Best Bagged Compost for Your Garden Organic Gardening Q A

Alright, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, today we have another exciting episode for you. Happy New Year, guys. It is now the New Year's. The New Year's is here. I hope you have a very joyous and fruitful and vegetableful gardening season here in 2026. I can't believe the New Year's here already. My garden's growing great. Today we got the bok choy, we got the kamatsuna, the mizamerica, my favorite mizuna, we got the arugula back there, we got the napa cabbage, and of course I got my amazing purple mustard greens over here in front of me. I got actually eaten out, which I'll make a video about later, my cauliflower and broccoli bed, and in front of me I have different kale beds that was also eaten out and attacked by the worst pest outbreak I've ever had in my entire life, and I'm definitely going to be making a video on it. So that you guys know how to prevent this from happening to you, because it definitely was not fun anyways. This episode we're going to go ahead and answer your guys' questions. I unfortunately don't have the time to answer questions that are put underneath videos, but if you do have a question you'd like me to answer, I'll post a link down below to my YouTube community tab where you can post a question that may get selected for next month's Q&A. With that, let's get into this month's questions. First question is from I'm Kevin Vanderhoning, 3375. Thanks for the interesting video, leaves me one question. Is there any productive use for leftover aloe in water? So that's basically when you take the aloe vera, and then you basically fillet it, and then you soak it, and then it makes a water that's kind of like yellowish, and then don't drink that stuff. It's not good for us. It could put you on the toilet. So I suppose if you want to put something in the toilet and have them have a laxative effect, you could drink it for a laxative effect. I wouldn't recommend that. What I would recommend doing is just using that water to water your garden. I mean, that's a really good use of that water to water your garden. Alright, next question from Gjones5258. If I can only buy bagged compost, which ones do you recommend? Thank you. Alright, so here's the thing. I mean, depending on where you live, the bagged compost can vary because they are generally regionally produced by, you know, soil manufacturers to specific recipes that companies have, and then they're just sold near you, and then there's different brands all throughout the country. So this is a very difficult question, but if I had to say there's like one brand that actually I trust because I met the owner years ago, and he's an honest guy, link down below to the video. It's the Dr. Earth Company, and they have a bagged compost that actually is a lot of the compost I use here in my garden myself. I still have a few bags left, and a lot of my garden beds were actually filled with the Dr. Earth's organic compost, you know, mixture. So that's what I'd recommend. Otherwise, I generally don't recommend bagged compost. I recommend finding a local compost facility near you and checking it out, and then finding, you know, what ingredients they're using for the compost and making sure it's a good compost, and then before you buy a truckload of it, buy, you know, a bucketful and do some test grows to make sure it works really good for you. Generally locally produced compost generally can be better quality than any kind of bagged compost you buy unless you go to a hydroponic store and then spend the big bucks for some really high end compost that then you're just going to go broke on, and it's just, you know, better to get it local in my opinion. Alright, next question is from Ganyasetaviva. Alright, if you're vegan and don't murder or kill anything and don't support animal products, animal usury or exploitation, what else can you use besides fish? Maybe biomass from yeast and fermentation. Alright, so yes, I understand there's many vegan gardeners out there that want to be veganic and not use any animal products in your garden, and I highly respect that. My goal is to almost eliminate the use of animal products, especially ones that are from factory farms in my garden, so I don't use, like, manure products. I think they're terrible because, you know, you don't know what's in the manure, you know, or I don't use things like blood meal or bone meal, which are from the animal agriculture industry when they slaughter the animals, they have all the bone and the blood because everybody buys and eats the meat. That being said, I do use a fish hydrolysate, which is probably, if I had to say one, you know, non-vegan product I use, that'd be the one I would recommend because I think everything else mostly I use is, you know, veganic, but I think that one really can have a big benefit to your garden. It's called Pure Protein, it's basically, it's like fish emulsion, but it's like the next level because it's broken down through enzymatic activity. That being said, if you're vegan, you don't want to put the fish hydrolysate, which is basically just amino acids from fish into your garden and it's like a foiler spray, you can get the same one made out of soy. So it's a soy hydrolysate, Josh at Boogie Brew still sells it, I believe. It's at boogiebrew.net slash G-Y-G. You guys can get the soy hydrolysate, which is, you know, not quite as powerful as a fish, but very similar for those of you guys that want to be veganic. And I do support, you know, gardeners, however they want to garden, however they want to, you know, instill their values into their garden, I highly respect that. Alright, next question is from Communidadmasculina5814, I love your channel, John. When will you have your secondary channel dedicated to cannabis? Success and health to you, with love from Brazil. Alright, so I started my cannabis channel already. It's called Growing Your Cannabis, and if you search for it, you may be able to find it. However, I have not yet posted publicly any videos on it. That being said, I do have one video sitting there, actually I got to get a second one over there too. The last video I did with TD is actually on that channel, but it's not yet posted. You have to hope to have an opening one day and start posting videos on that channel more frequently, all the cannabis content I make over there, so then I can re-monetize this channel that YouTube demonetized because of my cannabis content. If you do want to watch the video that I have with TD on that channel, if you join my Patreon, link down below, because YouTube demonetized me, all my videos that I film, whether it's on either channel, get to be advanced screened by certain Patreon levels, tiers, certain tiers in my Patreon, I think you got to do the $10 level, and then you'll have access to all my videos before they're even published, because I have at least a half dozen videos in the queue that you'll get to all watch first, before they will get publicly released at some point. So yeah, I hope to do it this year, but basically I'm like one guy trying to do this and I need to move all my cannabis content to that channel, and then move all the keywords and titles, descriptions, and all these things, and honestly I just haven't had time to do that, my life is just so busy just keeping up with making videos and doing everything else I'm doing, traveling a bunch, all these things, it just hasn't happened yet, so hopefully maybe later this year. Alright, next question is from Pixelology Studios, starting from zero in Las Vegas, what edible plants slash varieties do you recommend, what should I avoid, how should I protect my garden while I'm gone traveling, do you do any in-person meetup classes, plant tasting, I've introduced me to many I've never heard of, thank you. Alright, Pixelology, so what I'd recommend is I'd recommend you watch my previous episodes, every season I do a basically warm season and cool season garden tour, right, links down below to some of those videos I made in the past. You want to watch a few of those, like watch three of them that I've done in the winter tour and then you'll see what I plant in the winter, and you'll see the ones that I continually plant every single winter, like every winter I always plant my mizuna, bok choy, pak choys, I plant my komatsuna, I plant the arugula, I plant the manapa cabbage, I plant lettuces, I plant mustard greens, broccoli, cabbage, all different kinds of the brassicas, I also plant the sugar snap peas, and basically all the leafy greens, I've got spinach planted, so I mean basically we have two seasons here in Las Vegas, we're going to have the winter season which unfortunately, although you could plant all year long in Vegas, the nurseries unfortunately stopped selling plant starts in the only major nursery, Star Nursery, which I love and hate, stopped selling plant starts in like September through like February, and so like I have to drive, I drove to Utah last time, which sucked, don't drive to Utah, St. George area for your plant starts in November, you're not going to find any, and it was a waste of a trip, so I have to, I drive to LA to get plant starts because I'm not good at starting them because I'm traveling so much and doing so many other things, so yep, links down below to my videos on the nurseries I visited in Southern California to get my plant starts, so you guys can do it too, and then of course for my summer garden I plant a whole different series of crops, you know, the best performing crops, the standard crops would be okra, eggplants, peppers, I like the smaller peppers, not like the bell peppers, so like the sweet banana peppers are the best performing pepper that I found in Vegas, cayennes and jalapenos and all those things do well, different kinds of eggplants do well, cucumbers, Armenian cucumbers do pretty good, I wouldn't mess with the other cucumbers, gets too hot for them, if you do want to do tomatoes, I recommend cherry tomatoes, that being said my summer garden is mostly like tropical leafy greens, such as the belay, such as the Egyptian spinach, such as the Okinawan spinach, such as the longevity spinach, such as the moringa, such as the chaya, right, and these are all in my previous videos, so you guys can see what you'll be successful with here growing in Vegas, and then how to protect your garden when you're traveling, like I found that, you know, I'm traveling and, you know, my garden I don't really need to protect, actually, except this one of my last trips I basically got eaten out, my tree collards, like a whole, like six foot bed of them, got eaten to nothing, like almost to nothing, all the top growth got eaten to nothing, and so it really is not good, so I'll have a future video on that, and you'll see the pest that I had to deal with because I got a trail camera that's set up behind my video camera to try to catch them in the act, alright, so otherwise I don't really protect my garden when I'm traveling, what you do need to do when you're traveling is make sure you have an automatic irrigation system, in the winter it's not as important, but the summer time if you don't water regularly your plants are going to croak because of the heat, and then in-person meet-ups, classes, you know, if you, I might be doing a class this, hopefully, spring time at the Vera Grow, they have a, like a farmer's market, I think, every, what is it, Saturday or Sunday, or first Saturday of the month or something, so find them on Instagram, and follow them, and then find out when they're going to have one of their, you know, farmer's markets, and I sometimes show up there with plant starts, and one of these days I do want to give a class there, otherwise, alright, yeah, so that's what I'd say, is, yeah, follow the Vera Grow online, and hopefully you can see if I show up there, and actually will give a class there, hopefully this spring time, which is one of my goals. Next question's from Robert, 3927, does TD have videos from this year's plants, so yes, I posted it on my Growing Your Cannabis channel, but it is not yet public, the only way to watch that is if you join my Patreon, otherwise you'll have to wait until later this year when it is fully released to the public, alright. Next question's from Garden and Grow, hi John, do you consume cannabis at all now that you quit smoking? God bless, I stopped in in an effort to do what's best for my receding gums, alright, so I've never smoked cannabis except when I was like in college, but I haven't smoked in my recent years, I always have been an advocate for the use of edible cannabis, not the smoking, smoking and vaping and inhaling things in your lungs is not a good thing, I do like to eat cannabis leaves as well as the buds myself, you know, depending on how they are dried or processed, I may or may not get the intoxicating effects, which personally is not my goal to get intoxicated from cannabis, I do not like the feeling, however I do know many of you guys enjoy that feeling, but I do, my goal is to get the medicine out of the cannabis, you know, without getting intoxication, so yeah, that's what I'd say, I've never smoked and nor do I recommend other people smoke, but of course that, you're gonna do what you guys wanna do. Next question is from Smurfz6g, do you add trace minerals to your raised beds and if so how often? So yes, I use a product mainly called azomite, but I also get other mineral substances such as kelp, as well as also soil humates, which is mostly carbon with other basically broken down minerals in there, I will add it every season to my garden, so every season my soil will like lower, and then basically I'll put like a half inch or an inch to top it off, and then I plant my new stuff, so those are the minerals I add, I also will foiler feed in ocean minerals, as well as kelp to the tops of my greens, this bed actually needs to get hit with the foiler, because I haven't done it yet for this season, and all my plants are really needing it, because it's really gonna cause a growth spurt when I do. Alright, next question is from Joanna Jordan38, what type of soil are you using to grow your sweet potatoes? I've tried growing sweet potatoes for two years and I've not had any luck getting potatoes, just greens, but I'm not anything like you have here, what's your method? Alright, so Joanna, I mean I grow the sweet potatoes mainly for the greens, because the greens are very nutritious and edible, and you can eat them raw or cooked, especially for the summer time, because they grow very abundant and very easily, you know I do harvest tubers, and are my tuber harvests like amazing, incredible, I don't know if I'd say that, but I get a decent amount of tubers just because I grow so many sweet potatoes, I would recommend a soil that is not super compacted, so more in sand, because I grow in the pots, I put a nice potting soil mix that is a custom blend that I make myself, the other thing is that if you do feed fertilizer, you don't want to feed a lot of N, you want to feed a lot of P and K, this will help with the root development, if you feed too much nitrogen, then that may cause more leaf development, and not get the nice tuber development that you're looking for, so that would be my general recommendations, I mean I have friends that just grow it in the dirt without doing anything, and they get tons of tubers, so maybe if you overthink it and put too much of a soil, then you're not going to get tubers, if you just kind of let them grow in the crappiest place, you're going to be fine. Alright, so next do aloe thrive? I have no success. Alright, so I would say that aloe thrives in a variety of conditions, I personally grow my aloe pretty much in a greenhouse, that's pretty much covered most of the year, basically, I mean the main reason why I do this is because in the wintertime they got to stay warm, they don't like it cold, it hasn't gotten too cold yet, I think we've gotten into like the 40s, we haven't gotten like totally frosted yet, maybe we got like high 30s, I think we had a 37 degree night, we haven't gotten frosty yet, so my aloes are doing a little bit better, because sometimes in the wintertime they just really get messed up, but I think it also depends on how your aloe has been acclimated, right, if you bought aloe in the house plant, then you just bring it outside, it's going to get burned because it's not, you need to transition it and harden it off to being in full sun, aloe should be able to deal with full sun, and if your aloe is not dealing with full sun, then I would recommend, you know, just hardening it off, like bring it out for one hour a day, put it back in the shade, bring it out for two hours a day, and just keep doing this like over a month, and keep expanding the amount of time you're having in the sun, I mean, that's the only thing I'd say, I mean aloe could thrive in full sun conditions, like they grow in the Caribbean, you know, for harvesting, the more sun they get, the faster they grow, like the aloe that gets direct sun in the summertime for me, has nice large leaves, and the ones in the back, that aren't getting a lot of sun, have like puny leaves, so it's like, what do you want to grow, do you want to grow big leaves or small leaves? That being said, you know, even my aloe that's in pretty good shade, still grows and throws out lots of pups, so you know, I'm mainly building up my stock at this point, because a lot of the stock that I'm growing here is going to end up in Puerto Rico, I'm going to have like a field literally of aloe growing, so I can harvest aloe and have it raw, and I'm going to even freeze dry it here, hopefully pretty soon to see what happens, and that's going to be really fun. So yeah, so that's what I'd say, I mean, they could thrive in full sun to pretty good shade, but not full shade, the more sun the better if you guys want larger leaves. Alright, last question is from Sandra Quick C8H, how do you make your garden so lush? I would love to see your garden, thank you for sharing. Alright Sandra, so how is my garden so lush, you know, I mean, I don't have any like magic things I could say, like oh, it's because I make YouTube videos, it's so lush, no, like my goal is to eat out of my garden, and like I like abundance, right, I mean, that's very important to me, I always want to always have more than less, maybe that's because I grew up as a child in a middle class family where sometimes we, you know, we couldn't do things, like my parents couldn't fix their heater, and so we didn't have heat, you know, for a period of time, and you know, we always pretty much had food on the table, but like, you know, I always want to have abundance and have it really lush, so I mean, number one, I plant really densely, so the more dense you plant, the more plants you have, the more chances of success you'll have, right, and the more, you know, lush you'll have. Number two, I would say you want to focus on having good soil, right, if you have crappy like bag soil, like I talked about earlier, just from the, you know, store, a lot of it has a lot of wood products in there, this will not give you lush abundant growth, right, so we got to have a good compost, good soil to grow it. I would say number three is very important, is to grow the right crops at the right time, right, if, I mean, some of my crops on the other side of my garden are just totally not looking good, I mean, they got too cold, they got 37 degrees, they don't like below 45, and they're just all totally withered, and I'm, I mean, I'm not filming in front of that trellis today, I'm filming in front of the part that looks great, so I mean, maybe that's, you guys see a portion of my garden, but, you know, soon enough I'll be replanting that area with the sugar snap peas and then it'll look lush again, but, you know, all in due time because I got two hands and one life and a lot of work to do. See, what else I would say, oh, is then, the other thing I'd say is water appropriately, don't want to under water, don't want to over water, you want to give just the right amount of water because, you know, like the sweet spot when you're playing baseball, you want to hit the bat and the ball right in the spot to get the home run, and, you know, you want to get within the range, you get too little water, your plants are not going to grow good, you get too much water, your plants are going to suffer as well, you want to get in the sweet spot to water appropriately, and, you know, then you too could have an abundant garden, you know, and I think practice makes perfect, I've been gardening now for a long time and so the more I do it, the more I learn what works, what I learn doesn't work, I still also tend to experiment a lot with plants that I haven't grown before to see how they're going to perform, how they're going to do, and guess what, the ones that perform well, I grow next year, the ones that don't perform well, you never hear about again except in maybe one of my tour videos that I said, oh, I grew this, but then in subsequent tour videos you see, well, why doesn't John grow that anymore, probably because it didn't do good because I want a lush garden, and, you know, the things that don't grow good for me, that's alright because I'll just go buy them in the store, let somebody else grow them and buy them from the farmer's market, right, and that's what I encourage you guys to do, to have fun gardening, grow what really grows well for you, and if you can't grow it, don't try to like pull your hair out, I mean, I still got all my hair, don't try to pull your hair out growing this one thing you want because you want tomatoes that you grew yourself, but if you don't grow tomatoes well, like I don't grow tomatoes well, I just go to a local farm and buy them or go buy them from the store, right, and then I just grow what's going to be abundant and I know what's going to grow good and I'm really good at, right, maybe that's another thing, grow what you're really good at and then trade with your friends and neighbors that grow things that you're not good at, and we need to have more community in this world here in 2026 now, and I think that's pretty much it for this Q&A, I hope you guys had a lot of fun on this journey as the sun goes down and it's getting colder today here in winter of 2026, hope you guys have a happy New Year's and the best gardening season ever, if you guys enjoyed this episode, hey, please be sure to give this video a big thumbs up, also be sure to share this with other gardeners you feel it can help, also be sure to post your question down below so I can have another one of these next month, I don't get a lot of questions on my GYG channel, so I might discontinue these Q&A sessions, also be sure to click that subscribe button right down below so you don't miss my new and upcoming episodes, I have coming out every 5 to 7 days, you never know where I'll show up, what you'll be learning on my YouTube channel, so that you can become a better gardener and make sure you click the little bell so you get notified as many videos come out, and finally be sure to check my past episodes, the past episodes are a wealth of knowledge, over 1700 episodes at this time on this channel dedicated to you guys how to grow your own food at home, so with that, my name is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, keep on growing.