This is our final product. So, I’ve got half-pint jars of mulberry jelly. There’s a couple ways to seal them. The way that we have sealed these is with a paraffin wax. Your pour it on the top & it makes an airtight seal. Oh, man, that’s cool!

So, here we are today with Jason Golden on his urban homestead here in Kansas City. He’s one of The Urban Farming Guys. So, what do we got here, Jason? This is my magnificent mulberry tree.

It’s June 6th. These have been fruiting for about a week. & I’m gently taking off the ones that are ripe & leaving the ones that aren’t ripe. There’s two ways you can do it. You can do it the laborious way, like I’m doing, picking each individual one off. Or, you can lay a tarp down & shake the whole tree. But, the trouble with shaking the whole tree is that the ripe ones & the non-ripe ones are gonna come off so you’re going to lose more of your harvest by doing that. So, I’m doing it the slow way. This is what we got. That’s about two cups or so. You try to get maybe eight cups per batch. We’ll take them inside. Alright!

So, we’re taking our mulberries from our tree in the front yard & sticking them through this ricer. Now, what this ricer is good for is extracting the juice. So, if you want to make a jelly or a clarified jelly, you’d want to get all the pulp out. Now, if you don’t want all the pulp, you can make a preserve & just use a potato masher & just crush them in the pan. We’re gonna try to extract some juice real quick.

What is the papery filter? This is cheese cloth & this is just to keep some of the solids from going through these little holes. Okay. You can strain it the second time if you’re really picky on how much to go through. What is that, a piece of wood? Yeah; I don’t know what you call this thing. Mortar & pestle?

We’re getting something! Mulberry juice! Man! & that thing was probably built just for the—what’s this thing here? This is a ricer. You can put apples through it, you can put grapes through it..anything that you want to squish. I don’t know why you’d put rice through it, but they call it a ricer. So, I’m pushing it kind of hard trying to get as much out of it as I can. You do lose quite a bit of your volume when you just extract the juice. That’s why a lot of people do preserves or jams. So, what are we making today? This is mulberry jelly. Now, ultimately, you’re going to want to do a bigger batch than this, but this is just to kind of show you how to do it. Here you go. Put all that stuff in your compost, man. Nice. Where is your compost at? It’s right behind you.

What do you got right there, man? Where is that? Right behind you. Oh, that’s my barrel-ponics. Alright, we’ll have to do a future episode on that, buddy. Ha ha ha. Alright, let’s take this goodness inside & see what we can make.

Alright, so here’s your parts & pieces. You’ve got your fruit juice/mulberry juice. We’ve got about a half cup. This is just a sample, just to show you how. You’d prefer to have about four cups. As a rule of thumb with mulberry jelly, if you want it to set up right, you will need to add equal parts sugar & juice. You also need to add a box of pectin. Mulberries do not have enough natural pectin to jell up on their own. You can also try substituting gelatin or corn starch. Or, if you want to do it with less ingredients, you can make preserves, using half the sugar & no pectin.

Now, we’re gonna take it over to the stove & get this guy going. So, how are we gonna make it into jelly? Well, we are going to heat up the juice until it begins to boil. Then, we are going to stir in the sugar & the pectin. You can also add a tablespoon of lemon juice. Then, bring it to a rolling boil. Then, cook it for one minute & pull it off. Make sure you have your canning jars sterilized in boiling water, ready to go, as soon as your jelly comes off.

So, here we are at the Golden Acre homestead. We’re cooking up some jelly, eating chicken salad sandwiches with chickens that were grown here. Right back there; there’s family members back there. & bread that was just freshly baked in the $2 bread maker from yesterday’s garage sale. Man, we are doing good here..Jelly from the mulberry tree, chicken from the back yard. I credit the bread & the chicken salad to my wife; I just opened the fridge & helped myself.

Here we are for the taste test..We got some of the mulberry preserves. We burnt up that jelly, we were having so much fun. So, we had to break out the preserves. But, all the same. Actually, these are gonna be better; not as sweet. Oh, man; that is good. Yeah, not sweet at all. Way less sugar in the preserves. Man, why do people let their mulberry trees just fall on the ground? This is great.

So, Candy, what do we have here? We have a homemade fruit fly trap. We brought some bananas home from the store & ended up with some fruit flies.

So, I learned you can take a piece of paper, just wrap it into a cone, cut the tips so you can have a little opening at the bottom, & set it in a little jar, glass, cup, whatever, so it’s enough room for the tip of the cone to be above the liquid. You wanna put apple cider vinegar, with just a little water & a few drops of dish soap. & the dish soap helps the viscosity so the fruit flies drown easier. They can’t fly out, they get stuck on it..& also, the cone shape—they fly in & they can’t figure out how to get out..& then just tape around the edges so they can’t fly out that way.

Set it near wherever your fruit flies would be. Put it near the bananas, & it catches them all pretty quick. This is what you get.

Ooh, that’s nasty; pretty effective. It is, it is..it’s summertime.

You helping? Yep. You’re doing a good job, you know that?

So, the problem with mammoth sunflowers is they grow so fast that they end up falling over on their side almost 100% of the time..& I just refuse to stake them. But, we found another way. So, what you gotta do is dig a trench & put your seeds in at the bottom. Sunflowers are one of the few plants that you can pack dirt around the stem as it grows. Now, you can put your mammoth sunflowers wherever you want, not just on the side of the house or on the fence.

Our mammoth sunflowers are just about to the point where they’re about to blow over. So, we planted them in a ditch. Now, they’re grown up about almost a foot & we’re gonna pack the soil that’s piled up around the outside up around the plant. This way, you don’t have to stake them. Do this process when the plant reaches six inches…& pack some more dirt around it before it reaches two feet tall. You’re gonna want to put some fertilizer on these plants. We use fish waste from our aquaponics system. So, we’ve pretty much done that all the way down & now they’ll stand up on their own..& they’ve got a little troth for the water.

Here we are, it’s July 12th & our sunflowers have reached full maturity. & just through this time of waiting & watching, I feel like I, too, have reached full maturity. These things are growing right here with our pole beans & here’s one..& they are ripe, too. What we’re gonna do today is protect these seed heads from the birds. Last year, we lost 50% of our harvest just because the birds were one step ahead of us. We’re gonna show you how to do that. & we’ve got a special guest today; I’m gonna introduce you to her.

Today, we are here with some really special people. We’ve got Arthi & Voot. They are traveling across America on bicycles. They started in Boston. They’re traveling halfway across; we’re here in KC now. They are doing random acts of kindness everywhere they stop. So, this is Arthi & this is Voot. Can you tell me a little bit about what you guys are doing? Yeah, I’d be happy to. So, Arthi & I actually met in a class about community organizing at Harvard. & when we were in that class Arthi told me about her plan of biking across the country & doing these random acts. & it inspired me. I just thought this was a great idea. I love the idea of you know actually experiencing communities by biking through them..& meeting people in a much more interactive way vs. just kind of driving through & just seeing things through the window of your car. So, the kind of random acts of kindness we’ve done have been just a range all across the map. We’ve helped one guy clean his car leak. Our most interesting one, I think, to date, until now of course, has been helping a group called Pick Up America..& we’re just on our bikes, trudging through the sun, & we see a big, converted school bus driving by. & on the side of it, it said, “Pick Up America”. So, we’re interested. We go up, stop the bus, & ask them what they’re up to. They say, we’re doing a trash pick up, we’re picking up litter coast to coast. They started in MD, & now they were also in IN. We asked if we could join them for the day. They said sure. So, we spent the day with them just walking down the highway picking up trash along with them. We ended up spending two days picking up trash with them & the third day we ended up being in a parade with them in St. Louis.

Wow! That is super cool..So, you’ve met some interesting people, huh? Had some great conversations? We’ve had amazing conversations, & I think the best learning that we’ve had is people in this country are really kind & generous. & what we have done, has in no way shape or form, even come close to what other people have done for us. Wow! So, you go to give & –? & then, it’s just ridiculous..we have been given back like leaps & bounds more than we ever could have dreamed of giving. This one woman we met two days ago—We came into her town, we asked her if we could help her out with anything..She put us up in a hotel for the night, & she made us this amazing dinner, & she just shared a beautiful conversation & time with us..She gave us a lot of love & we were complete strangers. So, you know, it’s just been–Every single person we’ve met along the way has been incredibly kind & generous towards us & it’s been a fight to find something to give when every one’s been giving to us so much. So, it’s been really inspiring.

That is incredible! That is really cool! So, these guys heard about us & stopped by & we’ve had a great conversation, great time. Now, they’re about to help us harvest these sunflowers & they helped us with some green beans & some other things. Now, we’re gonna get to it. Woo! Okay, let’s do it!

So, Candy’s been researching this after what happened last year with the birds. Candy, what do we need to do? Well, we can take paper bags..You wanna use paper, not plastic, so they won’t mold. You put them over the head & you allow the sunflowers to finish maturing in the bags. So, it keeps the birds from getting at them & then you’re able to get a seed with more meat in it. We could harvest these now, but they’d be mostly shell & not enough meat. So, we want them to go a little longer, but we don’t want the birds to get them.

Yeah, so I’ve heard that you can cut these down & hang them in your house or on your porch, but you’re saying to leave them on the stem? As long as you can, yeah. So, we’re gonna put the bag on there to keep the birds from eating them..& then, come out here..When do we come back out here & take the bag off? You want them right as the seeds are starting to actually fall off of whatever this is called. They’ll get so dry..these little yellow things will fall off first & then the seeds will start to actually get loose so then you can just go like this & they fall right off. It was really hard the one year we picked them a little early before the birds got them. We had to pick & they were really green & we didn’t have a lot of meat…Yeah, I had blisters on both my thumbs. Alright, let’s get to it!

Boston to Boulder! So, this is everything right here? Yep, this is it. We have a tent, a sleeping bag, a sleeping pad, a pair of pants, two shirts, a pair of bike shorts, a helmet, a cook stove, a book & a toothbrush, toothpaste, & soap. That’s all you need. That’s all you need! Bye, you guys! Bye! Take care, thank you! Go, Urban Farming Guys!

When most of these little yellow flowers have fallen off or come off really easy, it’s ready to harvest. Alright, to harvest these sunflowers, the best way is if you were a trained ninja with a sword. But, today, we’re gonna try a little higher level of difficulty. We’ve got this, take this off here, &—aaahhh! What happened? What happened, Mom?

Now, we’re gonna knock off any of these little flowers if there’s any left. Titus, you wanna help? Yep. Yeah, knock these off. When they’re ready, these should come right off of here. We picked them a little too early last year & they were still good, but they were really hard to get off. & we got blisters on our thumbs by the time we got to about the 15th head. Titus, you wanna help Daddy? Yep. Help with those. Good job. So, you wanna take some of your bigger heads & save the seeds on those. This is just a medium-sized head; we’re gonna roast these up, soak them in some salt water, & season them up. Titus, you helping Daddy? Yep. Alright!

Here’s a separate batch; we’re gonna save. We didn’t cook these. We’re just laying them out to dry. We’re gonna put them in a dry place for a couple of weeks, then put them in a paper bag til we’re ready to plant them.

Okay. So, what you want to do is soak them in salt water. For every two quarts of water, use anywhere from a quarter to a half cup of salt. You kinda split the difference. You just let them soak overnight. Or, if you want to do them faster, you can actually do them at a low boil for a couple of hours on the stove & that will get the salt in the shells. Let them soak overnight & then in the morning, you can drain them & let them dry. Just spread them out on a towel or something. Let them dry & then you want to put them in the oven to roast them. Can you add some of your own flavors? Yes, we add the flavor beforehand…Or, you can roast them & add the flavor & a little bit of butter after. Awesome!

Alright, so spread them out on a cookie sheet. Put just a little bit of oil. We use some seasoning salt, some sea salt, & some garlic powder. Let the oil get a little bit on all of them. Stick them in the oven. You do low temperature, like 300, for a while. Just keep checking them every 20 minutes/half hour & see how they’re doing..When they seem pretty dried out & crisp, take them out. We’ll let you know how long these took.

Then, you pull them out of the oven when no one’s looking & you’ve got a tasty snack..You know they’re done when they’re nice & dry & you can hear them. We cooked these for about an hour at 300. You want them to pop when you crack them. That’s good!

These guys right here are our vortex filters. Retail, they’d be about $4,000 apiece…DIY version, about $100..You might be able to do it for cheaper. We’ve got a 55-gallon drum, with a cone built into it, down into a shower drain. Out here, you can pull off your fertilizer every day for your garden. I’ll show you about that.

We’re pulling off a pretty incredible fertilizer. We had it tested at the University of Columbia. 10-6-2 fertilizer with a ton of micro-nutrients. Right here, is our aquaponics system with IBC totes. We’re gonna be focusing on the four cylinders on the backside of the system. These are our vortex filters; we’re gonna show you how to build them from scratch. We have a pretty intense system so we built some really intense filtration. But, you’ll wanna think about these processes.

Stage One, you wanna settle out as much of the solids as you can before you send it to your mechanical filter so you don’t have to change your filter pads all the time. So, we built this vortex filter where the water spins real slow, the solids settle to the bottom, we pull them off as fertilizer every day.

Stage Two, whatever solids sneak by get caught in four filter pads so that the only thing left to filter now is the ammonia.

Stage Three, is the biological filter. It’s where you create a lot of surface area for bacteria to grow. Ours is a bead filter. You might do a sand filter or a trickle filter. After stage three, the ammonia is turned into nitrate. It’s pumped up to the plants.

Stage Four, the plants use the nitrates & send it back clean. & you can do this on a much simpler level. We wouldn’t even need the vortex filters if we just had 100 fish instead of 1,000. The rocks & the grow bed would do most of the biological filtration & we’d just to have to clean it out, whatever solids got caught up in there. But, we are on a mission to create organic fertilizer & harvest it. So, how did we build it?

Alright, we make our vortex filters out of 55-gallon drums. You’re gonna have to pick up one of these 55-gallon drums. This one here had vanilla in it. You wanna make sure it’s food grade. We picked it up for $15, got four of them for $60. & first thing you do, is plumb in this shower drain right here. So, we thought, we’ll drill a 3-inch hole. Come to find out, you run into all sorts of problems..When you drill in, here’s what we drilled out..it’s got a humongous bump in it. It’s anything but flat, so if you’re trying to plumb that shower drain in, you’re gonna leak. You’re gonna leak real bad, cuz it’s just not a flat surface. So, we had to figure out a way..What do we do? So, we went to go buy some new drums..Looked & looked; went to four or five different places & could not find a single one that was flat..found some that were more flat, but still it was rough & wavy. I guess it’s just part of the plastic process. So, I racked my brain. I went up to the metal shop, looking for a giant, 8-foot C clamp & couldn’t find it. So, I thought, man, I’ve gotta make my own tool to iron this plastic out, heat it up. It was a total theory; I halfway believed it would work. & I found these two metal plates right here. They were just plain metal plates. & I thought, man, if I get these holes drilled in it & weld on some bolts, tighten it down, put it together. You know, while I’m tightening it & heating it with the torch, it’ll iron that plastic out. & so, I went down to the machine shop, paid them $20, he drilled me perfect three holes right here in the middle of this circle I drew for him, & boom, we got a plastic vice..& it worked.

Okay, what we’re doing now, is heating up these plates, which we’re gonna use to flatten out the bottom of these 55-gallon drums. Kinda like what we’ve done over here on these.. So, I’ve drilled some holes to put the plate on both sides..getting the plates real hot. I’m gonna flatten out these barrels so we can plumb the bottom of them in. Now, we’re tightening this up, one by one. Don’t tighten any one of them up too tight before you go to the next one, just get it snug, snug, snug, snug. Keep going around. He’s heating it from the inside. We’re looking for it to start melting around this edge. But, it happens really fast, so you wanna pull off before the whole thing melts through & you ruin your drum.

Then, you’re gonna keep heating it..Switching back between tightening it up, heating it, tightening up til you get that bead of melted plastic around the edge. Then, you might have to run outside & hose it down before it melts all the way through. Okay, I’m starting to get a little bead, probably can’t see it in the video..Right there, that little clear, plastic bead. & there might be a better way of doing this, I don’t know..I’m just kinda shooting from the hip here. But, we’re about completely flat here..I’ve been tightening it up & heating it up, & you can go too far really fast. So, I better pay attention. See that bead, bubbling out on the edges there. This is where we wanna stop..

Next thing you’re gonna wanna do after you flatten the bottom of your barrel out, is drill a hole with a hole saw. We’re using a 3 1/4 inch hole saw…gotta make sure it’s real sharp. You want that shower drain to just fit through there, not too tight, but not loose. You want as much sealing surface area as you can. So, you’ll drill that hole, you’ll plumb your shower drain in. You make sure you have that gasket underneath the barrel..you might put one on top, but definitely one underneath. Use a bunch of pipe dope. You’ll put pipe dope on all these threads. Plumb that thing in there, & then put your tank up on blocks. Put your 55-gallon barrel up on blocks, throw a plug in there. Pick up one of these plugs for $2. You have to check it to make sure it doesn’t leak before you throw a bunch of concrete in there & waste your barrel. Fill it full of water, check it out, make sure it doesn’t leak, & then you’ll be ready to move forward.

So, this is what your cone is gonna look like before you rivet it together. Every cone is gonna be different. Every barrel is different. So, you got your upper diameter & your lower diameter for your shower drain. It’s a crazy equation. We got it from this guy; he used to build rocket bodies for the U.S. Army & he had to figure out how to cone down from a bigger cylinder to a smaller cylinder. So, hit up the wiki. We got the cone calculator. Alls you gotta do is type in the upper diameter & the lower diameter & the heighth of your cone. Make sure you got at least a 45 degree angle coming down so that the solids will fall.. It’s on our website: theurbanfarmingguys.com. Hit up the knowledge base & don’t give yourself a headache trying to figure out the cone all by yourself.

Next, we built a wood stand for our filter to sit on. It’s just four legs made out of 4x4s, a plywood top with a hole cut out for the shower drain to come through. Then, we plumbed off of that a valve. We made the whole thing high enough for a five-gallon bucket to go underneath it to pull the fish waste off. Next, drop your cone right into the barrel & center it over the drain hole. Then, take a Sharpie marker & trace around the top of the cone. You’ll use this mark as a guide when you’re putting down the cement base. Then, pull your cone out & mix up your cement. When your cement perlite mix is ready, cut a PVC pipe to the length of your cone wall & use it to form your base. Then, after it’s nice & cone-shaped, let it set for 3 days to dry. Come back, mix up some thinset mortar, spread it all over the cone, set your cone in, push down til the mortar squeezes all around the sides, clean it up, & let it sit for three more days. Then, come back, caulk it, wait for the caulk to dry, & you’ve got a cone-bottom filter.

So, here’s our inlet & outlet pipe. This whole thing’s been made possible by these magical uniseals. Instead of spending $100 bucks on a bulkhead fitting, we’re able to use these rubber uniseals, $5 apiece. Our inlet pipe is plumbed on..It’s on a rule of thirds here. This is the top of the cone, we come up a third from there, then come down a third & this is our outlet pipe here. You wanna get hard-turn 90s, this is as hard as I can find…& make them low-profile, cutting them down so they’ll turn inside your filter here. Let me show you. & you don’t need to use any kind of glue. Actually, I’m gonna drain this & cut it even shorter. & real soon, we’re start to get a vortex here & it’ll start to turn.

So, here’s what the finished product looks like. You can see the pipe coming in at the top is the outlet pipe. You can see the little tornado above it, the little vortex, it shows it’s working. This is where the water exits the tank. The pipe right above it is the inlet pipe. That’s where the water comes in, takes a hard right, & starts slowly spinning in the tank. The solids settle out & the clean water at the top is pulled off & sent to the second filter.

So, rewind a little bit, we’re gonna show you how to install the uniseal in the practice barrel. Before you drill your hole, you’re gonna wanna stick a support board in there. Like so, & drill right next to it..right there. Right now, we’re putting a beveled edge on the edge of these PVC pipes so that they’ll be able to slide through the uniseals. Then, you just pop the uniseal in the hole, push the pipe through, you gotta lubricate it a little bit with some WD-40. If you go too far, it’s one-directional, you gotta go all the way through, start again & push it to where you need it. Just enough to get our elbow in there, & we’re gonna put one up higher for the outlet pipe.

There you go, vortex technology is now in your hands. If you need a parts list, come check out the wiki on the web page. Stay tuned for part two where we build a mechanical filter & a bead filter. & come ask questions on the forum. We are here for you.