Former ALONE Contestant's Harvest On The Homestead And How You Can Be Self-Sufficient

out in the Wisconsin Woods is The North Wind Homestead that's a model of self-sufficiency where a couple grows their own food raises their own chickens turkeys and pigs and has an off-grid property powered by solar and wind energy Tom Gallison and Anne rosenquist were featured in a previous video she was on several episodes of the alone TV series where she was placed in a survival situation in Northern Saskatchewan in Canada and lived off the lake land for 19 days before tapping out Tom her partner grew up just down the road from the property he now lives on there's always some work to do on the homestead Autumn time is a busy time there are fruits and vegetables to harvest as this is how they make money to pay for the very few things they need to purchase like car insurance gasoline and pay off those dreaded property taxes out here it's necessary to take care of business well yeah that type of business is important an too but that's not what we're talking about right now it's harvest time on the homestead so let's join Tom and an Rock oper here and I'm with Ann and Tom who've been living off grid since 1982 on a homestead in the Wisconsin woods and they're going to tell you how you can become more self-sufficient this morning we're going to be digging up potatoes right now we got the purple potatoes and we're going to go on down the line we got some red heads and some whites here's a few yeah got some of those and we'll just throw them up here in the wheelbarrow go on down the line this is our potato haul so far just a little bit left to go and we're done don't those potatoes look pretty now that they're all cleaned up we're going to drive this little electric car down and dump off some apples all right all right so we're going to take some apples down yep all right let's take this little electric car on down on our way out we passed an electric car with a solar panel on it that was from the 1970s that Tom once used so this thing cost you about 2,000 bucks and about 1,000 for the shipping right yeah a couple years ago I don't know what the prices are now but uh it was bought on that Alibaba website by my son and shipped to Seattle and there's a trucker that goes out there and comes back and he use it as a back hall get it here and so what's the range on this electric car uh they say I haven't gone that far the range would be about 15 mil on the level um but I I use it mostly around the farm going a you know sometimes three four trips a day up and down the hill here to the far field we're going to there's the solar panel up top that charge the B battery were infected with insect larvae so uh we're taking them far away from the main part of the farm the new insects that are we generated from that aren't going to be in our crop all right so we're just going to dump them out in the field here yeah it'll make good fertilizer I guess the uh wild turkeys made pck at them too so this is your strawberry field right here this is our strawberry field yeah it's uh produced the fruit two years in a row and we're going to get some production next year too and then we'll probably be planting in the spring another field that will be our Major Field after that for a few years I remember my brother look at who used to raise strawberries down by Cumberland Wisconsin looking out the window there at that field before us when when I first got this place said Tom I don't think you'll ever be able to grow berries without a artificial fertilizer 5 years later it was a really good strawberry field there's Fisheries around here I was able to get to Fish waste those places for nothing and I would bury that fish was in the fields we established fertility here a little bit what do we have here an um well it's supposed to frost tonight so I piled all the zucchini plants that haven't really uh frosted yet for the pigs but I don't know if anyone knows this but you just cut off this is a zucchini stem Leaf it's kind of prickly on the outside I got a Clippers here you just scrape it you could do it with a knife too or even with your fingers and get those prickles off and it's uh it's like celery kind of it's juicier kind of tasteless but a nice little crunchy thing to eat okay so you can actually eat those stems of the leaf yeah it's actually really good those are some really big zucchinis tell me about those uh these you can see we put a red rag around them to mark them for seed we've been trying to save the longer ones so if once they get like this they're ripe which which means the seeds are ripe so we'll cut into these and get our seed but then we also Save A Lot to eat it's like my favorite um pumpkin seed or whatever it seems like they're the best seed you can get they're not as thick of a a shell or whatever yeah they make good good roasted seeds so you roast the zucchini seeds and they're even better than the pumpkin seeds yeah for sure yeah wow cool yeah so if your zucchini get too big there you go and then those are uh cucumbers that were got too big we're saving those are seed overgrown cucumbers and zucchini that got a little big uh before the frost but this is good good pig food good chicken food the chickens love the seeds Okay so cucumbers and zucchinis and these are going to the pigs and the chickens yep okay so all of this yeah good food for them and they like it a lot oh yeah a lot of protein in there collecting the last of the pole beans for the season season yep all right get the rest of those yum I've been staying in this little cabin here on Tom's property it's just down from Tom's house interestingly Enough Tom grew up just about A4 mile down the road from this property here let me give you a quick tour of the place come on in the front door and come on in here there's a little light from the solar panel got the little solar devices over there charging and whatnot this is the kitchen over here got a nice little wood stove which I'm probably going to make good use of this evening it's probably going to rain tonight got a nice little piece of artistic flare back there and this is the rest of the living area here go up these stairs up this ladder and I'll sleep up here up on the second floor I think I'm going to sleep right there I have a real mattress to sleep on this evening so that'll be nice got a view out here of the woods good morning fired up the wood stove last night and I worked here at this table at my computer doing some editing that was my cozy little bed for the evening and now I'm going to go and film Tom and Anne there's an abundance of their remaining fruits and vegetables to harvest everything from peaches to beets raspberries to broccoli fall keeps an and Tom busy as bees well maybe not this bee who seems to be having a nap you got a lot of garlic there Tom so these are the Cs yeah they're perfectly good or at least most of the clothes in them are but something like this were these little layers that cover the bulb there are three or four layers there but uh some of them maybe it was in the ground too long some of them disintegrated and uh so it doesn't look as presentable or if it gets super dried out you might set it down and the clove might get loose so selling the head might not be that good of a thing and another example of a c is this one it's pretty firm nice little head but it's it's miniature and most people want to have big bigger clothes than that and more of a head and this one is a a head that's kind of dried up some of these problems like this come from a disease called as yellow that's spread by insects and there are some other examples too this one is just a little bit starting to Yellow here and often that indicates that there's a a problem it might not be as as viable as a seed but it's okay to eat a lot of it's cosmetic and some of it is garlic that we just think we keep long enough because you you should be able to store garlic for a number of months into the spring pretty much if if you uh leave it in an Airy dry place you know out of direct sunlight and out of the cold okay so all the garlic you have there are the coals and the ones behind you you'll either sell or you use for seed for next season is that correct yeah typically we'll look for oh here like this is a nice a nice head of garlic here it's got fairly good size cloves and it's got lots of them it's got two four five you know uh so typically we'll break these up into individual clothes when we go to plant it and if there's a small clove will bounce that out for eating and the large cloves that are in good condition will plant a larger clove will give you a larger head of garlic the next year the size varies a little with the position in the field and all that but there's one variety up here that we just started with larger than most the heads on that are really good size and the individual clothes would be too this one is called Majestic Hing to plant a lot of that along with some of our other favorites like Georgian fire that's kind of a little hotter garlic I think we'd be planting some of that and a a German extra hard is a popular one that a lot of people buy okay so different garlics have slightly different tastes yeah right and and heat levels we've sat down and tried to distinguish that in a little setting here okay we got five different kinds of garlic here so let's start in and see what the differences are but well after the second or third one it's hard to detect the subtleties because you have so much garlic flavor in your mouth but we did find out of the ones we were growing that georgean fire was the hottest that was raw we into a COR comparison so I bet if you're tasting garlic raw your mouth is on fire yeah that's right with almost any variety yeah we're harvesting uh some cabbage that we already harvested if you harvest it early enough it makes some tiny heads and it's not good for much a number of different heads look how cute they are they're cute and some of them are real loose leaf now but some of them this is pretty firm you know there's there's five cabbages on there maybe okay so you can get multiple harvests off the Cabbage oh well at least at least two yeah yeah it's like free food it's not just red cabbage that stores there's different cabbages that store there's cabbage that that are made to store yeah and there's cabbages that don't store as well but these are hard and store well and we like the red cabbage so what happens with these cabbage when you get in a drought situation well if it's a long-term drought and they have been deprived of water and you get a sudden infusion of rain things grow real quickly and some of the heads that have formed will split and once they split insects get in there moisture stays in there it tend to start uh rotting so it's it's not a good storage cabbage or marketable cabbage before rain sometimes we will go out and we'll take the cabbage and put a little twist on it so you can kind of hear a little bit of ripping and that'll rip some of the tissue that's transporting the water up to the cabbage head another thing I started doing is getting a pair of large pliers instead you know and the method of that is you can see where I did it on this one earlier um just kind of tearing off the outer bark of it I put the pliers on there and go back and forth a couple times and that prevents the translocation of the moisture up that I think works pretty good because we had a heck of a rain after a heck of a dry spell and doesn't seem to be any cracking so organic gardening can be tough at times right like these apples what happened well it's a low Apple year so there's not many apples so they're all going to be cider grade but they're pretty gnarly I mean they're real gnarly like you know this this is worm Trails you know through there most of them have worms you can kind of see the worm Trails through there it's not good but they're good cider quality and you get sometimes you get fungus or what yeah there's some fungal issues going on let's see where's one right here this is this is called scab you know it's it's superficial it's just right on the outside see it's white inside okay so it's just it's just cosmetic yeah it's a cosmetic thing and actually this one doesn't appear to have worms as ugly as it is I don't don't see any warm Trails through here but just cuz an Apple's ugly doesn't mean it's not good right right there's no op pesticides on it apples are one of the top pesticide sprayed things around and personally I'd rather have an apple that has a worm inside because if that worm is happy and healthy I know that Apple's good for me too right and uh I get a little suspect with some of these apples that look too perfect yeah I don't want to die of cancer this is the chicken coup these are Cornish crafts chickens they're they're for meat they put on weight fast so they're probably ready to butcher but we might take them a little bit longer um in the past we've had them get as big as 18 lbs and they're still tender and still good there is a a turkey there is a turkey a meat turkey there's two of them yeah and so do you get eggs from these guys at all no we don't take them till they get old enough they're they're made for meat okay they're not really made to lay eggs now do you have any chickens out here that are for eggs yeah we have another coup so this is the meat group here and then there's a turkey in here yeah yeah it's a small one let's see where are you turkey two of are you in here there's there he is there's a turkey one there and then the other one behind that board see food dish he's a little yep he hurt his leg here comes the turkey this was the original structure the only structure on the property when it was purchased by Tom the chicken cpop so this was the only structure that was original to the property when you got it right the chicken coop yeah chicken coop an Old Log Chicken Coop probably made in the 30s probably almost 100 years old wow that's something and now we have Mr Turkey right here there he is turkey turkey turkey he's an oldie but goodie there's Mr Turkey strutting his stuff does anybody eat turkey eggs ah certainly we've uh we eat them occasionally they aren't as numerous as the chicken eggs so it's not like we're making a steady diet out of them we've also given them to other people and uh no complaints and your description of them was what H the harder shell a little bit more pointy um and they have more Al alamin the white part alumin yeah so they're a little little bigger than the chicken egg this isn't the largest Heritage breed you can get but the larger Heritage breeds have even larger turkey eggs in yeah than these what breed is this turkey Royal Palm p a l m it's a Heritage breed it's kind of a smaller Heritage it started from a wild turkey which is more brownish and grayish somehow they select and got this white there was a frost last night so might as well pick some of these raspberries for breakfast cuz they're just going to go to Mush on the vine now so uh got a nice little handful there and uh pretty tasty mhm no use in letting these go to waste M those are good picking The Last of The Season's raspberry today so we got pretty good haul considering it's so late this is real wild rice from a lake in Wisconsin so Tom uses the pole he has the pole and I've got the knockers so I'm using the sticks and you know like in the canoe to knock the rice in the canoe yeah so we do we get quite a bit of this we you know this is a good food so this is truly wild rice from the wild from the wild the ajba use it as a principal food historically they call it the the food that grows on the water so there's an added benefit to collecting rice what is that uh rice worms we've been ricing for years this is the first time uh this year we actually pulled some of those rice worms out they usually crawl off you know when you try to dry the rice and so it's not in your rice but there's a lot of worms cuz they're eating rice too we put them in a frying pan I don't know maybe a half a cup and man sweet good texture um and so fatty that was the surprising thing Rich very rich very good I would eat them again really good taste and all you had to do was just put them in a skillet yeah I would guess they'd be good you know dropped over the rice you know on your plate oh yeah oh look at this look we've got a couple of customers coming now our typical customers guys hey how's it going oh that's our official greeter or one of them Bernie don't eat that cookie I gotta say this girl looks like one smart cookie coming here what they call true goes best with cookies hey check out these cats these guys travel with three cats if you'd like to know more about this perfect Duo here oh look at that there's the other one this perfect Duo and the cats can be found on Scotty finds Adventure on YouTube so make sure to check these guys out we've got another one in the back too but she's sleeping these are nerum and you can actually eat the flowers and the leaves and they have kind of a nice peppery taste I'll show you they're real pretty and they taste good you can eat the flour and the leaf is this amaranth flower telling me what it thinks of me you might not expect to find fresh peaches grown in Northern Wisconsin but you can get them here of course not all are going to make the cut a little frog right there there he goes lots of broccoli growing here oh yeah it's in good shape now too Ann likes to pick the fall flowers and makes arrangements to sell or to bring into the house let's not forget the greenhouse and harvesting the last of the tomatoes forget those tasteless store Tomatoes the best are right from the vine am I right so how can people be more self-sufficient reuse things buy things used fix things question the need for things in the first place find a substitute or a way to fix something or make something for a little application that you might have start out small with things that you can Master you don't want to necessarily rip out your power line Electric System and get the solar in by evening time things take time sometimes and and a little study as you gradually form an attitude I think of self-sufficiency and self-reliance it'll set in in all walks of your life you can take it to extremes almost at sometimes I think it's so essential that we start repairing things and reusing things okay so recycle reuse restructure existing items perhaps I would say um get rid of your phone or your computer or limit your time on it you know maybe just an hour a day or you can't get anywhere by just reading about stuff or looking at stuff and books there's so many books get some good books um um you know going out and foraging is something that is so fun it's so fun to make meals out of things that you can get just by foraging and or grow your own food there's several books you can get that have a lot of condensed information about earth-based living and that sort of stuff you get kind of a book like that you know General and specific both but is easy reading you don't have to go cover to cover cuz a lot of times we only have a small snatch of time you know but you can get some good ideas and and direction in that little snatch of time so from your own experiences what would you say would be the best advice to give to people who maybe want to be self-sufficient but who aren't quite familiar with how to do that in a nutshell what would you say the best way to become more self-sufficient in their personal lives would be I think they have to look at why they feel they should become self-sufficient and there's all kinds of reasons for self-sufficiency one might be better economics another might be just satisfaction but a third might be in dire times even if you're not a oppress it might be important for you to be able to figure out how to do things with the resources at hand and if you have certain procedures you've started too you're not going to be as hard hit all kinds of things that add you know toward the future possibilities um dystopian some of them may be we live out in the country and we've been off- grid since 1982 but there are people in this General broad area that are hooked into the grid and their electricity goes out sometimes and ours hasn't been out can be as bad as have in a freezer full of meat and vegetables and fruits and the electricity goes out and they all rot take the minor steps first get a feel for it I think it's important to Buddy up a little to other people doing things too and then you can swap results you're having and compare you know notes on things we were trying to figure out how self-sufficient you guys are the other night let's list everything that you actually buy do you buy much of anything we buy salt fuel for the uh chainsaws and for a vehicle to make deliveries to town or whatever organic sugar to make jam yeah I do go through ax handles sometimes I buy a group of those at a group rate though I think I could make a handle okay you know myself and we buy certain food stuffs we go to thrift stores we buy a lot of used clothing there I try to avoid the the underwear but you know socks and shirts and pants but we also make a lot of our own clothing too that we wear at certain times out of deer skins because we brain tan deer hides sometimes we buy new Nursery stock plants we've got maybe a dozen varieties of raspberries growing right now and put that put that in the ground and after a year or two you don't have to buy 300 or 200 or 100 plants you can if you have the time and the patients you can propagate them yourself and it goes with other other kinds of trees too fruit trees and we buy flow we make a lot of jams to sell it commercially so we have to buy organic sugar and organic pecking for that we have we haven't figured out though we could do it and should be working on at the how to make our own pectin we do buy a lot of jars every Jar Jam we sell we have a little tag that goes on the top of it this jar can be reused or returned so basically what you buy in a nutshell I think we have and I remember peanut butter came up yeah peanut rice chocolate chocolate chocolate spaghetti did that come up like yeah yeah a little some like little treat things flour yeah we would have to Sugar coffee does that come up yeah coffee okay there's a few things a few things some oil gasoline but outside of that not not a whole lot right very rare so you don't spend much money cuz you have no utility bills right no no utility no water no water bill you don't really have any bills do you taxes yeah property taxes yeah we've got a farm so in Wisconsin at least a lot of the things that uh we purchase are if you're buying them new we can be tax exempt you know because the farm if it's for Farm use it's tax exemple okay so that saves you money there right you get eBay and Amazon to agree with your tax exemp status but you have to jump some hoops you have to send them with some forms and stuff so basically just a little bit of food some gasoline a few little gadgets and and that's pretty much it we had to buy a cordless phone this year so you make your money through selling your organic produce here correct yeah here in farmers markets and some Limited wholesale and that's the bulk of your income then right you can see the Old Wagon Wheel there and if you come around here you can see that the tree has entirely grown around it you can see it going right through the tree there tell me about this Tom what what is this it was part of a wagon that probably was horse drawn they had a horse or two and when they left the wagon got parked there quite a long time ago that's an Ironwood tree and and that's a maple up there and they uh they're probably about 50 years old so maybe they maybe they didn't start growing right away but soon after they left Grandma and Grandpa yeah Grandma and Grandpa she's the Maple and he's the iron there you go that could be and that wagon was from your grandpa yeah the wagon was from the grandpa I can't find anyone left to who recalls uh being on the wagon or anything but um you know my cousin Jane and dth might I question her on it so that thing's probably from 1910 or so maybe yeah I would say this is a spring leaf for the what the seat yeah the seat is it uh yeah or the or the cargo I'm not I can't really tell how long the thing was there was a back end to it or this was just like a you know a Buckboard sort of thing look at the springs they had it was it's probably made for hauling a load for sure oh yeah a half ton pickup doesn't have that that much for Springs now just outside of the cabin where I state is this old Pontiac that now serves as Homestead Decor does anyone know what year and model this might have been also nearby were those old farm implements was this some sort of harvester I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about self-sufficiency with Ann and Tom don't forget to give me a like on the video share and subscribe until next time this is rock hopper I'll See You by