This LA Urban Farm Gives Away Everything It Grows Here s How

Alright! This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com. Today we have another exciting episode for you. We're here in Long Beach once again, and today we're at Grow 2 Zero Farms. This is basically a quarter acre farm on the site of an old gas station that the land was dormant and a problem lot for many years for the city of Long Beach. And now it is turned into a farm that distributes free food to the local community actually every Wednesday. They have a weekly farm stand food giveaway. They started this actually in 2020. And they not only give away food from their farm here, but also they work with other food banks that bring in fresh food that then they'll basically put into little bags and distribute out the bag gates to the locals here in Long Beach. So we're here at 2851 Santa Fe, and this is basically the Santa Fe Raceway. Because people are just speeding down this like no tomorrow. So let's head into the farm where it's a little bit more calm, peaceful, and tranquil. Alright guys, so we're going to head into the farm here, and generally the farmer's here most days for a few hours a day, whether he's watering or just working the farm to ground. He was a former marine actually, so he's a veteran, and he's found that literally gardening was his answer and farming was his answer to connect and to help him work through some of the issues that come with being in active duty in war zones, which I could not imagine. I've visited so many vets over the years that get into gardening or start a microgreens business, right. Because, you know, gardening to me is therapeutic, right. We need a break from our cell phones, from computers, from Netflix, from TV, from the normal world that is so crazy and chaos, right. Get into your garden, take your shoes off, ground in the soil, work with the plants, they don't talk back to you, and your blood pressure's probably going to go down too. Anyways, let's head into this farm and check it out. Alright guys, so this is the entrance to the farm. The sun's behind me so this is not the best way to film, but basically this is the entrance and they got a bunch of fruit trees around some of the edges. They got like definitely a few mulberry trees, a fig over here. They got the pineapple guavas, apple, peach, surname cherries. But the main thing they grow here are the veggies. And basically this farm only operates because they give away the free food, only operates and is able to do the work they do, which is not just giving away the food every Wednesday between 4 and 4.30. They also do a lot of educational programs free for kids as well as a community at large where you can come in and they will teach you, like actually earlier today they had a class on container gardening or small space gardening where they had instructors come from the community to teach different classes. So through the city of Long Beach they have a program where you can not only just come to this farm but other farms in Long Beach, each with different instructors so you can learn from each of them to get really a wide variety of teaching styles as well as seeing different farms. So it's like one of the most progressive programs I've seen and I think more communities should do that. So I applaud the city of Long Beach who is, you know, taking steps to educate their community about farming and bringing more local food back to the community and more importantly educating the residents here about it. This is something most cities unfortunately don't do, alright. So anyways, let's go ahead and give you guys a little tour of the farm, some of the areas I think are really cool. I'm going to point out some of the ways they are growing food, hopefully inspire you to grow some more food at your house and then at the end we're going to interview the farmer to learn how this farm all works and why he got into farming. So we're going to do a hand cam shot, just kind of walk you guys around. So you can see over here they got like some kind of structure and actually that's a structure for the bees. So they actually got beehives because the beehives lost their location. So they said, oh you can put your bees here, but then to keep it safe because there's a lot of volunteers, interns and workers on the farm, they basically put it behind a net cloth structure made out of wood and the bees could fly in there. Then the bees have to fly up and over the structure so that nobody gets stung because if you're in the flight path. So that's actually quite smart. They have a greenhouse over there, trellis structure over there. They have basically flood tables here which they manually water. This is where a lot of their plant starts are. They have lots of lettuce in season right now and then they grow a lot of things in row crops. They also have sunflowers, good for pollinators, these are basically just volunteer plants at this point. They also have a little area here which is where they give the classes. They generally will have up to like 40 people in some of the classes. They're also doing like irrigation classes, so actually they're getting hands on work with irrigation. They're actually installing the irrigation on half the farm here. The other half of the farm over there is already done. So I think I want to show you guys some unique areas of the farm on how they're growing food and it might just give you some ideas too. Alright guys, so basically one of the things I want to tell you guys is that one of the ways they grow food here, but not the only way, is through raised beds and these are basically no-build raised beds. They basically got these concrete blocks that have cutouts for the wood that you could put in and then they basically run a rebar pipe through all of them so it doesn't tip over and that's how easy it can be to build a raised bed and then you can see they filled it with soil and they basically got all kinds of garlic planted inside the raised bed. That's one way you guys could just grow at home, even here in the city. Another way of course is you could just grow in pots, so they just have these nice five gallon pots and you can see they got a row of these pots with all different kinds of kale, dinosaur kale, red Russian kale, probably some white Russian kale, in pots. So I mean really they want to inspire the community to grow and as well as they give classes that'll teach you guys how to grow food yourself. Alright guys, so you can see behind me another very important area of the farm. This farm is called Grow to Zero and that's because they want to do zero waste, right. So all the food scraps that they generate and food scraps that the community could drop off get put into these compost bins basically made out of wooden pallets. That's very important to them that they compost and then add the compost to their garden to re-enrich the soil, even plants that get cut off or you know leaves and branches and twigs they cut up get put in the compost to turn back into soil. That's one of the really primary tenants and that's one of the reasons why this farm is called Grow to Zero, to be more sustainable on the planet. Alright guys, so you guys can see behind me a tree that I want you guys to grow. This is a huge Moringa tree with a lot of pods that are not currently mature all the way. They still could actually be harvested and eaten because they're still at a young stage. But the tree didn't really like the cold of the winter time, but it is now shooting off new growth on the tips and the farmer basically just cut this tree back and it just keeps growing back, you know. So a Moringa is a tree that I think everybody should grow because it can provide literally year-round food here in Southern California. It's also very, very nutritious in some places and cultures they call it the tree of life. Alright guys, so they got even more raised beds and you can grow a lot of food in a raised bed guys. I mean here they got a lot of radishes, these are really nice oversized radishes in this bed guys. Like look at these. These are super healthy. Look at that. That's a really nice radish right there guys. I'm going to take this with me. But yeah, so I mean even in just a raised bed they have the, it's a wooden raised bed, they got it lined with some plastic, probably better use a pond liner or even just no lining at all and let the wood just degrade over time. But yeah, nonetheless they're growing lots of food in a lot of different ways to basically give people examples of how you can grow food here in Long Beach. Alright guys, another prolific crop they are growing here up the hurricane fencing which is a perfect use of the hurricane fencing and even into their back gate is covered. Basically by the passion fruit vine, this makes lots of passion fruits and this is once again grows year round here and so this basically gives them nice privacy, also some nice shade. It does make filming videos a little bit more difficult depending on the time of day. But nonetheless look at how this is just filled in right. There are certain crops that they're growing here such as the moringa, such as the passion fruit vine. there's no crazy weather, inclement weather event here in Southern California. But as things are kind of getting warmer these days, that's quite unlikely to happen. So I really love that this farm focuses on, you know, some perennial vegetables and I hope that they'll get into growing more perennial vegetables because they're even more beneficial for people that don't want to become farmers and have to keep replanting annuals every single season. Alright, so aside from growing in raised beds and little planter boxes and growing in pots and things in the ground, they also have just standard more row crops growing. You know, they're here to show a variety of different growing methods and here they have some, I think, some radishes, some beets, some carrots, and of course some dinosaur kale. Alright guys, so I just wanted to show you guys this. This is a cauliflower they're growing. This thing is giant, like it's like bigger than my hand, maybe even bigger than my head. They definitely got some fertile soil here and I know I mentioned earlier that this used to be the site of a gas station and you're like, is the soil contaminated because a lot of gas stations, like their tanks leak and all this stuff, well this is like old school gas station like 50 years ago and then basically what they did was they did soil testing in multiple locations around this whole property, like going down 12 feet, you know, to ensure there was no contamination and of course then they put in like a gopher wire mesh cloth so the gophers wouldn't come up and then they brought in, you know, they did cardboard sheet mulching and then they put on lots of fresh compost on top so there's no, you know, risk of contamination from the subsoil that tested actually clean. Alright guys, so I'm sitting here in a brassica bin and there's just different kinds of collards, tree collards, kales, maybe some kohlrabis, some newly planted cauliflower in front of me, and I mean, to me like a lot of these plants like, looks like they need to be harvested more and they could be eating a lot more greens and getting a lot more greens out to the community. You know, as you guys know, my channel is called Growing Your Greens and I didn't do that haphazardly, it's because greens are the most nutrient-dense food on the entire planet because they have more phytonutrients, vitamins and minerals than other foods that people would normally eat, they also have the least amount of calories, right? And so it's the most important food for longevity that you should be eating on a regular basis so I hope the farmer here is harvesting his greens, whether he's going to blend them up into a smoothie, you know, steam them up or saute them or cook them at low temperature or even dehydrate them into kale chips, make green powders out of them, you know, so that him as well as the community at large could get more of these greens, they could actually get consumed and eaten so they could actually help benefit the health of people in the local community instead of sit here and then turn yellow and then just have to go on the compost pile, which is still beneficial because leaves that go to the compost pile are going to end up feeding the soil to grow more food but the goal to me is to get the food out to the people instead of having it go to the compost pile to end up feeding the soil to grow food later for more people if you got it. So this is one of my favorite parts of the garden guys, this is over here, they got the purple mustard, we got some more radishes, they got beets over there, they got mixed lettuces and then around this whole area they got like tons of fava beans and to me some of the fava beans definitely need to be harvested, they're definitely best eaten fresh, I like to steam them myself and they are absolutely delicious, I think I'm going to get a whole bunch before I leave today and eat them for dinner tonight actually. But yeah they're growing some amazing crops here just in the ground, in soil, all natural organically. Some of the best food that you could get here in Long Beach and it's given away free every week on Wednesdays from 4 to 4.30. Alright guys if you want a mild climate come move to Long Beach, check it out they still got eggplants on the plant, I mean I'm not going to say the plant looks perfect, definitely I can see the cold stress that this plant has gone through but it's still alive and kicking and still has lots of eggplants that can be harvested. Alright guys so another way they're growing food is basically using the T-posts that they basically use the nylon twine to basically kind of make rows so they could grow things like the snap peas, snow peas, shell peas and probably regular peas too. These guys probably got to come out soon some of them are getting some light powdery mildew but what I like about the farm here is that they're growing a lot of varieties, they're not just growing snap peas, they got like different kinds of snap peas, they got ones here I think they're probably growing for tendrils because the tendrils are just kind of going crazy and they got the purple ones and all kinds of things, definitely delicious. Alright guys so this is one of my favorite areas of the garden, this basically they're growing up the area that got the bees along the back so this is like the screened in area for the bees, they're basically growing the red Malabar spinach up the enclosure for the bees and as you guys can see like these leaves are definitely looking a little bit stressed out because they're getting a lot more reddish color which to me indicates some stress because it's probably been a tad bit too cold for the Malabar spinach but they are thriving and even more so like this is the most amazing patch of Malabar spinach I've seen because I mean unlike most where you might see a few like little fruits like randomly like these are like whole lines of just like of the berries so I'm gonna go ahead and pick a good one here for you I mean check this out guys it looks like a big blueberry and I mean if you crunch these they're just like deep purple they will stain all your clothes maybe use it as like lipstick but the thing I want to remind you guys that these berries are edible I would not chew up the seeds so you're gonna basically put this in your mouth chew gently just to blow open the berries get all the juice out and then spit the seeds out put them back on the ground so they could germinate meanwhile your mouth will just be purple due to the I think it's what beta cyanins which are quite cool yeah honestly these don't have a really sweet flavor or no flavor but they're really nutritious and I love that they are so prolific here in Long Beach all right guys so I wanted to share this with you because I was like I walk in look at this I'm like whoa this is interesting basically they got a four by eight flood table and then they basically put these socks in it and put holes in it and then put the soil in there and then they basically planted lettuce so they got six rows of lettuce and there's like ten plants down the whole sock and I guess I mean in some ways it's kind of cool because this is like mounted up so like this soil down below could maybe remain a bit more moist and then the plants you get the water in the sock but I'm like hey why don't you just like plant the lettuce in the in in the flood table with a bed with drainage and let them grow why do you need the socks I didn't really get a good answer but I'm like this definitely does look cool anyways so anyways they actually have another bed with flood tables they got a bunch of these actually flood table gardens which I think is an ingenious way to grow food because you don't have to build anything you basically just build a stand to hold a flood table and then you just plant in it I mean it's just super simple but they also have just a lettuce planted in the table in soil so let's go ahead and take a look at that next all right guys so here's the same flood table with the same amount of lettuce plants 60 lettuce plants in the flood table just growing in soil so I don't really understand the purpose of growing the socks I mean it does definitely look cool but they got an irrigation system in this one that gets piped up and they just got the newly planted lettuce this one was just planted more recently whereas the other ones were planted earlier in the year my question for you is which one would you rather plant would you rather do the socks which kind of look cool or this I mean the whole goal is to get people inspired to grow their own food which one inspires you more I'd like to know hear your thoughts in the comments below so I'm glad to see them growing one of my favorite perennial crops here especially here in LA to know that it does great this is known as the Chaya it definitely didn't like when it got too cold but now that it's starting to warm up it's starting to bud out and unlike my Chaya that basically all the the top tender growth basically lost its life you know here it looks like the tender growth stayed alive but you maybe just went dormant it defoliated now that basically spring is almost here new growth is shooting out so that's great they got the Chaya and then of course behind the Chaya they're also growing grains so this is the amaranth they got the yellow and red amaranth growing you of course you can't pick and cook the leaves to eat when it's younger but right now they're gonna be harvesting all the amaranth grain you know to eat and make like protein bars out of them for example so I mean I really love the diversity of different crops they're growing here they grow all kinds of different tomatoes you know that they got a bunch of tomatoes planted now and they're gonna be starting more soon and they grow a lot of peppers and a lot of new crops nasturtiums I don't even get to show you guys the sun's going down so I want to go ahead and interview the farmer before it gets too dark so you guys can learn more about the grow to zero farm here in Long Beach all right guys so now the pleasure of interviewing leaf Kemp who is one of the co-founders of grow to zero we're gonna have some some questions today about this farm how it operates by really not selling any produce as well as how it was started why it was started and why he farms and all these things all right so leaf tell me number one is why did you even get into farming in the first place you come from being a former athlete you know in in in school and then you were you know then in the military I guess you're a marine went to serve an active combat duty which I could not imagine so thank you for serving our country but probably when you came back from that you probably had some things going on in your head like unfortunately many veterans do absolutely although it did take a long time for me to have to deal with some of that about 15 years or so I was selling medical devices pursuing a hoop dream I was a basketball player and track athlete I just found it that working in the soil and having my hands in the dirt nurturing plants and taking care of other things was taking my focus away from my own issues and giving me back that brief space to be able to deal with things you know in the midst of a garden so that's kind of like the perfect place to do that not to mention a lot of my a lot of the things that I experienced were in Somalia so if you know anything about that it was a famine situation so you saw a lot of the result of not having food so that made a big impact on me wow and now you turned that around and now you're growing food for other people and how do you run this farm without without actually selling any food like how do you stay here because I mean you got some people that volunteer you also have interns but you also have people that you pay to work the farm yeah it's a lot of work and we're figuring out how to go to the next level but to get to the place where we have been up to this point we operate on grants we have a grant writer she's fantastic and she writes our grants when we win them she operates the program and so I get to focus on farm she focuses on the grant writing and the operation of the grant and then our CEO runs the business so it's a it's a team effort here for sure and we've been accomplishing a lot so we're very proud of where we are right now so if you're not selling the food where does all the food that gets that gets grown here and I snacked in a bunch of it today so that tastes amazing where does it all go we have a few different avenues we have a weekly food giveaway which we partner with food forward and food finders where we rescue edible food before it's thrown into the landfill we bring it back to the farm bag it up into individual bags and then our food supplements that which is then given away we deliver to veteran community down the street to seniors that can't get to the grocery store we have food fairs with another organization in Long Beach feel-good kitchens and they have a weekly food fair where they come and they it's kind of like a chopped episode on the Food Network where they're not sure what food they're getting but they're they're coming here on Wednesday finding out what's available and then taking that and teaching people how to cook with those ingredients farm fresh food so and then we have a few different food pantries that if we have excess food we make sure we get it to them and so yeah we make sure we're feeding the people here in West Long Beach so wow so this sounds like it's a farm literally for the community because literally it is growing the food to feed the community at the same time you're it's helping you to deal with coming back from active duty so that's great but then you even go further than that so how does this farm even educate local people about farming and gardening literally for free and do you really do this for free like people could come to the farm and get classes for free yes we have a future urban farmers Academy that we've been educating students for the past year and a half we're on our fourth cohort and our first advanced class which is a hands-on class our free farmers Academy is mostly online and then on the weekends you rotate between the urban farms here in Long Beach which is we have a growing number of urban farms so we've got a really good community here and you get to experience each farm each farm owner and kind of their own emphasis on what they're doing and we've added a very diverse curriculum so we're very proud of that it's very popular it sounds amazing and do you have any other kind of workshops or just local people that want to learn how to grow in their yard backyard front yard or whatever we're starting to add some classes yes and then we have a smart gardening contract where we host composting seminars throughout Los Angeles County on the weekend so we're doing a few of a few different versions of personal education yeah so great so like one of the questions I know a lot of people may have especially if you guys live in the Long Beach or Los a greater Los Angeles area is what are the crops leave since you're the farmer and you grow everything here and you've been growing on this property for the last five years what are the top like three crops that just are really gonna be successful no matter what everybody plans because I know a lot of people out there are watching it's like I can't grow anything everything just doesn't make it if I plant it but you know exactly what's gonna grow well like even if you mess up really bad you still got some food to eat yeah what are those beats are gonna beats are gonna crank around here I try and tell people the first if they're just getting into growing food plant some radishes they're super easy to propagate they're really fast growing it's the quickest crop you can plant and enjoy and so radishes beets and we have all growing your own greens we've got all kinds of greens here collard greens kale you know tree collards you know so all our greens are just cranking so yeah we do greens beets and radishes like crazy and what are the best perennial vegetables that you grow here ooh well I mean I've kind of turned some eggplant into perennials so yeah no I showed that one man that's crazy it's still alive you could see it's been some cold damage but it's man it's great and I just took out a few because we're planning on planting some different things so eggplants are one of my favorite perennials honestly where we are in zone 10b I could have grown okra all year long and I love okra but I took it out I took it out to you know you want to teach we're teaching people so we want to teach different crops we're just kind of we're not in a production mode necessarily here we're more in an education mode so it's you know I'm mixing planting perennials to kind of build a foundation here with taking some out and replanting them at sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense in in production mode but if you're educating it's a little bit right of course yeah and of course I would I showed the Moringa earlier which is a definitely a good perennial vegetable yes Chaya yes we just got three Chaya's those are I'm looking forward to those and that's kind of been my focus is kind of learning more of the perennial edible vegetables I mean those are when you start learning about perennial plants in general you know it's like plant it once and then forever yeah eat forever take care of it the right way and it's gonna be good to you forever so yeah I mean I would really heavily focus on perennial edibles if you're getting started yeah cuz that way you just plant to keep it alive and you could keep eating instead of having to like dig up stuff replant I mean you plant a radish you got to harvest it within 30 days and then then you got to plant more you ain't got no food anymore so yeah I think perennials really are very important especially for zone what 10b 10b we're in 10b it's like nice you can grow anything here another perennial only here in Long Beach so leave to me your farm and the education component and getting food out the people looks like you're very successful at and I'm glad you're successful at getting grants to basically fund the farm here but what if the grants run out like what are your next steps to ensure that you could continue to work at your farm here that you started for the rest of your life because you enjoyed so much but also more importantly serve the community with education as well as all the food that you're providing to all that it replaces around town yeah that's our challenge really is we've been very good at winning grants and and executing them we need to take it to the next level we need to develop a relationship with a partner that wants to make sure that we continue doing what we're doing a lot of times those are foundations or you know corporate entities sometimes or in tax write-off yeah whatever whatever relationship that we can utilize to take ourselves to the next level so that we can continue operating how we have been which is you know we're educating this community it's been so fun today we had you know 30-something people here learning how to grow in small spaces this is a quarter acre in an urban setting so it qualifies as a small space but some people have smaller spaces and we want to teach them that no matter where you are you can be growing your own food and you should be and when you do grow your own food you grow way too much food so you're usually going to have to deal with that and sharing is the best way to do that so that's kind of where we are here and we're looking to take this to the next level and we love what we do so I think we'll find that person cool so if somebody wants to like get involved with the farm here whether it's you know become a potential investor in the farm a partner in the farm or somebody that wants to be able to get some food from the farm or take class at the farm how can they do that you can go to our website which is grow to zero farms dot o-r-g and we have all of our information there so all right wonderful all right leave so are there any final words of wisdom you'd like to share as a longtime Long Beach resident and farmer here you know I think the more we do to serve others the better our life becomes it's just when you serve other people no matter what you're going through it disappears and that's how we kind of are doing things here it's just serving this community and having a good time doing it wonderful those are excellent words of wisdom because that's I mean that's why I'm making this video because I'm here to serve I'm not like nobody pays me to make videos YouTube even took my funding away because they demonetize my videos so I'm not getting paid nothing but I don't care because to me hanging out with cool farmers like leaf is one of the funnest things I could do on my Saturday all right so if you guys haven't started garden yet I want you guys to get the gardening bug like leaf and I have start your own garden start growing if you live in Southern California definitely start growing some perennial vegetables because they're the easiest they're gonna grow year-round you can just keep harvesting off them whether it's the eggplants the moringa or chai and there's many others that you could be growing so learn about them come down and support leaf and his farm here if you know people that have foundations that need to give their money away let them know about the farm here so that this farm can continue to serve the community educate and even provide food at like no cost which is totally boggles my mind they're just to definitely be more farms like this around the country to educate people about how to be more self-sufficient on this planet when more than ever we are getting more dependent on big producers and then we are just consumers when you can all start producing your own food like they are teaching here you know so we can be empowered and take our country back this one person at a time it's not hard guys it ain't hard so if you guys enjoyed this episode here at grow to zero farms be sure to give it a big thumbs up also more importantly share this with other people that live in the Los Angeles area as well as other foundations if you know any so that they could learn about the amazing job that they're doing here in Long Beach also make sure you click the subscribe button right down below so you miss my new upcoming episodes I've come in every five to seven days you never knew what new farms what new knowledge moms I'd be dropping on here what new cool crazy things I'll be sharing with you guys on my adventures around the country and the world make sure you click little bell so you don't find out how many minutes man and finally be sure to check my past episodes my past episodes are a wealth of knowledge over 1700 episodes at this time on this channel dedicated to you guys all about how to grow your own food at home and even inspire you just a little bit so with that my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com we'll see you next time and until then remember keep on growing