Mike, I live on a sand hill here in Jax. I have spent the better part of the last 4 years rehabilitating the soil by layering chip. At first my neighbors hated me because I covered 90% of my front yard. My dirt is black now. The lawn I left is super healthy and my fruit trees, ginger and other plants are like Hercules.

Also glad to hear of your bride's recovery too. Keep on growing!

Sometimes we all must stop and reevaluate what we are doing. Good ted talk. Looking forward to your cooking shows.

Please don't give up on your easy kratky methods of teaching, as they've been wonderful. 'Seasonal issues' cause many plants to collapse. Nonetheless, gardeners are wise to not keep all their eggs in one basket. What's helped me tremendously this year, was improvising 'Terra Preta' methods into container gardening. (See: David The Good Terra Preta /KZfaq, & many others as well). Thank you for all your efforts!!!

It snows here Mike and I grow tomatoes, peppers and eggplant in bato/ dutch bucket style hydroponic in my greenhouse year round. It's all hit and miss soil or soil free. Hippies unite 👍

Looking forward to seeing where you taking this channel Mr. Mike. Stay safe!

My Kratky tomatoe is still living off bucket humidity only. It looks near death but still blooming and growing little tomatoes.

I live in a small apartament with a balcony in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. No land or "backyard" avaulabre. Kratky is a good choice for me. Sending good vibes for you your wifevand your family. Keep on Growing!

Man that intro. Was kinda like a meditation experience. I love your "literal" down to earth videos. You could start a meditation podcast with that soothing southern twang 🌱☀️👍

Now that was a surprise Mike hehe, so cool to see me on your channel. I reckon to mix it up my friend and do a bit off both. I actually have a vertical aeroponics tower now and loving it. So I am actually gardening in both mediums these days! Looking forward to the live cooking shows too. Best regards from Australia Your friend Marty

Just starting to roll with kratky method this week. Love the salad greens in endless supply. Thanks so much for all of your videos, Mike.

I love the down spout kratky method for lettuce, kale and spinach when in ground growing is not an option, like this summer with the drought or now when the first freeze is just around the corner. I will keep on growin thank you very much!

Looking forward to seeing what is coming Mike 😁😸♥️✌🏼

You are heartbroken! Your effort go out the window. Don't give up! Tmr will be a better day. You will get creative! Looking forward to it!

Change is the only thing that one should count on. All the knowledge that you have shared has helped many folks start their journey in the gardening and eating healthier. You were one of the channels that helped me jump in the "deep water."

My thoughts are that kratke method is the cheapest. Growing in soil if you have means to pay for the wood chips not to mention having to add $$$ for soil nutrition and amendments and having to deal with snails and bugs the kratke method wins.!!!

Do whatever keeps it fun for you guys, Mike! I started Kratky this summer as an additional method to my outdoor soil growing. I live where the leafy greens season is short, and so added Kratky to keep the greens rolling. I’ll keep growing out in soil what seems to thrive that way, and similarly grow indoors what works best with Kratky. It’s a win! Fresh food, year round, and, so far, no planter burn out. (: Thanks so much for sharing your experience with us! Looking forward to learning new ways to serve it all up!

depends on where you live.. we had over 100 inches of rain in louisiana in 8 months and a pretty epic hurricane.. everything in my garden died due to too much water... but my kratky plants inside my building did wonderful.

I love the Kratky for starting my seedlings that will grow bigger & stronger (& cheaper) then any store or nursery will sell me. I love i can extend my outdoors garden to indoors now with kratky method. My hubby loves it so much that he's planning to build a 12x10 greenhouse since my hydroponics has outgrown our atrium. I stick with true 100% kratky method and don't use pet moss or soil. I use rock wool because I hate fungus gnats! I do sterilize my soil in the oven, but I hav very few pots with soil, they're usually just used as testing objects. Chin up! Smile & Focus on the Son!

Clutched my pearls a bit on that opener 😂 I think just about every kind of gardening has its place, depending on the resources and climate a person is working with. Florida has great sun, but the midday heat can make things difficult for plants and depending on where you are in the state the soil situation can be dire. Pretty sure a lot of the commercial tomato growers are practically hydroponics because they're growing in sand with liquid nutrient sprays hah! Everyone's gotta find their mix, what works with their space, their time, their budget, their ability. It's good to reassess regularly! Personally kratky will always have a place, because the barrier to entry is so low, as is the need for intervention.

I made 12 downspout trays last year, had success indoors with grow lights and outdoors last spring. Living in an apartment too, not bad. I'm going to do it again indoors this winter, along with a DYI deep water culture unit that I have yet to put together. I'll be posting on your fb group. Keep On Growin, you taught me that! 🙏for Keeley ❤

thank you for sharing all this great info and common sense. i love how you encourage us to just try things. to see what works for our enviroments/space. it is 25 degrees outside and in my living room i have a lovely zinnia blooming. and that just tickles my soul... have gardened out doors for 20 plus years. only started playing with indoors stuff a bit over a yr ago..

Considering we live in a strange world of man made Reset change....survival will be intuned to many DIFFERENT ways of growing and change. No reason to be an only/or kind of deal. I used to read Ben Franklin's gardening diary. He tried so many ways of experiment. Test and trial and we thank you for channels like this to help the over all knowledge pooling!

I am a decade long Montana farmer and have always been in soil. Just now coming to Kratky for the winter. I appreciate your new found balance and a return to soil. I never intended to leave soil, so I am excited to hear what you find as you get back to soil. I am not as familiar with Back to Eden and will have to do some reading into it. But I know one concern is that decomposing often takes up nitrogen available to plants in the soil. We also get tons of mushrooms that fruit annually, which is the other way to decompose other than a "hot" compost. It was a concern for us for awhile as we had kids under 2, but now we aren't so worried. I do top dress my raise beds annually with a half inch of a product we have available called soil pep. It's a partially decomposed small chip wood product. It does great to keep weeds down and water retention. At the beginning of each I turn it into the soil for added water retention.

Can you use aluminum downspouts instead of plastic just found you and have alot of aluminum spouts or will they kill my plants thank you for all the information will keep watching E

I have grown all in soil but am going to do some hydroponics. Your videos have been inspiring. I won’t go completely to hydroponics because I too love getting my hands dirty. However, growing the leafy greens in the downspout system will free up valuable garden space for other crops!

I have a black thumb. Kratky method has been the only thing. The videos are far and few. Hope you keep making them. Wishing you a speedy recovery. Do what you feel good to you. Many blessings

I am confused so what happened there at the beginning of the video with the lettuce? Did you forget to water it or what caused it.

You should check out the Mittlieder Gardening Method too. I've been using it for 10+ years and growing in sand and sawdust.

I live in high desert Rocky Mountain Colorado. I don't have "soil", I only have dust and sand (and turf so I can pretend to have grass). I recently found your channel and will be doing indoor hydroponics and was glad to find your channel so I can start without having to figure out pumps, etc. I'm also planning an aquaponics setup that I can hopefully keep in a greenhouse outdoors (someday). I wish I could do in ground garden, because we have always had one, but it's not happening here. Thank you for your channel.

I think it's important to use as many methods as possible, as a way to hedge our bets. I can't organically grow cruciferous plants outside without them getting covered in cabbage moth caterpillars. (I really hate those things!) I'm hoping I can convince them to grow inside, or in a screened enclosure, using either a hydroponics method, or maybe vermiponics. But I completely understand not wanting to give up growing in the soil! I'll be here to see what you're up to. 😊

I grow in both. But I love my little downspout kratkys for in the house! Under my big LED banks in the house. Lettuce and tatsoi-bock choi -basil. Its wonderful lol. And I got my down spout for free! Lol But my deep water kratky buckets for cucumbers were the best. The cucumbers outside never caught up or could compare. But the tomatoes didn't do anything compared to in the soil lol Now the eggplant and peppers and celerys also loved kratky. But several things didn't love it lol. Watching you experiment encouraged me to play. 8ve only got probably 10 days of decent weather and the frosts and cold will be here so thank you for all your help. Being a jack of all trades never hurts. Hope your wife feels better soon. I missed what happened but I'm a cancer survivor and during recovery your videos(and many other youtubers) kept me from going stir crazy bonkers. Everyone finds their balance!🥰🥰 Thank you for all your videos.

I enjoy growing in raised beds when it’s warm and indoors I use a Tower Garden which works great. I don’t know why you would have to choose one method over the other.

Great video...has a sort of sad tone to it...hope you and Keely are doing well.

Can you do a video on what goes well or badly in kratky also are they any worries with termites with the wood chip method

Hello Mike Here in Canada the winter is long and the vegetables especially in winter are very expensive and full of we do not know what, pesticides and many other products whose effects on health are unknown. This is what brought me started a small interior garden. I started growing lettuce the Kratky way for 5 months now and it's been an incredible success in three weeks we already had a harvest of fresh lettuce leaf. I also made cherry tomatoes, NO but there are so many that we do not provide to eat them we give to charities. For my part, I find Kratky to be extraordinary. Outside there are bad weather, insects and diseases are very numerous. Anyway next summer May 2022 I will try the MFT sustem in my backyard. Thank you for your very informative little videos I keep following you Ray

Yes. BtE method would work. I've been using pinestraw in the walkways of my gardens for years. Now, plants are making their way into the decaying pinestraw and growing well. Love Kratky.

Thank you so much for all your videos! I just found you recently, right after we had built a cold frame in our shady Zone 5 yard. I've learned so much and love the ways you find to save money. As my husband watched me switch my focus on hydroponics I think he was wondering why he built the cold frame. And this video is exactly the way I was thinking. We all need to do BOTH! Especially for us cold weather folks - hydroponics will get us thru the below freezing months. It's too late for us to do much planting outside, but now is the time to prep the outdoor areas for early planting in the spring! You might want to check out OYR Frugal & Sustainable Organic Gardening, he has some fantastic videos for gardening in small spaces! Thank you again for all your hard work and looking forward to more videos, including the cooking!

I now have my first successful batch of lettuce in the gutter system; grow lights definitely help. Eventually I want to grow strawberries - the ones in the store are so mealy, tasteless and $$$. In your experience, what system would be the best? I’m using my sunroom, since the Texas clay, heat, and mosquitoes are just too much for me.

Thank you for your guidance.

Back to Eden method is an investment that pays over time. The last house we lived in, I spent quite a bit of time running to the tree service that would allow me to haul away all of the shredded tree trimmings that I could get in. I put a layer about a foot deep across the back yard (it was fairly large by Henderson, NV standards. The next year I lay sweat hose and drip irrigation and planted sweet potatoes in addition to my usual tomato plants. I also tried okra but the plants were attacked by aphids and ants and died. Soap spray didn't stop the attack. I had a decent tomato season (February to May in Nevada, then the 100°+ temperatures kill the pollen and the plants won't set fruit) and sweet potato vines that covered nearly the entire yard. Just before our first frost I harvested the sweet potatoes and pulled up some monster sweet potatoes. I had never seen sweet potatoes that large before. They tasted great. The next year I planted watermelon as well as my usual tomato plants. All of the neighbors that thought I was crazy when I was hauling the wood chips and putting it down in my back yard got some huge watermelons as gifts. Oh, and I had a few volunteer okra plants that came up, and they grew great and I had a bunch of okra pods. The top of the ground looked like faded wood chips but dig down and you have dark fertile growing media. No fertilizer was needed, stuff just grew. You don't till it in, that will tie up the nitrogen. Then my wife wanted to downsize to a smaller place, now that the kids had left home. The yard we have is much smaller(typical of Nevada housing) and I am back to planning a container garden, but trying to figure out how to do a modified hugelkulture in each pot. I also plan to do some sort of Kratky for the greens but want to figure out how to do a float valve to maintain the nutrient level in the tub.

Our weather has been chaotic (floods, cold, very hot, heavy rain) crazy=like Mother Nature has the flu.! So I am trying the kratky method , much safer for my plants in our current weather condition, Hope you enjoy getting back to nature and the soil.

I pray a quick recovery for Keeley with no repercussions, in Jesus Name! So enjoy your videos! Looking forward to your cooking shows!!!

can someone explain what happened with the lettuce? What kind of seasonal issue caused it?

I was wondering what other soluable fertilizer I can add with the calcium nitrate and epsom salts apart from MasterBlend 4-18-38 as I am in Australia and cannot source it here?

In the alto g and summer I groaning the soil, even in the fall and winter I grow under cover. I like growing greens in the winter indoors with Kratky, There are fewer pest issues, and it’s great having herbs and fresh fresh fresh greens. Using both methods makes a well rounded year round garden!

Raised beds and hydroponics, never failed me in 30 years

I do no till, I also do raised bed, sq ft, and kratky gardening. I raise meat rabbits that superpower my soil and compost for the raised beds. We have a huge farm but I do in ground less and less with the exception of perennials. Figs, blackberries, persimmons, blueberries, raspberries, passionfruit, rosemary, and a lot of medicinal stuff. I have watched the back to eden a few times. I use more the hugelkultur method with a lot of compost and rotational nitrogen fixers. Like now kale, spinach, chard, mustard, onions, leeks, peas, hundreds of garlic, and heart of winter asian cabbage growing for the winter in the raised beds. I am kinda like you, most plants have to be useful. The way I justify it is I plant the medicinal garden flowers. Agastache, salvia, milkweed, borage, bee balm, mallow, elecampane, yarrow, feverfew, are all great pollinator food and medicinal. Also keep in mind you have helped a lot of apartment bound people that don't have a plot of dirt. We all have setbacks, I think the key is diversity. The kratky stuff is great for the year round indoor leafy greens and herbs no doubt. I'm even overwintering scotch bonnets in kratky. Thanks again for all ya do, Mike. TC and ATB, Cris.

The same thing happened to all my greens. The water got too hot. At least it was all dollar store stuff 😂. Im still going to try pool noodles instead of rockwool in my hydroponic systems. I hope that works. Im going to melt a hole in the center because i also think the seedlings got squeezed too much. Thanks for the inspiration!

Great videos Mike, and great advice in this one. Take a look at Korean Natural Farming for feeding your plants in soil. Blessings.

I hope Achilles will be feeling better real soon. Soil Growing definitely has it's feel good parts. Sitting on the ground, feeling the earth, the sunshine, fresh air. all that is so nice. At this house where I live now, pretty much everything that I tried to grow outside in soil was destroyed by soil based pests, airborne chewing pests, or four legged lawnmowers called deer. I put so much effort into making soil mixes, and raising my compost worms, and amending clay and stuff, just to have it destroyed every season. ( Also there are mosquitoes like mad here, so sad) I tried using the downspout outside and it was doing well, but the plants were still plagued by chewing pests and the water plagued by mosquitoes. I never got any harvest of anything from it. I found some space inside and im finally growing something that might survive to harvest. I'm trying to grow bok choi and it is growing just fine inside in the downspout on the table under grow light. I've regrown the roots of green onions and now have three containers that are growing more than I can eat, in clay pebble and water. I appeciate all the work you went through explaining the waterspout and other kratky methods and I think I'm benefitting from it since I can no longer garden outdoors like I want to for health reason and all the above reasons. I'm glad you like shiso , it's is nice culinary herb, but shiso is so invasive, it will grow anywhere and spread like...a weed. i accidentally let some go to seed, now Shiso has taken over my backyard and I can't pull up enough of it to keep it from spreading widely. I wanted to hire some goats to clean up my backyard, but I cannot now because the Shiso plants growing everywhere would poison them(highly toxic to grazing animals, cows, horses, sheep, etc and dogs.) So just be careful not to let you shiso go to seed uncontrolled or it might become a problem for you and neighbors. Good thing it has a shallow root system so it is easy to pull up. Good luck with your dirt garden.

We've been working with back to eden method for almost 3 decades. Our marginal soil is becoming truly fertile with many self seeding volunteers year over year. When our farm lost our 100+ water supply to PFAS contamination in 2017 we would have been sunk had it not been for our deep mulch gardens.

Hang in there, Mike.

Best hydroponics channel on the planet 🌍 I like getting my hands dirty, too.

The back to Eden method will work quite well

Try grow box using free cardboard boxes at store (grab while they stock shelves usually early morning). Line inside walls with shiny side of aluminum foil. Better than mylar! Add 100 watt led DAYLIGHT bulb ($10 pack of 4, Walmart). Add desk lamp (clip or standing) or hang with bulb socket adapter (bulb socket to wall outlet adapter) $2 for 2 at Walmart. $5 for 24 hour (15 minute intervals) manual Timer at Harbor Freight. Flip each 15 minute interval on/off.

I have soil and Hydro based gardens. Texas is HOT in summer so indoor growing of Lettuce is the only alternative. Outdoors I have done NFT, Dutch Buckets, Kratky, and traditional Soil. Its all good...

My Urban Garden is IN my apartment (no patio). The downspout planters I have have no bugs. My planters with dirt have little black flying insects so I'm going full kratky hydroponic. Going to try adding goldfish and aquariums.

Love your Channel 🐝 good 😊

Grunt lol, I decided to mold my own end caps for the 3x4 gutter down gouts, noy fond of 45 deg angle and i make them a hella lot cheaper than most charge, so i kmow the grunt sounds lol.

Mitlieder gardening uses hydroponic nutrients in soil. I tried it this year with great results.

Can anyone understand the name of the method???? I was hoping to see it in description.

I enjoyed the Ted Talk Mike 👌 happy for your wife too

Mike have you ever tried to grow collards in the kractky before

I grow in soil and hydroponic… doesn’t have to be one or the other. Just remember Paul Gauche used mulch not plain wood chips. It’s mulched trees, bushes, flowers, clippings, including leaves and all, and he fertilises with the chicken manure from his chicken coop. So essentially he is growing in decades of compost. I was inspired by back to eden also and ordered a truckload of ‘wood chips’ which took ages to break down, and didn’t have the results Paul had. When I rewatched back to Eden, it dawned on me that he didn’t mean plain wood chips, but he meant mulch. Again, remember he throws his old clippings and produce to feed his chickens, and screens his chicken manure to throw into the garden. I must say, water retention has been great. I don’t have decades of soil built up, but I can definitely see my clay soil improved with Paul’s method.

You may want to see if you have “Chip Drop” in your area. They will deliver wood chips to you for free. Back to Eden still needs fertilizer, he uses chicken droppings in his wood chips and blood meal for starts. I use kratke in the fall and winter for lettuce, kale, bok Choi, Swiss chard, basil, parsley,cilantro. Slugs and aphids have destroyed my winter garden outside.

I hear all my lettuce inside and it does real well

Hello Mike. I've followed your channel for a while, and have tried Kratky and bought master blend based on your vids. It worked OK, but I agree that growing in soil feels better, and in my opinion tastes better. I highly recommend you check out the KZfaq channel of Charles Dowding. He's an English Gardner who has dedicated his life to no dig, and he in my opinion is a master of his field. Good luck.

while change is inevitable i'll still stick with the Kratky or their Wick counterparts, the reason is simple : set it and kind of forget it..... seasonal shindigs is sometimes a bitch and a half but so far mine came up still great even with some mistakes in the seed germination part LOL

😊

Those outdoor plants look really leggy, not enough light I surmise. Take it indoors...

it just depends on what a person has

Just starying kratky

.tear.

Make it simple Men

Don't be fooled by Paul Gauchi. He mixes chicken manure into his wood chips for Nitrogen.

NO 🤓🤓🤓

Dear sir i have followed you for a while. but now am unsubscribing i don’t appreciate the drama queen beginning. sorry you chose to manipulate your subscribers that way .