 welcomes the this week's episode of food and again last week was really long we talked all about the weed harvest it was kind of a long episode so this week I'm just gonna give you a tour of the garden and where we stand at mid-summer you'll see a lot of great-looking stuff and you'll see a lot of weeds too so a lot of people who want to come for tours and to see what we're doing here growing our own food for the year and I know that that's not always possible due to present circumstances so I thought I'd just kind of put together a quick garden tour this week and show you what's going on right off the bat here off the back porch we have a lime a lemon and a bonsai tree and then over here we've got mint sweet potatoes these are parsley and a couple weeks ago I did a video where I mulched all of this and you can see there's no weeds growing back which is super nice and then over here we have cilantro and that's already starting to make heads on the on the plant so we'll be able to harvest a whole bunch of the of the spices and back here tomatillos and I'd never grown tomatillos before but I'm actually really excited about them they're starting to bear fruit right now so we had some last night in our burritos and they were really good and then over here we've got zucchini and these are German Johnson tomatoes they're a brandy wine type heirloom down here I've got a little bit of basil I had basil kind of spread out throughout the yard and then a bit of lavender so that's that's what we have growing on in this really this is one of our few it doesn't look like it right now but this is one of our few full-sun areas and so that's why I have a lot of these heat-loving things as well as a lot of things that we use in the kitchen all the time the cilantro and the parsley I'm also continuing to thresh the wheat that I harvested last week and so this is about half of the straw that I've generated so far pretty soon as I start to shut down some of the beds as we approach fall I'm gonna mulch them with a lot of this straw so this straw will become the ground covering for next year to keep the weeds down in the beds so right here we have a gooseberry plant that got us about two quarts this year and this is the fence that leads into our garden so let's head right into here so this is our main garden grow bed area over here I have some onions that need to be pulled because the tops have died and then we've also got a rhubarb over there that's doing pretty well forgive all the weeds I was just weeding yesterday one of my individual tasks I just haven't gotten the weeds picked up I like to let them rot a little bit before I put them in the compost pile over here this these two beds are problematic because of the walnut tree over here and I try and plant things that supposedly will grow under juggalone or under the under the walnut chemicals that get let out but it never really works out that well I have a whole bunch of lettuce both tom thumb and rose de verre that have gone to seed I've got a couple volunteer potatoes I had planted melons here but they're nowhere to be seen and then we have another potato patch here I think these are superior and so we're waiting on those for the fall I've got some kale that's gone to seed and then resprouted so I'm gonna collect those seeds I have four or five different types of kale I don't know what any of them are this is a crinkly leaf one in the potato patch and then right up over here this until yesterday was my P was my P bed but I planted some broccoli in here a couple months ago and now the broccoli has kind of taken over as I have pulled out the peas so now this will be a call bed until until the fall and hopefully we'll be getting a later harvest of broccoli from this bed and then over here we have well we had fava beans but I pulled most of those and then we also have some cucumbers these are lemon pepper these are salt and pepper cucumbers they're yellow but usually they're white with black spots on them I'm letting these goes to seed so that I can replant them next year I'm having some sort of wilt going on here and I don't know if it's in the soil or if it's due to cucumber beetle so that's something I'm gonna have to explore and moving along we've also got another defunct pea bed that I need to weed as well as some coal Robbie that's looking pretty good everything's starting to wilt because it's starting to get hot out here and so everything kind of wilts down during the middle of the day and then resurrects itself as soon as the shade comes this is a not full sun area a couple of these beds are full sun so these will be full sun and these but those are partial shade just because of the high trees we have around here's one of the challenges we deal with I have to think pretty carefully about what goes where because I want to rotate them number one and number two I want to make sure the tomatoes and the other heat loving things really have a lot of heat so why don't we step over here and we'll go into the greenhouse so believe it or not this is a greenhouse it actually goes down into the ground and the idea there is in the winter all that thermal mass of the earth will store heat and then release it at night keeping it warmer longer on the backside we have a whole pile of soil that was dug out of the wallopini or the greenhouse in the ground and I have a couple grow beds up there I grew lettuce again speckles and rosidae ver lettuce I also have a couple kale pots here outside those will go get mulch and then go into the greenhouse in the winter to keep them growing and giving us greens all winter long so let's head on down so the greenhouse is a bit of a construction zone right now I apologize for that but what I have here are some shelves where I do a lot of my starts and these are a lot of our late-season crops so I've got beets radishes lettuces there's some peas bok choy there's some more kohlrabi a different variety than we saw outside that outside I believe was vienna white and this is Azur star over there we've got cabbage we've got Copenhagen market up here we've got broccoli some more late-flat Dutch cabbage and some red express cabbage as well some more peas just to really get a jump start on the fall growing season these will go into beds that I'm going to be clearing out in the meantime and then over here one of my favorite features that we have in here this is a mass heater and so what happens is it's got a small firebox and I burn a real small fire in here just an armful of wood and then it goes up and heats this entire thing and then overnight this dissipates heat into the space so in the middle of winter it can keep it above freezing in here and it keeps this is a much more efficient system for trapping heat inside rather than say a wood stove or a fireplace that sends a lot more heat up the chimney and out of the building so this is going to be one of the ways in which we keep all of our vegetables growing throughout the winter now that we're out of the greenhouse we can see some other things that we're growing we have some zucchini that's kind of died here as well as some red express cabbage that's being overtaken by weeds and I'm going to work on that over the next next little bit we have some pumpkins growing here some volunteer potatoes from my potato plot last year in here I've got some more cabbages and then here's broccoli that's that's ready to be eaten so we're going to be eating that this week we had radishes there they've gone to seed and then over here we've got our more formal raised beds and they look completely overgrown overgrown but I mean that's the point these are this is all potatoes these are early these are early potatoes these are German fingerlings unfortunately they're growing the best out of all my potatoes so I haven't harvested them yet where I have a whole other winter potatoes that have already the tops of died yeah so I'm having to dig those back here I have cabbage and more Azure star Kohlrabi this bed was garlic until a few weeks ago I pulled all the garlic and now I'm gonna have to plant the and the beets that you saw in the greenhouse are gonna go in here there's carrots in that last bed there now if we go back to the other side where we just were over here I've got another bed of potatoes that are pretty much died out I had some potato beetles this year but not not too many and then behind that I've got squash and then behind that I have another bed that's was supposed to be beat but the beats never really germinated for some reason I see a couple beats in there but for the most part that bed has been taken over by weeds that's yet another one I have to turn back to be ready for some fall crops so I'll be working on that soon and just down here which is just off the camera view I've got a whole bunch of carrots these are some some light yellow carrots and over there under some black ground fabric I've got more sweet potatoes so we're trying to grow as much as we can this year I'm excited to have sweet potatoes again and then if we had back here past the carrots and sweet potatoes and more brassicas we hit the end of the beds on this side and here we have b-balm and some other things but for the most part this hasn't been turned into beds yet partly because there's a big spruce tree here that shades this area so this is kind of the last area I want to turn into into beds but if we go a little farther back we'll see where we keep the chickens so just on this side of the fence is where the chickens are currently because the chickens have different zones that they can be in and this is where we keep a lot of our perennials so we've got early apple trees these here and I mean these are currents we've got grapes along the fence line and the the chickens are allowed in here once the berry season is over we've got strawberries back there and they would destroy those raspberries all these different berries in this area once the berry season is over and we let the chickens in and they really take down a lot of the vegetable the vegetative matter we don't want we eat some things like that this is our rooster Sid is a barred rock we've got a couple of different barred rocks some leghorns and some I don't know what mixes as we make our way down the garden path we've got our San Marzano tomatoes over here there are paste tomatoes we make a lot of tomato paste the ones up front again we're brandy wine those were more for crushed tomatoes and eating fresh here we've got more red express cabbage guess what we're eating a lot of this winter potatoes and cabbage here we have a whole bunch of beans these are bush beans for shelling so we're gonna eat a lot of dried beans as well growing in and amongst the beans are some butternut squash and then we have different examples of mulch back here because these I weeded and I mulched with some rotted blue stem straw and you can see the weed load is pretty light here and then these I weeded and did not mulch and you can see a huge difference over here we have our raspberries that have been picked clean but obviously I haven't come back and pruned them and then trellis the young branches yet that's something I have to do when I find the time and then wider over here we have something that I call the kale mustard hybrid I planted my kale and my mustards too close together one year and they hybridized and so this is it's got the context the texture of kale it's real it's real robust but it has that sharp mustard flavor so it's really good it's one of my favorite things and I have tons of seeds if you want any let me know be happy to try and get some to you yeah beyond this are more beds there's some squash growing back here but for the most part these beds were abandoned this year and I I haven't been able to keep up with them I also didn't have anything to plant in them yet because just how it worked out we also have a couple more apple trees along this fence line that we're currently in the process of installing there's a lot of work in progress we've been here three years but if any of you know what this property was like beforehand this was all brush so this is a heavy weed load and it's been a lot of work to get it where it is now so let's keep going and I'll show you the chicken coop so this is actually how I control where the chickens go or this is one of the ways this is a fence and you can see all the branches I put on top because one of the chickens realized she could jump up here and then jump out and wreak havoc in my garden so this whole fence line will move and closes next to the chicken coop over there and then the chickens are closed off and they can only go into their backyard right now it's in this position so that they can go into the berry area and take down a lot of the weed load that's built up there over the year so I'm gonna come through here and come over to the chicken coop this is one of my favorite things that I've built so far the posts and the timber came from a spruce that was dead on the property when we moved in so we split it and rived it and built a timber frame chicken coop the walls are made out of waddle and dob which is an old way of building up walls before we had drywall and dimensional lumber you go to our YouTube page and look for chicken coop timber frame chicken coop part one and two you can watch us you watch the whole process of building this thing there's a lot of fun but the chickens live in here and right now I have this door open but they also have another door here which lets out into their backyard right now it's closed because I want to give the plants back there a chance to recover from having the chickens digging through them and eating them all over once the winter comes this closes and then the chickens go back there again in there we've got lay boxes a food a food hopper water and a roost we also have water outside and then chicken scraps that we give them in the mornings so now let's go back out and around and we'll go look at the bees so back beyond the chicken yard I've got a shed and in the shed I've got three beehives and they're back behind some screen but this is kind of a Slovenian or Swiss style bee shed that I got was inspired by the bee shed at the Nuglar historical village which is in Nuglar, Wisconsin you can check them out when they're open but you put the bees inside the shed and then they have a lot less elements to contend with you can see the cool barn square my stepmom gave us for our for our shed this is actually barn paint and I mean like real barn paint from a hundred years ago the red coloring is from rust and the reason barns are red and maybe you already know this is that people would take rust linseed oil flour water and and a drying agent they boil it all together and they paint with it and the rust is a microbial inhibitor it keeps mold and and other bacteria and other things from growing on the wood and breaking it down and rotting it so it's actually a growth inhibitor as much as it is a paint and it was fun to make basically everything in there was edible not that I think you'd want to eat rust but it gives a nice a nice kind of burgundy color to the shed that I that I really like and then from here back it's mostly brush although I will show you Lauren's butterfly garden and a couple other things so let's head this way so as we come back over here we can see Lauren's butterfly garden and she can talk more about this or maybe post some pictures but she has all kinds of stuff that a lot of it has started to go down for the season like world milkweed yeah Mexican hats and lots of other things that I don't know as much about so and as we continue to walk down our long narrow yard we come to what used to be the chicken fence when the chickens were in this back area but under the chicken fence I've got some logs that were inoculated with mushrooms spawn so we're just patiently waiting for some shiitake mushrooms to grow there and then at the very back of our property we've got our pile of wood chips that we keep working through we use these to mulch paths to compost all kinds of things these are really important for for everything we do here and thanks to the mallins for delivering those regularly if we step out to church street on the back of our property we find another area with full sun and here I'm trying to colonize it I put down cardboard and then mulch and now I've planted squash and pumpkins and things in it hopefully next year I'll be able to use this as a full-on grow bed because it gets so much nice sun back on Church Street so now that's basically our property however I've gotten some other space from our neighbor Phil and Lynn who have let us grow some on their properties so why don't we head over there so back here is what we call the north of the back 40 which is essentially a tenth of an acre here where I put a electric fence and a high fence around it to keep out the rabbits raccoons and deer which got everything I grew in there last year and I've got corn beans and squash growing this is where we grew a lot of our field potatoes we grew turnips as well as we tried to grow oats last year the oats grew really well but this year they only came up really short and I don't know what the reason was so we've got all those plants out here I've had to cut down most of the early season crops the peas the turnips the oats the flax is still growing but I'm going to be planting out the faster growing cabbages and other brassicas that will grow into the fall after I harvest the squash and the corn I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do in this area but things are moving along really well then over on this side Phil and I grew potatoes kind of a joint effort he had the extra space and extra potatoes and so we put in a thousand potato plants here and if you want some potatoes we have extra we kind of grew them on purpose because we didn't know what the economic situation would be this late in the year and going into the fall so we have a whole field of potatoes here they're planted on the surface with mulch so they're really easy to dig if you want to come gather some you're welcome to I just let me or Phil know first so we can kind of point you to the best the best spots and yeah but they're free for the tanking so let us know if you're interested for sure that's exactly why we grew them this to give away to our neighbors and then I also got about a third of the greenhouse the hoop house here to grow in so let's go inside and check that out so in the greenhouse we have tomatoes and until about a week ago this was all full of cucumbers but we've already put up over 50 quarts of cucumbers and pickles so we are done with cucumbers I cut most of them down and in their place I've planted peas so those peas will come up as the fall comes on the peas you saw in the greenhouse that back at our house those will get planted into empty spaces here that don't germinate very well I've also got some coal plants I've got a bok choy planted here and there these are some banana peppers that are continuing to grow over here we have all kinds of tomatoes and these are all volunteer tomatoes from my potting soil I don't heat my potting soil enough to kill all the plants all the seeds that are in it so I get a lot of volunteer tomatoes they just happen to do really well and so I plant them over here and then I won't save the seeds from these I'll save the seeds from the San Marzano's German Johnson's and other tomatoes on my property next door these will simply be volunteer extra tomatoes so here we have about 60 to 70 tomato plants in here some of them are cherries some of them are more of a brandy wine type but also got some paced tomatoes going here we have a little bit of basil and then so that's bok choy back there and then from here on it's going to be a late flat Dutch cabbage so these are going to be some of the longer growing cabbages that need a little bit more protection later into the season the water comes as a good idea by Phil the water runs off and into these buckets and then I use the buckets to irrigate everything and to simplify watering all these tomato plants actually built a canal here with check downs and so every day when I water the tomatoes all I have to do is dump five gallons of water here on the side it runs down and irrigates the roots of all these tomatoes the tomatoes are fertilized primarily with ash for potassium and then chicken compost and also urine for nitrogen there was a Finnish study that showed that urine and ash produced just as much tomato fertilizer as store bought and it's also free so that's nice you can actually see I have the yellowing of the leaves here and that's because I'm manganese deficient and I haven't put any salt on them yet and really manganese is such a minimal sort of input that I'm not too too worried about it so what the plants are doing is they're stealing manganese from these younger these older leaves and bringing them up to the green top so that's why that's why I have some yellowing here these are all going to get trimmed off in the next week anyway as we move farther down the greenhouse you can see here we still have some cucumbers just to continue getting seeds that's why we have some really big cucumbers and also just for snacking for the rest of the year more tomatoes here in each one of these boxes is a sweet potato plant so we're hoping to get some good sweet potato yields this year they should be easy to harvest who just lift the block up and dig through looking for potatoes and then here we have hatched chilies some of my family live in New Mexico and they're really big into hatch chilies there so we decided to try and grow some and they're growing really well actually in this greenhouse and I'm kind of excited for harvesting more of those we had some in the burritos that we ate last night so they were really good and we got more tomatoes over here just to have a little more we do have one egg plant we were supposed to have more but they didn't germinate very well we've also got some basil over here I have two plants that love a lot of heat we've got both okra and fig tree the okra are getting a little bit of Japanese beetle pressure but overall they're doing pretty well here and then the fig tree is in a pot and so this will come into the greenhouse or the house itself once the fall comes along well that's the tour for the week I'm gonna head back into our property here from linen fields but you can get an idea of everything we're growing here when it looks like the mid-summer a lot of weeds that I'm still dealing with but also we're getting a lot of produce which is nice looking forward to the fall and a lot more brassicas and sauerkraut and stuff like that so thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed our little tour and we'll be back next week I think with a whole video about all the different ways that we're processing tomatoes because that's really what's what's coming in right now thanks for joining us