 As part of my effort to clean up our raspberry patch, I'm taking down invasives, invasive trees like buckthorn that have grown up and kind of taken over that area. So I'm chopping those down, I'm gonna let them dry here for a few more days and then we'll have a bonfire. I'm using the trunks of the buckthorn and the other invasives as trellises, as posts for trellises. And to keep them from rotting, I wanna keep water from getting down in here because this is where a lot of the rot will happen. So I cut them at an angle and now I'm just gonna give them little hats. So they'll just have a little bit of a shingle hat that, you know, it's not really gonna keep it that dry, but that is a nothing. I showed how I was digging out a big pile of soil and putting down what are gonna be beds. I hadn't had time to build the beds and so I had to mow them down with the side last week. And now I've figured out I can plant sweet potatoes here. Two characteristics of sweet potatoes make them my choice for planting here. First of all, they really like warm soil. So I can aggressively cover these weeds with a black ground fabric that I dug out of the chicken coop. So here behind the chicken coop, so I just need to get the soil off the top and dig it up because I don't actually know what it's doing here. And number two, they don't like to be wet. So again, they can stand the fairly dry conditions that I can create under here. Number three, they can put up with juggalone, which is the toxic substance put out by walnut trees. And now that I've got these mounds of dirt covered with black plastic mulch, I'm going to plant out my little sweet potatoes. These are the first sweet potatoes I'm planting out. I'm a little late. I would like to have had them in weeks ago, but that's how it goes. And they're heat-loving plants. So I'm going to trim this tree back a little bit and they'll get plenty of sun, but they need four months to grow and that would put us mid-September. So I'm probably gonna have to put hoops over them and plastic to keep that heat in for the end of the season, just for them to finish up their tuber production. So I've got those here. And then I also have some that are gonna go in the greenhouse. They say how many days you need to grow them, but really it's units of heat is what they go off of. So the ones in the greenhouse, I can put out a little later because they'll have more heat in that greenhouse. These here, they need a little more time, so I'm getting these in now. So a finished study shows that urine and ash used together can be as just as good a fertilizer as store-bought fertilizer on all kinds of plants that need leafy growth. So I've just generated a little fertilizer here and I'm gonna cut it with a gallon of water. Or a little less than a gallon of water doesn't really matter. Five to one, 10 to one doesn't really matter just as long as you cut it. And now these peppers are looking a little light, so I'm going to give them a little bit of fertilizer and I'm trying to get it on the soil rather than on the plants, just not to burn the plants. And I'm just giving them a little tiny drink. So I'm just gonna try and hit those a couple times a week and now the leftovers I'm gonna give to my cucumbers and my tomatoes. And then I'm gonna put a marker where I left off so that tomorrow when I come to fertilize, I'll know where to pick it up. So these really pretty curly cues are garlic scapes and this is how a garlic tries to reproduce by making a flower bud. If I let this go, it will drop seeds everywhere, number one, but number two, it won't produce much of a garlic head. So I have to go and remove all of these scapes. The nice thing is you can pickle them and use them like kind of like a garlicky asparagus in cooking. Now I'll make some pickles. So I brought my scapes inside and here's what's left of them and then cut them up and also stuff them into quart jars with the help of my niece who does not want to appear on video, which is probably smart. We're doing two different types of pickles. We're doing more your regular garden variety pickles. These have a brine and that brine has cup and a half of water, cup and a half of vinegar, two tablespoons of salt, two tablespoons of sugar and then some spices and dill and things in there. And then we pour that in and seal it and we'll pop it in the refrigerator. These will be refrigerator pickles because we've never made pickled garlic scapes before. We don't know if we like them so we don't want to do like 10 pints of them and then have a whole bunch of things that we don't want to eat. That's kind of a waste. And then these, these will be lacto-fermented pickles which means instead of adding vinegar, which is an acid to secure these, these are going to use lactobacillus organisms to make their own acid, lactic acid in here and they'll ferment themselves. So these just get salt water. So it's two cups of water with, oh, I forget, two tablespoons of salt. I'll post it on the link or on the page below so you can click on those links and follow these recipes yourself. And these will ferment over the next few days. I'll show you as we let the gas out and then they don't need to be refrigerated. They'll just sit in the basement until we're ready to enjoy them. Time for a quick update on the different crops I have here. My turnips are looking good. They need to be thin drastically. My beans are doing okay. They're starting to flower out. My peas, unfortunately, I think are a lost cause. I couldn't keep the weeds down or the birds away. Now we'll move over here and over here we have my flax emerging and hopefully we'll overtop this grass fairly quickly. And behind me I have some overgrown potatoes that I have to weed here pretty quickly. But they're looking good. And then of course over here I've got my polycrop corn beans and squash. And behind me my squash beans and corn planted separately comparing the different yield which I've talked about ad nauseam. Corn's definitely coming up and it's about ready to be thin. And finally over here you can see the oats. And it just looks like grass but that's what oats are. They're a type of grass. And so they're a lighter green. I'll zoom in here and show you they're a lighter green in rows that are competing with the other grasses and hopefully they'll quickly overtop them and become the dominant plant in this plot. So everything's growing except for the peas and hopefully we'll have a good harvest of all of these. And now once twice a day we burp these things. And all that CO2 that's being produced by the lactic producing bacteria gets off-gassed. Otherwise this could explode. And then once it's closed down slowed down considerably I'll just close it up. Wait till next time. Well now we're in the greenhouse next door and here I am making sweet potato containers. And so these hold about oh, 25, 30 gallons of material. And so what I have done is put in composted straw and then each one is getting five gallons of composted chicken manure and other compost. So pretty strong stuff. So I put that in, mix it around a bit, spread it out, do the same with this one. Now add some more composted straw. The nice thing about growing this in the greenhouse is a lot of extra heat for those heat loving sweet potatoes. So now there's kind of this core of compost surrounded by this straw and it will continue to break down over the growing season. And hopefully in the fall I'll just be able to lift up and tip these over and they'll be full of sweet potatoes. Now I'll just start pre-hydrating these puppies because they can absorb a lot of water. And now I can plant my sweet potatoes in this giant pile of straw that will continue to rot down over the season. So I just open up a hole in this compost. Sweet potatoes are really forgiving when transplanting. They, I haven't seen much in the way of transplant shock. They establish roots really quickly. They're pretty, I don't wanna say drought tolerant, but they're not water hogs, at least not in my experience so far. Now I'll water them in, not that they need it, but. And that's it. It's raining today, I might as well take the chance to take care of my tomatoes, which means cleaning out the suckers here before they get big. I can just do it with my fingers as they're small. This is just to encourage a central growth along with the central, the central leader here. This one's not too much taller than its existing attachment. So I'm not gonna do anything. So the way I prune them is this typical way at the juncture of each one of these branches, there are little suckers that grow. And these suckers would become almost full-fledged plants of their own, and they just make too much bushiness, especially in a greenhouse environment, maybe outside. It'd be fun to experiment with letting it go, but you can even, if you want extra plants, like I could put this in a cup of water and it would have roots and then I could plant this, it would become its own plant. I have plenty of plants. I've got probably 200 tomato plants this year. So not really necessary. And see here, it's trying to split into two halves. And if I have more space, I could let them grow into two halves, but because there's two halves, I'm just gonna pick one and I'm gonna have it go this way. So I'm gonna pull this one off. Otherwise we get a split plant and then it just becomes really unwieldy. And now I just collar it onto the net here. Fertilizer day. And by fertilizer, I don't mean, you know, bought in chemical fertilizers because a lot of our bought in chemical fertilizers are derived from fossil fuels, so we don't have them. What we're doing is we're adding ash, urine, and compost to all of our tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and sweet potatoes in the greenhouse. Each tomato plant need the total of one kilo of ash through the year, so today I'll give them a quarter of that. I'll add the same to the cucumbers. And over the course of the summer, all the tomatoes would need about four liters of urine. If you're just fertilizing with ash and urine, according to a Finnish study, which I wrote about on the blog, you can check that out, lowtechinstitute.org. This last week we had that blog post come out. But because we're also adding compost, we don't actually need that much of either ash or urine. So they'll have a super abundance of resources available. Today I'm adding about a half a pound of ash to each tomato plant, and then I'm gonna add a scoop of compost. And then I'll continue, I've already been fertilizing with urine along this line and I'll finish adding urine to this row and then I'll start on this next row. Well, that will do it for another week on Foodmageddon. We got a little behind the production schedule again just because the rest of our life intruded on our food growing. We're doing a bee breeding research project, which you can find out more information about on our website, lowtechinstitute.org, which you should be checking out anyway. You can subscribe there to our blog where you'll learn things about like ash and urine fertilizer before you hear about it here on the web series. We hope to get another podcast out soon. You can find us the low tech podcast on most of the podcast apps. Feel free to reach out to me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all those things. So anyway, I hope you're having a good week. Hope you're staying safe out there and we'll catch you back next week. Thanks for watching.