Hey everyone, Rob Greenfield here,
and we are at my urban
Food is Free demonstration garden.
This is going to be a crash course
in how you can grow food for free,
or with very, very little money.
I'm going to cover all the
limiting factors in gardening,
so we're going to go over how to get your
garden beds, seeds,
water, soil, mulch, compost,
everything that you need in order
to be able to grow food for free
or very, very little money.
So first thing's first is
raised beds, containers,
what you're going to be growing the food in.
And, since this is a demonstration garden,
I really wanted to show many ways
that you can do this in urban environments
or out in the countryside.
So I'm going to show you the 10
different gardens that we have.
So here we have an old nightstand.
This is just as simple as laying
it on it's side, filling it with dirt,
and then planting food in it.
You can use things like bookshelves,
drawers, anything like that,
where you can just lay it on it's side
and fill it up with dirt.
Here we have an old pallet.
The bottom is the pallet as the base,
and then around it, it's just using
the pieces of the pallets.
Or, these are fence posts.
99% of all pallets in the United States
are used 1 time,
and then end up in a landfill.
Pallets are endless.
You can get them on Craigslist,
behind grocery stores.
So many ways to get them.
So here's another really simple
raised bed.
This is just old scrapwood.
You could go buy
brand new from the store,
but the truth is that it's
laying all over the place.
Here's four 5- gallon buckets.
These are free all over the place.
You can go behind
grocery stores or restaurants.
They get a lot of their food ordered
in this like mayo and pickles
and things like that.
So you can use these buckets.
These are great for balconies and
patios, and things like that.
here we've got tires.
In neighborhoods like where I am in
Bankhead, Atlanta,
there's tires everywhere.
They make a really simple,
really easy raised bed,
and you keep them out of the landfill.
And then over here we've got milk crates,
also thrown away like crazy,
and you can make beautiful little
gardens out of those as well.
Another wasted resource that you can use
is bricks.
I got these from an
abandoned apartment complex,
which are just numerous
all across the community here.
This is my favorite of all.
This is just an old toy car of sorts.
I don't know if it was a sandbox toy car
or what, but anything that can hold
in the dirt, you can use it.
That's the idea of making stuff
for free and keeping it simple.
And then we've got some
vertical gardening here.
This is a great way to use an old ladder.
This is just a trash ladder I found
in an abandoned apartment complex.
And you just take old buckets,
or whatever containers that you find
for free,
stack them up, and then you've got
yourself a vertical garden.
For people that live in
urban places, apartments,
vertical gardening is a way to really
make your space go further.
Here, I haven't finished this yet,
but this is just an old pallet.
How this works, is you
just have to seal the back.
And then you fill it with soil,
plant it with herbs...
Right now I have some
herbs sitting on top.
Really cool thing here,
talked about using your resources,
using wasted resources.
This is is an air conditioning unit.
What I did is I positioned
the plants underneath it.
So these are actually using this water
that would have otherwise been
completely wasted.
You would be amazed
how much water you can get
from an air conditioning unit.
The key to making raised beds for free are
to be creative, use wasted resources,
use what is near by, and try to have the
least environmental impact,
and need as few virgin
resources as possible.
These are keys to always remember
when freestyle gardening
and trying to grow food for free.
Composting is extremely simple and only
as complicated as you make it.
A lot of people worry that
composting is this difficult thing,
but the truth is that the worst thing
you can do is not compost.
As long as you are sticking your kitchen
scraps, your yard waste, and so on,
into this,
and if you don't even think you're doing
it right at all, that is far better
than putting it in the landfill.
Making a compost bin is also as simple
as creating compost.
This is just three pallets,
nailed together, or you can use wire to
connect them.
It's just so you can keep everything in
and keep things like dogs out.
Just add kitchen waste, yard waste,
and paper waste together in a pile.
You basically want a
30 to 1 Carbon to Nitrogen ratio.
Carbon is your browns.
Nitrogen is your greens.
So browns would be things like
dried leaves or cardboard.
Greens are things like kitchen waste
or yard waste that's still green.
Now, how to get compost for free
when you're just getting started:
One, you can go to a lot
of the city landfills.
You can go to Google and do a quick search.
Find out if your city landfill
gives out free compost.
This is compost they're making from
yard waste that they pick up,
sometimes food waste,
if they have that program.
You can also go on Craigslist
and just type in "compost."
You might find mushroom compost
or a community garden that just
went out of business.
Just go on Craigslist, type in "compost,"
See what you find, a lot of times
you'll find it for free or very cheap.
You can also just make your own.
There's wasted resources all around you
to make compost.
Again, you just need to find
your greens and your browns.
Your nitrogens and your carbons.
You can do this by finding yard waste,
you can find huge piles of leaves or grass
clippings all over your neighborhood
and they'll get your nitrogen.
What you want to do is find food waste.
You can do this in multiple ways.
You can go dumpster diving.
Grocery stores are a great place to get
quality fruits and vegetables that are
going to waste,
that will make great compost.
You can also ask your neighbors
or local restaurants or businesses
to hang on to their food waste
and put it into 5 gallon buckets
and then you'll pick it up.
You can talk to coffee shops
to get their coffee grounds.
So wasted resources are all around you,
in order to get your
compost materials for free.
While we're on compost, let's talk about
mulch and soil.
You can get mulch for free, all around you.
One way, old leaves.
Collect them from your neighborhood.
This is a great way to get mulch.
Another way is cardboard.
The idea of mulch is to
do two things, really.
One: to keep moisture in.
It helps to keep the evaporation
from happening and keep the moisture
in the soil.
Another thing is, it decreases
your need to weed, because it
doesn't allow the sun to get through
for weeds to be able to grow.
As far as soil goes,
you can go back to Craigslist
and just type in "fill dirt" or "soil."
Fill dirt, a lot of times, you can get
dirt from construction sites.
They might just need to get rid of all
of this dirt that they dug up.
Another thing is you can see if there's
an abandoned garden,
abandoned community garden,
you can get soil or dirt from that
a lot of times.
Or, you might be able to just dig some up
from an area in your yard, as long
as you're not messing with
the native environment there.
Rainwater harvesting is another thing
that people think is really complicated,
but it's really just as simple as
diverting the water from your roof
into a container that can hold rain water.
Simple as that.
So what I have here,
this house, when I got here
earlier this month
had no gutters whatsoever.
If you have gutters, 90% of the work
is already done.
I simply put 10 feet of gutter on the roof
and then all you need is a downspout
that directs into the barrels.
All I have is a down spout,
and then I cut a hole in
the top of the barrel,
and put some mesh wire.
This is so that you don't have mosquitos
that are able to get inside there.
And then I just put these rocks here
in order to make sure
that the gutter downspout
is going directly into the barrel.
And then, on the bottom,
it's really nice to put a spigot on there,
but not necessary.
You can always go really simple
and just scoop water out of the top.
I like the system of having
a spigot on here though,
it makes it really easy.
And then, what I do is, I just set
an old bucket on the bottom of it.
To water the garden, I have this bucket,
which is just a bucket I found outside
that was going to waste,
and then I poked holes in the bottom.
Makes it really easy to water.
By watering your garden with rain water,
we're talking zero pennies.
Zero money in order to be able
to water your garden.
Here is another way to use water that
you wouldn't normally have
and would have been wasted.
This is a simple 5 gallon bucket
that came from inside the kitchen.
You can put this under the sink
and unscrew the P-trap
and place this under the sink
so that the water drains out.
And then you bring it out every time
you fill 5 gallons.
or you can just place this next to
the sink and then dump water in there
from the bowls and things like that.
So that's called grey water.
If you want to get a little bit fancier
but still simple, you can do
laundry to landscape,
which is just taking your washing machine
and setting it up so that the water
comes out into the garden.
You can also put a bucket in your shower,
or you can do the same thing and send your
shower water directly out here.
Another cool thing you can do is just
set up your hose as a shower,
next to your garden, so that the water
goes straight into your garden.
Lot of ways to be able to get water
for free, and use wasted sources of water.
Now, when I first got into gardening,
I never would have thought that there's
a way to get seeds for free.
But even seeds can be gotten for free,
and there's a lot of different ways.
Once you've started gardening,
all you have to do is save your seeds.
Let some of the plants go to seed
and then harvest those seeds so
you'll have them for your next planting.
But, if you're just getting started,
you won't have that.
So what you can do is
you can go to gardens
in your community.
A lot of times, community gardens
where they might have neglected plots,
will have tons of plants
that have gone to seed.
Ask if you can go there
and harvest those seeds.
Another thing you can do is talk
to your neighbors,
talk to people who are gardening,
and ask if they have
seeds that they've saved.
A little bit of seeds
goes a really long way.
Another thing you can do is ask people
in the community if they have seeds
that are going to waste.
Seeds that are older
and they might not use.
What you're going to want to do if the
seeds are older
is probably plant them first
in little trays that you can actually
test to see if they work, before
putting them in the soil.
You can harvest them from nature as well,
if you can find wild plants.
So, a lot of ways to get seeds for free.
Lastly, if you are short on cash,
if you really want to start gardening
but you don't have the money,
I can cover the seeds for you,
it's one of the things that I do.
And to figure out how to do that,
to get more information, just go to
my website, robgreenfield.tv/freeseeds
and you'll be able to get seeds for free.
So there's no reason
why you won't have seeds
between one of those,
to get your garden going.
Another limiting factor can be space.
But if you have a creative mind
and you're resourceful,
there's spaces all around you.
You can use balconies, window sills...
You can use porches and patios.
You can use vertical spaces.
You can turn lawns into gardens.
Just grow food, not lawns.
You can also use
other people's vacant space.
So there's people who have their
yards that aren't getting used.
Just grow it in their yards,
of course, ask them.
And then give them a percentage
of the food so they are getting
food for free.
You can also join a community garden
or make a community garden
if there isn't one.
And you can also freestyle garden
in abandoned lots or unwanted locations.
One really important thing I wanted to say
is that food is actually growing for free
all around you
if you open up your eyes.
You can eat the weeds.
There's broad leaf plantain.
There's dandelion greens.
There's lambs quarter.
Some of the most nutritious plants
are growing all over us,
in the cities and the countryside.
We don't even have to do any of the work.
It's just growing there,
ready to feed our bodies.
So get into some wild foraging.
I hope that what you've seen
here in this video, is that
gardening doesn't have to be expensive
it doesn't have to be challenging,
it can be really fun,
you can do it with very low
to no environmental impact,
while actually increasing the positive
impact you have on the world around you.
You can involve your neighbors,
involve your community,
and grow food to feed yourself,
feed your neighbors,
and to make the world a better place.
If you want to learn more,
more details and figure out excatly
how you can you can do this,
you can go to
robgreenfield.tv/foodforfree
Thanks a lot for joining,
and grow some food!