Want a BIGGER Garden Harvest?

Spring is right around the corner and every year we do our best to think ahead and do as much prep work as possible outside to prepare for the growing season. Growing food involves more than just planting a seed and watching it grow. There's also things that need to be done in the background in the off season to ensure that you'll have the best success when the time comes for harvest. Today is supposed to be absolutely gorgeous. This morning is still freezing cold. It's like 30s but the temp is supposed to rise like 30 degrees today so it's supposed to be like upper 60s which is perfect so I'm going to try to get my fruit trees pruned. Cody is going to be working on the raspberry patch and the grapes. I'm also hoping to work on some of my perennial herbs, get those cut back so that they can have nice fresh growth for the growing season. While it's still really chilly out here I'm going to go inside and work on finishing off our maple syrup that we did on Saturday and while we're outside today Cody's going to be working on one of his obsessions as well. This is pretty heavy. It looks like there's about three gallons in here. We boiled down 65 gallons of sap the other day. That was almost twice as much as we did the first time so I don't know if I boiled it down quite as much as I did the first time before we brought it inside but it was getting really late and dark and so I just brought inside but this is brown and sweet. It's just not very thick at all. I'm going to pour this in here for Michelle before I go outside to work on my little project. This already looks a lot like maple syrup it's just still really runny and that tastes like maple syrup but I know it's not done it's very runny yet so I'm going to boil this down for a while. This chilly weather is perfect for cold smoking so I've been using this grill to grill some steaks. Just the other day I did my first batch of smoked cheese. It is so good. It actually needs a little more time. One video I watched the guy said that it will be much better after a couple of weeks. I guess it lets the flavors mellow and really soak into the cheese but it already is really good but I want to do another batch today. I just got this little pellet tube here. It was really cheap on Amazon and all you do is fill it with pellets, light it, and it'll just smolder. I think I got about six hours of smoke out of this when I did it before so hopefully I'll get about that again. I'm gonna get it lit, set it down in there, and then make sure that it stays lit before I put the cheese on here. I left the cheese in the house so the cat doesn't eat it while I'm waiting. For the first round of smoked cheese that I did I used a cherry blend of pellets. This is a bourbon barrel maple and pecan so I guess we'll see how this tastes. This is at just a nice smolder now so it is definitely lit and going. I'm going to use these heat deflectors. They just sit on the lower rack and that'll make so if that thing does put off much heat it's not coming up directly against the cheese and then these racks go up here in the top. This cheese smoking is so simple. Literally you get that thing started, set these things on the rack, and just let it go for hours. Come back and you got smoked cheese. I've got several different kinds of cheese that I'm putting on here. I've got pepper jack, cheddar, mozzarella, some colby jack, and some moonster. Michelle thinks I say that wrong. She thinks it's munster. I think it's moonster. Comment below which one is right. I'm gonna close this but I'm gonna have the bottom and the top open. Just let it smoke away. One of the kids is inside watching the sap for me. They're watching the temp so I'm going to get started on pruning these trees. It's always one of those jobs that is kind of daunting. Like I'm not a pro at pruning trees. I'm not going to give a whole lot of tips today because I don't feel like I should. I'm just, I'm not the pruning guru. I have read some books, watched some videos, and it's a little bit frustrating because it's one of those things that most people say different things and some of the things kind of come down to preference. How you want the tree to look, what you want out of the tree. So I just do my best. Cody has done this in the past. He's a little bit, um, he's not very decisive and so it takes him kind of long and I'm just like, give it to me, let me do it. So it's not like I'm better at it than he is. I'm just, I just get it done faster. So we've just kind of decided that's how we'll do it. We have two pear trees, two apple trees, and then a cherry tree. The cherry tree did really well last year. So I guess I'm not doing something too wrong. I do wish we had some tree mentors like apple tree, fruit tree mentors here in Ohio, but we haven't really found anyone who does a really good job with organic fruit production. It's hard here in Ohio because it's so wet. So we're just experimenting and doing our best and so far honestly we have not been successful, but we'll just keep trying. Hopefully this year Cody will get a spray routine down. We say that every year. This is the year. This homesteading life that we live is truly wonderful. We genuinely love it and we definitely try to show a balance to our audience of the good and the bad, the hard things and the good things. Before our own privacy we don't always show all of the hard things that go on. Cody and I have both struggled a lot with depression. For me it was after I had babies and I was in those postpartum years and I had hormonal imbalances and was really struggling with adrenal fatigue. There were times in my life where I depended very heavily on therapy to get me through and I'm not remotely ashamed of that. I noticed that when my mental health was really well my physical symptoms started to fall in line. Therapy can look big and scary sometimes and somewhat intimidating and it can also be hard to find a therapist that's near you, but Better Health is a sponsor of today's video and they take all the intimidation out of therapy and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. You just go to their website and answer a few questions and they'll match you with a licensed therapist with years of experience helping people with struggles just like yours. You'll usually be matched within 48 hours and then you can meet with your therapist on a phone call, a video chat, or through messaging. And if you feel like you and your therapist for some reason aren't a good fit they make it very easy for you to switch therapists. We believe that everybody should consider therapy and if you want to try Better Health for yourself you can click on the link in our description box betterhealth.com slash more than farmers or you can choose our channel at sign up and you'll get a special discount on the first month of your therapy. We cut our raspberry plants all the way down to the ground every year right before spring. This helps with a couple things. It helps keep disease away, that fresh growth, and it also makes so instead of your berries kind of trickling in all year long you get more of like a bumper crop towards the end of summer and into the fall. Michelle really likes that because picking raspberries is a really big job and it makes so it's more of a concentrated time of doing it rather than just coming and doing it all throughout the summer. I'll be cutting them all the way down just right above the soil and that seems a little scary but they grow really fast and they will get really tall again by summer. I have heard though that you can't do this with every variety of raspberries. This variety is Heritage and it definitely works for these. We get a ton of raspberries every year but depending on which kind of raspberries you have do some checking before you do this. And I'm going to be using this DeWalt chainsaw here so I don't know if you remember last year I was trying to come up with a solution to cut these down. What I was doing before wasn't working that great and I got a blade for the bottom of my weed eater. That worked pretty well. That is on good and proper. But this DeWalt chainsaw has become my new best friend. I use it for everything around here. It's a pretty safe saw to use. When you let go of the trigger it stops right away. It's got a guard on it. It's got a guard here. It doesn't kick around like a gas chainsaw. Really really like it and it's going to be super simple just to reach in here and cut these off. If you don't have one of these yet get yourself one. All right we pulled the one pot of maple syrup off the stove because that one was done. We actually hope we didn't overdo that one. We didn't. But this one is getting really close so we're keeping an eye on that one but we're going to start dishing this out. I've tasted this a few times and it is so good. Way better than the last batch we did. Really really sweet. We've already run this through a flour sack towel filter but the last time we only did that and it was like fairly silty in the bottom. So trying to get a little more out this time. This is having a hard time running through this thing. All right this hit 217 so I'm just going to take this off. And this over here was straining way too slow and I decided I don't care if there's a little bit of silt in the bottom. We're going to use a flour sack towel again. Takes me back to milk straining days. With this heat it'll actually seal. It's so hot. We use this one for the last time that we made syrup. We already used it all. So we got one and three quarter gallon. We did 65 gallons of sap. I'd say that's a really good ratio because last time we did 35 gallons of sap and we only got like three quarters of a gallon of syrup. Well and this time the syrup is much sweeter. It must be a difference in the sap from the earlier still cold season until this. There was a lot more like fluctuation in temperature from cold to warm. Well and the sap was just like pouring in whereas before it was just trickling. Later this spring then we're also going to take the tiller on each side of this row of raspberries and we'll till it down so that it's about two feet wide. That really helps keep it a lot more manageable. Raspberries will just grow and grow and grow. It would take over our whole yard but this way they're easy to pick then in the middle. This trellis also really helps and like I said earlier even with cutting these down and then tilling beside it we get gallons and gallons of raspberries out of this row right here. Right there. While we're down here I want to show you something over here. I came down here the other day one of the first warm days. The bees were flying so excited because both of the hives look like they're doing pretty well. There are bees flying around. I haven't actually looked inside the hives yet but looks like they're doing good because they're flying. They made it through the winter at least. Oh that's starting to sweat which is not actually a good thing. It's not supposed to get warm enough for that. I think I'm actually going to take these off now. I don't like that they're sweating like that and that they're starting to sag. I think my problem was I started it this morning when it was in the 30s which would have been totally fine but it really warmed up fast and this thing is black so it's soaking up the sunshine and it's just getting too warm in here. I need to get a thermometer to put inside here that reads a lower temperature. This one doesn't start until 150 degrees and it'll start melting and stuff at like 70. So I'm sure it's easily up to that by now. It might end up being a little dry on the inside because the sweating or whatever here would be releasing some of the oils from inside of the cheese. I'm guessing it's still gonna taste good and I guess I learned a lesson. Right now when it's warming up during the day I just either need to start it way early in the morning or maybe start it in the evening and let it go through the night. I'm gonna cut it open just to see what it's like on the inside. It just looks like cheese. It's a little soft. I mean it tastes really good. This has been out here for about four and a half hours now and so it's got plenty of smoke flavor on it even though not quite as long as the last one. Yesterday we did not get everything done that we wanted to get done. We had somewhere to be last night so we had to quit a little bit early. So this morning we're back at it. I really want to finish these trees. I got most of them done and I will say I was a little bit discouraged with our apple trees. They seem pretty diseased but I guess we're just gonna keep trying. I just have my cherry tree left. This one did really well last year. I was able to make a couple pies from it. So I'm just gonna do what I did last year. I'm just gonna try to make so that there's branches that aren't crossing each other. Anything that goes straight up or straight down which the down doesn't happen very much. Just kind of try to make so that the air can breathe especially in the center. What I do before I do each tree is I google like what are the main things to look for. So I'm definitely not a professional but I'm doing my best and I feel like every year I'm learning more and more. The fruit trees are done finally. It's a huge load off my mind. Cody might go over them and do some perfecting touches yet. Now I just want to cut down all of my herbs. This is thyme and if you just leave it like this it'll definitely come back again the next year. But it's just really hard to pick and if you cut these back it just allows for nice fresh growth. Ah there's still some green stuff. That stuff is still alive down in there. That's amazing. This is the last thing on my pruning list today which is a big relief. Cody still has the grapes to do. This is my lavender rosemary sage and echinacea. Parsley sage rosemary and thyme. I am just going to whack these back so that they can come out with fresh growth this spring. And check this out these are chamomile plants that are reseeding. Oh and there's lavender starting to come back. Goodness there's just like tiny light green new growth down there. This is the kind of pruning that I like. Just take it all off down to the ground. These grapes desperately need some help. I'm gonna have to train these up here. Something that I should have done last year. And then there's a few of them that need to be snipped off. So this is another thing that not terribly confident about. I'm not going to give a whole lot of instructions but I'm going to do my best here. The general idea of these is to get the plant growing up and then branches going out on each wire up to the top of this thing. And then the shoots that go I believe it's up from these branches here are the ones that the grapes will actually grow on. So like this one here went from all the way from this plant all the way over there. So this needs to be cut off right here at this post. And somehow I got to get this thing out of here without breaking other stuff. Everything's a little brittle. These plants don't seem to be doing the best and I think a lot of it is they need some more nutrients. We've got a weed barrier fabric down underneath them which is working really well for the weeds. But we want to be able to compost these. So today we're actually going to pull the weed fabric up, put a bunch of compost down, and then put the weed fabric back down. Being really careful because these branches are fairly brittle. And I think they're looking better now that they're not quite as much of a mess. But they're still looking a little sketch and I'm kind of like I hope these actually regrow because they just kind of feel dead and stuff. This weed fabric has lasted really well. It's been a couple years and we put this down when I still had a full-time job off of the homestead and it kept Michelle from needing to do a lot of weeding. So it's been really good. But this stuff is definitely past its prime so it's going to have to be replaced either with more weed fabric or possibly with a mulch of some kind. I feel like we kind of went all over the place the last couple days. And if you want to see like exactly how much space we gave everything and our actual layout for our homestead, you can watch this video next.