#12 JULY GARDEN TOUR at Abundant Permaculture Farm in Norway | Alfheim Farm

It's the end of July and we've finally gotten around to give you guys a garden tour. I've been wanting to do this video for such a long time. It's just we've had so many friends and volunteers over in the last month and a half. I think we had seven volunteers and countless friends over. So it's been a really high pace here at the farm. But the garden is looking amazing and we cannot wait to show you what it looks like. So this is what the new part of the garden looked like this spring. It was just an overgrown field of grass and now we filled it with 60 new beds. Luckily we had a lot of help. And this is what the mandala garden looked like this spring. It was all ready to be planted because we made this last year. And this is what it looks like now. Abundant and beautifully green. This is our second growing season and I'm so proud of how far we've come. If you don't know what it looked like before let me give you a quick reminder. It was just a bare overgrown field when we moved here. So we got an excavator to move rocks that were already on the property into a circle that we filled with manure from the barn. Then we filled it with more rocks and tiles to make it pretty which was such a big job. Luckily we had some help. The beds are made from material that we've either had in our barn that we cut down ourselves or that we got for free. The compost is from our own barn or a local horse farm. The topsoil we had to buy. Then we cardboarded everywhere with cardboard that we get for free from a local furniture store. The cardboard is to deprive weeds and grass of light so eventually they will die off. It is an environmentally friendly solution to garden liner as the cardboard will eventually break down and turn to compost. Before we lay it down we remove all the tape and staples. Now it looks like quite a mess with cardboard lying everywhere but we will hopefully get wood chips this week to cover it. We're kind of hoping to make our own wood chips but the machine is quite expensive and there's too much work for us right now to cut down all the trees that we will need. It's impossible to always do everything yourself so this time we're taking a shortcut. It's hard to know exactly how many types of vegetables there are in this garden because it kind of depends on how you count them. For example I have three different types of potatoes, four different types of cabbages, six different types of carrots and 15 different types of winter squash. But I assume we're growing between 30 to 50 vegetables which is quite amazing. Broccoli, corn, tomatoes, bok choy, leeks, spring onion, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, beans, peas, sugar snap, cucumber, kale, parsnip, salad, broad beans. We got almost every kind of a vegetable you can imagine that can grow in this kind of climate. Things that flowed so effortlessly last year is somehow not flowing this year. For example last year I felt like I just threw some herb seeds in the ground and forgot about them and came back weeks later to an overflowing herb garden. However this year barely anything that I sowed has made it and if it did it's growing really slowly. Peas and not to mention beans were also extremely abundant last year but this year they were slow and not producing as well. But then again crops like broccoli, cabbage and carrots that barely grew at all last year are doing great this year. So broccoli is probably the crop that I'm most proud of this year just because I have never grown broccoli before and this turned out pretty amazing if you ask me. It's gone a little bit over, it's gone a bit to flower but that's just because I it's been raining for the last two days I've literally been waiting to harvest this and to film it at the same time for this video. But that's okay I'm just gonna harvest a couple more and then I'm gonna give them a quick boil and then put them straight in the freezer and this will be food for for us during winter. So when I harvest the broccoli I cut it at an angle because I'm gonna leave this plant because when you leave the plant it'll start to produce little shoots out of the stem and then if you cut this at an angle the water will just run off. If you look at this plant that I harvested maybe two weeks ago it's starting to produce little broccoli shoots and those are as tasty and edible as the big broccoli head. Wow look at this thing it's just humongous and no bugs and just a really good broccoli. We've been eating from the garden since May when the first solids and radishes were ready. After that we started getting carrots and beets and now most things are producing. The only vegetables that aren't ready are potatoes corn and winter squash. Last year we had so much produce and we started selling at a local flea market. However I don't think we're gonna have enough to sell this year mostly because we're feeding so many people from the garden for every meal. Last year we also didn't have a big freezer and space in our basement to store food but this year we do. This year I'm planning to pickle ferment and fill up our entire basement with jars of food from our garden. This year I made some of the same mistakes that I did last year which is to not give the plants enough space. Although I've given them a lot more space than I did last year they still are so way too close together but we're adding on more and more beds and rows throughout the season so I think next year is going to be the year where I have all the space that I need. I've also made the mistake of not harvesting when things are ready. Somehow I have this idea that I want to save this and this vegetable for later but then suddenly they've bolted or gone to seed and then they're almost inedible. We water our garden with rain water as much as possible. We hand water our tomatoes straight from a rain barrel and the rest of the garden gets water from our rain water tanks. We just hook a hose to the drip system and turn on a small water pump and let it drip for a couple of hours. The new vegetable beds are lower in the terrain than the water pump so we actually only use gravity to water them, no electricity needed. One thing I've spent more energy on this year is flowers and they're having such big benefits both for the pollinators and for us that I want to spend a lot more energy and time on this next year. I'll focus mostly on medicinal plants like calendula or echinacea but also flowers that are just purely for the visuals. We're told a story in Norway that the fields has to be used to grow grains for animal feed. That is not possible to grow vegetables here but as I'm sitting here in my abundant and overflowing garden that has fed both me and my partner and our family friends and volunteers throughout the season I know that that is just not true. Norway's self-sufficiency rate is at about 40 percent and from personal experience I know that we could and should do better especially in times like these where food supply chains are being compromised. If you want help or tips on how to start your garden you're more than welcome to reach out and we'll help you the best that we can but I'll also write down below resources of people who are far better at explaining how to grow a garden than we are and people that we look to for inspiration and tips constantly. Growing my own food is probably one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in my life. The feeling of juicing celery for breakfast in the morning, eating a soup from root vegetables from my garden for dinner and eating strawberries homegrown for dessert is the most amazing feeling ever and it makes me so happy to see that more and more people are embracing this kind of hobby after the pandemic. You do not have to be a professional to create a garden like this. We had the bare minimum of experience before we started. All you need is good soil and good seeds and sun and water of course and a bit of patience with both yourself and the plants that are growing. The seed already knows what to do you only have to provide it with the proper conditions so it can actually do it. I hope this video has given some insight into how we started our garden from scratch or better yet inspired you to start growing your own food. Having food security is one of the most empowering things you can do for yourself and loved ones both in general but also when the state of the world is as uncertain as it is now. I hope you like this video and we're excited to see you in the next one.