HIKING: Overnight in the forest with beavers and wild animals. Beef steak. Survival instinct.

Good morning guys. We got a nice little spot up there on our trellis. My name is Aaron. I'm Rachel. Welcome to our five-acre homestead here in northern California where we're attempting to grow most of our own food and we're trying to start a flower farm. Today is a garden day where we're going to be harvesting all these onions and this is the most onions that we've ever grown and this is an attempt for us to be a little bit more self-sufficient to see if we could grow a year's worth of onions. I didn't count them all but I think we've got about a hundred onions here. If we eat one or two onions a day. We go through onions. We came really short. This is the largest batch of onions that we've ever grown. Rachel's moving my tripod. This is us having a little bit more food independence on our farm. Maybe we didn't grow them perfectly. They're all shapes and sizes but you know if I can skip the store a few more times because we grew what we're eating that's the goal here on our farm. Okay so this year we grew two varieties. This is a cougar onion and then this one I believe I think this one's the red maiden. Just like a little variety in our onions. Okay don't get me wrong. So the way that you tell if done if done onions are done. Oh my gosh dude this is gonna be it's gonna be hard. The way that you tell if onions are done is they do this little floppy thing right here. The leaves or the foliage at this point has stopped putting carbohydrates into the onion bulb and it just dies. It's just ready you know this is the indicator you know these we're gonna harvest all of them. This one probably could go a little bit longer. There's some that are still standing up. It's really not going to affect how these things store if we harvest them all right now. It would just look lame if we left half of the onions in here and harvested the other half. But at this point the onion has also stopped taking up water and nutrients from the soil. So when we harvest these we want to take a lot of care in not bruising the onion. So right now they're super swollen with water and nutrients. If we damage them in any way if we like crush them, smush them, dent them, bruise them then they won't store as well and they'll get mushy or moldy once we put them up in the storage. So if you happen to bruise one that's fine just make sure that is the one that you use first. But the whole idea of having all these onions is to be able to use them intermittently throughout the summer for us throughout the year. So we want to be able to They take a little bit of care once you harvest them to be able to have them have a long shelf life and we're going to go over that. So this is a really tiny onion but it's going to be a really good example of how we harvest these. I will, you could grab a fork, you can grab one of these like spades or something like that and going underneath and lifting up all of the soil underneath the onion kind of just puts like no pressure on that onion and then you come out with something that's like intact and you can see that this this paper is already forming around the onion. This is what's going to protect it for long-term storage. The goal is, a little dingleberry there, this will cure. We'll put this in a dry place that gets a lot of air circulation and not direct sunlight. We have dry, I mean it's it's going to be dry for the next few days. Here in California we get really really dry summers so we don't want to have this in direct sunlight but we do want it to have a lot of air circulation but this will also continue to dry off. You see how it's already started while it's been in the ground. We're going to harvest all these and then we'll show you how we arrange them underneath our shop so that we can get them all dry so that we can have onions all year. So we're going to start stacking them right here and we're going to see how many onions we get. I got my helpers that didn't comb their hair or wear a hat today. We just woke up from bed. We're trying to beat the heat today. As soon as that sun goes over that tree, it's gonna start getting really hot. So okay, ready? Good. Show me if I taught you well. Which one do you do? Any, any one. Okay. No, they get through that one. Wait, can we just? No, yeah, yep. So away from the root underneath and then pry it up. Boom. And then gently, we want to keep the soil in the garden and just kind of gently knock that off. Boom. Knock it off. And then go put that over in the pile. So the reason why we're taking care... Seriously, all the time. Pardon the neighbor's wheat eating while I'm trying to have a zen moment in my garden. The reason why we don't yank these is because yanking the roots could break them away from the bulb which would leave an area that they could get mushy or that they could get mold or anything like that. So after we cure this, after it gets that nice papery shell, these will all dry out and you can take scissors and cut those off. Get all those danglers off and it'll be nice. You can cut here off as well so that you'll have that nice normal looking onion that you get from the store. So there we go. One more. Add it to the pile. So guys, we harvested all those onions and you can see we had, we kind of companion planted some tomatoes in here because we just didn't want to wait for the whole harvest to be done before we start tomatoes. So these are all indeterminate like cherry type tomatoes. I think we have some green zebras, some sungolds, our favorite, and some yellow pears. So all from Haas Tools. If you guys want to support us there, use the link below. You get some free seeds. If you use it, buy $25 or more and you get some giant sunflower seeds. Oh no, you get some Haasinator tomatoes which are over here, which are doing fantastic. Haasinator-maters. Haasinator-tomatoes. So guys, if you are practicing crop rotation, which you should be, after onions, these are a list of things that you can plant and I'm reading off my phone. Lettuce, carrots, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, pumpkins, celery, radish, brussel sprouts, or squashes. So we have to kind of figure out what we want in here next. We do have cucumbers and squash sprouting over there. So maybe we'll take this area and just kind of intermittently plant those between the tomatoes. We want to be intensively gardening our own food. I don't think we're going to do cucumbers because I just don't want like the trellisy mess. We'll probably pick a dedicated row for cucumbers and have that up on a trellis, either a Hordonova trellis or a cattle panel or something like that. Okay, final count on the onions was 121 onions. Actually, I'm pretty sure if we buy that amount from the store, we do not use 121 onions in a year. So we just grew a year's supply of onions. Delicious, organic, as local as they can be onions. That's super exciting. We also have like five or six over there, so it would be like 126 or 127. That's right, right. For science, the other day I just harvested a few, so we do have more than 120. And AJ ate one and we ate the raw one, so then it would be 129. Oh my gosh, this guy's our math whiz. Is that cool that we're growing our own onions? They're pretty big too. Yeah, let's go take a look at the biggest ones. We got a couple small ones and that's all like watering and fertilizer, but we got a couple pretty gigantic ones. Not as big as the ones that Lazy Dog Farm grew, but let's see, dude. That one's pretty, yeah, pick that one. I think that one's bigger. The one next to that one. Dude, massive. That's, that is a good fist size onion. So I guess softball size is the goal, but this is gonna, this is a big enough onion that whatever dish we're making, that's gonna, that's gonna do it for us. So okay, we are gonna hang these up on our rack. It's gonna be fantastic. This is a piece of a goat panel that we had left over. So go ahead and get an onion, Rick or Kate, whatever your name is. Okay, and we're gonna thread it, all the foliage in between there, so it's head up. Hey guys, there we go. Here's with the onions in our garage. So we will let them dry here for the next seven to 10 days. This foliage will start drying. We'll trim off, you know, everything except for like two inches of the stem and that will be a perfect onion that will stay in our pantry for months until we're ready to use it. So you guys can see, we have some pretty large ones and then a lot of these small ones probably could have got some larger, more consistent onions if we followed a fertilizer schedule, but we didn't. We just watered and we got a fantastic crop of onions. So we will go back into that bed and add the fertilizer before we put in the next crop. So, you know, we are constantly amending our soil. Not perfect, but we are moving that way. Guys, we appreciate you being here with us, following us along on our homesteading journey. Smash that like, subscribe if you're not. If you are, we really, really appreciate it. It really helps us. And then share this video with somebody who wants to grow onions or is growing onions and needs to know how to harvest them. You sharing this video really helps us out. It really helps our channel grow. Thanks guys for being part of our onion harvest. We really appreciate it. So I'll take this time to say goodbye until we meet again.