 Welcome to the Private Property Farming Podcast. My name is Mbalin Waco and thank you so much for joining us. We are at an exciting new location today and we're bringing you a fresh gardening series in partnership with home growers where we're teaching you how to grow your own food using various systems and in just a few minutes we're going to be chatting to the owner of Home Growers to tell us a bit about his journey, how he started this beautiful brand and how he's teaching a community to grow their own food and as usual please like, share and comment on our farming podcast. Well without further ado let's meet the man behind the brand. Cass, how are you? I've been looking for you. Wow, good to meet you. Welcome to Home Growers. Likewise, thank you. This is a lovely area that you have here. Tell us about Home Growers and yourself. How did you start the brand and when did you start? Cass, the Home Growers concept is just such a brilliant concept. I started it just after lockdown when it came out of that hard lockdown. I became a vegetarian prior to that and the concept and the journey for me was really about understanding food source. Where did my food come from and for me I want you to know if I grew the veg, if I bought the veg, what was the quality like and was I getting the best out of whatever was presented to me and that's how it started. I started questioning a lot of what was coming out of the soil and I started reading a lot and I started following different trends in Europe and America and seeing our people doing things differently there and I wanted to bring it to South Africa and I wanted South Africans to be able to grow in small spaces the most incredible vegetables, herbs and fruits and berries that you can in small spaces and that was the journey and as I said I became a vegetarian and this is where it all really unfolded and came about but the lockdown is what switched it on. Yeah so how's that journey been becoming a vegetarian and then starting a brand that you know caters around fruits, vegetables, growing your own food sustainably in your own garden no matter how big or small your space is. How's that journey been and what type of different fruits and vegetables are you are you are you selling here at Home Growers? Yeah so the journey has been incredible so we tried and we've manufactured a lot of our own product in terms of the grow bags so we've got these vertical forests which is a beautiful beautiful movement you know people want to grow anything on a vertical you have a wall so a person's living in a townhouse complex for example and they don't have garden space they can put a vertical forest up they can grow their strawberries as you asked about berries strawberries they can put vegetables in there you've got your peppers you've got your celery you've got your onions you've got almost anything that you can grow in these beautiful pockets yeah like I say made in South Africa or South African conditions and this is what we brought to the table yeah how to use the pun the table because it's very important because food comes from the garden from our farm as we say yeah farms onto the table and this is what it's all about so it went from those went to potato grow bags to grow your own exciting potatoes at home is such an incredible thing last year the amount of potato bags that we had sold for people to start growing potatoes was explosive they're coming back now for season getting their lives back on track we've got the grow bags themselves which are all the chemical free so biodegradable you plant your trees in there so even if you don't have a garden and you want to grow trees you can grow them in bags successfully I've gotten we will show you at some stage I'll show you some of the veg and the fruit trees that are growing I've got beautiful nachis I've got I've got nectarines I've got 50 we counted 30 odd nectarines in a tree this size already all my fruit trees that I've got growing at home have grown out of grow bags and like the my nectarines so the best was this last year the first tree I took home was a nachi tree yeah and this tree was about that size and as it was flowering and you saw these beautiful flowers I saw fruits for me and I thought to myself it's can't be there is no way I'm gonna get fruit out of this tree and this tree grew so I didn't grow that much bigger because it was a smaller tree but the fruit screw and you'll see on my profile you'll see we have two photographs of nachis the whole tree was bending over because the size of the fruit so then I started growing the rest of my fruit trees on my my grow bags and my nectarine tree we counted over 30 nectarines growing on my nectarine tree in a grow bag and we've got mangoes yeah we got avos and we've got a host of different fruit trees growing out of grow bags you're making me hungry just by talking but you know this is such beautiful greenery just take us through the different growing systems I'm seeing a lot of hydroponic setups and a very very fancy looking system yeah so maybe just explain to us the different growing systems that you have within home growers yeah perfect I'll start with this one okay this is the grow barrel the grow barrel in less than one square meter you will grow over 67 that's right 67 different varieties of herbs and vegetables wow organic soil and you're gonna get the best growth this is beautiful then what we do is we have a whole host of different varieties of herbs and vegetables that are sold in either pots or seedlings and so on the nice thing about this is that you can take this and you can pop it into a grow barrel you can pop it into any other medium that you have yeah but remember the whole secret about home growers is all about we're not a nursery okay this is what is where the magic lies you know we are a center of sustainable excellence in terms of growing what you eat and eat what you grow that's what we are so you're not going to find as we call the smellies we don't have the roses and all the smelly nice pretty things yeah you have the edibles and everything edible and our systems are all engineered for that so I'm going to bring you into this one now this is the okay hydroponic system yeah this is the monster this is a lot of people call the big daddy because this is designed to have incredible amounts of different vegetables growing so this one as I pull out you'll see here we've got a massive root system that's forming yes I can see that NFT so it's a nutrient flow technique with the water if I pop this open you'll see very quickly and we'll go through some other stage with more detail but you'll see there how incredible look how healthy there's roots are you can see the water a lot of people say but how come and like I say we'll go through and detail some other stage but people say but how come there's not deep deep deep deep in water what it doesn't have to be it's nutrient flow technique okay flow as you can see there the water is coming from and it's carrying all the nutrients and the plants absorb those into the root system and you get the most incredible growth wow so this is and you can grow various varieties because I definitely see spinach um this is cabbage yeah different varieties that I see here so what's happening as well say remember season has just come on come through yes whereas we've gone through some hectic cold fronts absolutely let me tell you if you saw what those cold fronts had done I mean I took some pictures and I'll send them to you you just have a look on the end here we had crystals we had these we had these articles growing I couldn't believe we came in the morning that the articles were hanging and some of the more frail plants unfortunately couldn't survive that cold yeah but the farms are the same problem the farms the farms you produce all the little seedlings yeah they lost their entire production yeah first of the cold so here you can so last year we had eggplant like you cannot believe the one section here was hanging with egg plants absolutely incredible tomato growth if you love tomatoes let me tell you you've got to see tomatoes growing on these systems big plum beautiful juicy tomatoes absolutely beautiful perfect let's go to the side I want to show you some other interesting things that we've got wow as you see this is the AFRI hydroponic we got so many other different forms of hydroponic this is more of a flat structure as I see yeah absolutely so but you can see how great the growth is you must see the celery so we have a restaurant as well that we supply which is beautiful so that restaurant gets or whatever you see growing here all this fresh produce goes straight into the restaurant people come in they love it because of that so I want to show you so that's the one then you got the tower hydroponic okay I converted my tower hydroponic system into a chili factory this thing produces chilies for me like you cannot believe so what happens is you've got the reservoir with all the nutrients the water pumps all the way up here on the top here you'll see you've got all these clay pebbles yes I see them and they're rich in nutrients so you see those white little stain marks on there okay that's because they're still covered in the fortune of nutrients which is fantastic what type of nutrients do you have does one have to put in these type of systems so there's there's many types that one can use we use a dry compound unit which has been pre-calibrated so when people come to home growers it's already set up for them they just take it they mix it into water and they put it into the reservoir and that is it and we teach them the whole process and how often does one have to put in nutrients okay and any type for any type of crop so it depends yes so tomatoes are naughty they like to drink a lot more than most other vegetables you've got to give them a bit more yeah and but you check it you've got meters and that you can't test you see the nutrient levels to see what it's like all right but because we've calibrated by on a 20 liter 30 liter reservoir we've got it to an exact science so we've made it easier for our customers to at least work through the hydroponic process that they don't have to it's not too technical yeah you take the technical part out of it all yeah and if I may add there it's because you know people would hear the word or the term hydroponic and think it's just so um a grade you know maybe it's only um jargon that farmers can understand but I think what I'm picking up here is that the benefits of buying all these different systems for the home grower is that not only are they buying the system from you but you're also giving them a bit more education on how to successfully grow food that they will eat so you're still providing that support in terms of how you know the growth process should be absolutely so I want to show you now so just as anyone who visits home growers we say we'll take you on a tour we show them around they can't believe it you know the average person looks at herbs and veg and they go and they only know the few things they know time they know basil and then they probably get lost off the basil and they go what happened yeah but you've got so many others so before we get there I want to show you one thing which is one absolute favorite now this is this is a a herb it's called passion fruit daisy if you take your nail and rub on the leaf rub it hard okay rub the nail and then smell smell that your finger you smell the air oh yes you smell the passion fruit yes yes yes incredible this is an insect repellent it's the most incredible people put it into their gins and so on there's so much you can do but why don't we probably move on I want to show you what this is what's important I want to show you how hydroponic hard work you saw the pebbles a few seconds ago yes and then I'll show you the net cup here so if I pull this net cup out I'm gonna it's gonna be a bit of a trick because we've got such strong root growth oh wow incredible growth now what happens is those those roots if you look at the water flow it's just little splashes of water those little splashes of water are so rich of nutrients that these roots are sacking out all those incredible nutrients and you're getting such an incredible growth and the leaves are so lovely and quite hard as well it's incredible you know people look at this and they come here and especially like the grow barrels as well the leaves get you that size and people look and they go is that real because it looks like rubber rubber so this is how it should be I can't agree yeah it's not like this wow this is lovely so I'll have to get this baby back and as well with this system again any type of crops could grow in because I also see lettuce as well and herbs I suppose absolutely great what other systems do you have I see lovely bags this looks very pretty that is very interesting I'll go through that one this is special but this is what lost you people were going mad for this is my one of my absolute favorites this is a potato grow bag we already got potatoes growing in there you can see them shoots coming through yes okay so we've got potatoes coming out of this so we harvest potatoes so all my potatoes at home I've got five bags and I've got potatoes coming out of succession and then as I harvest the one I start the journey at the back and then wait for it to push forward and we roll the potato bags okay and we have magnificent potatoes growing okay potato grow bag this one here is the rollup form again engineered for people that don't necessarily have gardens yes garden space or they've got a big garden big property but their kitchen is quite far from the garden yes as a result of that you know that they typically don't go into the garden to go in form or plant their veg and so on so this makes it easier so it's engineered in South Africa with obviously UV protected material okay and this is still potting soil or potting soil and compost mixture so we use premium all organic as well okay you can see this is only now probably about two weeks old if that okay and in doing well healthy healthy healthy vegetables what's lovely about this type of solution that comes in two sizes you've got the one and a half meter sorry this is the one meter okay the one meter and you've got the one and a half meter what's nice about you can link them put them next to each other but you can grow anything you can go straight from your cabbages your lettuces your onions to your sweet potatoes that's one of my favorites sweet potatoes yeah you must see them grow and a lot of people don't realize you can actually eat the leaves the sweet potato leaves so that's like another big benefit and how you manage this place this growing bag is that you're just water the the the crops just normally with the watering can as you wear it okay great and the water retention it's got all the little drain holes underneath it okay so you're not losing a lot of water right so the nest that the need to water on a very frequent basis is taken away so ideally you want to put it on the ground so that the water could drain off into the ground and actually well anyway because we've got on the sides lovely so you save water you're going to be able to enjoy your favorite crops yeah and you're going to be able to feed your friends and your family and have fun at the same time oh my this sounds so amazing Cass so what else can one get just besides the different growing systems um you know do you do you also provide seeds and seedlings for for for home growers to start with absolutely so besides the seedlings and the pots and everything else we have a wide variety I still like to think we probably have the widest variety of of seeds edible seeds so you'll see different strains and types that you get which is really special and you've got propagation kits okay so that's if somebody is going to take it a little bit more seriously and they're going to buy this kit it looks like a little incubator type of thing where it's got little jiffy plugs in it which is made from cocoa peat you put them inside the cells inside this this propagation kit you put water in so the jiffy plugs which is cocoa peat absorbs all that that moisture in the water it expands you drop your seeds into there you close the lid creates an environment which is moist and warm and humid a perfect environment and then what happens is within days you start seeing shoots of growth and then you've got this beautiful environment oh wow vegetables and herbs growing I love to see this and that's from there you either go from that into soil or into hydroponics or into grow bags or into your pockets so the choices are endless this is amazing but before we go I'm just noticing this beautiful wall what's happening here this is one of my absolute favorites as well this is a special one this is as we call the vertical garden or the vertical forest and people give it different names which is quite interesting some people call it the strawberry pronta some people call it different names but you know we have now this is what's beautiful 365 days a year 365 days a year we've got strawberries growing that's our secret how's that possible in johannesburg absolutely perfect conditions you can see how they're growing the trick is that as the strawberries grow always try and keep them out of the soil try one try one I'd love to I've been spotting this one oh wow there are no chemicals and they're sprayed with anything it's just water and they are juicy they are plumb wait till season grows they're going to be about the size of that when people visit home growers this is probably their favorite spot as they come in the ogre pluck a strawberry and eat it oh you can see the clustering look how beautiful they are their flower and their fruit and the trick is you got to manage your strawberries so as I start to run the parent plant lets it run and obviously produce more offspring you are cut that run for it to produce more flowers more flowers means more fruit yes so we got incredible amounts of strawberries so this one also would be good for the patio because it has this whole entire wall stand and I'm seeing there's strawberries there's some peppers here there's some beetroot same system you could grow anything um organically throughout the year and what's beautiful about this although you're seeing it on a on a wall yeah the system comes in inches so you buy either a four pocket eight pocket a 12 pocket set depending on your need if you only got a small little area and you need only two fours you can put two four pockets on if you want to cover a wall you can go put four eights and 12s and cover the wall that's what makes it so special so you can customize it for the client based on how big of a wall that they want absolutely that's exactly it wow it's so easy it's and it's got rust free eyelets so you got no rust dripping into the into the food source which is important and you've got drip holes on the front and the back of the actual units so there's no blocking so you don't get root drop and that's why you get the best growth seems so easy to manage let's go inside wow so this is the inside of home growers Zachary cast this looks lovely I'm seeing very different seed varieties here that a home grower could start off with and tell me about this what is this small little kit here okay so if you recall when we were meeting and we're discussing in the yard yes spoke to you about a propagation kit now this is your propagation kit and I said it's like a little bit of an incubator okay it comes off and inside there you've got little jiffy plugs and that's made from your cocoa peat so what happens is when you put water inside this they expand and then you take your seeds and whatever seed you're deciding to use you pop into the jiffy plug you close the lid yeah propagation kits okay and what will happen is over a short period of time within days it's going to start shooting and you're going to see beautiful little leaves coming out and the root system is going to form and once it's fully established from there we take the jiffy plug out yeah I guess we take this and it's going to be you and all of a sudden now you're going to have a plant on it you're going to take that and that's either going to go into your grow barrel or it's going to go into your hydroponic system from the plants itself because in the in the hydroponics you're going to use with your little clay pebbles but this is to get you growing so this is like a little nursery that's exactly beautiful your own home portable nursery that is exactly right so what else is inside the storm seeing various things especially growing stuff oh and some I've seen from outside as well those are interesting so we've got collapsible worm forms okay so if you want to start your own worm composting at home we have the units we've got composting units as well and because this is about edibles we try everything so you even got your mushroom grow kits and a lot of people don't understand them you've got a variety it's all culinary so you can get your own mushrooms going you can harvest them you can cook with them there's so much you can do with mushrooms are these actual mushrooms yes absolutely so how do I plant this so no you don't plant it what you'll do is you'll prepare it you'll cut it you'll spray it you'll keep it moist and then as the marcelium starts to develop you'll see the mushrooms starting to pin and they start to grow they explode so you'll see a difference so what you'll do is maybe another time when you come through I'll actually go through the mushroom grow kits with you and we'll actually prepare one wow test it and let's do that I think that'll be quite exciting that sounds exciting definitely so this is another product which we've done which is also you never saw it outside okay it's called the watch me grow bag okay because you could see that's right so the kids love it specifically and the big kids like myself and the reason being is we take your tubes and you take let's say your onions your carrots where it grows beneath the soil line okay never see what's going on yeah this is a UV protected film so you'll see the root systems forming so you get to see what's happening beneath the soil line so if somebody's interested to see what's happening to their radishes their carrots their onions this is the all the crops that go that grow below ground great as a nice it's beautiful for kids yes entertainment and education yes also for those that want to see what's happening with their own growing from seeds beautiful great what else do you have these are very very fancy looking buckets so I take it it's another form of a hydroponic system that's right so this is the deep water culture system okay which is a very very popular growing tool okay what allows you to do that allows you to grow a host of vegetables in water so it is a hydroponic system okay like other hydroponic systems that typically they're pumps in them so it needs electricity yes none of that okay gets supplied with eight vegetables of your choice right nutrients that will have lost you a year because you can carry on growing growing growing the net caps the pebbles and the instruction kits right that will get you growing so it's literally just water in here and nutrients and nutrients and you've got your pebbles and your plant like we've seen outside this is amazing so if I understand correctly I'm coming into home growers I'm buying a kit I'm buying seedlings I'm buying seeds as well you're teaching me and providing that off-site support and these are the various stuff that I could buy to complement my my growing systems right because I'm seeing a lot of feed here some root gel so this is just to obviously make sure that the plant is healthy throughout the cycle lovely journey you want to have a successful journey yeah passing out what I want to show you as well so we've got the two roll up forms this is the one meter one so the one you saw outside was full of soil yes now you can see when I talked to you about the drainage holes and that's when you get the natural draining going through you've got the support strap so don't get bulging out of the sides so your growth of any vegetables and like I said if you're putting even your sweet potatoes in this is ideal it's ideal for anything absolutely special if a person doesn't have a garden then you have the one and a half meter one just a bigger unit as you can see much bigger same but bigger yeah the concept identically the same and then I want to show you the very special happy place which is the seedling room okay and there I want to show you this is really one of my favorites so oh wow so the seedling room we get fresh vegetables and herbs every single week so all of this has come in we still got to reliable some of them so you'll see that's not beetroot this is butter lettuce but as it comes in every week we have fresh fresh fresh organic seedlings vegetable seedlings delivered from the farm for people to come and get and these are put into their various systems yes the hydroponic whether it's a grow barrel whether it's the vertical forest you name it you use any of these into those systems so I basically come on to home growers I come in here into the store and then I leave with my fully fledged garden so like for example there we go so I'll take a spinach as an example yes so you'll buy your fresh spinach you'll put that in your take at home you would have your beautiful butter lettuce with your take as well start that journey I mean you've got so much on beautiful spring onion you've got everything beetroot lovely beetroot you know my favorite about beetroot is not necessarily just eating the beetroot itself it's harvesting the the leaves for salads and they're actually getting the barn so these come in what type of sizes am I buying the whole tray or is in six 12s how do they come in what we decided to do is we wanted to change the whole experience okay when people not to be restricted so what happens is you go to any other typical place of buying greens you're restricted to barthing in trays of sixes and eights or whatever it is but who wants six spinach or who wants only six or whatever it is you'd come in so you know what I've never seen that people want to buy one of those I want to try one try one try two try you choose that's what makes it special so the next time you come back you say you know what the last time I tried for example we had the customer came in over weekend brussel sprouts and it wasn't ready for them but they're private now before if you had a bar traditionally you'd buy them in sixes you'd say but you're not going to do that but get your experiment this looks lovely this looks lovely what else do we have to show us within home growers okay so we'll show you we'll come out of the seedling room okay I've got to show you this I forgot you as you walk past it okay talk about hydration I mean summer's here okay feel it it's warm and people are going to start going away again weekends and holidays but what we need to always remember is about keeping our little green friends hydrated yes so this is the perfect little solution it is called a lazy waterer so what you do is you take a two liter bottle and or a 500 ml buddy bottle cold drink bottle you fill it with water you pop it on on top of this mechanism and then you adjust there's a little tap here that you turn and it drips it works on a drip ratio so you're just half cost you want the water to drop all you want to drip all you want it to do is to drip drip drip drip drip just to keep a soil moist so while you're away for a weekend or a week whatever it is your little green friends are helping it's like your own automatic irrigation system running again no electricity needed wow no one has to check on it special Cas I'm seeing some lovely looking pots here just explain to us what these are as well these are beautiful so these are stackable pots what I love about them and what a lot of people love one is they come in a variety of colors okay yeah the creative people don't necessarily just buy one color they mix and match so they have a green and a black and a terracotta and a gray all matched keeping it colorful and the nice thing is you can buy them in each is and as budget allows yeah one month you buy one with the next month you buy another and so on and you can grow massive amounts of beautiful veg out of this I mean you'll see on the outside and I'll show you I've got a I've got a beetroot which is growing the size of a almost like a rugby ball you know and it's gone mad it's growing out of the side of this but you've got beautiful spring onions you've got you've got a wide right you've got a french lavender which is growing out of the top with the one there magnificent actually beautiful so it's a very very interesting product you have to grow with great hard duration as you can see there so the water does get through and even if you've got worms in there the worms can pass through which is beautiful we're unlike a lot of pot systems that you have you don't get that this gives it to you a fantastic fantastic addition and it looks very durable as well could last too long durable uh stackable easy to store easy to move easy to erect you know you don't need to have additional help wow cast thank you so much for allowing us into this beautiful space that you have here home growers definitely looks like a beautiful brand teaching us to grow our own food we look forward to the journey that we have ahead with you thank you very much it's an absolute pleasure having you in our space today and thanks for the opportunity it really has been very special and I love helping people and getting them onto a growing journey it is really something special to enjoy well that's great to hear because I'm excited to announce that we've got a lot more in store with the private property farming podcast our home gardening series so stay tuned for the next episode thank you