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Welcome to the Dissident Gardener.

I think that's what I'll call these shows.

I don't know what I'll call it.

I'm not sure the titles really matter all that much.

Well, as you can see, I made some progress on my gardening.

Now, that's two hours worth of work.

It doesn't look like two hours worth of work.

If you look at the other video I did, what I was showing,

Before,

well,

you walk past here,

you know,

this is probably 15 feet altogether or something like that.

And,

you know,

it's one of those things where you think,

oh,

geez,

how long does it take to pull up a few inches of soil?

But it turns out there was a lot more to it.

I actually, I didn't think it would take that long either.

I mean,

first of all,

you have this stuff,

which was down there,

but it was just covered in weeds.

And it wasn't like single weeds.

It was like a network of weeds, like a latticework.

And I'll show you this black thing that was underneath it here that it was woven into.

And so it was crazy.

And then there was this plastic as well.

It was just a lot harder.

You just couldn't shovel it out.

What I had to do is first shovel off the stuff off the plastic side and then slowly

pull the plastic up,

which of course was tucked underneath of all my moldy little stones here,

which I don't know why I like that mold.

I mean, since the stones themselves are kind of ugly.

I would actually take those out.

I don't know.

Well, anyway, but that's a topic for another video.

But once I got to this point,

then I had to find this black stuff that was,

it wasn't everywhere,

but it was like in this area.

And that was a real bear to get that out of there.

And then, of course, I pulled out a million weeds out of this soil.

If you look, I'm sure I'm doing good camera work here.

You know, this is really the soil that is most common here.

You see there's a ton of little rocks, a lot of clay, a lot of sand.

You know,

that's why growing stuff,

I mean,

you know,

some stuff you can grow,

some stuff you can't.

I mean, obviously, I've got pine stands.

I got oak all over the place.

You know, trees don't care.

But certainly a lot of plants do.

So that's what the whole potting soil, gardening soil business is.

So what I'm doing...

as you can kind of see here i'm pulling up some of this heavy stuff i'm going to

put down i think i'm going to get about four to six inches worth of gardening soil

down here and then i can put my plants in and i'll show you what they look like in

a few minutes

I was hoping to have all this done, but they're still in the garage now.

I got them from a local nursery, which was very helpful.

I basically said, look, I don't know anything about gardening.

I showed them a picture of my area.

They know the land around here.

And I said, look, I'm not looking for something.

I need some color.

Everything's green.

I mean, Kermit the Frog would get irritated by how much green I have.

So tons of green.

I'm looking for some color.

And I said,

I'm okay with something that's permanent,

like flowers in the spring or early summer and then just stays green.

But I'm also okay with something that, you know, lasts the summer and I just get rid of.

You know,

people have said,

you know,

as I'm talking about this,

they said,

hey,

you know,

what you can do is that you can get,

I forget what they call them,

but they're plants that basically just live in the summer.

They die and, you know, next spring you put new ones in.

I'm okay with that.

You know,

as I was thinking about it,

I started to understand the logic of that because then every year you can kind of

redo your area and try different things.

And it's not an expensive hobby either.

The plants that I bought,

I mean,

well,

first of all,

the soil,

not knowing what I was doing,

I went to Lowe's and I bought garden soil,

eight bucks a bag.

Come to find out the local nursery sells it for $4 a bag.

So

You live and you learn.

But now I have enough soil for 10 gardens.

But anyway, this is called dwarf bearded dragon iris, I think.

I think that's what the little tag says.

Yeah, dwarf bearded iris.

So I saved those guys.

I don't know what they do.

I don't know what the beard is.

I'm not sure what the dwarf is.

I'm not even really sure what an iris is.

But I save those, they'll stay.

What the heck?

You know, I'm not a killer.

Well, anyway, let me show you the crap I had to pull out of this thing.

You'll notice, walking down here,

I'm not making people seasick.

I took all the old dirt.

I threw it over here.

I decided I had a problem with the Welsh getting in my backyard.

So taking some advice of King Offa, I'm going to build a dyke.

So I put all the dirt and weeds and grass.

And you can see, you know, it's just like a latticework of this stuff.

But this, well, here you go.

Here's that black plastic thing.

So I don't know what the hell that is.

It's not plastic.

I don't know.

It's not biodegradable.

But whatever it is,

It was a real pain in the ass to get rid of.

So let me go show you my flowers now.

All right.

Welcome to what will one day be my workshop.

Right now, it actually originally was a garage.

And you could fit a car in here, but it's pretty tight.

And I don't really have a need to do that.

And my truck, I'm not even really sure if it would fit here.

So I decided, what am I going to do with this?

So I said, well, I'll make it into a workshop.

Now, what am I going to work on?

Well, I'll find something.

But anyway, there's my ego mower.

It's real dirty.

Last time I used it, which was like two weeks ago, because it keeps raining all the damn time.

I mean, it just got filthy.

I don't know what the hell happened.

But I have to clean it up.

Blades need to be sharpened because I hit a million stones.

The stone fairy has been a real bitch this year.

I went back early in the spring, and I removed stones and sticks, and she put them all back.

Well, anyway, say hi to a little man there.

These are the things that I'm...

I was told that these are pretty easy,

kind of hard to screw up.

Just give them plenty of water.

They'll be fine.

This white guy here is a dusty Adolf, and this is some sort of Himmler bush.

I'm not really sure about these names.

I'm thinking the woman at the nursery might have been pulling my leg.

Who knows?

But I like these yellow things and these purple guys.

And there's some other... Let's see.

I don't know if you can see that in there.

There's some other purple doohickey guy in there.

Anyway, there's actually a lot more here than it appears to be.

Because if you look, each little pot is this.

And she said, you know, during the summer, they'll grow two or three times their size.

They grow fast.

And then come the autumn, they'll die off.

And then that's it for them.

So anyway, we'll see.

I can always buy more.

And you can see the little man here.

He doesn't really like them.

He's curious about them.

He doesn't eat them, which is a good sign.

They're supposed to be deer resistant.

So we'll see if that's true.

Now, as far as, let's see, what else we got here?

Oh, see, there's my, that is the proto workbench.

And that means it's just the wood.

And as you can see, I have two by sixes here that are 10 feet long and are cheap.

I bought the cheapest two by sixes.

Now they're all straight, at least they're straight when I bought them.

And what I'm going to do is the legs are 4x4s.

So I'm going to make 4x4 legs.

I got 2x4s underneath this pile too.

So I'm going to make a really sturdy base, over-engineered sturdy base.

The top I'll make out of the 2x6s.

And if I don't like it, I got $30 worth of wood here.

I mean, I think these were six bucks a piece.

So,

you know,

you're not talking,

if I'm going to use six of them,

so that's $30,

something like that,

almost $40,

counting tax.

So if I don't like it,

tear it off,

recycle the wood,

use it for something else,

and that'll be the end of it.

But anyway, that's the plan.

The problem is that the weather is screwing me up here.

My hope was I'd have the gardening done.

Today the back piece and then I have the weekend to work on this But now I got to

fit the gardening in because I don't know how long these guys will last and they're

little pots and we're supposed to get rain on and off and through Monday Then we'll

see what happens.

These are my bikes.

That is my trail bike and it's not a dirt bike or a mountain bike,

but it's good for like a gravelly roads and You know as long as it's not too bad

and that's my road bike

Road bike's actually very nice.

I fell off the back of a truck to get my drift.

And it's carbon fiber.

It weighs about five pounds.

I didn't get the...

I actually didn't ride it that much over the last few years because the roads have

gotten so dangerous in Baltimore with...

diverse drivers so i stuck to this i have thousands of miles on this thing this is

a tank and it's great for bouncing around trails um there was a bunch of trails i

could ride and and i found uh along the sino canal here there's a huge long as 100

miles with paths and it but they have a paved one that's like 20 or 30 miles so i'm

gonna i'm gonna get back onto this guy try and lose some weight you know it's one

of those things uh get back on the bike put my home gym here which is what this is

and put this thing back together

And then,

you know,

maybe I'll still be an old man,

but at least I'll maybe be a little more fit.

I'll be a slightly more fit old man.

And there's the two guys there.

They're kind of camera shy.

It's funny.

This camera freaks them out for some reason.

And that is a freezer that is as old as me.

It still works.

It's amazing.

I actually work better than the freezer I have in my kitchen.

Yeah, you throw something in there and it gets rock solid in a couple hours.

But, oh, here's that bench that I mentioned when I wrote about...

This is what I bought.

It's like $200 off Amazon.

Pretty nice.

Not too nice, actually, for a bench.

So I'm just going to use it for clean work.

There's my battery collection.

All right.

I think that's enough of that.

Enjoy the video.

I'll see you next time.