Food, Community & Government, Home & Lifestyle

Grow Your Own Food: Greens & Legumes

Lesson time 15:10 min

Learn how to grow two of Ron’s favorite vegetables: kale and sugar snap peas. Ron tells you how to plant them as well as how and when to harvest them.

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Topics include: Leafy Greens: Planting • Leafy Greens: Harvesting • Legumes: Planting & Harvesting

Ron Finley

Teaches Gardening

Community activist and self-taught gardener Ron Finley shows you how to garden in any space, nurture your plants, and grow your own food.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] RON FINLEY: Right now, we're about to talk about vegetables. We're going to get down, and I'm gonna show you how to plant some shit. So you guys ready? Let's do this. First of all, we're going to have-- we've got some kale seedlings, show you how to put those in the ground. We're going to put those in one of the boxes that we worked on that I showed you that you can repurpose-- a dresser drawer. We also have some snap peas, and we've got some sweet potatoes, so we're going to show you how to plant those too. Three of my favorite vegetables. Y'all want to plant some motherfucking kale? Right now, I'm gonna show you guys how to plant some shit. We about to get in this right now. I'm gonna show you how to have food on your plate in a matter of a month or so, depending on what you plant. So we're going to get into kale. And it's a some leafy green. The thing about most leafy greens, they have folic acid, they have vitamins A, C, and K, and a lot of fiber and iron. So this is the bed that we started earlier with our soil-- our store bought soil-- and our compost. So I'm going to let you guys see how we plant seedlings. So you can see these are already started. This is kale. So what you want to do is you don't want to break the plants. So you want to create a safe haven with your fingers, and you want to squeeze the pot. And fortunately, these are not root bound. This is a good example of what you would want to buy at a nursery, because you can see how healthy the plant is. It's all bright and the colors. There's no yellow branches on it, and it's just it's a healthy plant. You can see. You will want to buy this also because it's already grown. So rather than planting seeds in the ground that sometimes might come up, sometime they might not. You already know that this is going to come up. You already have it. And if you look closely, you can see how long some of these roots are, and I like the consistency of the soil. I like the fact that it's not pulling away from the roots. That you can see that it is clumping, but it's still breaking apart. So what you want to do-- I just do it with my hand, but for people that are scared of soil and worms, what you can do, you don't have to dig a hole. You basically just move the soil out of the way and put your plant there and cover it. But what you don't want to do, you don't want to go too far below the root ball or where the plant is coming out of the ground. You don't really want to plant higher than that, because that point here is the hardiest part of the plant, and it will resist a lot of times breaking and rot. So again, your spade, pull the soil out of the way and put the plant in there. Soil that's attached to the root ball as you can. A lot of times, people go to the nurseries and they buy these plants, and they fuck up because they take all the soil off of the root, and they put the plant in shock. You want to keep it attached. Thes...

About the Instructor

When Ron Finley first grew a garden on a curbside dirt strip, he got cited—and then a warrant was issued for his arrest. He fought back, got the laws changed, and started a movement. Now the community activist and self-proclaimed “Gangster Gardener” is teaching you how to grow your own food, keep your plants alive, and find beauty and freedom in gardening no matter the size of your space. Start planting a revolution.

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Ron Finley

Community activist and self-taught gardener Ron Finley shows you how to garden in any space, nurture your plants, and grow your own food.

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