now, and right now you got some really nice cannabis, but not a lot of, much else in my opinion. I agree, and in my defense, it was like, it was like late March, and we had a frost, so that killed half my seedlings, right? And then in early April, early April there was like one day where it was like 85 degrees, and then that killed the other half of my seedlings, right? So I had a ton of excellent seedlings really early this year, and like half of them died on a frost day, and half of them died on a hot day, so yeah, I'm behind, I'm behind on getting the other stuff in, but I was very protective of the cannabis, so the cannabis survived and the other stuff, you know, fell by the wayside as it tends to sometimes, but no, I mean, dude, come back in a month, I'll prove you wrong, you know? Alright, so then why don't, why don't you just go out and buy some plant starts at the nursery and then put those in, and then start growing those so you can actually have something full of garden, I mean, that's what I do myself. I like that idea, but on one hand, I think there's nothing really like growing from seed in the soil that you've got on hand, you know, it's like when you grow, when you go to a nursery and you buy the plant, it's like you don't know what they're using in that soil, you don't know, you know, maybe, maybe it's a great nursery, and they're awesome folks and all that stuff, like you can have the best nursery in the world, but maybe there's a, there's a viral infection in some of the plants or something, like I don't know anything about what other nurseries are doing, all I know is like what I do, like I've never had a viral infection in any of my plants, the only time a viral infection has ever come into my garden was when I bought a clone from, from a cannabis club, and I came and I brought it and I planted it here, and as soon as it went into flower, it got the tobacco mosaic virus and it like, it just, it just died, I couldn't even use it, so that's my hard learned lesson, why I grow from seed, and then also like it's more cost effective if you just buy the seeds, you know, like you can buy 200 seeds of something for the price that you can buy like one plant at a nursery for, so you're paying for someone else's labor, you're paying for someone else's soil, I've got my time, I've got my soil, I like to buy my seeds, so that's how I do it. Right on, I respect that so much, because I know a lot of my viewers out there too respect you so much for doing that, I wish I could do that, but I don't have the time to start, or patience, and I got one of me and a lot of things to do in my life, and I buy plants and you know, I don't grow cannabis with my vegetables, because maybe if I did it'd be a bit more protective of them, but yeah, so yeah, more power to you and profit off, and I will always say, never will I say nursery plants are better than home grown plants, some of the best plants I grow were not purchased at a nursery, they're just the volunteers, the seeds that dropped and they come up where they want to, when they want to, at the right time, and they always grow more vigorous than any nursery plant I've ever bought, hands down, so yeah, you got me on that one man. Well that's exactly what I did with my sunflowers this year, I let the sunflowers go to seed last year, and then this year, like early spring, I just saw all these sunflowers popping up from where those old sunflowers had died, and those are my most successful plants right now, this year, those sunflowers are taller than me right now. Alright so because you don't have a lot of plants, I brought you some, actually I always travel with plants, but let me show you guys what I brought you, I brought him some stuff called water spinach, and water spinach, it is considered a noxious weed in some states, and it may be illegal to grow where you live, so you might want to check that out, but actually I bought these at the farmer's market yesterday, in San Francisco, and they were harvested the day before for eating, this is from actually Southeast Asia, and you just eat the leaves, not related to our standard spinach, but this is a great plant because they're so easy to propagate and grow, literally what happens is, I basically already plucked off all the leaves from the lower nodes here, and you can see like there's new growth coming out, but also what happens is you can just put this in a cannabis cloning machine, with an air stone in there, and it's going to grow roots out of the different nodes, and in some cases you might just be able to plant it as a nice wet garden, so you want to make sure you plant several nodes under the ground, and maybe just leave a few pointed up, so you want a nice large deep hole, and we're going to see how this does down in there, and we'll just put it right in there, look at that, and see how it grows, I mean he's got some nice soil in there, and either it'll make it or it won't, but hey this is how we learn, and the water spinach is amazing because this is a nice summer grown green, like lettuce will bolt in the summer if it's too hot, this loves the heat, loves the temperature, if it gets too cold, like this plant really doesn't like below 50 degrees, so it really gets kind of hurt, and at freezing it just dies, but this thing can grow up to 4 inches a day actually, so it can grow like as a big vine, so it can go crazy, so even in the heat, in the Las Vegas heat, 100 degrees plus, it laughs at the heat, it grows, it has a nice tender green you can eat and harvest, and yeah, so I'm going to give you a whole bunch of these guys to just plant in your garden, and then you can try to root some to get them healthier, and just see what the heck happens. Can we try a leaf? Yeah, yeah, try a leaf man, yeah, because I mean I've eaten all these things, but you haven't. It has a really nice, it doesn't really taste like much really. Like spinach. Yeah, like it's like spinach, but it's not related, it doesn't have the oxalate content that standard spinach does, it's actually related to the sweet potato vine, so it's kind of the same family, of course sweet potatoes, you could also eat the leaves as well, and these leaves are very similar, they make nice flowers at the end of the season for me, but yeah. Tastes a little like borage. Yeah, you're right. A little like borage. Yeah, so these are cool, one of my favorite plants, and I mean this is an easy way to start, I mean a whole bunch was like 3 bucks at the farmer's market, and I got a lot of plant starts now for 3 bucks, and also you're ahead of the game, because now you're not starting from seed man, there's a lot of material already, got leaves so they could do the photosynthesis and make roots pretty quick and be off to growing, and then lots to harvest and eat, blend up, juice, put in salads, eat more plants guys. Well if it's 4 inches a day man, it's going to go nuts. Up to 4 inches a day, yeah, they could go crazy. That's really cool. We'll see. I'm excited to see it. Yeah, loves the heat. Alright Seth, so one of the parts of the first episode I did, link down below to that, if you guys didn't see the initial episode I did here at Seth's when he was still getting some of his girls in the ground, was popular, was that other people that you follow online, you know about this avocado tech, obviously you learn from this, the low stress method from somebody, this dude's like, he's like a knowledge bomb in this guy's brain, he knows all these little things, and over the course of the season you're going to see little tips and tidbits come out that I'm going to make him extract from him and share on my channel so that you guys can learn how these can be implemented into your grow of vegetables as well as cannabis in living soils, but what other people that you didn't mention last time influenced you, because I know you watch YouTube a lot and take a lot of information in, try things, some things work, some things don't, and you have your favorite tips and techniques and people that you follow on a regular basis. Totally. Well I think, I bet every time you ask me that question I'm going to have a different answer because I'm always trying to figure it out. So I think a big one that I should have mentioned last time is the Future Cannabis Project, they do all these amazing videos, like long form videos, they interview Clackamas Coots, the very well known cannabis grower, who I think is kind of like the master, he's like the godfather of living soil, and then let's see, Scott Scamness, he is a total badass, he's like on the scene telling everyone how wrong they are when they're wrong, it's very cool to see, he's like, no, no, don't do your compost tea that way, do it this other way and all this good stuff, so he's killing it, and then, yeah, dude, I mean the guy Blue from Green Tank who talks about avocado tech, he is a total badass, and then like non-cannabis channels like Epic Gardening, you know them, they're super popular. Yeah, I've met him, I've been down to his place before, he's blown up so much, he interviewed me back in the day. Yeah, he's got a great channel, and yeah, he blew up big time, he's like mega now, dude, so he's a total badass, and I've learned a lot from his channel, not only like companion planting and cool stuff like that, but also I love the aesthetic of his garden, you know, he's got that cool pond, and he's got all these different raised beds all over his property, so yeah, that's another big one, man, I'm positive I'm forgetting a lot of people. Oh, you know what's a good one? If you like podcasts, check out The Growcast, you'll recognize it, there's like a purple leaf as the icon, and they do like all these really amazing episodes where they'll go through each individual nutrient, like they'll do a whole deep dive on nitrogen, and like how does nitrogen function in the plant, and how do you get the nitrogen to your plants most efficiently, and like what's the best way of feeding it, and then on the next episode they'll do calcium, and they'll be like, well why do we need calcium in the plant, and then like how do you get it to the plant, and what are the best inputs, and all this different stuff, so yeah, Growcast, that's a really good podcast, like, you know, I'm out here gardening, I'll put my AirPods in, and I'm just like picking weeds, like listening to people talk about like, you know, growing plants, growing cannabis, it's great. That's cool, man, yeah, I'm gonna have to check out that podcast, actually, I usually listen to podcasts when I'm driving, in the car, that's cool, on long trips. Alright, awesome Seth, so any final words of wisdom you'd like to share with my viewers today before we sign off? Oh man, yeah, keep a layer of armor on your soil, like, you know, there's this guy named Gabe Brown, who is like a livestock guy, like in the middle of the Midwest, and he has all these different rules for like how you treat your soil properly, and one of the big ones that I see a lot of people not doing is like, you need like a layer of armor on your soil, like you wanna mulch your soil, or you wanna have like cover crops on your soil, or like anything, you know, as long as your soil is protected, that's gonna give your worms the ability to go to the very top layer of the actual living soil, and pull all that nutrients down into the roots and everything, so yeah, you know, I mean, that among many other things, have a good layer of armor on your soil, like I don't like seeing exposed soil, I just wanna see the soil when I pull the layer back, you know. Right on, yep, I mean, I concur, I'd say that's definitely super important as well. Alright, so if you guys enjoyed this episode with Seth, and the second update here for his growing season, be sure to give this video a big thumbs up, more importantly, share this with other people that could benefit from learning about the avocado tech, and the low stress, and all the different frasses, and the worm chows, and everything we talked about in this episode, also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss out on any new and upcoming episodes that come out every 5-7 days, you never know where I show up, or what you'll be learning, and make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as many videos come out, I'll probably be back at Seth's in about another month to share with you guys the next update here, and I don't want you guys to miss out on that one either, also be sure to check my past episodes, my past episodes are a wealth of knowledge over 1700 videos at this time on the channel, dedicated to teach you guys all about how to grow your own food at home. So with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, we'll see you next time, and until then remember, keep on growing.