A Neglected Garden Can Be a Productive Garden!

good morning friends it is early and we are gonna go head down to the garden and do a massive garden harvest today i have a really fancy birthday dinner i'm going to tonight so i have to get down there get as much out of the garden as i can come back and get ready so whatever we don't get to today we are going to come back tomorrow and my parents are actually going to help tomorrow because we're going to save the potatoes for tomorrow but i know there's a lot of stuff in there and i kind of want to get some of the weeds under control so it's going to be fun so my car packed up and let me show you what i am bringing down to the garden first off i have a knife i don't know where my harvest knife is and so i'm bringing my nice bread knife remind me to bring it back because i am the notorious for leaving stuff out in the garden we have four baskets hopefully that's enough or hopefully i can fill them i don't know which is worse if i ran out of baskets or if i don't have enough produce to fill them so we have four baskets these baskets i've gotten at goodwill just over the years this one is a beautiful handcrafted amish basket that was a gift it's all hand woven and everything it's beautiful and i love this basket and then here i grabbed a paper bag just in case we need it i need to collect eggs i have my harvest apron this is called a roux apron i can link it down below i'll show you how it works i absolutely love it and i haven't had the chance to use it yet this year so i'm excited i packed a little lunch because hopefully we'll be down there long enough that i'm gonna need a little lunch and we got all of our gloves i'm just gonna keep this in my car so that we have gloves when we need them for harvest i am a gardener that likes to wear gloves i buy these there's a hair at costco they're really cheap it's a pack of i think like 12 for you know seven bucks and i can throw them in my washing machine and i absolutely love them so let's head down to the garden to say i'm excited to be here would be an understatement of the year i almost could get emotional that i now get to spend the entire morning and afternoon in my garden it's been a busy busy few weeks and or months i should say and i just have not been able to spend any sort of quality time in my garden and today is the day we get to all right so this is my harvest apron i like to have this on while i harvest so that i don't have to constantly run back and forth to the basket if it happens to not be right next to me i have a couple of these because they wash up really well and they do get dirty because you're putting you know garden fresh produce in this big pocket so i have i think four of them two is plenty but they were gifts in my p.o box and so i like to put this on we're gonna get all of our baskets out i think my goal today is to do some serious weeding but that's lower on the totem pole so probably number one harvest all the onions number two harvest all the cabbage harvest any tomatoes and tomatillos that are ripe any whip summer squash that's ripe and green beans that are ripe and i can already see in the midst of this craziness there's gonna be some good stuff out there for us to harvest today even though it looks crazy probably shouldn't be wheeling around a knife all right get some gloves on oh it makes me so happy to be out here today with you it's what my heart needed all right let's get out there oh probably we need to harvest as many herbs as we can today too maybe an extra pair out i'm gonna go move my car we're gonna get to filling these baskets i just took a stroll through the garden tons of emotions are coming up right now one i'm finding some beautiful things that i had given up on i haven't been in the garden in probably a week and so there were things in here that i was like the total loss total loss and they are not a total loss they are exploding and then there are the emotions of oh my goodness how have i let this get so out of control one thing that is a failure we're gonna start right off the bat this green stock and this has nothing to do with green stock this is 100 my fault you have to water it it's uh it's not on irrigation and this green stock is completely dead i'm embarrassed to say that because it's embarrassing it was looking really beautiful you saw what it was looking like and right now looks terrible the other thing is though what's kind of interesting this one died but the strawberries look pretty good because i have been trying to water them there is a few dead leaves in here but there are quite a few plants that are thriving in there so i am happy about that but this is something that i had given up on were these green beans the deer keep eating them down but i think they've gotten established enough and they're starting to produce flowers i think we're going to get green beans off them and i was thinking i wasn't going to get a year's worth of green beans but as long as these produce we're going to hopefully get some green beans i was getting a little overwhelmed when i was walking through trying to decide where should we start i think i'm gonna do the same concept that i typically do when i'm doing any like organizing or cleaning and we're gonna start with something easy in order to get a win under our belt and that is gonna be the celery i definitely think i grew enough celery this year to get us through the year here is our celery and it looks so good we started from here to here from seed and from here over those were starts we purchased i'm also going to get in here and harvest any of the cabbages that are ready so we're going to have fun in this bed taking it back these red cabbages are just starting to form heads so we won't harvest the red cabbage today oh but there is a couple green ones in here what i've decided to do here is make my life a little bit easier when it comes to preserving this celery i'm cutting the top part majority just leaves on the top here off and we are going to give this to the chickens to enjoy and that way i'm not trimming the whole entire celery stock bringing it inside trimming this off and then giving it to the chickens later i'm going to go ahead and just do it right now i could absolutely save all of this for stock but i have enough of it and whatever leaves are left i'll save for stock so the chickens have not had very many greens in a while so they're going to enjoy eating all these greens best part about having chickens is nothing goes to waste and they're gonna have fun eating that i'm walking around again getting overwhelmed so i'm putting my focus glasses on let's focus at the task at hand and let's check something off the list that's gonna make us feel productive so we officially harvested our first celery of the year so there are a few kind of blemishy type spots on there we'll go through and cut those off when we go to preserve so you can see even though i cut a bunch of leaves off for the chickens there's still going to be plenty for me to make stock out of with celery if you cut toward the end but you leave the heart of it still there it will start to shoot up a second batch of stalks so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to take my knife and i'm going to cut right toward the base leave that intact and see if we can get some more celery to come out of there oh there was two plants there while i'm in here i grabbed another basket so i can get the cabbages i'm gonna cut the plant at the base and leave the stock in there and that's gonna go to the chickens the reason you wanna leave the root end in the ground is because that will break down and produce really good organic material for the soil i'm going to cut right here i could just put that there to compost in place but i would rather have the girls enjoy a nice green treat some of these we need to clean off the outer leaves there's definitely some damage but that's okay i think maybe well i don't know maybe on this one it's too bad all the way through it's kind of slimy that one that one's gonna go to the chickens that's okay that one looks really good though once you pull those outer leaves off beautiful [Applause] out of this bed just along this one little strip we got this whole basket of celery and we were able to get an entire basket of cabbage from here over and we did have a couple that we had to sacrifice due to rot so i'm going to clean all of this up and i'm going to give all these green bits to the chickens i probably could plant no i know i could plant a second planting of beets or something in here radishes lettuce spinach something along those lines but i won't be here to harvest it so what my goal in this is to clean this up and make it look really pretty so that's what i'm gonna do and while i was in here let me show you something i found this is another thing that i completely gave up on and i was shocked when i saw it i planted cucumelons along this trellis oh i don't even know months and months ago i thought they all died and all of this green this is all cucamelons i've never eaten a cucamelon before there is a baby cucumelon i just completely gave up on these and they're growing all the way up our straw flowers so uh in the next couple weeks we'll probably be able to taste some cucumbers let me taste this one right here it's kind of big i don't know how to know when it's ripe or not but let's try it let's see i think it's ripe actually it tastes like a cucumber tastes like a cucumber it's good it's really good let me show you something that is disgusting we do not have vine borers or japanese beetles but we have massive slugs and that was living in my squash bed there is another one that is the reason why some of my cabbages are all moldy there's another one right there i'm disrupting their habitat i grabbed my really really big stainless steel bowl that we can put all of this chicken scraps in walking over here i got distracted by weeds so i just pulled them and gave them to the girls this is my strawberry asparagus bed and it has been taken over by weeds these weeds are about to go to seed i'm gonna take a minute maybe five ten fifteen i don't know and i'm gonna pull all of those your blackberry in here so i don't know if you can tell but that is a hundred percent better these fronds here are not weeds this is asparagus so we got the tall weeds out it still looks messy but i can see the strawberry plants again which is a huge huge huge win awesome it's not very hot out here today it's only like 75 i think but it's humid it rained for the first time yesterday in probably a month month and a half so it's really humid out here and we're not used to humidity around here so one thing is i should have worn my boots not my sandals i didn't realize how dirty this was going to be today and so i'm going to rinse my feet off and we're going to get to harvesting again enough weeding even though i have more weeding we're going to do today but i want to get to something fun this is where we were just harvesting earlier and i have a few cabbages in this cabbage patch that need to be harvested again the red cabbages are really little and i'm going to let them grow a little bit more we have our cilantro here so this is probably about i'm gonna say [Music] well you know i don't know if i should wait to harvest it till it all turns brown or that's what our corgander our cilantro turns into coriander but what i was coming in here to show you are these beautiful beautiful cabbages whatever variety of cabbage this is very very little bug damage they've good size and i'm excited to harvest them these little green ones i'm going to go ahead and harvest two because it looks like they're trying to bolt which means produce a flower and then i'm also gonna pull the weeds you know i think i'm gonna harvest the cilantro i think i'm gonna do it so so i wish you could smell this coriander it smells incredible absolutely incredible and i think this is a good time to harvest it because even though they're not all the way dry a bunch of the seeds are falling on the ground so i probably should have harvested this a little bit ago but that's okay this is kind of an experiment to see how it works oh you know what i'm gonna do let me go grab that brown paper bag to put all of oh yeah the seeds are falling all over my cabbages let's see try to somewhat oh they're falling all over in that bag so this is a good idea if i can make it work i'm losing a lot of seeds [Applause] okay there we go [Applause] wow we lost a lot of seeds that's okay i think to get rid of some of this bulk i'm gonna ch chops chop that off if i uh oh where did i put my knife oh shoot here's more friends where did i put my knife oh no oh no okay i'll be back i gotta find my knife i found my knife and i just cut the extra organic material off of these cilantro plants we probably lost about 50 of the seed on the ground in this cabbage thing that's okay this is an experiment we're gonna see how well it works and we're gonna taste test it together we're gonna cook with it maybe we'll make like some sort of i don't know maybe i'll google like a coriander recipe like a curry or something really yummy like that before i'm totally done in this bed i want to get in here and get some of these really big weeds that i haven't been able to get to these are massive this is right where i harvested all the cabbage i'm gonna leave these cabbages in here as weed barrier just so we don't get tons of weeds in this bed these are the peas that are done so two beds cleaned up and harvested this looks so much better we cleaned up all the really tall weeds we got the coriander out so the walkway looks nicer there are a few more weeds on the ground but that's okay this bed is done i want to do something a little bit easier for a minute because i'm getting toasty so i grabbed another basket and we're going to harvest tomatoes tomatillos zucchini and green beans and i carried the hose over here because i want to water this area and i want to harvest before i water this whole area the tomatillos tomatoes and my winter squash patch over there are not on irrigation so they haven't been watered in a week but they still look like they're doing pretty well tomatillos last in the fridge for a really long time so i don't have to preserve these up right away the ones i harvest hopefully i'll be able to get a couple harvests and then make a big batch of salsa verde that's all the tomatillos we got but there's quite a few tomatoes in here these are the juliet tomatoes and i'm so happy with them i had a patient tell me about these and there's a lot in here they're the first variety to ripen for me i think i'm gonna go ahead and pick the ones that are blushing and i'll let these ripen on the counter i will be here tomorrow but i'm not going to focus on tomatoes and that way throughout the week as they ripen i can enjoy some tomatoes because we're going to be preserving a lot of stuff up so i'm not going to come down here probably for a few days after tomorrow now it's time to water no fancy water system for this area i just use my cattle panel and my hose we're going to water the winter squash first and then we'll water the tomatoes and tomatillos the tomato patch we were just in is over there and now we're at our other tomato patch this is our mostly roma tomatoes our determinate tomatoes and i saw a few that were blushing in here so i'm gonna grab these these plants are doing so well i want to prop them up though i don't want them on the ground this one i'm going to let continue to ripen let's see what else we see i know i saw more in here but look at how many tomatoes are on this plant it's incredible it's amazing these two tomatoes have blossom end rot which is a calcium deficiency or it can be too much watering i think i know that's not the case so i'm gonna give these to the chickens i'm going to get a bunch of herbs to dehydrate this afternoon this is our basil i have not yet harvested enough for a year's worth of basil but our first frost date is usually november 19th excuse me november 9th so we'll bring this home and we'll put this in the food dehydrator right when we get home i think we need to harvest some of our peppers as well oh that's a weed my goodness our poppies are so pretty i wonder if i could harvest the seeds and get poppy seeds out of here oh wow they're super small i could probably save seeds to plant but not to have poppy seeds look how small those seeds are i want to get some of these chinese five color peppers you can see they start as purple you know i think i'm gonna let them turn to red so we'll wait maybe tomorrow or harvest them we have this plant here so so pretty it's a weed basil is one of those plants the more you harvest it the more it will produce and so i want to try to use that natural ability of the plant for my benefit so hopefully we're going to get a lot more basil off that plant sun's coming out so i got to put this in the shade when you're harvesting basil or when you're growing basil you really don't want it to go to flower because then it will get bitter so that's why you want to keep picking picking picking do you see right there where there's the two little leafs coming out those will all produce more branches and look at this carnation how pretty is that in this nasturtium my lemon basil has already gone to seed and so it's going to be bitter so i'm going to let it stay in the garden though because the bees love love it and it smells divine just run your hand along it yum yum yum yum let me show you another really cool thing in the garden these sunflowers are living their best life they're just so beautiful i've never grown sunflowers like that before i can't believe what i'm finding in this pepper bed look at our poblano peppers they're so big oh my goodness i'm so happy about that i'm gonna let them grow a little bit more oh you know what maybe we'll take three of them just so that look at that that is incredible yay and then i did figure out what kind of peppers these are these are my peach sugar brush peppers the most prolific pepper plant i've ever grown this was a gift from one of you in my p.o box and we picked peaches together the other day i'm going to make peach hot sauce with these peach peppers but they need to grow a little bit more and ripen they're going to turn a nice orange color but we can get these jalapenos in the meantime when i was over here a second ago i saw some peppers that needed to be harvested so i picked a couple of them right here look at that one i can't believe any time i grow a pepper i'm shocked i'm just i can't believe that i grew some peppers now there's a bad spot on that but i don't care i'll just cut it off yay i can't believe my peppers very hard for me to grow peppers in this garden i i'm telling you so anytime i can i'm even one pepper off one plant is a huge huge win and you want to know what's crazy is every single one of these pepper plants in the garden i started from seed with you we did it together i just realized that and all but like four of the tomato plants in the garden we started together as well talk about a huge accomplishment not that you can't be a gardener if you buy starts that's not at all what i'm implying it just adds another level of complexity when you are starting from seed yourself and wow oh my goodness there's so many peppers on this plant amongst this weedy mess there is like seven peppers they're little but i don't care that doesn't matter they'll still be a pepper that we can eat look at all those peppers in there oh my gosh friends i'm also going to get in here and i'm going to clean up all these weeds this is a tear oh my gosh look at what we grew from seed together as well it's a peachy carnation so pretty and look what i found over here this is a jalapeno plant i think and look how many jalapenos are on this teeny tiny plant it can't even stand up straight so let's get all these weeds and then we'll have the satisfaction of picking those two jalapeno plants i hate this grass weed whatever it is it's so invasive and noxious chickens will enjoy it though oh i'm getting dirt all over my veggies that even looks better okay look at that we're not supposed to be harvesting potatoes until tomorrow that's incredible we'll harvest the rest of that plant tomorrow look how much better that looks so we just reclaimed to hold another bed and i cleaned up down here too i didn't show it before but this was all that invasive grass right here so it looks a lot better so now we get the satisfaction of harvesting all those jalapenos i have never grown so many jalapenos in my life much less jalapenos that i started the plants myself i can't even tell you how amazing of a feeling this is i've been seeing a lot of instagram reels lately about how you know we shouldn't exercise because like in the 90s with diet culture and everything that you know i even felt this way the reason we exercised was to improve the way we looked right it was more for aesthetic purposes than necessarily mental health or general health in general and i was thinking about that today as i've been out here working thinking you know i garden for produce right i garden for food that is one of the ultimate goals right there is something that's incredibly satisfying about growing your own food plus it tastes better and it's more nutritious you can grow a million different varieties of things that you can't buy at the grocery store but i don't just garden for food i garden for mental health i garden for being in nature for exercise goes back to mental health there are so many factors why i spend time in the garden other than just trying to produce food for josh and i anyway i was just thinking about that that there's more to gardening because yes i could go to walmart and buy these jalapenos for a whole lot less cheaper than what i have invested in this garden but i wouldn't trade it for the world i also was thinking if this is any indication of the size of potatoes we're getting tomorrow when we do our big potato harvest i am going to be one happy camper all of the waste in quotes that we harvested today like the weeds and the cabbages let me show you how much that ended up producing for the chickens to play with there was no green in this chicken coop when we got here this morning and look how tall that is that is probably a good solid two and a half feet tall and now they get to enjoy eating that playing in that pecking at it and it's a great nutrition but it's also good fun and enrichment for them it gives their little brain something to do isn't that right little bo peep now we're gonna harvest some eggs hey girls hey girls today's egg harvest and i just gave them fresh bedding so they are nice and clean and i saw one more thing that we can harvest well there's a lot more things we can harvest but only one more thing well no i think i'm gonna leave it we'll let it get a little bit bigger and we'll harvest that beautiful yellow squash tomorrow so tomorrow's project is to clean this bed and this bed and harvest all the onions and potatoes i'm not sure what i was thinking putting all these peppers on this in this basket with the tomatoes it's gonna crush them i didn't think we were gonna get so many peppers so i'm gonna put these over here and i'm also going to crush that basil which i don't want to do we did this together friends this was our efforts in a little bit of nature a lot of nature i shouldn't say it none of my efforts i don't know i don't know what i'm saying since it's my friend's birthday i thought i would see if i could harvest a bouquet for my garden for her for tonight i was gonna go buy flowers for her but let me go get my knife you know this red one doesn't really go i think i'll keep that one for myself so in here we have zinnias rebecca i think that one doesn't really match either so we're gonna take that one out status yarrow when i first started gardening two and a half years ago i was not interested in growing flowers at all my whole focus was growing vegetables well i found nicole at flower hill farm she has a youtube channel and she has greatly inspired me to grow more flowers flowers are so beneficial to the garden not only do they create amazing beauty it's also a whole other skill set to learn growing flowers versus vegetables but they're fantastic for the pollinators so the more flowers and color and pollen you have in your garden the more likely you're going to get more produce out of your garden and i learned all about these different types of flowers and the confidence to grow these flowers from nicole at flower hill farm here is the harvest one full basket of pepper sweet and hot an entire basket of celery a ton of tomatoes cucumbers basil and green beans lots of eggs way more cabbage than i would have expected a beautiful bouquet and coriander seeds so now we get to load this all up and i need to go home and preserve some of that basil so productive so enjoyable it's getting hot tomorrow we're going to be here bright and early harvesting all the onions and potatoes and taking back a couple more beds because they are crazy overgrown with weeds but we took back one two three four beds today which is awesome i'm super super thrilled with that productivity and all this harvest i need to get this inside before it starts to wilt like i am i definitely need to wear long pants tomorrow because my legs are super super itchy from walking through all the weeds and the tomatoes and everything and that's why we're gonna be here bright and early in the morning before it gets too hot so time to load up all of this produce we had a little stoke no no no let's see we had a little stow away i want to put him in with the rest of the cabbage where it's nice and moist to continue to eat the bugs in the garden see no no no no you're right in here right in here there you go you'll enjoy it in here better there you go last basket i have the water off i've been known to leave that on look at this i thought it was a snake it's our first red noodle bean oh my goodness there's a ton of them well no there's four but we're successful oh it's mushy all right let's see what this tastes like wow it's not very good well no i take that back wow it's sweet but it kind of tastes like a radish more than a green bean but like a sweet radish if that makes any sense hmm just spotted a bunch more and i'm a little hungry so let's go check one thing out real quick i don't know if the apples are ready to harvest yet but they're getting really big on this one tree so i thought let's see if we could harvest one and have a little snack i've been eyeing these ones for a couple weeks now they're like the perfect specimen of an apple let's give it a try i still have that red noodle bean flavor in my mouth eatable pretty tart whoa should not have picked it yet all loaded up and ready to go put it in the refrigerator to preserve up this weekend

Channel: Acre Homestead

Views: 302,722

Keywords: Acre Homestead, Growing food, freeze drying food, Garden harvest, growing food, backyard homestead, homestead, organic garden, gardening, farmstead, vlog, harvest, garden, backyard garden, growing cabbage

Id: gCWp5CGCuP0

Length: 42min 46sec (2566 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 27 2022