Touring a unique terraced backyard farm | Farm Dreams

Let's head up the hill and you can see kind of the other areas of the farm. Okay, oh, carrots! Yep, these carrots are pretty close to ready. Yeah, yeah, wow! Everything looks so incredible from up here too. It's like this is where I feel like I would hang out every day. How much space did you say this was? Uh, with the kind of house, it's like 1.2 acres.

Okay, yeah, but I feel like, you know, the average person doesn't need 1.2 acres to grow food for themselves or their family, right? You can really kind of fit a lot into a small space. So, a lot of what we do here is really applicable to someone who's growing at home.

I know that Eric is no stranger to the heat, so I'm just looking around and trying to figure out how he deals with this direct sun. My friends, like I was mentioning at So Collective, they really want to lower the temperature. Yeah, you know they're getting kind of blasted with heat. You could fry an egg on their soil, right?

Well, actually, the thing that we're doing is using shade cloths, and I could show you on this bed here. Um, so if you want to take a few, they're a little hot. Yeah, out there. I feel like this is just further driving the point home that it's really very hot.

Yeah, I mean that's interesting about shade. Is like underneath that shade will be 20 degrees cooler. I'll do these three. Cool! Yeah, I'll hold this shade cloth, and you can roll it out. Oh yay, you can just pull.

Okay, cool! Yeah [Music]! And then we'll unfold it up and over. Yeah, perfect! I was hoping we would run under it like in elementary, army crawl. Maybe when the plants, like when they're wilting in the afternoon sun, you know, obviously it's not going to kill them but a stop photosynthesizing during that period and are actually using up energy rather than creating it.

So, especially with like, you know, younger plants that we transplant in the shade, it really helps with transplant shock. Nice! Yeah, transplant shock. I feel like I got transplant shock when I moved to LA.

I'm sure I like this neat little row cover; it feels like we tucked him into bed. And yeah, now we can play their lullaby. Seems like, you know, such a simple solution to making sure that your water isn't evaporating straight out of your garden beds as fast as you can put it in.

This is really accessible. This is really easy for the everyday person to use, and you could physically put your hand underneath and feel how much cooler it was just by adding that small structure. Bye lettuce! [Music]