 Hello there. You might be wondering where I've been. Everything's been going fine. We just took a little bit of a summer hiatus because it's the summer. We needed a break. It's a lot of work to put together these videos and while I enjoy doing it, you know, everybody needs a break from work once in a while. So we're in the greenhouse to collect some pickles. We've got a couple dozen quarts put up already of the fermented kitchen pickles. The tomatoes are about to come into high production. It's just been a really busy time. And so this week on Food'em Again, we have all kinds of ketchup videos to show you what we've been doing. Some of our successes, some of our not so great successes or otherwise said failures. Things that we need to do better on or maybe we won't be able to improve on next year because we won't have access to the same resources as we did this year at the beginning when there was fossil fuels. Now that there's no fossil fuels, my oats, for example, aren't growing very well. So I'm worried that I'm not going to have oat seed for next year. We might be out of oats, which is kind of a problem. I'm going to have to start talking to neighbors. There might be some spare oats laying around. So we'll see what we can do on that front and a lot of other areas. So stay tuned this week and we'll catch up with what we've been doing during our little hiatus here. Glad to be back. Welcome to this week's Food'em Again. I'm also working to hoe up the vegetation between the rows of potatoes here and hill them up with that dead vegetation to keep the potatoes underground. Alright, so this is an unhoed row. You can see the weeds growing up. And now I just finished hoeing this row and this is one I did the other day. And so what I'm about to do is hoe this stuff up, hill it up to keep the potatoes covered from sun because if they get sun then they get turned green and it has a compound in them that is unsafe to keep. And then once I'm done hoeing this one up, it will look like this one where the soil is totally bare and hopefully I'll get some mulch on here to prevent more weeds from growing. Now it's been like four or five days. We're going to have a look at the pickles. Still hard. Let's see. Tasty. So now I'm going to take the pickles, pack them into quart jars or yeah quart jars. Maybe I'll slice up some of these larger ones if I can get them out. There's a bit of a helper here. Somebody learned how to use the stool all by himself. Hooray for us. Now I've got them in the water bath canner for 15 minutes and a half inch head space. And unfortunately it kills the probiotics. Maybe we'll save some without the water bath canning and see how long they last. But this at least, we'll do this for most of them because we still want to be able to have all the vitamins and minerals all winter even if we are getting our probiotics from other things like kimchi. And now we can do the dishes. It's been 15 minutes so now I'll just grab these jars. I'm doing an experiment. I'm using old, I'm reusing canning lids because canning lids are not a renewable resource except for the reusable canning lids we have. So we'll see if these seal or not. And here's something I've been working on. I pulled up, I was going to make a video of pulling up all these garlics but it was raining so I couldn't but the ground was nice and wet so I could pull them up real easy. So I've been letting them dry here on top of some wood to get air underneath them. And so now one thing I'm going to do is make some garlands to hang up and continue the drying process. Of the larger bulbs so when we're too small so they'll just get planted again next year. So this is one garland and these are pretty small. These got knocked over by a windstorm and basically have died and they weren't going to get any bigger. So I pulled them out before they rotted. So I'll get even nicer garlands off of the next ones. And so now I can go hang this up in the basement where it's, you've got a dehumidifier running and it'll dry out more fully and we'll use them all winter. But this is probably an eighth to a sixteenth of the garlic we'll have for the year. So I hope you like garlic if you come eat at our house. So every year we turn the back of our yard right behind the house into a garden space. This helps shield the solar hot water heater so we don't get overheated solar hot water in our house. Here I've got cilantro behind me I have parsley. Here's tomatillos. There's tomatoes and zucchini that are growing pretty prolifically. But I haven't weeded in a while so that's what I'm up to today. So one problem I've had is that I get going on weeding and I weed until I drop and I'm completely spent and tired of weeding. And then I don't put mulch on top of the bare soil because I'm too tired I'm done weeding. So what I'm doing today is I'm weeding a small spot and then I'm going to mulch it. And then I'll weed another small spot and then I'll mulch it just so that I don't have to weed it twice. Like I'm having to now because I failed to put mulch on it the first time. So now I have all my parsley weeded. I have my mint weeded. I've got dill and basil up front. My walkways weeded so now I'm going to try and protect that investment of time by adding a little mulch. Three or four minutes of adding mulch will save me a half hour of weeding later in the year. Hey, you're watching me weed. I have a soaker hose on these crops. I'm just putting it right under the mulch because I don't want that water to seep out. I want the water to be in the ground. Okay. So here I have composted blue stem that I have by the truckload. And then this is just wood wood. This is just sawdust from my workshop. So the sawdust actually absorbs a lot of nitrogen, potentially making it more difficult because it's so carbon heavy, making it more difficult for weeds to grow perhaps. I don't use the sawdust on my plants because it will suck all the nitrogen out of soil, leaving them no nitrogen to grow themselves. So I'm hoping that this will be absorbing nitrogen and then over time this whole rot and become compost that can then go on the beds once it has a little more nitrogen in it. But hopefully this composting and this weeding and then the mulching will keep the weeds down. I won't have to weed here again this year. Or if I do it will be a lot lighter than it would have been had I not mulched you. One thing I had been really diligent about up until this point, well up until about two weeks ago, was keeping the fence line clear. And as you can see I have kind of been falling down on the job and letting vegetation grow up and touch the fence which reduces the effectiveness because it bleeds off electricity instead of zapping the rabbits and the raccoons that are coming in to eat all my stuff. It's zapping the plants uselessly so. But this illustrates kind of what I want to point out in my, in the episode this week is I like to show you the things that are doing well. But a lot of times there are things that are not doing as well. I should probably show you some of the things that I haven't done quite as well as I would have liked. So keeping this fence line clear up until a couple weeks ago I've been doing great but now I've kind of fallen down on that job. Now this is usually where I do a big round to show you what I've been growing in my back 40 area. And over here I have my oats and over here I have my turnips and other things. But as you can see the weeds, the weeds won. It's just been really hot and really dry. My oats never really came up high enough to over top the weeds. The weeds won and my oats only came up about this high. Which makes me think that I planted hybrid seeds that I had saved from last year. So unfortunately I think I am out of luck for oats. Luckily one of my neighbors grows organic oats and I believe he has a silo full of them. So I'm going to have to take a bike ride over there to get a 50 pound or maybe 100 pounds of oats for the winter. Because obviously I failed. Maybe I can talk to him about his seeds and maybe he has some seed stock left over. But if not I am out of luck. These are covered in Japanese beetles which are kind of the scourge of our area. Over here my turnips are actually doing pretty well. The ones that survived. So maybe I should start harvesting these and maybe pickling them or otherwise preserving them. Because they are not going to last much longer. Obviously the tops are dying. It's real hot and dry so let's maybe harvest some of these. But for the most part they've had to fight the weeds. So they're not as nice as they could be but they're still pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that turnip. And then over here this is supposed to be my flax field. And usually what happens with flax is it grows so aggressively that it blocks out all the weeds. But my flax seed that I planted early on wasn't viable. It must have died. It got wet and musty and it must have rotted. So frustratingly I had to plant a flax seed late. And I do have flax here and it is blooming. Here are a couple of flax flowers and there's a seed pod. But it's oil flax so it's much shorter and has a lot branchier structure than the flax seed that I had grown before. Which was for fiber which was much taller and had fewer seeds. So hopefully I'll be able to hand pick enough flax out of here that we have some to eat. And then I can plant it earlier in the year so it will grow on top of and kill all these weeds before they get a chance to overtop them. So that's another area that I didn't do quite as well as I'd like. So we do have some flax growing in here but I'm going to have to hand pick it. It's going to be time consuming. The one success story I do have is my corn which is 7 feet tall and looking really strong and good. It's tasseled out. I'm getting corn growing here so I'm hoping for a good corn harvest if I can keep the deer and the raccoons out. That is the big issue. And this remember was my plot where I was comparing polycropping, planting the corn, beans and squash together. Unfortunately I think my beans, oh no I do have beans. I do have beans growing up on some of these weeds. But what was supposed to happen was the squash was supposed to keep these weeds down but I have a ton of whatever this is growing up. I'm going to have to go through and I'm just going to have to use my scythe and mow everything down. And then I'm going to plant some cabbage and other things for late season crops. I have to get those in in the next week or two. So basically what I'm going to do is mow down this entire area. But that's the plan for this area since I've basically lost out on any chance I have for summer crops in this area. Other than corn and I do have some beans here growing and some other things. I do have squash growing it's just lower level. So hopefully we'll get some corn, beans and squash out of this area. We have our turnips, the oats are a lost cause. And we do have a couple potatoes so let's go look at those. And finally we have our potato rows, believe it or not there are potatoes growing in here. So there are potato plants here but they're mostly dead so it's worth just digging them out now even though it's a little earlier than I usually would. If I leave them in the ground, voles and other things will eat them. So I should probably just get them out now and then reuse this plot for fall crops. Alright so I'm going to take down all these weeds with my scythe. Now I could make big six foot wide wind rows so I could take down six feet out of go. But what I want to do is create three foot rows. And those rows with the rotting plants will become where I plant my winter crops. So I'm going to put in some cabbage and other things, turnips. And so I want to mow rows that I can later mow so I don't have to keep weeding them. I'm just going to make narrow little rows that I can scythe to keep clean. Now it's time to go through and find all the turnips I can. Then I can mow down this area. Things are looking really good in the greenhouse. Here's my fig plant that I've moved over here. The okra is coming up nicely. The sweet potatoes are really starting to come in. We're even getting about two dozen cucumbers a day now from these monster cucumber plants that are already taller than me. They're about to hit the top and then I don't know what I'm going to do with them. Tomatoes are coming on. A lot of green tomatoes right now that we've taken a couple of but we're waiting for them to really start pumping out tomatoes here in about two weeks. Here I've got a whole bunch of late season crops there in the greenhouse. Most of the day it's 80-90 degrees which is perfect germination temperature for a lot of seeds. I've got all kinds of great stuff like kohlrabi, bok choy, cabbage, broccoli, a cabbage. This is a late Dutch or late flat Dutch. This is Rocket Express. I've got radishes. I've got some spinach, lettuce. All of these are beets. I've got some more lettuce. I come in here, water these guys, make sure they're nice and damp all the time. They're good germination. Hopefully in a week or two these will be up. In another week or two they'll be ready to go in the field because we only have another 60 to 80 growing days depending on when the first frost comes. I'll use frost covers. I'll use other. I'll plant them in greenhouses. Hopefully in that time we'll be completely transformed into a winter growing machine basically. I have to finish the walls. I have to get shelves up permanently that can grow stuff all winter. That's the goal at least. I'm going to work towards that pretty heavily in the next couple of months. Yesterday I planted a whole bunch of seeds and pots. Popped them in my greenhouse. They're so warm they're just going to germinate real fast. They're going to be planted out in the field. Here in the greenhouse I have some spots with nice soil that I had tried to plant peppers and other things in. Some of them died. I'm going to go ahead and direct sow some cabbage. Here I'm sowing some bok choy. I'm going to do some Copenhagen Market farther down. The goal being these are in a greenhouse. They're going to germinate quickly and then they're going to have an extended season because of being in this hoop house. For the places that I have existing plants I'm going to plant those in pots. I'll put them nearby and then when those plants are dead I'll pop the cabbage into the spot and then I should have a whole row of cabbage. So even though these cucumbers are producing I don't have a place to put them anymore. I'm running out of pickle jars. So what I'm going to do is take down all but the best plants and plant peas here for the fall. And then I'm going to leave the best plants to produce my seeds for next year. So I will let them grow big, fat, delicious seeds. Another problem I'm having is I'm running out of chicken feed. I'm pretty much out of the formal feed so I'm giving them extra scratch and I have a lot of green space to go foraging. Well we've got another week in the books. Again sorry it took so long for us to get another video up but we should be back. Next week we have a really exciting video. It's the wheat harvest and so I'll walk you through all the steps from the field to the table with wheat. So that's going to be pretty exciting and we're going to get in hundreds of pounds of wheat that we can then put in our basement. Next week we will just be concentrating on the wheat harvest because that is taking up a lot of time and has a lot of different steps. It should be really interesting so stay tuned for that. Click the subscribe button to make sure that you hear about that the first thing when it goes live on YouTube. You can also visit our website lowtechinstitute.org. You can buy blog posts about the wheat harvest, food and vegan and a lot of other things we're doing like our bee breeding project. You can reach me at Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on Facebook. Just search for lowtechinstitute. Twitter at low underscore techno. And we're also on Instagram lowtechinstitute all one word. So find us on all those fun social media places we often post videos and pictures ahead of time. So you'll see them before they show up on the video. Other than that I hope you're all doing well and I'll catch you back here next week. Take care.