Yesterday was a really nice day here in San Diego and so I took advantage and I got some

gardening done and one of the things that I needed to do was mix up my grow bags. So grow bags, for those

you who don't know, are actually the subject of my next book that's coming out in 2021.

So quite a ways away. It'll be ready for next season guys. But in the interim as I've been writing it I've been testing a bunch of different grow bag strategies. I really like this container for many different reasons and the principal reason is just the benefits of the air pruning that it provides.

And I'll get into air pruning in a different episode, but the downside of grow bags and there are probably there's probably one major downside

and the most major downside again it's going to be the fact that it is so porous

it's going to lose water from all sides including the the top the bottom and all around because again it's not made of plastic it's completely completely porous now that's great because you get the air pruning benefits, but a lot of people

seem to say that anything they plant in a grow bag just dies because it doesn't get enough

water, it just dries out too quickly unless you're really on top of the ball, then yeah, you're going to forget to water one hot day and then boom, your grow bag is dead.

And so what I had, and I had this from another project I was working on is I had a 2 by 6 frame and so it was about 2, what was it? It was 2 feet by 4 feet. Those were the dimensions and I had some waterproof lining that was

stapled inside. So I basically created a little outdoor pool or like a little

mini bathtub, right? So what I did is I put the grow bags in that in about an

inch of water. A lot of people will say well you're going to get mosquitoes and

that could be true and if you do get that you can pop a mosquito dunk into that and they will just die. They won't make it through that.

That's an absolutely foolproof way to kill mosquitoes. So I did that. So now you have water

wicking up from the bottom, right? And that's a fantastic way to help stave off some of that water loss.

But I also brushed out about an inch of soil because I fill the grow bags pretty tall and I replace that with a shredded straw mulch.

So the shredded straw mulch is nice because number one it's mulch and mulch protects the soil,

but number two it also is reflective and so it's going to stave off a little bit of the

soil heat especially for growing in a darker grow bag and so those are some things

that I've been testing and they

certainly seem to be helping the overall soil moisture quite a bit and so I would

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