Alaska Garden Harvest & High Tunnel Update

[Music] today we are in the garden and we are going to be picking cauliflower kohlrabi and cabbage we are going to make sauerkraut and cannon and we are also going to make pickled cauliflower and kohlrabi and I did want to show you guys the high tunnel today a lot of things are looking really good in there there's been a lot of growth since we last showed it on the video we get to see the government every day so to us we don't always notice the changes but I do want to show you out there what it's looking like and how things have been going we are just under 18 hours of sunlight now so we're not getting quite as much Sun but it is still plenty of Sun for the garden first off I'm going to harvest the cabbages that we have ready in this row this is a new variety for us that we are growing from a local seed company and it did really well it produced a head earlier than the rest of them I also have red jewel and red integro growing next to them and some of those already some of them are not quite ready so we're gonna let them go a little longer with all the recent rain we've gotten I do have a few that have split but that's okay this is more cosmetic than anything I'm gonna harvest this one today and although these leaves are edible on the outside I'm going to just give them to the chickens and ducks on my way over to the other cabbages I'm going to just point out a few things to you guys that are doing really well first off is our beets right here and they're doing excellent I think we have a few big ones in there this one looks like it's ready it's a decent-sized beet so what we're doing is we're thinning them because beets and Swiss chard each seed that you plant will grow 3 plants typically and that is just too many plants in one little area so we thinned them I've already thin them a few times and I'm gonna come back through and maybe pick out the beets this size and let other ones get bigger usually we can get softball sized beets so we will be hopefully storing those away in the root cellar over the winter but this is a nice one for eating so these are our Brussels sprouts and they were usually ready in the fall they're starting to make their little buds right next to it I have a nice purple cauliflower a lot of the cauliflowers and broccoli were a little bit heat stressed in this bed but that one did do well so this bed we planted cauliflower and cabbage a little bit later and they actually did better than the first round we did this I believe is red jewel from territorial I absolutely love this cabbage it always sets a really nice head and pretty early it's a little small it's so going this is the Integra I believe which takes longer but it's another red head that's really nice and what I do for cabbage is is I just come through and get the outer leaves because they can you know have pests marks they can encourage slugs to get up to your plants we don't have any slugs but they also occupy a large amount of space and your plants don't actually need all those leaves that they'll put on on the edge so it is a good idea just for maintenance to come around and get some of the larger leaves on the outside we have three cauliflower heads here that are ready to harvest they're a little bit lower down on the plant this has got a little spot we're gonna have to cut off but they look pretty good we're gonna pull this out again I'm gonna be feeding the leaves to our chickens and geese you couldn't always eat broccoli and cauliflower stems we just tend to have extras so they the animals are pretty appreciative of it this is a pretty nice head it is starting to separate I should have picked it when it was a little tighter it also could just be the heat we had we had that really hot period for like two weeks of 80 to 90 degrees which is very uncommon for Alaska this one had a few little slimy leaves on the outside this variety was more susceptible to it than the other varieties we've grown and I don't think it's a huge issue you just pick it off and then the inside looks nice overall I'm really happy with the varieties we grew we primarily grew seeds from territorial seed company big fan of them since we were from Cottage Grove Oregon and we also grew and my gardener and Denali seed Co which is a Alaska seed based company all three of them really have nothing bad to say about good value very good germination rate and their vegetables we got seemed to do really well so I'm very happy with all three of the brands we're gonna head over to where the kohlrabi is and I just wanted to show you guys how the potatoes are doing so that row right across from me is primarily potatoes it's all potatoes except for some b-bomb at the end these are fingerling then we go to mountain rose and the rest are a variety we got locally and there's ones on the end we've held them up three times I generally don't held them up after a certain point and just let them do their thing they've been flowering and setting seed pods and they are just massive you can tell they're almost about to fall over and we've never had our potatoes get that big so we did dig some up the other day and they're doing well but we can't wait until they die back and we can get our big harvest this fall this is a purple Vienna kohlrabi which is a new variety for us and they've been doing really well they're getting very big we do eat the leaf sometimes but if we have a lot of greens to eat already or other things we're eating I do give them to the chickens and the geese but that's a nice really nice variety of kohlrabi this is a green delicacy kohlrabi from territorial they do get a little bigger we have already harvested a few of these purple ones so we have a few in the house that we're gonna be pickling along with the cauliflower one other thing I wanted to show in this outdoor part of the garden is that we have started a second sowing of certain crops we've started certain you know oriental greens and spinach and I did do some lettuces and radishes that will most likely have time to mature before we hit our first frost which is generally in the middle of September we are used to living where the growing season is a little bit longer so I can usually get in two crops of cauliflower cabbage things like that here we didn't quite have that opportunity so we are trying to make the most of this space we have and the time we have to grow I'm going to try to grab all of these or most of these bring them over to the chicken coop and then we'll come back to the high tunnel [Laughter] so we're gonna walk through this high tunnel and everything so far has been doing really good some of its doing better than we ever going to grow even an organ I don't know how maybe because of all the additional sunlight I don't have the shade cloth on the high tunnel we really don't need it unless it's maybe 85 to 90 degrees which it's not very common here again so I haven't actually had it on and some nights I do leave both the window and the door open just so insects can come in and out but sometimes I do close it as well if I want to retain some of the heat inside first thing in here is our peppers and we have quite a few different varieties there all seem to be doing very well I haven't pruned them they're setting lots of flowers and we really haven't had too many issues with aphids or bugs on these plants in here if you come in I can show you some of the peppers this is a bell pepper variety that makes a really nice pepper that turns a little orange color these are banana peppers I believe they're starting to get big on the bottom you can see these ones back here and these pepper plants have all set flowers up top two that need to mature and that's a new variety for us that's Anaheim but they all seem to be doing really really well Eric and I need to come in here and harvest them we're gonna be making pepper tuna teas and some other things with them and I believe if I come through here and harvest them the other ones should develop and have plenty of time so we get quite a few peppers off these plants these are jalapenos and Serrano is over here we've got a banana pepper so far I haven't had any cross-pollination that I know of right behind the still I have our cucumbers we have pickling a slicing cucumber which is what you're seeing here these are the first to start being ripe that one looks like it's pretty much ready to harvest and then we have lemon cucumbers I don't have as many of those those are definitely gonna be the later ones to mature these are doing really well that's a bush pickle there and they are actually surpassing the height we allowed them I did put up some extra string it's definitely not the best setup but it is working for this year we're gonna have to revise that gameplan I've never had our cucumbers grow that tall so this is a very exciting year for us with cucumbers we have our temperature gauge right behind our mr. shim mr. shim grows incredibly well here I don't know what it is about Alaska but it doesn't seem to get very big this one's actually not as big as they get and it's just nicely trellising up this little spruce log we have in here next we have our corn and if you can see it's pretty difficult to walk in here the corn has surpassed eight feet and it is bending over at the top I don't think we're gonna have any issues with it trying to protrude or harming that plastic it is six mil poly so it's pretty thick stuff but I didn't expect to the corn to get that tall this year the corns are starting to make their ears and they've already have their silks up top and what I do is I come in here and they shake everything and it gets really messy but all the pollen will then come down and pollinate the ears and we do have good ventilation here but that's just kind of a extra precaution to make sure that those corners do get pollinated and we end up with a good harvest of corn this is a yellow and Ferno corn it's super delicious I like yellow corn a lot and other corn we're growing is a white variety that it's also a very super sweet good corn all in all our tomatoes are doing excellent this year they are taking a little bit longer to mature than we would have had back home but that's okay we are primarily gonna have them for canning so fresh eating is not as important and they are setting lots of their flowers the vines are all maturing really nicely this is Hillbilly I believe and then we've got Kellogg's back here which have these massive tomatoes on them but it does put a lot of energy into that so what I'll need to do is probably go through soon and prune off some of the stuff that's not going to mature in time we haven't had any issues with blossom rot I do put cal-mag occasionally on these and I try to keep them evenly watered so I'm glad to see that hasn't been an issue this year let's go ahead and head up a little bit higher most of these tomatoes have reached the height that day we wanted them to reach so they are about five feet tall or a little bit over that and I did top them off and so what I mean by that is I went through and I cut off their top growing point because they will not have enough time to grow the way they could in another climate and I really want them to focus more on maturing some of that fruit rather than to continue to keep growing if you remember our tomatillo plants they were pretty tall last time we did the tour well they have surpassed the high tunnel now they're actually about eight feet tall which is a new thing for us but they are setting plenty of fruit and a lot of them are mature lower we should have plenty of these for salsa these are going right now and they still have to get bigger inside of there I went ahead and picked a tomatillo they are really good raw but we are gonna be using them primarily for salsa we did have a little bit of a struggle with aphids this year or currently do have a little bit of a struggle I did pick up some neem oil I can't say I am 100% sold on it it's not that I don't think it works I do it's just that I think once you get a fits they're very difficult to eradicate so being that this is a high tunnel we've got humidity probably some stressed out plants I pretty much knew we were gonna have a fence the zucchini got hit the hardest behind me and I think that's because they're on the south end of the greenhouse and they get the most Sun so if I don't have that shade cloth on on a hot day these plants will wilt because they are in pots I went ahead and prune them back they're starting to regrow and they look a little better but those did get a fits and our eggplants if you remember also had a fit they look really good and they are starting to set more fruit these plants were hit really hard by aphids at the beginning of the season and even though they look okay I don't think they ever made a full recovery they are setting some of their fruit so this is an eggplant here there's a nice larger one down there but for the size of these eggplants I would expect at least 20 eggplants per plant and we just don't have that this year so on this side of the high tunnel we actually have another Tunnel within the tunnel we did put some wire up two lollies two trellis even further it's pretty messy it's not the prettiest looking but you know what it's working for this year we're already starting to harvest green beans this burgundy variety was the first to be ready these are really nice green beans they do cook green when you cook them so that's kind of a fun thing we also have a few other varieties going and then we move on to our shelling beans so these are some shelling beans and a few of them this is a Windsor fava that one looks like it's ballooning up pretty nicely and I will have to look up when we pick them I don't think we pick them right now I think we wait until they're dry if I'm correct maybe you guys out there can help me if you've grown these before I did not realize that they weren't going to trellis so next year we'll figure out a better system but right now they're just kind of bushing and staying lower to the ground this is vortex and bees are probably seven or eight inches but they get to like a foot long so we're gonna let those keep growing we're now entering our squash trellis area I do have a few watermelons going one of the watermelons is doing better than the rest it hasn't I think it's working on setting fruit but I don't know if it'll mature in time so it is working on growing which is pretty cool because we are in Alaska next we have our squash we have butternut first but or not for us the variety I got doesn't germinate the best and it's always the slowest growing so I'll probably be looking into a new butternut variety if you have any recommendations out there but these are doing well and they're growing we next have mixed in spaghetti squash pumpkin and acorn we are more familiar trellising with hog panel or cattle panel so the twine in here is not quite strong enough to support things like this that are very heavy and one day we came in here and this branch actually fell down so we had to strap it back up again we're gonna have a whole different system next year but it is working for this year and the spaghetti squash are always the ones that are champion they grow the fastest they put on the most this is a genetically deformed squash I don't really know what's going on with him I don't know if it cross pollinated in the past or something but it is kind of funny-looking we've got some more spaghetti squash here and then we move on to pumpkins now I wanted to point out that the base of these plants I have pruned them up quite a bit that is for airflow to manage a feeds and also just to be able to walk through here we want good circulation all of that so they look a little not so pretty down here but they are nicer up there and we have them trellising across this arch with just that twine we talked about this is a pumpkin these are like little sugar pumpkins third tinier so they're not gonna get much bigger than that I think that's actually their mature size but they will turn orange and lastly I have a bush delicata type squash and it is growing well it's starting to set some of the flowers but it just doesn't get very big so this is pretty standard for it overall I'm pretty happy with the squash growth in the past we've had more squash set so I think I am having some pollination issues with the squash in particular I do have plans to put a fan up a little higher to keep some of the airflow moving where the flowers and the squash are trying to set since we've pretty much missed a lot of the opportunity on the lower portion of these vines overall I think we're gonna get plenty of squash so I'm happy and there are other things in the greenhouse that are more than making up for some of this stuff that's not doing quite as well so when we first moved here it was a little bit on a whim we haven't talked too much about that but we just went full course with this idea of moving to Alaska and we've researched if you could have a garden here which you can clearly but you're sure your season is condensed so I want to say it's a little more intensive in that aspect and when we moved here I virtually just thought we weren't going to be growing tomatoes cucumbers zucchini stuff like that some of these crops in here would probably do okay outside some of them want it we wouldn't have a long enough season for them to mature corn is one of them it's not great for a high tunnel but it's one of the only ways you can really grow it and get ears to set here in Alaska and our climate so again we're just very appreciative to have this high tunnel this year it has made it possible for us to have these crops for fresh shading and for overwinter which is really really valuable to me and Eric and I don't know if you remember if you've been following us for a while the soil or the dirt or even rock shall I say that we're standing on is not very fertile at all would be my guess and in fact it is quite rocky so we brought in yards and yards and yards of manure soil and that is why I think things are doing good this year also the heat I think the extra heat this year in Alaska has been helpful but without that manure I don't think any of this would have been possible Eric and I are going to be doing a garden review near the end of the season where we're gonna go over varieties that we grow what we'll do differently next year maybe how we'll change some things and just basically our whole plan for next year based off of this year you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 877,135

Keywords: garden tour alaska, garden tour, first year garden, raised rows, gardening off grid, homestead alaska, homesteading alaska, garden alaska, high tunnel greenhouse, hoop house alaska, greenhouse alaska, off grid cabin, off grid life, off grid vlog, alaska channel, living in alaska, off grid living, trellising greenhouse, garden land of the midnight sun, willow alaska, mat su valley alaska, gardening cold climate, summer in alaska, giant cabbage alaska

Id: D52z0gxJ084

Length: 20min 6sec (1206 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 09 2019