Harvesting Garlic for the Year | Moose Stuffed Pita Pockets by the Campfire

[Music] welcome to the garden i don't even know if i can call it that there's a lot of chickweed right now we are actually going to be harvesting our garlic today it's a very exciting day garlic is one of those crops that takes a long time to grow if you happen to catch when we planted it we started this garlic back in september it's possible it was october you want to time it right around then and you plant each individual clove and from each clove you get an entire garlic bulb so it's very exciting stuff and we are now at the end of august that's the entire time it took to grow it's definitely at the point where it's ready to harvest so we're going to be digging up this entire row it's about 15 feet and we are growing hard neck varieties only we're in zone three so we plant our garlic in the fall to get the best harvest the following year usually it's in the summer it just kind of depends on the year we amend with our chicken litter i am n with a lot of nitrogen because garlic likes a lot of nitrogen we also use fish bone meal to give the phosphorus to this row and on top of that we mulched with like six plus inches of straw the mulching is really important in our climate because it freezes so deep in fact this bed does freeze you know we've got a raised row here of soil but it does freeze really deep into the ground but that mulch just provides it what it needs to overwinter and then come spring after the snow melts we will dig off the mulch and you will start to see little shoots of garlic emerge and it grows grows pretty much the entire season until mid-summer when you see scapes form there's a little one right here it looks like i forgot to clip that one off or i couldn't see it not only are scapes edible there's a little flower stalk but we clip them off to redirect the energy back to the bulb because we want to harvest some big bulbs and i've already been doing some checking on these and i think it's going to be a good year for us i'm very excited to get them up i'm not quite sure how many varieties we planted i know there's quite a bit in here probably over 10 so i don't know which variety this is but i wanted to show you the leaves and these are the leaves you want to pull them when the plants telling you certain things and so the leaves will turn yellow or they'll kind of wither and get this brown crispy look to them and usually once they have five to six layers of their leaves look like that you know that that's a good indication they may be getting close to ready now these ones look a little bit worse and i have let them go a little bit long i really wanted to push it so they would get big but also we have not had a very good weather we've had a lot of wet weather that's not ideal for harvesting garlic it's better if it's dry because you want to pull it up when it's dry and it just works better for curing it let's go ahead and pull this one out of the ground and they usually have some really big roots so they're a little bit harder to get out this is a good example to show this one did go a hair past when you'd want to pull it up and so what happens is each leaf is a coating around the cloves so there's all these cloves in here this is the bulb and each leaf is what protects your garlic cloves you know when you get it from the store and you have to peel off all those layers but this one actually started to separate just a little bit and the separation can happen the older the garlic gets if it's too mature in the ground you didn't pull it in time i think we're going to be okay but we may see some of this happening just because i did let it go a little bit long so this is a good example when to pull garlic or even a little bit sooner you're looking for these leaves to look like this or yellowing and you want the top to probably still be a little bit green but in our case it's all turning yellow this is probably a better example of one in its prime and the soil is very moist again not ideal i wanted this to be much drier you usually don't even want to water garlic at all near the end of the season and i have not been watering it but it has been raining quite a bit so that is why it is so moist this one did not start to separate in fact the bulb looks to me it looks perfect because once they start to have so much definition you can tell they are going to start to separate the other thing that happens with the wet weather is it can make it so you don't get as many of those really nice coatings on there this one looks like it has enough and once we go through the curing process it'll dry out and be perfect i think we've been growing garlic for five years or so and i still find it very helpful to dig up the bulbs you know as they're growing to kind of see how they're doing you know try not to disturb the roots but just kind of check in on them first they start to swell so they'll be like almost perfectly circular and that's not ready you know you haven't had the definition or the bulbs or the cloves start to develop so you want to wait until you see some curvature and you know that it's getting closer to when it's ready to harvest eric's going to jump in here we're going to get all of these dug up and see how we did we grew i think we grew about four pounds this year we upped it from the last year and i'm growing six pounds this fall that we're going to be starting so every year we're growing more and more not all of it makes it unfortunately here because it's so hard we do have some of the cloves they must rot and we lose them but again that's okay we just have to account for that i'm pretty excited to get these dug up so we're gonna get going [Laughter] look at the pink beauties [Music] that's the one i stabbed i stabbed the biggest one how nice is that turns out that these were harder to keep track of than i had thought i had put some nice tags down but i think amidst the entire year they got lost somehow so we think we're on chestnock red but i don't remember planting that many of these ones chestnut red i think it has like 10 or more cloves so even though it's a hard neck variety you get some smaller cloves they're not quite as big this is a really nice size one not all of them are that big we definitely had some smaller ones i stabbed one on accident too eric's just kind of pulling them out the other varieties that i have were ones that we grew a year ago that didn't actually do that well and i saved some of those cloves to replant and so i have those just separated it looks like those ones are a lot smaller than this year's crop so we're just going to keep going music was a variety that i was most excited about it has massive cloves and it just gets really really big if you're into big cloves that's because when we go to eat food we like to use a lot of garlic cloves or preferably just one massive garlic clove we've grown elephant garlic in the past and that's awesome but it doesn't grow well up here it's just a little bit too harsh so i'm thinking music's a really good one are you still on that oh what's your next brain the next one is going to be red reason let's see romanian red no no we got a purple glass [Laughter] so far i think we've dug up a few different kinds and we really like music i think this is actually music it looks a lot like this variety but i think this was another variety i really liked as well and i think it was the polish hard neck i'm not quite sure but they all they all pretty much look the same and they have really big cloves and not that many of them per bulb whereas this one has probably looks like it has maybe six maybe eight cloves per bulb and it's got the purple striping or i i don't know if this is a marbled variety but you can see on its you know it's got all that cool coloration on the skins a little bit smaller of bulbs i don't know why i just am always we always want to go for the big ones because we don't want to deal with pulling off skins off of multiple cloves so i think in the future we're probably going to grow a lot of the bigger varieties oh would you say this one's small here the next tag errol starts right here oh okay i want to show you this one look look no it starts right there red romanian did you see how small it was that was a good one where did it start well you're pulling small stock this is a small stock it's gonna be small but look a big stuff that wasn't that small though i didn't think for how small the stock was i don't think i don't know if i ordered any of this this year that's a little one we're pulling up just some of the last ones and what these ones are is when you plant garlic and you take your bulb you'll end up with some smaller cloves and you know we didn't want to waste them we wanted to plant them and they're smaller but they did okay so i think this is this is the last of them i think that's one right there i think that's that's it good harvest good job baby all right well we got all of the garlic harvested and the next step is going to be stringing it kind of cleaning it just a tad bit and hanging it up and the reason we're going to do that is to cure it because we can't possibly consume this much garlic all at once you can absolutely eat fresh garlic like this when you dig it up it's ready to eat but we want to dry it because we want to store it we definitely have some of them that were winners so i'm going to try to grow those ones in the future i've already ordered my garlic for this year i had to pre-order in advance since we're going to be planting it very soon ideally i would love to grow a lot more to account for the losses and to have some of our own supply to replant so i don't have to order it every year it may seem like a lot of garlic but we use a lot we feed it to our chickens as a dewormer we eat a lot and we also like to use it for canning too the soil looks really great in this row but we're not going to be replanting the garlic right here we're actually going to plant our garlic a few rows over we're going to go ahead and get this strung up now pretty good right pretty great i'd say pretty great today okay awesome this variety did really well well some of them are small he's a lot of strong than terrible is that level i just dropped that stuff yeah carrying garlic is really easy and it's actually very simple to do if you have an outdoor space or even like a basement or a garage we've done it in a garage before too um you just take a few bulbs i mean it doesn't have to be any certain amount like a cluster and you tie them up on a little string that's what we do with twine and you hang them you want them to be somewhere they get some good ventilation good circulation around them that's why i outside is ideal you don't want them in direct sunlight so we're in an area that's going to be a little bit shaded for the most part temperature is not as big of a deal at this point i mean warm is nice cold is okay too it may just take a little bit longer and humidity is also okay at this point too we don't have to be too finicky about that because we're just curing them they're not actually in their final storage place and we're gonna leave them completely dirty so all the dirt and the tops and the roots and we're gonna clean that up later once they've cured what did we do last uh last year about five about five just whatever you want whatever you want beautiful the more it is the probably longer it takes you don't want to string them up with me too take me forever uh i prefer heated because it's kind of hard this is our dual purpose hanging rack oh my god for fish and for garlic probably hang a little mousse on there too if we wanted i don't think it would have been it was a real baby but okay is like your favorite variety too which one the large one yeah for sure i mean why not that's how i feel why not why wouldn't you they taste great i mean uh it was good until i just jammed it yeah we won't completely i mean it'll be nicely spaced they don't have to be on each nail that's what i'm thinking space here excellent garlic harvest getting it all hung up really uh puts in perspective we got a lot this year did great i find one more hook for this i just want to mention that garlic is like one of my favorite things not only for cooking but in the garden i'm all about easy gardening i'm all about stuff that just stays outside we don't have to start seeds inside like carol said you just put these bulbs in the ground you mulch them and almost here later you got garlic oh there's one right there just like eric said it is incredibly simple to grow garlic it does take a lot of time i mean it just is a longer growing season crop but it is extremely simple i would recommend it if you haven't just got to pick up the bulbs and split the clothes up and get them in the ground these are going to take about two weeks it just depends on our actual temperatures we get but about two weeks to cure and what will happen is the layers on the outside will dry the leaves and that's going to protect the cloves on the inside this is hard neck garlic so we're always going to have that hard neck or stem right there and in about two weeks or when i think they're done when they get all dried up i'll show you guys but we're going to cut them and then we're going to actually break off the roots because they'll be so dry and this dirt will have dried up and they'll be totally ready for storage and long-term keeping in general hardneck garlic does not store as long as softneck garlic that's usually what you find in the store but i think some of these varieties are fairly long storing so if we have to figure out how to preserve them we will do that in a few months we're heading back to the garden now because we have some more work to do we had our first frost in here a few nights ago and you could tell it just wiped out the squash and zucchinis and stuff like that and also our potatoes kind of started to die back so we're not yet ready to pull those up i'm going to give them some more time they really need a good amount of time in order to get that thicker skin on them i like to wait till they have that it works better for storage so we're gonna wait on that but we are harvesting some of our corn we actually got a very small yield of miniature corn but i'm excited about it this is alaska it's our third year growing corn and this year we actually have some decent quarantine we ate some another night so our corn did not get that tall but it did make ears and each plant put on two but only one's really big or edible the small ones can go to the chickens they really like it and it worked decently well for pollinating we did have kind of a wetter summer so that's not really ideal for corn but we do have some corn and again you're probably like that's not very impressive but i'm impressed okay corn is something if you live here that's a hard one to grow especially where we're at a little up at a higher elevation so we've got some little little corn not all of them pollinated perfectly it looks like this one had some trouble but it's still going to be delicious and probably just gonna end up eating all of them ideally i would love to have extras to freeze but i don't think this is going to be the year for that again still very happy with something i don't remember the exact name of this corn variety but it is supposed to do really well here and i think on a warmer year it would do better this was definitely a cooler summer i have some construction plastic on top of the row to kind of help warm up the soil that does seem to help it's our second year growing it outside the first year we grew in the high tunnel although it did really well it just didn't get that good of pollination in there and that's why i moved it outside do you want me to do that job i know that job's coming yeah that's fine a little cobb in there what happened to him oh my gosh you grow some good looking corn can you please put that in the chicken bucket that is the chicken boy right there no that's the chicken parker i have small ones in there too that's the chicken bucket you need to put the chicken times in there too i'm putting good corn in there well sorry that i'm not doing it exactly how you want what if you got like corn cob somewhere they hand you one of those i would probably what was going on this is from alaska locally grown corn it's six times as expensive and it's not good i'm joking no he's not joking i'm not but i'm being friendly [Laughter] uh it's not every year we get sunflower seeds and i really love sunflower seeds but i think this year we got a few heads that we're gonna get some seeds from kind of brush them off and you can see some nice nice seeds in there so we'll harvest this guy clean them up a little bit let them dry a little and we'll roast them maybe with some salt have some sunflower seeds to snack on there's still a lot left to harvest outside in our outdoor garden but we're just kind of prioritizing what needs to be harvested first i don't suspect we'll have another frost for a few weeks just because we've kind of had some cloudy weather and some rain so i think that'll hold it a little bit warmer we're gonna head into the high tunnel though and pick our pepper plants because those did not do as well this year it's very warm in here today and that is how we can get away with leaving some of the crops in here longer in the season it stays warmer in here even if it's a little bit frozen outside it'll stay warmer inside of this area usually i wait until the last second to harvest things in here right before i know there's going to be a frost but our pepper plants did not do that well this year we have grown them twice very successfully in the past and we planted a lot this year they really started off strong the starts were good that we started and they were putting on a lot of really good growth and setting a lot of peppers but about mid-summer i started to notice a problem with a lot of them and it just got worse and there was really nothing i did that could seem to correct it in fact i don't even really know what happened i'm thinking moisture was an issue in here i left it pretty warm all year and there's a lot of moisture in here and i think that may have contributed to them they're not looking that pretty at all but we're going to be stripping them all down today and harvesting what we did get off of them kind of a bummer we like to can a lot of them and i just don't think we're gonna have that much this year to can our tomatoes did really good they're also stripped down they look naked they're just to their fruit and that's so they can hopefully ripen otherwise we'll pull them inside and they'll ripen inside the cabin i think this is i really like this tomato variety they're huge and this one's ripening down here they look really good i'm pretty excited about our tomatoes this year we're gonna be making salsa and tomato sauce probably in another month or so this is what's kind of going on with our pepper plants it's it looks a little bit different on some of the different varieties some of them look fine i mean i really can't find one right now that looks fine but they just i mean they really did bad there there's some fruit on the lower parts of the plant where it was doing well and then they started to get almost like a wrinkly appearance and i had thought it was maybe like a lack of water but i was watering them and i think i over watered them that didn't really seem to help anything and they have gotten some raw and some mildew and some of the plants are actually like molding so i'm thinking it may have been a circulation or moisture issue i can't attribute it to the soil because it was just this row and i use all the same soil throughout our garden so a little strange this is the first one for me a lot of the plants do have some good sized peppers like this banana pepper but there's only about six on that plant and usually we would get a lot more from each plant it's still beautiful though what variety is this like anaheim anaheim to me you're going to see red ones too because we let them go longer do you want to have one separate for this because that's usable well when are you gonna go through this i'll just put it right there fantastic what's another word with the p that's fabulous pad with this woody woody woody look at this one look at that one oh that's loaded with goodies right there i love that color can i get one of you because there's a lot to there it's like a thanksgiving it's like a bouquet this is what i was talking about oh yeah those are sweet oh my gosh i think they're sweet bell pepper snack peppers try one of those that's good this is what we were having happen just a little bit there some of them are rotting and i know there's something called blossom rot that you can get on peppers but i don't think that's what it was a lot of ours were actually rotting from the top right now let's probably the coolest looking pepper i've ever seen that one and that one those are awesome beauties not much else from the plant though not much else bro that's okay dude that's okay we don't expect much right don't expect much dude i can sense that you're disrespecting me just a good dog that likes to hang out right it is partially blossom or not i mean not a bad pepper hole the five gallon bucket over there we have that completely filled up that's kind of a mix of peppers pepper cheese banana peppers anaheims some bell peppers we're gonna make um kind of like pickled peppers or banana peppers out of all those these ones it's a tough call it's between making cowboy candy and salsa and aerial eye especially with the tomatoes doing good the tomatoes doing good we're leaning towards salsa so we're gonna freeze all these and uh we'll roast them up when we're ready to make some salsa but for now we're starving it's been a long day in the garden we're gonna cook up something to eat lime [Music] so um that's good that's a blueberry mint mojito we're gonna light a fire we're cooking over a campfire tonight you're a sad strange little man you're the worst i was biting he's biting he's showing his boss thank you so tonight we're going to be making some pita pockets we've never made them before we're going to fry them up in some moose fat and then to stuff those i'm going to cook up some ground mousse meat with a bunch of good seasonings and we're going to be making a corn salsa we're going to be using corn that we harvested today uh cilantro a bunch of the peppers we did some the garlic a bunch of good stuff so it should be good it's not that the winter's already here you know what i mean it's that the summer is so short it's not that the winter is long and cold and dark it's that the summer is not it's like brief and quick but i mean i feel like i look forward to the winter you look forward to it now but when it's march you're looking forward to summer but when it's summer you look forward to the winter we're making a pocket oh i don't know if they're always traditionally made into pockets let's do it they're already blacking us oh okay maybe i have it too hot it's hot [Music] oh this fire is hot oh my gosh it's too hot you gotta try from there you gotta try it it has the consistency of a funnel cake like light fluffy and soft yeah i don't think i nailed it but the flavors are yeah it's actually really tasty good oh my god the world's shakiest table do you see that i said i stabilized it with my hips camera man you want to corn on the cob there you go dude bro you want one there you go dude eat a veggie spicy i don't think you're going to want to put all the hot peppers um i don't think you're going to want that one there i think you need to cut that into a much smaller slice once you taste that oh my gosh what kind of pepper is that he was trying to tell you what kind of dumplings what is that i don't know it's hot really hot my mouth is on fire i thought that was an anaheim no i was trying to tell you i said the red peppers came the red peppers were in the hot oh my god oh it's going on my nose you ate it i just licked it balsamic i already got balsamic olive oil but i'm just thinking it may need more with a how hot those peppers are you left them in really big chunks did you just want pepper well i'm pretty sure this is gonna be one of our last kind of nice evenings up here in alaska this year it's winter i don't know it seems like it's hitting kind of fast i can already see my breath in the air tonight we've hit below not below freezing but we've hit freezing uh twice already and it's still august so we're kind of having a good time tonight we're gonna make a great meal this corn salsa turn out awesome uh it has such good flavor it reminds me of like a pico de gallo it's got a the corn green beans cucumbers tomatoes it has an extremely spicy pepper i don't know what this is but it has some major heat to it arrow inside she's gonna make like a uh a mayonnaise dressing she's gonna blend an egg and some olive oil with some salt and pepper and she's gonna make a mayonnaise and we're gonna stuff our little pita pockets that was that's a hot pepper you know i left the tags out there so i can still i can still go look and tell what it was hot that's what i'd say okay this i'm pretty sure it's gonna be the best meal we've ever had looking at that though go ahead that's yours baby thank you i mean you know it's hot because it hits your eyes first it's good cheers baby it's really um wow bread's really good mm-hmm it reminds me of peroski mm-hmm doesn't it the corn and the red items on the cucumber yeah it's actually surprisingly not that hot i don't know if it's because we just haven't had this stuff in a long time that it's so good but this is so good [Music] man okay we're done we're full that was delicious plenty more to harvest out of the garden we have our work cut out for us definitely and i'm actually kind of looking forward to the winter season take a little break and relax and we'll see you guys next time okay you

Channel: Simple Living Alaska

Views: 455,102

Keywords: off grid living, living in alaska, homestead alaska, tiny house alaska, off grid cabin, off grid in alaska, cabin in alaska, homestead off grid, life in alaska, garden alaska, high tunnel garden, greenhouse alaska, gardening alaska, raised rows garden, gardening cold climate, greenhouse tomatoes, solar fence garden, greenhouse garden, growing food, grow food for a year, sustainable garden, summer in alaska, midnight sun, garden vegetables, homestead living

Id: Q4UMj_wfjCU

Length: 34min 7sec (2047 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021