Gardening with Eric Lampkin - 4/29/20

WCBI evening producer Eric Lampkin introduces us all to what he considers the easiest thing in the world, gardening.

Today it's all about creating your very own "salad bar,"

Night, i'm the six and ten producer, but during the day you will usually find me out here in my garden.

I'm here to introduce you to one of the easiest things in the world.

People think gardening is hard.

It's not.

This is what i call the "gateway drug" to gardening.

It's nothing but a couple of bags of soil, some seeds and water.

You're good to go.

Now here you'll see on either side of me, these are what i call my "salad bars".

It's a mixture of lettuce and other salad green.

I set these up just to basically keep the bags of soil off the ground.

What i'm going to show you today is how to do this and a couple of different options on how to do it.

I'll show you how.

Eric lampkin: all right, so this is the new salad bar.

You might say the third generation.

I built this basically using some scrap one by four i had lying around, chicken wire, a few screws.

I got it set up on sawhorses.

What we're going to do, the easiest thing, i've got two 50 pound bags of soil.

I got these at the co-op.

So, we've got a box, we've got potting soil.

The next thing you need's a knife.

Pretty simple operation.

You'll want to do this all the way end to end.

Basically, what you want to do is a little slit down the middle.

When it's all said and done, we will actually cut this piece of flap away.

You got your dirt up here.

Do this on both bags, obviously.

Eric lampkin: all right, we've got some pretty black soil here.

It's going to be good.

You want to kind of move this to the edges a little bit, fan it out a little bit.

Get it even, as even as you can.

I'm just kind of getting this out, kind of banking it up a little bit in the ends.

That way, when it starts to really rain, you don't get all your soil washing down to the sides.

You'll have a little bank along the edge here.

I'll take my little garden knife here, and i'm going to make a little easy furrows.

You want to do it shallow.

Actually, lettuce seed only has to be about a quarter inch deep.

That's why it does so well in these bags like this.

Eric lampkin: the other thing about lettuce seed, it's really small.

Lettuce seed is tiny, so a little bit of it goes a long way, and a lot of it goes a real long way.

We're just kind of sprinkling.

You probably won't even be able to see this, and i'm probably sowing a little heavy here, but that's why you thin things out.

So, we've got the seeds in.

Hopefully they're kind of evenly spaced.

All that's left now is cover them up a little bit.

We're going to give it a good soaking with the garden hose.

If you don't have a garden hose, you can use a watering can, tea kettle, whatever you got.

It doesn't make that much difference, just so long as you give it a good soak in the first go around, and get it down there.

Give it a chance to germinate.

As warm as it's been, it should be pretty easy to germinate right now.

Eric lampkin: i forgot one thing, and this is very important, no matter how you set these up, you have to have drain holes in the bottom of your bag for the water to drain.

I've already watered this.

I've already soaked it in good.

This is the last step.

All right, this is pretty easy.

All you need is your handy dandy knife, and you don't have to have any sort of set pattern.

You just want to cut several little slits in the bottom of your bags of soil to give it some room to drain.

Eric lampkin: there you have it.

Pretty simple stuff.

Hopefully in the next few weeks, these beds are going to look like those beds over there.

You'll be seeing a little green stuff popping up, and you'll have your simple garden.

And, some good salads too.

Hey folks, if i can do this, you can do this.