VIDEO: Red Pontiac Potato Update May 8, 2020
Our Red Pontiac potatoes that we planted in buckets this year are doing well. They look nice and healthy. Our Candy onions are progressing well and starting to swell.
Category: Backyard Homestead
Description:
We are keeping a video record of what we plant in our garden, where we plant it, and how much we harvest each year. We also raise chickens, quail, and fish. We are trying to become as self-sufficient as possible in our limited space. We live in a neighborhood. Our garden, fish, quail, and chicken space is about 3,000 square feet total. We wanted to lower our monthly grocery bill and to know where our food is coming from. We want to be able to rely on our own healthy, fresh, homegrown produce and less on processed and packaged food from stores.
VIDEO: Garden and Chicken Update May 7, 2020
Our new young chicks have turned out not to be all hens. One of our hens from our old established flock has started trying to crow, possibly in response to our new rooster. We harvested enough asparagus, Oregon sugar pods peas, and broccoli for a nice stir fry for lunch!
VIDEO: Potting Pepper Plants Escamillo, Cubanelle, Carmen, and Nassau May 4, 2020
Today we transplanted our peppers into larger containers. We started these peppers from seed in flats and now they need a little more room.
VIDEO: Harvesting Carrots and Planting Potatoes April 26, 2020
Today we harvested our Danvers Half Long carrots and then planted Red Pontiac potatoes!
VIDEO: Garden Update and Harvest April 18, 2020
We picked our spinach, strawberries, and asparagus. The blackberries are hanging with berries! Our seedlings in flats are looking good. The garden is starting to come along!
VIDEO: Strawberry and Asparagus Harvest 4 12 20
We had our first major strawberry harvest of the season! Our strawberries and asparagus are doing well!
VIDEO: Garden Update April 8, 2020
We’ve been out the past few days working in the garden. We’ve planted Contender and Provider green beans and our Silver Queen corn direct sow. We transplanted our straight neck yellow squash, National Pickling cucumbers, Siberian kale, and some mixed lettuces that we had started in flats. We mulched most of the garden and have…
VIDEO: Garden Update Part 2
This is a continuation of our last garden update video. Our asparagus and spinach have started growing and are ready for harvest!
VIDEO: Garden Update March 24, 2020
Our spring garden is finally starting to kick in! We have greens, lettuce, onions, and strawberries starting to show some promise. In this video we added some cardboard and another layer of mulch over the garden.
VIDEO: New Additions to Our Backyard Flock
We went to the co-op yesterday and found Welsummer and Red hybrid chicks to add to the flock. The Welsummers sound pretty fun. They are supposed to lay deep brown chocolate colored eggs. We have six girls in the chicken run now. We will have eleven total with the addition of these five.
VIDEO: Spring Update 2 9 2020
It is starting to look like spring around here! The plum tree is blooming and we are trying to hand pollinate it this year in hopes of actually getting some plums, lol! Our daffodils and peach trees are starting to bloom. We have planted our Candy onions again this year. We are also trying the…
VIDEO: Garden Update and Harvest October 17, 2019
The temperatures have dropped and we are finally getting some rain! Almost feels like fall around here! The cooler temperatures and added moisture woke up our Shiitake logs. We had a nice Shiitake bloom. We also harvested our first watermelon of the season!
VIDEO: Garden Harvest and Update October 6, 2019
Our fall crop of green beans has really started to produce! The peppers and okra are still doing great. We are finally due for a rain and a cool down.
VIDEO: Garden Harvest and Update September 29, 2019
The garden is still producing pretty well for this time of year. It hasn’t rained in over a month and we are experiencing record high temperatures. We are still harvesting peppers and okra and we picked our first harvest of butter beans of the season!
VIDEO: Easy Method for Breading and Freezing Okra
We have an abundance of okra right now so we are preparing it to freeze in different ways. We like some of our okra unbreaded to use in soups and gumbos but we also like to freeze some of the okra breaded and ready to fry. This video shows how we bread our okra and…
VIDEO: Garden Harvest September 1, 2019
Our peppers have really started to produce well! We are harvesting a lot of okra and peppers lately. Our hot steamy weather is really good for okra and pepper production!
VIDEO: Garden Update and Harvest August 22, 2019
Today we harvested our first batch of Silver Queen sweet corn. We have pulled some of the Roma tomatoes and planted more bush green beans. We have some fall plants started in flats. Garden is still producing fairly well!!
VIDEO: Easy and Delicious Fermented Sweet Pickle Recipe
This sweet pickle recipe was Alan’s Mother’s recipe. These are some of the best sweet pickles I have ever eaten! Sweet Pickle Superb 16 lbs. cucumbers 1 box pickling spices 1/2 box alum (2 1/4 oz. per box) 10 lb. sugar 1 cup salt to each half gallon of water – strong enough to float…
VIDEO: Do We Have Weeds in Our No Till Garden?
This is an update of the peas we planted about two weeks ago. We had a lot of questions about weeds and weed seeds in our garden. We mulch using hay and grass clippings as well as other materials and don’t have problems with weeds. We constantly add mulch and we haven’t tilled since 2012.
VIDEO: Planting Mid Summer Crops in Our No Till Garden
Our squash quit producing almost entirely and our green beans have slowed down dramatically. It’s time to pull out old crops and plant some new ones! We planted more pink eye purple hull peas, some bush butter beans, and some more bush green beans.
VIDEO: Garden Harvest July 8, 2019
Just a description of what we harvested in the garden today!
VIDEO: Garden Harvest July 3, 2019
This harvest video shows a week’s worth of green beans and cucumbers. The last of the Candy Onions we harvested from the raised bed have dried and are ready for a weigh in. The rest of the harvest table is from July 3rd. The peppers are starting to show out!
VIDEO: Final Candy Onion Harvest June 19, 2019
We harvested the last bed of Candy onions we had planted. These are the onions that were in the raised bed.
VIDEO: Garden Harvest June 18, 2019
We harvested our Stowell’s Evergreen sweet corn today!
VIDEO: Garden Harvest June 13, 2019
We harvested more candy onions, squash, and our peaches! We planted some watermelon in the area where we just pulled the onions.
VIDEO: Homestead Harvest Quail, Eggs, and Garden
Today we are showing some of our early spring harvests getting ready and making space for our summer garden crops. We harvested the last of our Red Russian Kale and weighed in our first harvest of Candy Onions. Our garlic dried enough to do a weigh-in. We are also starting to harvest our blackberries and…
VIDEO: Garlic Harvest May 2019
This is our garlic harvest for 2019. We left the garlic in the ground until all the foliage was dead this year instead of digging it as soon as the foliage started to bend over. We had a pretty nice garlic harvest!
VIDEO: Yellow Straightneck Squash Harvest May 25, 2019
We harvested our squash for the first time this year! It’s easy to forget from year to year just how good fresh squash is! We also found and killed a squash vine borer.
VIDEO: Harvesting Red LaSoda Potatoes May 19, 2019
We didn’t intend to plant potatoes this year but we found a box of seed potatoes we had saved from last year’s harvest. Instead of throwing them away we just scattered these seed potatoes on the ground and covered them with hay. This is the resulting harvest.
VIDEO: Garden Update May 19, 2019
Our garden is finally starting to kick in and show some growth. Everything is starting out a little slowly because it has been such a rainy wet spring. This is an overview of how everything is growing!