The Reality of Food Self-Sufficiency

the reality of food self-sufficiency looks so different than the common perception we have been working so hard to be able to accomplish our goals of growing as much of our own food as possible and i'm super excited to share with you some of the reality of our lives so we purchased a new bowl two cows and a calf from a friend in addition to that our current herd of cattle grew by one when our cow nelly she had a calf this spring and we also have been breeding our own chickens to regenerate our flock and to grow chickens for meat as well cam and i are not big fans of the hybrid cornish cross chicken and so we have been breeding heritage delaware chickens and they have been so amazing for both eggs and meat production in a previous video i also shared that we had our turkeys hatch we have 10 turkeys that will be ready by november our turkeys are quickly outgrowing their brewer box we need to put them in a bigger facility so i had a friend that converted a old carport into a chicken a portable chicken tractor so we're going to kind of use his same concept to to make a turkey tractor this and like you know fold it up around this bottle i grow a lot of cover crops in the garden to build and enrich soil life and health when they start to flower we crimp them down and then cover them with tarps to get them to die before planting our main vegetable crops in them so we use a homemade crimping tool and each year it ends up being something a little bit different this year cam just found this metal pole that we used to crimp the crop down and last year we used a t post with the string so crimping down cover crops works better the more weight that you have on it so that's why cam and i tag team this job it's always a little tricky to get going at first because you need to be coordinated and then synchronize your steps kind of like you're doing a dance [Music] [Music] keep going keep going [Applause] it has been nine days since we laid down the tarps i just checked the other day and the cover crop underneath is brown which means it's ready for the tarps to come off so we're gonna fold them up and then kind of let everything dry out for a day and then we will plant tomorrow this is good soil it is may 19th and it is the day i am planting tomatoes i'm hoping to get to my peppers today if i have enough time but definitely the tomatoes i have over 100 tomatoes the kids took some and planted some in their gardens so have mostly paced tomatoes to plant in the family garden it is three weeks past our average last frost right now i prefer to wait a little bit to plant mine just because we have so much heavy rain in our area we also often get hail storms and it's really damaging to the plants they just don't like it i also live in the south so i have the luxury of being able to plant them a little bit later if i need to we have a longer growing season so i can do that uh but also i was waiting for my cover crops to kind of die off under those tarps so everything is all prepped and ready to go and we're gonna plant today when i plant my tomatoes i really don't do too much at planting time especially because i've started out with this cover crop already which adds a lot of nutrients to the soil and i'm planting directly into the residue of this crop [Music] [Music] [Music] sweet [Music] let's call it a day [Music] once our asparagus got super tall it is starting to flop over because it's so tall and it makes it really difficult to weed so what uh the kids and i are gonna do today is try and stake it up somehow and the idea in my head is to do basically some sort of florida weave method like i do with my tomatoes but with the asparagus not really sure how that's gonna go down but that is the plan that's really higher [Music] you can probably go a little bit farther on these crews maybe one like right here maybe any guidance okay now we need to lift those ones up this is a giant it's fun oh that's wet too it's working it's gonna create a little bit of shade i think on these two rows which isn't a big deal because in this row i've got stuff that i actually want to have shaded so it's not going to be a problem at all so i'm planting corn today and it's raining right now it will not stop raining so i'm just gonna be working in the rain i decided to deviate off my original garden plan for this year i had planned on 400 row feet of corn and i just checked my freezers and our corn is like at five or six pounds left we got 50 pounds for the year that we froze and then we ate a lot fresh too but last year i planted 600 row feet so i i had planned on even less space this year and i just i'm realizing i need to make sure i do the same amount of space as last year so i'm going to do 600 row feet of corn and i'm just going to do three garden beds across and i do two rows per 30 inch garden bed across so this heavy cover crop behind me was the winter rye hairy vetch and crimson clover it's a very heavy mulch it's going to be difficult to direct seed in so what i'm planning on doing is kind of pushing that mulch to the side so i can have a place for my cedar to go down the row and i'm also planning on putting some compost down so that there is a place for that corn to germinate and enough soil there for it to germinate and then in these other two rows these were peas and oats they break down super fast and there's a lot mess material there so they'll be easy to direct so into right now when you're wearing boots and the non-waterproof stuff gets wet that soaks down in your glute so now my boots soaked it has been raining literally for three days straight and the sun is finally out i picked a good day to come out i thought i was gonna be working in the rain and then it just all cleared up which is pretty magical and this experiment that i'm doing i have no idea if it's gonna work but i'm gonna keep going on this and go all the way down the row and see how much i can get done today because the weather is nice so is dad coming back soon no he's got a late meaning yeah i got it foreign come on noel and dax planted a garden bed of corn for me this morning they planted the one with all the mulch on it i was really afraid my earthway cedar would not make it through all that mulch so they just hand planted that and the other two rows where i had my p o cover crop and it just really died back i will be able to take my earthway cedar through that hopefully it'll germinate now that it's finally warmed up and stopped raining a really nice clean surface raining outside today and so we decided to take the day and do our first canning of the season we have strawberries this year and so we're cutting those up and we're going to make lemon strawberry jam which is our very favorite just a very small batch right now because i only have a couple strawberries so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] yesterday we had a major major issue in the garden it was so distraught and overcome i did not video any of this i could not pull out the camera i didn't want to share any of it but i feel like today i'm in a better place and i can share this with you so hopefully we can all learn together i definitely learned my lesson so here we go so yesterday i came out to my tomatoes and a lot of them were flopping over like really droopy and not like they hadn't been watered it had it had rained for four or five days straight and i was like i think they are too wet so i put my hand down in the soil and down in the soil it was like they were sitting in a pool of water the soil was just not draining previously when i created this garden all of the beds were mounted up and raised and over the last three years that we've done this garden they have sort of leveled out and i thought it would be fine but it wasn't fine so for four or five days the tomatoes were just sitting in water and it was obvious now how distressed they were i was i was just so devastated you put so much work into the garden and all of this i was like i don't even know what to do so i pulled up this tomato just so it would dry out and then the idea came like i just need to raise the soil level so i took a bunch of compost and cameron helped me move compost over here and we took each tomato dug it up and replanted it above ground level with a lot of compost around it so that they weren't sitting in water anymore some of them it looks like they are not going to recover but others are perking up today which is really good so we're still gonna get a tomato harvest this year the kids gardens their tomatoes look amazing because they're uh they still have this wonderful raised bed we'll see how this all pans out i was like so excited about the tomatoes this year they were looking so good and uh i had done a better job than usual growing them in pots and yeah so it went from like major high to major low taking all of this into account now that i know the drainage is absolutely horrible uh if the beds level out in at the end of this year i am going to take the dirt from the aisles and put that up on the beds so that they raise our rays back up again i'm pledging my squash directly into a pile of compost and the main reason for that being that i want to keep the squash above ground level after yesterday's poor drainage issues they are one plant that can handle being in rich compost really well they actually really like it this is last night gave my tomatoes the weekend to see if they would recover and some of them are and some of them are it looks like i'm going to lose about 50 of the tomatoes i'm going to be pulling out plants today and i just need to roll with the punches here and move on some of them actually did perk up a little bit but they almost look like they have the start of a blight which i do not want in my garden either so i'm actually gonna pull those two or maybe trim them back i'm not sure i have some alcohol that i brought out here with my with my knife so that i can prune off things it that need to be pruned off and then clean my tool as i go along so i don't pass anything to other plants that's also an option we'll see what happens when i get there and what i'm thinking i'm gonna do is number one i'm gonna make sure i baby the tomatoes that i have left number two is i'm gonna start another tray or two of tomatoes we're right at the end of may so it's really late in the season for me to be starting tomatoes i've never started tomatoes this late but there's still a chance that they could produce and i'm willing to take that chance nothing to lose at this point so i'm going to start a couple more trays of tomatoes i also have some volunteer tomatoes around that have popped up around where i had my tomatoes planted last year and thankfully there are still some left i weeded some of them out as i went along this season but there's still some kind of here and there so i'm going to grab those and transplant them the only thing with doing that is that i don't know whether or not they are a cherry tomato or a slicing tomato or a paste tomato i can kind of tell but not entirely so that's going to be a kind of a wild card but i figure it's worth a shot better than doing nothing it makes me feel better to at least do something i don't know the only other casualty we had is the peppers they also started to get some spots on them which don't look good but this pepper i've grown and saved seeds from from for several years and they i've had them get spots before and recover so i'm hopeful that they will recover fully they don't look as sad or as sick as the tomatoes did everything else looks great we're having a good harvest of our peas and strawberries and the cabbages look good celery is looking good so all of our other crops look good just had a major problem with the tomatoes this year but hey live and learn we're moving on and it's hopefully going to be a great rest of the season i'm heading out to plant those tomato seeds but i thought i'd show really quick my potatoes they actually look really good over here i had cam drop me off a bale of hay i don't know if you can see it back there so that we can cover these with hay because now is the time to bury them deep they do not like heat and so where we live it is good to keep them really covered with straw and then like last year we had a really good harvest because we did that i probably won't get to that today but i actually went inside and i changed my shirt and the rest of my clothes after working with those tomatoes just in case they did have disease i didn't want to spread it around and put it on any new plants the freeze-dried strawberries are done and they are so good i am gonna get these into jars and we're gonna vacuum seal them and that will also help because my kids really love these they could eat them in about 20 minutes so i want to save them for the winter and have them eat the fresh ones for right now you want some right now don't eat the big ones okay you're welcome [Applause] okay i went around my garden and grabbed all of the volunteer tomatoes that i could find so far and i'm already up to 15 and i still saw quite a few more out there actually but i'm trying to grab the ones from the tomato rose last year that were paste tomatoes i want a bulk amount of paste tomatoes because they are easier for me to can rather than like a slicing tomato or a cherry tomato which has a lot of water and a lot of seeds i'm going to go ahead and transplant these right now i am doing it at this time of day so that there's less shock involved and they have a little time to recover before morning comes it's also supposed to rain tonight and i'm gonna water them in really well so hopefully this works if not like i said i have nothing to lose at this point [Music] [Music] oh wow cool oh strawberries you told us to pick someone yeah that's good [Music]

Channel: The Seasonal Homestead

Views: 891,284

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Id: FJv_nCAdCio

Length: 24min 28sec (1468 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022