 Well, it's finally hit the the heart of lettuce season and here I am harvesting freckle freckles lettuce which is a Leaf variety that we're growing for the first time this year and so far I'm really enjoying I like how it looks I like how it grows and this is growing on the back of our ground greenhouse This is the in-house greenhouse and this is some of the soil that we dug out to dig down to put the greenhouse in the ground and I could just harvest the whole heads, but I'm taking a little more time and I'm going along and just picking Leaves off of each one and This will extend the season a bit with these plus once they start to bolt. I'll let them bolt and then I'll get seeds for next year Now I'll probably have to choose either this type or the rouge de verre that is up on the other bed on the back of this Which one I want because I can't have both of them flowering at the same time and cross-pollinating Unless I want to experiment with crossbreeding, which I don't particularly it's not a lot of calories, but After eating all of our winter foods and our dry staples for months Having all this green is a real nice addition to the diet way back sign my property I have some beds that are totally overgrown with the nice thing about them is they have full sun And I'm a pretty shady yard in general. So this It's maybe a quarter of my really sunny areas. So this is where I can put corn and tomatoes and other things. So What I'm doing last year I built some beds up with some some nice soil, but Weeds got away from me and I just wasn't able to keep them down not to mention Plants and air are animals came in and got all my my starts. So this year I'm gonna have to fence it and Remult it That's ready to mulch it all you can see what happened. So this year. I'm trying to pull on smother with compost and wood chips and Straw and we'll see what this looks like as we go through the season Now that my corn has emerged in these mounds that I'm doing the test Remember, this is the bada crop where I'm planting just corn just beans and just squash And here I'm planting the corn beans and squash together so I can compare the yields with Otherwise similar growing conditions same amount of compost and space yada yada in this half This is my corn and now this is my beans and I planted three beans and two quarts of compost and over here I Am planting three beans into each of the each of the corn mounds and what I'm going to do Eventually is snip these corn plants. I'm gonna pick the three strongest out of five seeds planted and I'm planting three bean seeds and I'll pick the top two bean seeds So I'll fit them out and I'll have to do that here for the corn as well and the beans here So they get the same treatment other than they are planted together or apart And so here I am today planting up the beans next week. I will plant out the squash It's windy and it's hot But it's cool down from how hot it was so now I want to get some corn in and you've seen me plant corn in mounds over in the the back 40 and there I had 12 and 18 inch mounds with scoops and compost and their soil all around them and That's all been eroding because of rain and I'm pulling the top top soil in the mounds And so I'm not really enamored of that process even though it's a pretty traditional one So what I'm doing here is what I'd like to do which is plant through cardboard And so what I have is I've smothered this whole area, which you saw me start last week Covered it all in cardboard and then I put this mulch on top of it and this retains moisture. It retains soil fertility I'm not gonna lose any top soil. It actually builds soil and I'll have more soil next year some people like Charles Downing who I really admire on YouTube I I think is His videos are and gardening are really Inspiring and I like to watch them when I'm in need of a bit of energy, but I have good soil I have good fertility so instead of putting compost on top of poor soil I want to tap into that soil and so instead of putting compost on top and planting into that what I do Or what I am doing this year and what I've done in years past that seems to work Well is I clear the mulch off of a row And then I go down with the hammer Because I can't find my planting Implement and just pop a hole Making sure not to hit my fingers and I'm going every six inches This allows the roots of the corn to have Passage into there and then each one just gets a little handful of compost And this is really just to hold the corn kernel that I'm gonna put in I don't want to put the corn coil down the hole because it might not come up So I've got my handful of compost In each hole I grab my my corn. This is pop corn a friend of mine Chuck gave us pop corn and Instead of eating it. I'm planting it. Thanks Chuck So I just pop the corn in, tamp the compost down on top of it. It's about an inch down just with my finger An inch under the compost And then put the mulch back lightly on top so it can push through it and that's it And so I'll do one two three rows In these two beds here and that'll be plenty of pop corn as long as the deer don't get it or the raccoons or the buggers Now a couple of years ago I started building a hedgerow hedgerows are a little unusual in America, but essentially What it is is it is a hedge that serves as a fence and it gets its Horizontal members by cutting down trees and you can see For example right here Is a tree that I cut down you cut it down in a special way You only cut halfway through and so I cut halfway through and bend it over and that leaves the cadmium The outer layer the vascular layer of the of the tree intact And that way it's still alive. So here's the trunk that was growing up here and I bent it over now. It's got all of these guys growing off of it Right and so now what I'm going to do is bend these down And knock them Into weave them into the hedgerow they'll keep growing and it just becomes this really thick tangled mat of vegetation That shouldn't keep animals out. This was used to keep sheep and other things In in paddocks and fences in England and other places As a little like I said unusual here in America, but it's a nice low-tech sort of way to keep things Fence off so that's what I'm working on before we get dumped on we're about to have a storm So I gotta hurry So now this will grow up And I'll weave it all back in and over and over until I have a dense Hedge that Animals can't make it through Well, we've got 140 degrees on the exterior Of the compost pile and it's starting to rain. So I gotta hurry And get this back in the hutch We had 140 on the outside when I get to the inside here. I bet it'll be up to 160 You can see the steam coming off of it And it stinks because it's compost That's how it goes I'm trying to put the stuff that's not hot On the bottom and in the middle And just to cycle everything through so everything gets a chance to get real hot And composty Well, here I am out actually my strawberry area. So back here behind me. I have strawberry beds And here I just scythe down a whole bunch of ground covering and this stuff drives me nuts this This stuff It just grows like It's just so pernicious and difficult to kill and worst of all, it looks like strawberries. So it crops up in my strawberry patch And looks like strawberries have to be really careful when I'm weeding. Oh, it drives me bonkers. Anyway, my plan here Is to make three rows That are going to be strawberries But right now they're going to be nothing and I'm going to put in Tomatoes because it's full sun. It's a nice spot And so I'm putting up a tomato trellis that I like to put up. I like these better than the cages Um, and I'll show you what I'm up to right now And then I'm going to hoe this into three rows cover that up plant my tomatoes and we'll be good to go So what I've done is I've driven in six posts And then I've run these bars Back and forth and now I'm putting these on top and what's going to happen Is I'm going to plant the tomatoes below this Tie this twine up here and the tomatoes will grow up the twine I find this to be easier to use than the tomato cages and we'll we'll see them grow on this through the season But uh, yeah, so here I am just lashing this all together So it can come be taken apart with a knife in the fall for the record. I really really dislike these Plastic smothering things But number one, I am out of cardboard Number two, I'm going to pull them up. I've been reusing these things. I never bought these these Just showed up. They were I was digging around and I found them in the ground So I reuse them and I'm going to cover it all with wood chips and I've hoeed up two or three large Mounds of good soil and a whole bunch of weeds And so what I'm going to do is make the smallest hole I can And plant my tomatoes through them and then mulch around it and hopefully that If I do this and leave it until next summer It will completely kill all this ground cover because I can't stand this ground cover I can't tell you how many times I've removed it and it keeps coming back. It is just so pernicious I I'm not going to use chemicals on it number one At this point, where would I get them? And number two, I just can't bring myself to do it, but They're tempting. Oh, man. I I understand why people use them or did use them But it's I just can't do it. So this is what I'm left with and crossing my fingers. The worst part is It's an ornamental ground cover that somebody put in here Ah, good intentions, and I'm sure I'm doing stuff that the future owner of this house Maybe someday down the road would tear out. However, without fossil fuels available I think everyone's backyard is going to start looking more like mine I will say the nice part about growing tomatoes in this is that it keeps Uh, the soil microbes that often carry bacteria for tomatoes off of the tomato plants So when the water comes down as rain, it splashes on here It doesn't splash on bare earth and send microbes and bacteria And pathogens up onto the tomato. So hopefully they'll do really well here. We'll see Well, we've hit 150 on the surface So hopefully we're 60 160 internally And luckily for you smell doesn't come across in video because this thing stinks Last week. This thing was that high up to the top And now it's dropped already in half All right, I've been working this morning to grind up some corn I had leftover corn from my seed stock So this is dent corn. It's multicolored and I put it through This is the end of the first round stainless steel blades For birds The interesting thing about this cornmeal is it's whole corn. It's whole kernel meaning that the germ is in there and the oils and What would be taken out to make corn syrup and other things? Cornmeal that you get at the store has a lot of stuff removed just like white flour So when I grind up whole corn, it should make a different tasting product a fuller product I built this around because before if I ground fast it would just fly all over And so this piece of a plastic milk jug and I'm going to make a more permanent Edition here really keeps everything a lot more organized So essentially what these burrs do Is run the corn through these channels Where they get ground Between the channels when they catch at the end giving a nice Tight space for this to fit the the meal to fit through And if it doesn't fit through it, it gets caught and split kind of like hunt like a whole bunch of scissors that fit together And so these are sliding like that and catching the corn and slicing This is an old Schwinn world sport 10 speed It was picked up Lauren was going to fix it up and use it, but she's got a better bike anyway And so it was just kind of literally collecting dust Hang up I think I actually got rid of the wheels. So what I'm going to do with this Is turn it into basically a human power hub A universal human power hub where anybody Pedaling on this can run all kinds of different appliances The first one that I'm going to make it run is the grinder The plan is to mount it on something that will hold it at about this Orientation and then I'm going to get a hub for the back a replacement axle I'll put a new derailleur And chain on it so I can ship the gears And then that hub is going to come off on a belt pulley And a belt pulley is just a round disc with a v in it. You have them in car engines. You've got a well I've got one right here actually Happen to This is an old bench grinder But it's got a pulley with a belt on it and basically I'm going to replace this motor With this bike and then I can run all kinds of tools That I'm going to build Like I said the first one's going to be that grinder And so what I'm going to do is make it so you can grind Corn, wheat, oats, whatever With pedal power instead of arm power It took me about Probably 15 minutes to grind a cup of corn three times So with this I'm hoping I can cup not only cut down that time But make it more pleasant time also because this is not a natural motion whereas bicycling is extremely natural so Now I just need to find the parts take some measurements build the stand And get that together. So I think I'm going to have to take a trip into the nearest town To the bike shop you can get some scrap parts Some of my potatoes look really good and they've been weeded consistently And I can put down some leaf mulch to keep this weeds down But over here I've had a little more trouble As you can see The grass has been growing up and that's because there was a fence here and some infrastructure That's hard to weed around and so today I'm coming with my scythe And I just kind of want to demonstrate How effective a scythe is in reducing All of these weeds around plants that you don't want to cut down. So here we have potatoes Weeds and more potatoes and so What I can do Is walk And simply just catch All the weeds On this side Of the potatoes and with the tip I can kind of guide The scythe To push the potatoes out of the way catch the weeds and cut and then I go back On the other side And now this becomes mulch And will die And smother Some of what's left Now a friend of mine botan anderson who runs one scythe revolution who taught me how to scythe And also I bought this scythe off of him He had the really neat idea of spacing his potatoes out exactly the length Of one large movement of a scythe about six feet and that way he could just walk And scythe a field between his potatoes And drop the hay on top of the potatoes As mulch with one motion and it's really clever I'm not doing it here because I don't have the space, but it's a it's not a bad idea Well, there we are 160 Well, it's been a busy couple of weeks and not just for food growing Sometimes I need to take on freelance work In order to get down what I need to do and that's what happened this last week And that's why there wasn't an episode last week So what you're seeing in this episode was a lot of what happened last week And some of what happened this week and next week I'll catch up fully But yeah, I'm sorry that I didn't get the episode out on time. That's uh It's one of the things I really try and do but Work sometimes just gets in the way. So thanks for watching Foodmageddon Next week we'll be back with a lot more plants a lot more growing and a lot more weeds Because it's that time of year if I can't get on top of them now. I'm gonna be sunk But we're having a good time with the with the warm weather and being home, but Yeah, it's definitely going to be a change Coming in June as we won't be able to go to the grocery store as often And there's gonna be a lot less available as fossil fuels become more scarce So do resources so stay tuned for that Like and subscribe and all that jazz. Please share with your friends Check out our blog at lowtechinstitute.org and you can reach me at scott at lowtechinstitute.org Thanks for watching. Stay safe