 Welcome to the Private Property Farming Podcast. My name is Malin Wakur and this is another special edition of The Gardening Series with Home Growers. And today we're going to be doing a live demonstration with the Roll-Up Farm and just to show you how you can fill it up using compost or potting soil and start growing your own food at home. Cas, thank you so much for hosting us once again. So today it's all about the Roll-Up Farm. Just explain to us what is the Roll-Up Farm and the concept behind it. Balie, absolutely my pleasure, it is so fantastic to have you here again. The Roll-Up Farm is something very, very special. Okay. I tell you what, so now if you look at it you'll see it's flat and there's a reason for it and the way we say Roll-Up Farm is when you get it, it's actually rolled up and it's easy and it's done that for easy transportation. Okay. You get it up as a Roll-Up bag. Right. And hence the name the Roll-Up Farm. So you unroll the form and you have this bag but I'm going to go through the motions and the technical components around what makes this bag so special. First it's made from a UB protective material. Okay. It's got all the stitched reinforcements absolutely everywhere. It's quite strong. Yeah. So it's very strong, very sturdy. It's going to last a very, very long time and it's going to give you some of the most incredible vegetables and herbs and berry bushes you'll see some of the strawberries already have over there. Nice. So the other guy, you know, a teacher trick in terms of how to get the best of your strawberries are going to work well in the Roll-Up Farm. Now what you'll notice as well, and I'll show you towards the light here, you'll see there's little holes inside the Roll-Up Farm and the reason for that and it's there all over and the reason for that is once you've prepared your Roll-Up Farm with all your veg and you put all your soils in, remember you've got your potting mix and you've got your composting, we use the two, we blend it all together and you get a nice concentration of the two inside the bag. So you've got a nice release of nutrients going back into the plants that are able to grow and sustain themselves. Now when you water, the water is slowly released out of this bag into the ground. So the bag holds a lot of moisture, which is what you want. Yes. You don't have to water as often as you would if it were to have been typically in a pot or in soil. Now this is a very, very special bag for people that are living in environments where there's very little space or their garden is right on the other end of the property or outside the courtyard or on their patio or on their on their apartment so they've got a nice patio, overlooking a park or whatever it would be. You can actually dress it up quite nasty and I'll show you earlier when I put a picture of one of our customers who's actually taken one and they put paving bricks around it and they've made this look so special which is what you can do, you can be so creative but I think what we need to do is we need to start this and we're going to prepare the soils. I'm going to introduce Gift. Now Gift is my right-hand man. He helps me with absolutely everything and when you see the magic at home growers and you see how well everything is growing, we say thank you to Gift. Awesome. Because Gift is our man of the moment and he is going to help us and we're going to prepare, we're going to cut open the two bags and we're going to blend in the potting mix and the composting and we're going to strategically put in a variety of different seedlings that we got. Remember we only use the edibles so you can have a wonderful variety and as we go through it I'm going to go through each one and explain to you what's been put in and the purpose for it and when we plant them we put them in a very particular order because the different seedlings or vegetables grow at a different rate so we've got to do it very cleverly. So for example we'll put tomatoes and we'll go through it as well and we like to be able to prop up the tomatoes at some stage either with a bamboo stick or some type of mechanism to hold it up but then as that is part of the process we just need to know where we put it but I'm going to start with the strawberries as well and show you where to put the strawberries and the strawberries will always be put on a corner or the sides so the fruits can hang over the edges so the fruit doesn't grow in the soil, doesn't pick up bacteria and the strawberries don't rot. But before we fill up the bags I know that these bags come in different sizes so just explain to us what size bag is this one as opposed to the one that we have in front there. Fantastic. So this particular size bag is the one meter one and the one in the front there which we already put some of the soil in just to set it up is the one and a half meter version. Okay. They're technically designed very similar to the same way. They've both got their supporting straps with velcro on them and the reason for that is that you adjust the velcro and the strap onto it just to hold it up and just give it some firm holding until the soil is compacted and it's held itself well into position for easy and healthy growth. That both are identical and the one thing which worked out very well which you'll see on that one on this one here if you hold this like that okay you see if you imagine soil inside here you've got different zones so you can already position where you're going to plant. So you've already got predetermined zones to put in your veg and your herbs and your berry bushes. And you can put the plants in different groups as it is. Okay great. Special special special stuff and one of the others that we've got growing which is our first one that we set up a while ago we've got beautiful beautiful sweet potatoes growing and the sweet potatoes grow and they thrive in here. I've got one going at home which has got magnificent cucumbers on it and that's what I want to see and this is where the magic is because if you're able to grow those kind of vegetables in a small environment you're going to get maximum results. Right so should we get gifting? Let's get gift. Gift please join us and let's go through the process in setting up this magnificent roll-up form. Right so we have gift here what's the first step Cass in getting this set up now? Okay so let's take it one step back and unpack the roll-up form from its packaging. Okay and we now start the process by removing the velcro strips. Okay and the reason for that is that we're going to now start filling it with a beautiful mix of potting mix and composting which is really about getting this all prepared well into getting the seedlings into the mix and we can get a beautiful display of magnificent herbs and vegetables growing in a roll-up form. Awesome, quite excited so I see gift is compost here now. Okay so what gift's going to be doing is putting the compost in and you'll see there's bigger pieces, chunkier pieces in the soil load itself and so we're going to take a mix of composting and you can feel the texture it's a lot chunkier than that of a potting mix okay and there's a there's a couple of reasons as to why we do this and it's it's very about it's very much for let's just get that in. So what's the difference between compost mix and potting soil? Okay so that you'll feel the texture yeah the texture and the potting mix which I've just got in now it's a lot finer there's a lot there's more soil inside it in terms of its composition your composting is made from chunkier pieces so a lot of wood chips bigger pieces that would come from the rehabilitation of garden refuse and the process is about getting it into organic state where it starts to decompose and it's bigger chunkier pieces which allows you to have decent form so if I squeeze that in a hole that you'll see you've got a decent blend of nice hard strong pieces of bark and other wood fillings and you can see this one now you can see the rich color it's a darker darker color to that of your potting mix yeah potting mix is almost got a brownish color to it and the composting is darker correct and it's full of nutrients right so give just put about three bags so there's first compost then potting mix and then compost correct so when a person buys this roll-up form three bags go into this specific size so what we typically do is only one meter one we normally put two and two two bags compost two bags potting mix right right now we've got three you can see there's a little bit of capacity okay so what we're going to do is going to put the next one in and then we're going to put the straps up and so that's the purpose like you see the straps there's a reason for it so and is there a strategy behind compost potting mix or can you just mix it all as long as you mix it in to give it a fair representation in terms of what's in the load and again you can see the difference in the color it's not as dark as that of the compost yeah so it's a very very very different color and texture itself and i've covered that strap which we'll take out there we go so once we've got this in place we're then going to just knock it together we're going to push it down compact it quite well and hard into the roller form itself okay so then it becomes easier for us just to their position those seedling plugs into this and then what we're going to do is to have a bit of the light in our garden you can see it's already holding the form together yes and you're going to land up putting the strawberries in the corners and the trick here and it's a really special way of growing and planting the strawberries is to put your strawberries on pot where the fruit hangs over because you don't want the fruit to grow in the soil because it's bacteria and you don't want bacteria to grow onto the fruit itself right you'll see these are flowering as well okay beautiful beautiful beautiful strawberries and you can see we had a couple of red wigglers here because some beautiful insects as well already so you don't plant the strawberries with the bags the bags don't you compose no not at all so you must remove those and put them directly in so we're going to start that process now okay so we'll start digging into the corners there so let's get this done so we'll open these up a bit okay so that's that's a nice size hole that you've dug okay that will go in there and then we just fill up the soil and then we can get the rest done and then what we'll do is we'll use a spray bottle afterwards just to give the mix a nice soaking and a bit of hydration so that we have a decent offering of water onto these seedlings and these beautiful beautiful strawberries and in a couple of weeks time you won't believe the difference in how this is going to look it's going to look totally totally spectacular and we have very very different offering to that as what you're seeing right now I mean the last time you and I met and you looked at that that roller form that we had set up it was very very sparse in terms of its variety of what was growing now if you have a look at it there's almost no soil to be seen everything's green it's just an abundance of green growth so that is what is special about it and the one thing which I don't like about these plastic bags and you'll see for example so it holds a lot of water and water doesn't drip through effectively although there are some holes in you can see how this is clayed out and what happens is if you don't get decent drainage you'll end up getting aggressive root rot yeah now with the roller form you don't have that because you've got strategic holes all at the bottom and the water slowly seeps out so you don't have that and then if you see this this is very clayy compared to this so you're not going to get the problems of water logging in the root system which is going to cause root rot so this is the best way to do it the healthiest way to do it and your seedlings and your your strawberries are going to have an absolute fantastic time in terms of their growth so we'll pop that forward you'll see we've hung all the strawberries forward so they're all out on the front of the grove of the roll up and their different blocks as well absolutely all in their different little blocks so now what we're going to do a gift you're going to take out some of those plugs there for us and we are going to now position different vegetables in different parts of this roll up form so the purpose of the strawberries they have to be at the edge so that the the strawberries could hang right so there's a couple of techniques around why we do it that way one is that it's certainly that's beautiful that's time um what happens is your your vegetables that are your strawberries that grow or easily accessible to to be able to harvest now think about if you have them in the middle as well if it wasn't an issue with these these the strawberries growing into the soil and picking up bacteria once you've got a decent canopy of tomatoes growing and you've got thyme and you've got parsley and you've got beetroots and you've got tomatoes to try and get you those strawberries is impossible yes and they're not going to flourish but putting them out the way you've done now you're all going to get the best strawberries that you'll ever believe looking forward to it so before gift starts planting maybe just tell us what we're planting so this is a common time time seedling and this is it well that's a beautiful tomato that particular tomato variety is called the money maker beautiful beautiful plum red tomatoes absolutely special and these are your tribes there's a garlic tribes beautiful garlic tribes and we've got some beautiful lettuces and those are there those are basil that's a purple basil oh wow beautiful variety and the nice thing about the basil is that you got your different red oak and green oak and then you got your parsley's and then you got your beetroots that you're parsley yeah and then also once they start and they find their form sense that you're going to get the color that you're going to get they're going to be bursting with absolute flavor and vigor when you see these things growing it is going to transform whatever garden area you never had before whether it's on your patio whether it's outside your kitchen yeah whatever you decide this is going to be revolutionary right it'll be a very very special place so what's our strategy in planting we've got the strawberries at the corners different crops and different herbs so do we put it per group in one block so no so you can do that in certain elements like if you're going to do carrot spring sample okay highly recommended you do that but what we're going to try and do here we're going to take the tomatoes and we're going to put them towards the ends over here okay we're going to try and get them towards the ends of the bag and the reason being is that if you're going to need support for them because remember tomatoes can grow incredibly huh you've got to put something into support them so you might take some bamboo sticks put those in which is going to support that beautiful beautiful bush and there's a lot of tricks there's a lot of magnificent tricks to get the finest tomatoes growing out of a tomato bush which i'll explain to you another time you cannot believe what you can do it's it's literally like making magic on your whether it's your garden whether it's in a roll-up form with no matter where it is yeah i'll teach you a trick so let's get planting let's get those going so we're going to put those out so it's a very simple thing we're going to just dig a little hole there okay pop these in okay we're going to just give them a bit of space to to grow because they're all going to grow incredibly well and just remember what you want to do is you want to achieve by way of giving them their capacity to have support using whether it's going to be bamboo sticks or some metal frame or or whatever you create okay so we got that and then and these ones could go so those can go anywhere i mean they don't make a difference these are going to be nice just to give some nice color in terms of not color but the greenage in terms of little strands coming through of beautiful beautiful beautiful charts so for a person who's buying this roll-up form and they have no idea where to plant and how to plant would home grow as a system just to show them you know how to start separating the different plants based on the different groups so that it could grow optimally in this form absolutely okay we have a seven-day support line on whatsapp as well so you know those that make contact with us we walk them through the process okay they get all the support seven days a week on whatsapp or telephonically it doesn't make a difference we're there to support and help those that once you start growing and having a vibrant vibrant roll-up form in there on their property awesome you know as you see we really dress us up as a lot of green there's spectacular green happening and and also the one thing which i must stress as well you know when you plant any herb or vegetable for that matter there's no guarantee that every single one of them are going to take that is great you all get a degree of failure so don't be alarmed you know understand that the plant has gone through a significant amount of shock and as a result of that they do struggle and do suffer now what makes it very very interesting when you start using organic soils your probability of having natural worms or worms inside the soil to keep the soil balanced in terms of nutrients you've got a good chance of there already being worms in these bags red wigglers and there's obviously other varieties as well and they will basically munch away on the composting pieces and convert that into a nutritious food source for the plants and these plants are going to thrive you come back in a couple of weeks time and you take a snapshot view now and we see exactly what we have today versus what we can have in a few weeks time that's going to be it's going to be magnificent great i feel like we have no more space left no we don't we've actually over one shoot which is fine so i think gift you can take those babies away and we'll use them somewhere else so after planting this looks fantastic very colorful and quite spacious and then i suppose then we bring the water so now we've got to say what game what you do is we have these heads that we put onto an old cola bottle and you pump it up it creates pressure inside the bottle the nozzle allows you to just so you can get your misting oh wow literally spray around and you hydrate all your vegetables and what's important about using a spray head or a spray bottle with a misting unit on it is that it doesn't damage the finer vegetables that you planted if you take a host pup a lot of people don't realize they take his host pup and they're in full blast and they're blasting it and got mud shooting everywhere and you've got damage to your poor little seedlings that you've just planted doing it this way you're causing absolutely no damage whatsoever and that is the secret and the secret to success when it comes to growing beautiful vegetables herbs berry bushes strawberries whatever you decide you have that option in terms of your roll up form and although we're talking roll up forms today we take the same methodology we apply it to anything if you do around the house this is just a mechanism to get you a different product or produce outputs right so my last question for for the show and specifically for this roll up form is then once you've put in the water you know where do we put this balcony outside and do you just you know water every once a week and just wait for the crops to grow that's right so the one thing which we recommend people to do is obviously use the finger test just take your fingers just plug part into the soil and you'll feel the depth and where the moisture is if it's dry water don't ever let it dry out and as i said before the magic around this bag is that it controls the amount of water that it lets out so you're not losing a fortune of water so that's a great water management system water harvesting process involved to keep this this whole system because it's a system like to refer to it as a system to keep the system hydrated and healthy and you'll see in a couple of weeks time you will not believe the difference is what you have here this is going to be mind-blowing and we're going to take photographs and we're going to look back and we're going to say now i can't believe this is what we were doing x weeks ago this is really special stuff looking forward to it cast thank you so much for hosting us once again today and explaining the concept around the roll-up farm so i suppose yeah let's continue to take pictures of the growth and let's see you know what's what beautiful vegetable garden we could uncover from this thank you thank you very much thank you so much for watching the gardening series today and we just did a demonstration of the roll-up farm and we're going to be taking pictures and sharing them with you just to see the progress of these beautiful vegetables and herbs throughout the coming weeks so come on through to home growers get your own roll-up farm buy your own seedlings ride shared home growers and they have a 24-hour support line through whatsapp just to assist you in how to plant where to plant the plants and the different crops that you could buy and grow in your own roll-up farm please do share some videos and photos of your own farm using the roll-up farm and remember to tag us that's it from me Bali Moko and i'll see you on Thursday at 8 p.m