Hello everyone, welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast, Kevin Espiritu here with Ariana

Iapini of the Birch Arbor Gardens.

She is an edible garden designer and consultant.

We talked yesterday about being a student in the garden and of course, you do have to

try some random and weird stuff sometimes to just see if it will work and solve the

unique problem that you might be facing in the garden.

So Ariana, I know that we have different climates, we probably have different challenges.

Is there anything that you've tried that's a little out there or a little funky that you

want to share with everyone?

Well this year I'm trying, so last year I should preface this by saying last year I started

growing in grow bags for the very first time and I did almost all of my tomatoes in the

grow bags last year and I didn't have any irrigation setup or any internal ways to water.

And so I found that I had so much drying out that we had such a dry summer last year

and a lot of those plants were really craving some more water and I actually have them

lining my driveway so they're kind of on the cement which is just, you know, drying

them out that much faster.

So this year I'm experimenting with the grow-oia-oia system where I've been able to utilize

those irrigation vessels inside the grow bags as a way to kind of slowly water in some

of those plants and so I'm doing a side-by-side comparison experiment with a few of the same

varieties of tomatoes, some with the oia, some without and then even the grow medium that

I'm using or the growing medium so I'm using some of them have a 50-50 mix of compost

and some of them are entirely potting soil so it's going to be a really cool experiment

...