Hi, I'm Realtor Sara Morrow with Cell State Ace Realty. Today on Proper Tee Time, we get to hear some pro tips from horticulture consultant and expert Joel Reich. Like me, Joel hails from New England, but has spent much of his professional life here in Colorado. He consults throughout the U.S. and also abroad and he's done so as a Longmont homeowner for 16 years. Joel holds a master's degree in horticulture science and his faculty at Colorado State University. He and his pet snakes spend half a year in Cuenca, Ecuador and half a year here in Colorado. He is especially passionate about mastering mushroom types for foraging, grafting and pruning his way to the perfect apple and finding pockets of feral asparagus clumps that grow around our many ditches across the front range. You'll want to watch this episode from start to finish at least once because this guy knows his stuff and he can help you increase your home's curb appeal and your home's value. We're being here today. Sarah, thanks for having me on. It's a real pleasure. Likewise. So let's jump right in. So why don't you tell us what you do and what you love about what you do? Sure, easy. So I'm a horticulture scientist. I've had experience and training in just about every kind of plants that you could possibly have. And what I do these days and have done for a number of years is I consult, I give good advice to people everywhere from multimillion dollar private companies producing horticultural crops of various types all the way down to people with a landscape that maybe just bought the house and want to know how to address what they've got or the changes they'd like to make over the first couple of years in the house and everything in between. I work with public education groups. I work with community gardens and again, just about everything. Greenhouses, cut flowers, you name it. If it's plants, I like to get into it and that leads me into what I like about it is the diversity. I'm very fortunate that I've got kind of an expansive set of knowledge and I get to do different kinds of things every day with every different client. Wow. So going back to the homeowner piece. Let's say I just moved in and I've got a postage stamp of a yard or I've got three acres for that matter. What are some ways that I can increase the enjoyment and even the value of that property either slowly over time or all at once if I don't have as green a thumb as you do? Yeah, well, first I would say there's a lot of ways you can approach a landscape and here in Colorado, everything, if it's gonna look good, it's gonna have some kind of irrigation and you're gonna have different kinds of irrigation depending on what kind of landscape you want. So the first thing I would say is rather than just start doing things, actually sit down and think, what kind of landscape do I want? Do I want a landscape where I'm growing lots and lots of flowers? Do I want vegetables incorporated or do I just want some trees around a perimeter and a big lawn to play on or just because you like looking at a lawn? So I would really encourage people to actually think deliberately about what kind of landscape they'd like and then start because often the irrigation has to go in first, the irrigation will be suited to what you want and that can be a really expensive retrofit if you haven't thought it out first. That's really good advice. So let's talk about, I just bought a house, I move in, I love it, but spring comes and there's already a lot of life taking up residency where I live. Let's say it's like mint or some other really invasive plant that's everywhere or it's a perennial that I never would have planted or what if it's like mushrooms or I don't know, remnants of marijuana fans even? Like what if there's something that I really just knit and choose myself that I really just want to get rid of? Like how do I identify it and how do I responsibly rid the property of that? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So identification, certainly somebody like me could help you with that. The place I used to work is the Colorado Agricultural Extension Service and they've got a lot of materials online but they also offer free or very inexpensive plant identification services. So you could take pictures or typically they're gonna ask you for a sample, bring it to your local office, there's one in every county and that's part of their job is to identify plants for you.  So it starts with the identification. Many plants, you could just dig them out. A lot of perennials like you mentioned, the shrub that you just don't like, usually digging it out is gonna be easy. For many people, use of an herbicide is gonna be an appropriate choice and that can be easy and there are a wide variety of herbicides out there including ones that are considered organic for people that that's important too. So between herbicides, digging out, there's even other ways you can do things like just simply covering stuff up for a year with a piece of landscape fabric or even a piece of cardboard with some mulch on top of it. You can just start it for life for a year and then it's dead. And mushrooms for what it's worth are really easy to get rid of if you got some mushrooms and there are both fungicides but there's also organic products that would work fungicidally to address mushrooms that are undesired. Wow, cool. So you mentioned CSU although I'm not sure that you use those exact words. Can you talk more about the folks that are gonna help us identify plant life and how to reach them? Yeah, sorry. So I'm referring to Colorado State University and there's something called the extension service which has an office in every county in our state and if you just were to Google CSU extension or CSU extension near me, you would find the local office here in Boulder County it's at the fairgrounds. They're frequently located at county fairgrounds but not always. And again, that's a taxpayer funded organization that, again, part of their responsibility is to identify plants and help people with this kind of horticultural stuff. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I've used them in my orchard. I sent them some soil samples to get my pH levels right and to figure stuff out if they were very responsive and they've got a whole lab which I kind of geek out on. While we're on the topic of orchards and trees I wanna talk about the relationship between trees and houses. One of the things that comes up in a real estate transaction often is the health of a tree, the safety of the tree, the closeness of the tree and its root system to the home. Can you talk about responsibly planting a tree like how far that needs to be from the house and also can you talk about how to be the best caregiver for a tree that's already there, maybe that's mature or even I've noticed in these new built homes there's already a bunch of trees on the property sometimes all different types that are kind of adolescents. Can you talk about that? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks for prompting me to talk about this. So yeah, trees can be one of the biggest value points on a property that can also be very expensive when things go wrong and something folks should keep in mind is you might walk or drive around the front range of Colorado and you see all these trees what we sometimes refer to as our urban forest and it's easy for folks to not know that this part of the country is not really a hospitable place for most trees. Before European type settlers came to this area there really weren't any of these trees there was the occasional cotton wood and then maybe a pine around but all of the trees that we grow here have come from different parts of the world and not all of them are really at home here. So we tend to have a lot of diseases a lot of storm damage and so selecting a good tree is really important that's the kind of thing somebody like myself could help you with but I also wanna point out in the scenario of the new house that you've just bought especially in new development very frequently here in Colorado housing developers have a one year warranty on the landscape plantings they put in around houses and often there is an economic incentive for them to put in the cheapest plants planted in the cheapest, fastest possible way and I often get called in 18 to 24 months after a development has sold and people are now living in it and we start to see plants crashing and because they were planted poorly or they were an inappropriate species selection for our region so you might wanna ask about that kind of stuff and be prepared to possibly do some mitigation and some changes early on in the lifespan of your home ownership. Point out that trees if they're planted poorly if you get to it within the first year to 18 months it often actually makes sense to unplant that tree prep the ground and the roots of the tree properly and replant it so there is a certain window though in which you can do that so again, timeliness is important. Right and that's you're referring to a new build not just a new home but a brand new build with a new lawn and Yeah, yeah and so on properties that are a little bit more mature with more mature plantings and trees there are a lot of certainly storm damage and I think anybody can notice that if they looked for it you know, snag branches and broken branches that are hanging at odd angles but there's also a lot of vascular diseases, right? These are bacteria and fungi that infect the vascular system of the trees. One thing I'd always encourage people to look for is signs of any kind of seeping or leaking on the trunk, maybe coming from a branch angle or especially from a place where a branch has been removed you might see some dark or wet staining on the trunk down below that that's an indication that you've got some rot going on inside the tree that can often lead, not necessarily immediately but within a few years to the need to remove the tree which is a very expensive proposition so there's a couple of things you should really look for I'd also encourage people especially on a more established property to test out the irrigation system if there's an in-ground irrigation system they often have problems and anytime you're doing work underground prices can be very high so look for that kind of stuff as well. Thank you for the tip. I want to talk about xeriscaping it seems to be this new trend which I think is great given the scarcity of water that we're experiencing here in Colorado especially. Yeah. Can you talk about what it is, why it is can I still have garden can I still have raised beds if I've like sworn off grass? Yeah, grass, you know it's a conflicted topic in landscaping these days but you're right, xeriscaping has become popular and I just want to clarify it's xera x-e-r-i that comes from the root word xeric which just means low water use it's not zero escaping which some people think oh I just put rocks out there there's no landscaping it's a zero escape. Nor is it zero water. That's right, nor is it zero water and so to address I do think that xeric plantings make a whole lot of sense in a world where we're trying to be more responsible with limited and shrinking water resources and there's a lot of good resources out there to help you design and maintain a xeric garden. Two things I would say though one the biggest pitfall that I see people get into when they attempt to install a xeric garden or say switch a lawn area over to a xeric planting is that they don't address the weeds especially perennial weeds and also the seeds what we call the seed bank of annual weeds in that area so they put a lot of work in in putting in their xeric landscape and then they are plagued by weeds and I would encourage anybody doing this to take a little time between taking out the lawn or whatever the previous landscape was before you install the xeric landscape there's some methods you can use to eradicate the weeds that are there and all of that is much easier you have a lot more options and a freer hand in managing those weeds before you've put in your new plantings and a hardscape so I wanted to mention that and I also wanted to point out to respond to your question with irrigation systems these days it's actually very easy to have a predominantly xeric landscape but if you wanna have vegetables or let's say you wanna have all xeric plantings but you'd really like to have a 10 by 10 patch of lawn to go lay on in the summer those are really realistic options given the way we can break up different zones on a irrigation system so don't think it has to be all of one or the other a lot of times outer areas of a property people like to do in xeric designs and then a little bit closer to the house maybe they've got some raised beds for vegetables or cut flowers or possibly even that little postage stamp lawn so it's all possible it's gonna start with designing the landscape irrigation system to address that proper protest jeez this is rich okay let's talk about this no-mo-may or no-moing if you do have a lot of grass yeah am I over watering my grass now that I'm a coloradan am I mowing too frequently am I mowing too early in the season we're getting so much rain I couldn't even mow this week if I wanted to so if you talk a little bit about mowing and why people wait to mow I don't really get that I don't always completely get it myself my understanding is a lot of the motivation behind this is mow to mow sorry sorry sorry good one sorry I didn't catch that so I believe one of the reasons is people are concerned about pollinators and there are certain wildflowers even weeds that will come up in some people's lawns in May and I know that some of the push behind no-mo-may is to allow those flowers to bloom and provide pollen and nectar forage sources for some of our pollinators I'm a little conflicted I think that there's other better more efficient ways that we could address that I'd also say this especially in a rainy year like this May and early June are when our lawns are growing the fastest we all know our mowers can cut a certain amount of grass but if that grass gets too long it's just going to bog down and you actually can't mow it with your mower anymore so I think maybe looking for a happy medium between letting it grow longer but not so long that you can't then mow it so get on it yeah and I just want to throw out one other thing about mowing letting the the grass clippings mulch right as opposed to bagging them and taking them away is a really good idea it's actually kind of a sad irony that I see a lot in landscape management and lawn management because we're putting fertilizer onto our lawns then it goes into the grass those clippings are actually rich in nitrogen so we take them off we send them to the dump and then we buy more fertilizer and put it on and it's not really a particularly responsible or efficient way to manage the nitrogen cycle in our landscape so I really encourage you to mulch the lawn with the clippings so since you're on the topic of mulch and I do this a lot on my own property can you talk about grass clippings wood chips, pine needles, leaves do these really reduce the necessity of water like the frequency of watering or does it really just help make the property look more buttoned up I love to talk about mulch so first of all the two main things that you benefits that you will get from mulching is one you absolutely can reduce water loss from the landscape and therefore reduce the amount of water you need to add because if you think about it the top of the soil surface is where you're going to evaporate a lot of water up into the air as vapor by putting on mulch down you're actually creating a little bit of a vapor barrier so that that water that that soil surface isn't getting hit by the sun it's not having our dry winds blowing across it that's going to kind of scour water out of that surface so just by its physical presence you are retaining more water in the soil profile so that's the first thing that you get from mulch second thing is mulch can be very effective at suppressing the growth of weeds very careful important distinction here annual weeds these are weeds that are coming back from seed year after year mulch will do nothing to suppress perennial weeds like your can of the thistle or your bindweed they're just going to come right up through it and frankly they might thank you on the way and say hey thanks for mulching because I have plenty more moisture to work with now but for annual seed-based weeds you can really suppress a lot of that growth because you cover them up the seeds don't get exposed to light many of them require a little exposure to light in order to germinate so those are the two big benefits with mulch another thing I'd like to clarify for people is that mulch isn't a thing per se it's more of a verb it's a thing we do so many people have in mind that you go to the store and buy mulch that implies that there's one thing that is mulch when in fact you could use compost to mulch with you could use wood chips or bark chips to mulch with we've also seen a lot of increase in things like recycled tire chips being used as mulch in farming and gardening we often talk about using plastic mulch where you see people cover beds in a plastic mulch which one it's going to retain moisture in the soil it's going to suppress weed growth so it's a mulch even though it's not exactly what most people think of when they hear the word mulch but mulching in general is a great practice awesome appreciate the clarification on that as a mulcher so I recently read that a single almond takes up to three gallons of water to grow to full size so given that and given that we live in a really arid place where we all need to be responsible about our water use what are the five or six veggies or fruits that as a busy professional I'm best off planting in my one or two raised beds well boy that's a big question I would say this though even though vegetables as a group take a fair amount of water because they're producing something for us uh by square footage a vegetable garden doesn't necessarily take any more water than say lawn in many cases you can grow a very bountiful vegetable garden with less water per square foot than a lawn would require so just in that sense a vegetable garden can be considered a water saving planting versus lawn on top of that last time I checked none of us are really eating a lot of grass for dinner but the vegetable garden is actually producing something that you can eat with the water that you're putting in so you can do it with less water than a lawn by comparison and get something delicious and healthy out of it I would also say that drip irrigation is really important I think a very strong argument can be made that the invention and the development and deployment of drip irrigation around the world is probably the single biggest innovation for water savings that's ever happened in human history because you can deliver the correct amount of water but just to where your plants are so not only is it a very parsimonious way to use our water resources but you also can avoid for instance irrigating the areas between your desired plants which in turn suppresses weed growth because you're withholding resources for them to grow in those areas between where your drippers are and then you also asked you know what would be a good or an easy crop or vegetable to grow if you're a busy professional I know a couple of those people who don't have enough time in their life to do everything and I would just say this potatoes and onions they are very easy crops to grow they both like water but again not more than a relatively similar area of lawn wood and they're really really easy to grow and they're things that our climate here is great for there's a lot of potatoes and onions grown commercially in Colorado for that reason and I used to avoid growing those two crops for many years as a gardener because I thought well they're so pedestrian how much better could could a garden potato be than a grocery store potato and the same thing with onions and then it was like 20 years ago I realized what a bonehead I've been because actually they are wonderful and I won't go on and regale you with tails of delicious potatoes and onions but of course they cook up nicely together most meals go well with a side of potatoes and onions and they're they're pretty darn easy so I would I would encourage if you just wanted to do one little plot of something productive try some potatoes and onions pedestrian I love that I'm stealing that this is pretty pedestrian I've seen you on YouTube do some grafting and I admit as an orcharder I look at that like wizardry like magic you made a crab apple peach plum tree out of an apple tree and I guess I'm curious if I'm a new homeowner in a new property could such a tree with a lot of variety if I could get the grafting right become an asset so that's a big huge question that I want to talk about yes grafting is awesome and seemingly a little bit magical I remember the first time when I was about 10 that I was exposed to what grafting was and I was eating an apricot two types of plums and peaches all off of the same tree and I thought wait a minute that's amazing and I was kind of caught up in it since since then and so grafting also I'm a historian as well and I love that grafting is something our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years and so the idea with grafting is you are taking one tree or shrub it's always done with woody perennials and you are adding something else to it okay so as far as the value that homeowners might get from this kind of thing here's a little surprise you probably actually already have some grafted plants in your yard okay for instance if you've got a flowering crab apple it might very well be grafted onto a different type of crab apple root that's very common almost every rose bush that is sold has been grafted and it's a good example of why we graft okay so in developing really lovely showy roses with nice aromas for instance often the plant itself and its root system becomes a little bit of a weakling and it gets prone to all kinds of diseases to you know being fussy about the soils or the climate it's planted in so what's typically done with roses is you take a wild rose that is just tough as nails that's the root system and then just above the level of the ground you cut off the wild rose and you replace it with a scion of the desired rose variety and now you're getting the best of both worlds and that might be the best phrase to describe it with the apple trees and fruit trees I work a lot with again same thing we want the super tasty delicious productive apple or pear or peach but we don't want the roots of that variety because they are weak so we put on different roots there's been hundreds of years of breeding programs to just develop apple and peach and cherry root systems that nobody's ever going to let them fruit we're just putting a very desirable variety on the top so for instance it is probably most commonly used in terms of fruit and you mentioned combining different fruits on a tree there's certain rules we've learned in horticulture and this is kind of the essence of horticulture right is how to understand plants what they give us naturally and then how as humans we can come in and team up with what the plants bring us with our own ingenuity to make even better things and so for instance some of the rules I'm talking about is like you can graft all kinds of apples together you can graft crab apples and apples together you can't graft pears to apples but you can graft asian pears to european pears you can graft peaches and plums and nectarines together because they're all in the prunus genus um and you can graft all citrus together but you couldn't graft a citrus to an apple so some of these rules are things that you know of course there's publications that explain all of this or someone like myself certainly could explain these kinds of rules to you one thing that's just to show you the creative way you could actually use this in an ornamental landscape is let's say somebody said I really like maple trees but I can't decide between a red leaf norway maple and a green leaf norway maple you could have somebody like me come over and make you a custom tree that had alternating branches of red and green leaves if you if you wanted to um so there's lots of fun stuff you can do with grafting um you know cacti are commonly grafted there's there's probably a lot of grafted plants in or around your life you might not be aware of but it's a pretty important thing in the world of horticulture guys get this man onto your property so I could just go on asking you many more questions um bring it you have been such a wealth of knowledge we unfortunately are out of time um can you just quickly tell us I'm gonna I'm gonna put your contact information up but you do work with residential homeowners and you do come over as a consultant one-on-one two people's homes yeah can you just tell us your website really quickly and um yeah yeah of course so um my website is www.rike-hort.com it's REICH is how you spell my last name um you can also just contact me directly by text or phone at<PHONE_NUMBER> um you'll also find various videos online that I've done and I absolutely do I mean I mentioned that I work with these multi-million dollar companies but that's fun and it pays the bills but I also get a lot of pleasure about working with homeowners I do things with groups of homeowners sometimes it's more cost effective if a whole bunch of people in the neighborhood have similar issues going on pay me once and everybody comes to the session I don't mind doing that for me it's about getting the information out there we've all got to pay bills but I'm really about the education um so yeah I'd be happy to help anybody with with that kind of thing and if you think something is a little bit odd or you haven't had good success getting clear answers from somebody else that's exactly the place where you might want to call me or someone like me pick up that red phone and call me say Joel I've got a horticulture issue I need it addressed right the first time and I'll just say this too one of my great joys in life is helping people fix problems but even better than that is avoiding problems in the first place with timely good advice so I I I hope there's people out there who can either utilize my services or those of someone like me um to avoid problems with with timely advice hmm I can't think of a single homeowner who would benefit from you thank you so much Joel for being here that's the property


We're all pretty familiar with NASA having mission patches for every flight, but they weren't always a thing. The first mission patch is what we're talking about today on Vintage Space. Like so many things of the space age, we owe mission patches to the military heritage. Pilots used to wear mission patches on their jackets to denote their core and their division. And the test pilots that made up NASA's first classes of astronauts brought that tradition to the space agency with them. But mission patches didn't come to spaceflight right away. The Mercury astronauts flew with a NASA meatball logo and named tag on their suits but no mission patch. The ones we recognize today were actually designed after the fact as commemorative patches. The same is the case with Gemini 3 and Gemini 4 mission patches. Gemini 3 was the only mission of the program to have a name, the spacecraft is called Bolly Brown, and Gemini 4 was the first flight on which astronauts wore American flag patches on their suits. The first mission patch was actually created by the Gemini 5 crew, Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad. The Gemini program was NASA's fastest moving program and my personal favorite. 10 manned missions flew in just 20 months and every single mission advanced NASA on its path to the moon. Gemini 5 was the third manned mission of the program and NASA's first real long duration flight. Because it was a long duration it was also the first flight to use fuel cells as opposed to batteries as the power source. Fuel cells of course being a vital technology for the longer duration missions to the moon. And the crew, specifically Cooper, was pretty keen to have a patch for the mission. Inspired by a model covered wagon Conrad's father-in-law had whittled, Cooper came up with a patch featuring a covered wagon and the motto eight days or bust to mark the mission's duration. He took the idea directly to NASA administrator Jim Webb who approved the patch but not the motto. He said it would give the public the idea that if the mission were cut short for any reason it would be a bust. Something NASA really didn't need in 1965 when it was closing in on that lunar landing deadline. But the covered wagon was eventually approved and Conrad and Cooper became the first astronauts to fly with a dedicated mission patch on their suits. And commemorative additions of the Gemini 5 patch that you can get today do have the eight days or bust motto. If you guys have questions about the mission patches leave them below and let me know what your favorite mission patch is because everyone's got a favorite and we tend to wear them with a little bit of pride. For more on the Gemini 5 flight check out the latest post over on Vintage Space at Popular Science and for daily Vintage Spacey content follow me on Twitter as AST Vintage Space. And with new videos going up every Tuesday and Friday don't forget to subscribe right here so you never miss an episode.


but it's a critical one because it lays the foundation for an entire year, an entire year. Not perfect, but close. I saw that. Thanks. I noticed that. I see it roll. Is it pretty nice out? There you go.  You all know how I like to communicate on YouTube. A lot of times it is through imagery and not just words. Although I know I can talk a lot here in the studio, but my real passion is storytelling with beautiful images, which we're going to get to in a second. But I was just thinking, gosh, well, as I've been saying, it's almost 2020. And I was thinking back, oh man, one year ago, where were we? What were we doing? What was I doing here on YouTube? And so actually, I had to look it up. I typed it into the search engine and I said December 18th and boom, up pops. This vlog, I'm going to show you a little clip from 365 days ago. About 3,000 subscribers one year ago. Oh, what a year it has been. Thank you for being here. Thanks for hitting that subscribe button. Thank you for caring to listen to my story and to come. Oh my gosh. I'm just, I'm just reflecting back, like, how much we've actually done here on this channel in the last year. So here's one more clip. Actually, well, we'll do two more clips, one more clip that jumped out of me from the past 365. There you have it. And before you know it, we're meeting where in Washington Park, here in Denver, group of runners to celebrate 50,000 runners, uniting here on YouTube to chase down dreams, hold each other accountable, get inspiration from each other. It's just, it's incredible. But all right, here we go. Here's the, a little bit of the business side of this vlog. I think many of you know the types of vlogs I enjoy filming and editing and publishing for you. I love Seeking Beauty. I love races for me. But I also, as you know, love filming races where I'm actually doing the filming and not doing the racing. I love the training side. I love sharing as much insight as possible into the training that I believe in. Okay. I love the shoes. We love the studio. We love shoes here. I'm not really the tech guy, even though today, the second video that published today was all about some wireless, wireless earbuds from Jaybird. So I dabble in tech, but it's not my strong suit.  So keep that in mind as you answer this question of the day, which is a critical one because I'm going to bookmark. I almost forgot the word. I'm going to bookmark this video. I'm actually going to save the link somewhere probably in my email, but then also in a couple other locations because this vlog right now I'm going to return to go back to over and over and over again in 2020 to read your comments. Okay. So here it is. Question of the day. And keep in mind, you know who I am. All right. What vlog ideas or blog categories would you like to see me focus on in 2020? There it is. It's big. It's big. All right. So again, I'm going to bookmark this URL above.  So if you're out there and you're always, you know, you're thinking of ideas for me or you're like, gosh, I'm just curious about what Seth is up to in this realm of running or I'm curious about this or whatever the case may be. This is your time to shine down in the comments. Okay. And keep in mind again, how I like to film what I'm, I'd say I'm more of an expert in than other areas. All right. Thank you. I'm not even going to give you ideas. I want you to put on the thinking cap and run with it. All right. That is it for tonight. Thank you for being here. Thanks for watching. I know it was more of a, yeah, a simpler vlog, but it's a critical one because it lays the foundation for an entire year, an entire year of vlogging and sharing my passion of running with all of you in the new year. It's going to be a good year and onward and upward. All right. There you have it. Okay. You know what I'll do? We're going to toss it back on the right to the, the vlog from 365 days ago. I think you will enjoy it. And then on the left, we'll toss it back to another highlight of 2019. One of my favorite blogs from this past year. All right. You know the drill. See beauty, work hard and love each other. See you tomorrow.


All right, I Like this I don't know why I have not Done it more often than I was supposed to because I was so bent on you know setting up light and all these things to record I think this is the most the minimal setup. I've done in My YouTube in life, whereby I'm using the window in the house as my key light and it's quite soft So let me know if you like it. I actually do like it and I'm using my You know famous practical lights my lamp over there as well as the lights coming from the dining area as my practicals and I like how it looks. So, yes, what you're seeing on your screen. Wait, hold up. Hold up. Let me actually turn off my AC AC off Yeah, what you're seeing on your screen is not click baits. This is not my usual Should I say conversation or topic I will discuss on the page? I mean, usually I'm posting videos on Self-development mostly and then a bit of lifestyle here and there travel So if you're new to my channel, my name is Kwame and when I'm not, you know, doing YouTube I'm doing documentary films. I'm doing voiceovers and when I'm doing YouTube. I post self-development and Travel and lifestyle here in Ghana But today I want to talk about something which I think is also part of my self-development But you know, what do you say much more private but then again, if you think about it I share bits and pieces of myself every time I come here to talk to you or make a video So I don't see why not and I'm doing this one because the question comes up a lot, you know And I felt that well, maybe I can talk a little bit about this side of my life And I'm not sitting here to talk as an expert or anything. I'm just sharing my experience So it's not to rub anything in for anyone or say that what I'm doing in terms of You know, choosing the person that I want to be with as a partner is the right way or this I'm not even going to share any of that Maybe not But yeah, I do get asked the question quite often Or questions about, you know, how the relationship came about and how we're making it work And down to the point of the very intrusive one Like why her, you know, and those ones come from The fact that my partner or my wife is a European and Caucasian So why did you choose? Why did you choose to go for Adam Bruni?  So I don't get that question. You know, I don't know how I answered that question anytime it came up, but today I just want to, you know, share a little bit on the concept of love and choosing the right person or choosing the person you want to love for the rest of your life And these are my personal experiences or Yeah, my personal experiences of the conversation. So I don't think you can hold me to generalization Or anything like I say that this is what love is or whatever it is But there are some true facts at least pertaining to me whereby You don't decide who to love And you can't really tell at what point you fall for the person You can't say or pinpoint that at this time of the day on this day I fell in love I mean granted there are a few cases, which is still arguably, you know Arguable that people say there's love at first sight. You saw this person and Boom, you knew this was a person, but it has to be reciprocal in the first place. The person has to like you back Which is what I think builds up to a point where you can see that, you know, at some point in your life You know that this is the person that you want to fight for you want to be with you want to have as a life partner because of the things They do for you and it's selfish. I think it's selfish because You like somebody or you choose the people because of how they make you feel And the things they can do for you to support they love everything and it's, you know, supposed to be reciprocated So there's that as well. So I don't think there's an exact point. So my story started in 2015, you know This lady came to in turn at where I was working at the time and we hadn't even spoken For for the time she was there. She was supposed to be there for three months. We hadn't spoken until about the last week When I mean we by some chance we started talking and It grew from there very fast as well. I realized that oh, this is reasons an interesting person to talk to And we spent hours and hours. Hold on Yeah, we spent hours and hours together And started talking over text because she had to go back to her country And then she came back and fast forward, you know We became a thing and then we decided to choose to be with each other But at this particular point in time that I said I was in love with her or felt in love with her I don't know because that's How it builds over time However, after that has been built You choose every single day Especially when you're with this person and your relationship isn't one which is, you know Trying to be an overstretched honeymoon face whereby at some point you realize that no, this is the person you're with and you're comfortable being yourself You're comfortable when you're not comfortable to be angry But you can be angry and express it your emotions are not held by because you want to be the perfect person for the person So you're yourself. You're angry. You're sad.  So when there's anger issues and there's the sadness and all that How do you choose to be with this person still that is that is the real Deal that is where the work is And that choice is where you have to decide often people have this, you know Weird expectation of what love should be that it should, you know, be nice always And you know, they don't want to get or lose grip of the honeymoon phase because it's so nice. There's all the activities of, you know fun and coziness and All that and they think that it should be it forever. No, it doesn't it doesn't work that way And that is why The tough decision of choosing to be with somebody for the rest of your life is is much more work than the enjoyment that comes with it And so As to why you decide to be with somebody It's it's subjective. No one can tell you why you choose to be with somebody for me And the kind of person I am I love those who love me And this person that showed me time and time again that she chooses me every single day It makes sense that I'll choose there every single day And she supports me every single day So it makes sense that I Reciprocate so there there are a lot of things to talk about when it comes to why we choose the person we love I fell in love with a person I wasn't looking out skin color. I wasn't looking at where the person was from. It's just how the person made me feel and I choose to fight for and with this person For as long as I can and that's basically why we choose the people that we want to be with one of the things that I would say has um Helped which I lack or lacked a lot of which I thought I had more because of my previous relationships was communication and communication has been the glue because a lot of the things that we tend to fight about or tend to have misunderstandings about are things that Bottom line or when you when when it boils down or when it boils over is that is that the right way to say when it boils over you realize that Oh, it wasn't that bad It was just a misunderstanding which was incommunicated properly and that can be fixed and I I often resort to the silent treatment which I've said before in my video on my birthday And it didn't work, but this person this person that I'm with has showed me that Communication is everything and she has opened me up to Talking about the things that we need to talk about what we need to talk about them and how we need to go about them and it has grown Over the few years that we've been together. So Why do I choose this person? I don't know There's too much to talk about and I just know that She is the person I want by my side as a life partner and I would choose her any day so Yeah, I don't know if I Answered anything you wanted to hear if you have any Questions you want to ask you can do that in the comment section below and let me know If you want me to do a follow-up video based on those questions also, let me know so that I would Maybe prepare much better to talk because this was very freestyle. I didn't script it I'm not going to script the next one either, but it'll be based on the questions and Let's just have a conversation about this because this is the one thing that I know that people find quite difficult and It's it's not like it's there's a particular hack for anyone There's no formula. So if I share my experiences and you can pick something from it Yeah, good. It makes sense that you pick something from it, but I can't Say that what I do or how I do Works and that is it and you should take it. So, yeah That's um about it. I hope you enjoyed it and Me swaying from my usual videos to this point And uh, yeah, I'll catch you again in the next video here on it's okay My name is Kwame and peace for now


What's up everybody once again is Brandon man Sean and today I got to talk about a music resource or tool because it is Friday people and the tool that we're going to talk about today is extremely useful for seeing your progress as an artist, for seeing your fan base and the engagement and even where certain people who are talking about you on Twitter are located. What tool might that be? I'm talking about next big sound now if you guys don't know what the next big sound is I'm a hop into the back end so you guys can see it as I talk about it. Alright so this is what the home page of the next big sound website looks like and as you can see they say smart and timely insights for the music industry and you can get them insights for the free and I know that's pretty important for a lot of you guys so let's go ahead and hop into the background I've been using this website for a while so check this out I already have Ed Sheeran's artist profile pulled up and if you look at it you can see they're showing his audience reach the metric trend as far as his audience that means it's growing right now still his audience engagement is moderate and his artist social stage is epic and also if you click on these descriptions you'll actually see what exactly that means so metric trend growing it's saying overall his metrics have been growing blah blah blah it'll break it down you guys can play around with that when you decide to use the website for yourself and I'm going to go ahead and show you though here's a cool thing chart appearances for Ed Sheeran this stuff happens automatically if you have a Pandora profile and there's some other type of profiles it'll do automatic updates for as well now look at this audience for Ed Sheeran if you look they show a 60% female fan base and a 40% male fan base now where they're getting this number from Twitter mentions Twitter retweets so basically it's not your fan base on all platforms as you know it it won't be necessarily reflective of your fan base super accurately but at least your fan base in terms of conversation on Twitter so it says 60% of his Twitter mentions are females 40% are males 59% of the retweets are females 41% are male and if you go to top countries United States is where most his Twitter activity is coming from and then United Kingdom that's actually interesting fact you know well I guess it makes sense in some ways as well now if you look at the top city you can see that London is where he's getting a lot of action from in terms of its Twitter mentions and then Sao Paulo that means that's Sao Paulo Brazil I don't know that's the whatever anyway you can see these top cities so that's cool for him as an artist and then if you go down further you'll see YouTube views it's going to show the trends and to follow when it oh I don't know what's going on right there chill out right all right so you'll be able to see the actual metric trend of particular YouTube videos that you've released and what is going to do I'll show you with another artist is basically show the week to week change here is more of as Sharon's videos though okay here's the week to week change here right December 15th through December 21st 49 million views okay and then but the week before that it got 50 million views basically so that's a 2.4% decrease in the amount of activity that it had the week before not huge but it doesn't mean he lost followers or lost views it just means it's not growing at the same rate eventually is going to go down to you know not really getting a lot of views at all because everybody knows when something pops it gets most of the activity all right I'm going to go to another artist because everybody puts in only some of their social information they choose whichever platforms they want to do so let's go to this right here the Pandora trendsetters chart right now they're showing Takashi is number one on the Pandora chart as far as getting those trends those spins you'll see little Zan little baby take K her Daniel Caesar let's go ahead and look at Takashi's profile Takashi his audience reaches an enormous he's got an established social stage it's not it's not epic like Ed Sharon's his audience engagement is passionate you know all that similar stuff looks like he didn't put in his Twitter account Instagram followers though right you're seeing the Instagram data for him and you can see that change with the likes and all of those things and let's try one more artist let's just go with gold link there we go that works the Anthony Carlos okay that's go links real name no idea all right you see he's getting most most of his action in Illinois then he's getting action in Texas yada yada yada the cap county Georgia Atlanta I'm probably scrolling this too fast so you guys my bad you know let me pull up something right quick though let me do a comparison who would I compare gold link with rapper wise it actually really doesn't matter I'm just gonna compare him with Kendrick Lamar though for now bam the platform will do this so if now if I'm going up and I'm showing all this comparison in the data let's just say we now see Kendrick Lamar's information versus gold links information Kendrick Lamar is the second stuff Kendrick Lamar is the second bars what is he getting in these cities he's getting more action of course he has a bigger fan base but it's just a comparison tool you guys can use that as well as you like just just for fun you can so just fine you can compare Kendrick Lamar to go link and you can see that go link is just for fun you can care just for fun you can compare Kendrick Lamar to go link and you can see that pretty much in all cities go link is getting more action and Kendrick Lamar except for dang nobody really fucks with Kendrick in Texas like that dang people don't really effort Kendrick in Texas like that okay that's a fun fact right there all right Philly they're not messing with you in Philly either all right Kendrick you got some work to do DC anyway there's more to the platform but you guys can go in and get a feel for yourself and the setups easy I'm not gonna go through that but let's just say this if you want to use this website once you create a profile all you have to do is type in your name so let's just say I typed in an artist name I don't know I'll just make up a name let's see if there's an artist name down on duck no there's no artist name down on duck so all I do is click add down on duck except that would be your artist name and then it's basically simple you start putting in the social links for whatever your pages are it's very simple to figure it out from there all right and as I said it's free you guys so it's almost no reason not to just put your information in you have that useful information if you ever decide that you want to use it other than that you know what to do hit that subscribe button


to just show you guys how I've been creating some of these things in this Tone Tanned sketchbook that I've been working in that have recently garnered a lot of attention on social media. Now this is a Strathmore Tone Tanned sketchbook. I think this is the soft cover and I think it's five and a half by eight and a half I think. Now I will say I love the paper. The sketchbook, yeah, I had to quote unquote condition it to get it to even sort of lie flat. And what do I mean by that? I mean like do this and bend it back on itself like every single page because it doesn't really want to naturally lie flat. So that's probably my gripe and I'm not a huge fan of spiral bound notebooks or sketchbooks so I kind of wish that they had created one that had sort of a cover but lay flat I don't know. If anybody has any ideas about sketchbooks, ones that open in lay really flat so you can sketch on both sides of the paper. I especially love the Strathmore Tone Tanned paper. Let me know, leave something in the comments below. But yeah, now that I've bent every single page now it does much better but I started out in the sketchbook just sort of messing around to be honest and doing sort of these things and then COVID happened and I started playing with faces and seeing what kind of other mediums besides gel pen would work in here and messing around still withdrawing. And fun fact it really doesn't like like Sharpie. I think this is Sharpie. I don't think it's a paint pen. I think it's a Sharpie pen. Anyway it doesn't like it so it bleeds through but all the other pen it seems to take really well. This is a little bit of water soluble crayon on this penguin and it actually did very well. You can barely you see it through the other side. It takes different kinds of gel pens and ballpoint pens and pencil brilliantly. So I did this. We went right before the fire started in Oregon. We went on a drive just to get out of the house. We drove around the area and the different counties and we ended up in Mount Angel and there was a store sign. I'll put the picture here. I think that they sold honey and things. I think it was it might have been a tea shop but anyway they had this cute bee on their sign so I came home and drew him. Another day we went literally the day the smoke and fire started getting bad here in in the Oregon area where I live. We went to the Japanese gardens in Portland and we I love the koi pond so I drew a koi fish and then they had a bunch of bonsai trees so I had a little tiny bonsai apple tree so I drew that and then I started doing these. So these are inspired by nature pictures that I've taken either recently or in the recent past. They are a lot of fun. I'm not attempting to exactly copy the nature. I'm just being inspired by said nature piece even this one and then this one now my friend Mike Deakin posted him his vlog today and in it he talks about one of the flowering vines in his backyard and he showed it a close-up of it on camera and I did what I could to get a screenshot of it because I really wanted to be inspired by that to draw it so we're going to do that today first I need some water so hang on okay so let me pull the picture up on my pad so this is the flower I'm not great with names of flowers so I don't know what what that is but we're gonna be inspired by that sometimes I'm inspired to use the exact color of the flower sometimes I'm not for the most part I use gel pens these are just jelly roll gel pens I have the number six I have the tens which is just different nib size oh there's a few eights in here too I really kind of just go by the colors um they have some muted colors and some bright colors I have a lot of there I even have the metallics but honestly the metallics like sitting here I rarely use them I probably have way too many of them because for how much I use them because I just really don't I should probably rethink even having them here to be honest with you um okay so for this flower I think for the moment we're going to stick with we're initially going to pick a couple of purples I'm going to want a green because it has a green center and I think I'm going to want to pick a blue we're going to pick out a couple of blues and we're going to try them on a scrap of paper which is something I always do let's try this purple too I don't think it's going to be the right one but let's try it and see so sometimes they use white paper sometimes they use this paper I just whatever's handy I've got scraps of paper in here so let's see um no that's too gray I think I'm going to want this one for the light purple yeah I'm going to want this one for the dark purple yeah I think I'm going to want this one for the green yep and then I think I want to add a blue the question is which blue I don't think that one maybe I think this one's too bright I think we're going to go with a light pale blue the only other one I would do would be maybe this turquoise blue yeah turquoise blue all right so I usually start with like the main color of the piece I'm being inspired by but I don't always and in this case I'm going to start with yeah I'm going to start with the main color no I'm not I'm going to start with the green so these flowers have a green center and again we're looking to be inspired by and we're not looking to copy I have to put my reading glasses on otherwise I can't see what I'm doing I'll zoom in for you guys right about here now this is one of their newer colors I think um um I have this is the six I do wish sometimes I had these in a bigger nib I know a lot of illustrators like to uh they like their pens but they like them in small nibs I generally like bigger nibs so not is it not that I'm a professional illustrator or anything but I tried so I'm just making sort of a funny shape circle here and I think I'm going to add a pop of another color I have this sort of dark goldy color which I think might be nice in this flower center so we're going to add some dots like tear dropy shoots I have found that the Sakura jelly roll pens do layer actually very nicely on top of each other if you just wait for the one on the bottom to mostly dry I think we're going to do that so what color was this this was I don't know number 415 and this is 432 I think that's what the color is yeah all right so then we're going to go with our light purple we're going to do sort of these long drawn out tear dropy kind of shapes you want to be careful not to stick your hand in the gel pen when you're doing this because it takes a minute to dry and it's probably still wet when you're going around sorry about the pain in the background it's my computer my art friends must be chatting and I forgot to turn it off so so far we have that it's cute huh so I'm going to do that all the way around again inspired by we're not looking to exactly copy right now I do think I'm going to turn some of these drawings into stickers for the Etsy shop I might actually make sticker flakes for those of you who are into stationary and that sort of thing you know what that means little packs of individually cut stickers printed stickers so look for that I'm not exactly sure when so if you're interested and you want to be sort of on the waiting list when I do make them let me know I like that I don't think I want to add anymore okay so now we're going to take the dark purple and we're going to do our sort of petal shapes that are part of our flower now this is let's see that purple one was 423 this one is 424 these are all sixes this one doesn't say so it might be a 10 I don't know doesn't say on there you are okay okay that's a good basic shape but I'm not done yet so I'm going to take our shape I'm going to decide where and when to thicken the lines and attach them to each other and then fill in the space and do that and go all the way around and what I will also do probably is do this uh broken lines and dots seem to be part of what I'm drawing when I'm making these maybe we think I'm not going to put those this time and then I always end up putting them anyways this is a fatter pen it doesn't have a nib size on it but it's probably a 10 so just work your way all the way around okay so then we have sort of our pop highlight color on this one I think it was the same color pen um I'm still debating about what color I should use let's see I do love the way that looks I still wonder if I should use this blue one that I dismissed the first time choices right can't take it back once you get it on there does it even need it does it even need the pop of blue I'm thinking if I'm debating it that hard maybe it doesn't even need it there is a pop of blue on the original flowers down the center but you know we could go back to using this pale blue which actually might work so then what I would do yeah this is a good color I can tell you the minute it hits the page it's there but it's not smack you in the face there that's an art thing right smack you in the face right yeah that's perfect this is number what number is this this is a 06 nib by the way this is number 425 that's what it says on here and no this video is not sponsored by Strathmore or Jelly Roll but you know if y'all are watching and you want to sponsor you know I love your paper Strathmore and I love your pens Jelly Roll Sakura I love your pens so I'm just drawing elongated ovals in front sizes at least three down the center of each pedal and look at what that does it gives it a nice pop so I share my daily drawings good or bad some of them don't turn out but I share them anyway on social media so number one if you think you can't draw I don't draw perfect all the time either I don't I'm not great at necessarily drawing so but sometimes I get lucky and it turns out I just practice a lot so if you think you can't I hope that my sharing my successes and failures with you on social media helps you give it a shot anyway and if you want to see what daily drawings I do do follow me over on Instagram or something I'm not on Twitter anymore I'm on Instagram though and I have a Facebook a couple of Facebook art groups and a Facebook page so you can follow me or join the groups but if you don't do Facebook you can follow me on Instagram I share daily drawings when I am not going on my evening walks when I'm able want to take pictures of that I share all kinds of stuff so I'll be taking a picture of this later and sending it over to Mike since it was inspired by his garden yeah look at that I love it so something simple just some paper and some gel pens it's nothing you know expensive or anything these are simple materials so there you go I hope it gives you some inspiration about what you can do and how you can do it and take it into a new unique in different way I do think we're going to be scanning some of these drawings and turning them into some kind of stickers for the Etsy shops if you're interested let me know all of them are inspired by nature pictures of some sort and probably because of the organ fires right now in the day I'm doing this and I can't go outside and I'm kind of missing my evening walks but that's okay I'm going to keep doing this because I'm having a lot of fun doing them so anyway if you want to again follow me on social media or support the free content here on YouTube or over in the Facebook art groups you can click on my link tree list of links in the video description and you'll find all the different places I am on the internet and all my Etsy store and Patreon and all of that stuff patrons usually get free copies of things just FYI either digitally or physically in the mail just FYI anyway so check that out and not just for me though go check out your favorite content creators they probably have a way to support their free content it usually is in the video description but not always if you can't find it ask them and maybe they can send you the appropriate links don't forget to stay safe stay creative and stay healthy and go out and do something nice for yourself because you deserve it and I'll see you later I think I need to go through those metallic gel pens all right bye guys


A day at the office for the engineers of Alpha Company 54th Brigade Engineer Battalion can be literally quite explosive. The demolition range conducted in Turkey by Alpha Company served as their annual certification and a show of capability for their Turkish host. More importantly, it allowed for synchronized training during FS 2016, Turkey's national military exercise, and the first time American forces participated in it. It's definitely opened the eyes of a lot of soldiers coming to Turkey, working alongside a Turkish. Turkish have been more than welcoming since we arrived. I think it's definitely going to help any future operations. We can just kind of jump right in and work alongside them without any issues. The training in Turkey, a proven NATO ally, although tough and challenging at times, seems to be just what the doctor ordered for these airborne engineers whose company model is at the breach. I think my soldiers are gaining a greater appreciation of infantry mission and understand how important it is to provide timely effects onto targets that they have for their mobility and counter-mobility missions. So they're able to see how important it is to be experts in their craft and provide those timely effects as needed and precisely where they're needed. The demo range consisted of shape, cratering, razor charges to include Bangalore torpedoes, Army Sergeant Carlos Gonzalez, Gohan Bay, Turkey.