The Crop That Feeds Our Family More Than Anything Else

We don't buy any produce from the grocery store and today we're planting our number one crop that makes that possible and we're going to take you through the whole process of everything we do to get that in the ground. But first I need to grab something. Before we start planting this garden up here, what we call our front garden because it's closest to the house, needs to get tilled again. We till twice in the spring. One time as early as possible when it's dry enough. We get it tilled to take care of the weeds and stuff and then usually some weeds start popping back up. If you look out here there's some weeds popping up here and there. We till it one more time and that gives us a really nice seed bed. I know there's a lot of controversy out there about tilling versus no till. We've come to the place where we feel like this works really well for us and we take really good care of our soil. We have tons of earthworms. Our soil tests show our soil improving every year. Our yields improve every year. The quality of our vegetables improve every year. So this is working. Maybe no till is working for you and that's okay. To me it's personal preference. There are some main things to care about or worry about with your soil. You don't want to leave it uncovered as much as possible. Obviously right now this is uncovered but for most of the year our soil is mulched. We do cover crops and then there's vegetables growing in it so we keep our soil covered as much as possible. Then obviously we're adding our soil amendments. We're adding our compost so there's the right nutrients in the soil and we're adding organic matter. All the leaves that we're using for our mulch that's adding to the organic matter and this soil just gets better and better every year. It is absolutely beautiful. It actually rained during the night last night. It made us think we were maybe not going to be able to plant today but it actually seems dry enough so I think I was kind of delirious in my sleep and just thinking that it was raining all night long but I think it just rained really hard for just a little bit. Not only did it rain last night but it's also supposed to rain this afternoon and then for like the next week or two so this is the theme of like every video right now in the spring but we're racing the rain again. Come on. As a testament to our method of tilling and composting and cover crops this garden up here I used to not even be able to hardly keep the tines down into the dirt. It would just bounce all over the place. It was so frustrating but over time as we worked on it now it's to the place where I can pretty much just let it do its thing just kind of walk beside it so it is working and there are a few other reasons why we don't do no-till and I'll let Michelle tell you about that in just a second. As a side note that old horse tiller barely works sometimes but it does work. I think we should probably get a new one. I actually had a friend offer to give us one and I should probably go after it but this one just kind of keeps limping along but if you don't have a lot of money to put into a new tiller they can be a really good option. Those old horse tillers were made to last and you can get them on Facebook Marketplace for a couple hundred dollars usually but you have to be willing to do a little work on them every now and then. We went to Berlin Seeds this last week on Friday and came back with all of our seed potatoes and garlic and a bunch of other really fun stuff that we'll show you later on in this video but this morning we need to start out really quickly with planting our white potatoes. Cody got everything tilled which was so nice and I am now going to cut these things up. I like to usually depending on the size of the potato and all of that I like to cut the seed potatoes into usually like two pieces. These definitely need to get planted. I like to make sure that there's at least three eyes on each piece of the potato that I cut. White potatoes are my all-time most important crop that I plant in my garden. If I could only plant one thing it would be white potatoes. White potatoes make such a big dent in our food security, in our food supply. White potatoes are very very versatile. They can be made in like a hundred different ways. They're something that pretty much everybody likes. They store super well without any preserving. They're easy to grow. They just check all the boxes for me. I consider them my number one staple crop and so when it comes to my white potatoes I always plant these. These are one of the first things I plant. I make sure that they get the best spot in the garden. If the seed potatoes are really small like this one I will not cut this. I definitely will leave this. You can actually get different seed potatoes. Some of them I think they're called grades. Like they grade them differently. Some of them are meant to be cut. Others are meant to not be cut and I know I got some of both this year but I can't remember so I'm just going by the size of them and how many eyes they actually have on them. The potatoes that I just cut up are red pontiac. These are huckleberry gold. I'm super excited about these. It's a new kind of potato that I'm trying out. The berlin seeds catalog had them for the first time this year and I thought they sounded super interesting and I am not planting yukon gold this year. It's really sad but I've just had too many mishaps with them. They were infected with some kind of virus. It's called virus y. There's a brown spot and then all over the potato there's just like little spots. This is a purple potato that's white on the inside called huckleberry gold. I cannot wait. The next three bags of potatoes that we're cutting up are kennebec. These are kind of like next to yukon gold. They're my all-time favorite for just taste and storage. Yukon gold will outshine kennebec and red pontiac with when it comes to storage but the last couple years they struggled with disease and so I ended up having to use them first and so the fact that they stored better actually didn't do me any good because they had disease and didn't store as well. So I got mostly kennebec this year because kennebec do very very well for me. Real quickly off camera I put some soil amendments on here. I think I talked about doing that in maybe our last video so I won't go over that again. Raked it in real quick and now I'm gonna mark the rows and put the rows in with the wheel hoe. Michelle can come out here and plant. Spoiler alert it started raining but you're gonna have to watch the rest of the video to see if we get everything planted before the rain starts. It might be a little bit loud on this tin roof so I'm gonna turn on the noise canceling here so hopefully that's a little quieter. I just wanted to take a quick minute to tell you about the sponsor of today's video BetterHelp. It's online based therapy, something that I've used for myself and has been really really helpful for me. For most of my life, earlier in my life especially, I have struggled with depression and several years ago we were really struggling in our marriage. I was very burnt out with homesteading and I was really struggling with depression and I knew I needed some help. We had gone through marriage counseling before for us as a couple but finally I got to the mental health. I went through therapy and it was something that maybe even very literally saved my life. I just think that it's so important today with everything that's going on in the world and yes for all of time bad things have been going on in the world but with what's going on in our generation and then the bombardment of social media, all of the scrolling that's going on, all of the things that are right in front of our eyes that can really affect us mentally and I just think it's so important to be taking care of our minds especially if you're a parent as a father or a mother. You have kids you're taking care of. It's really important to take care of yourself so you're able to take care of them. That is why we like to talk about BetterHelp because we want to see as many people as possible get the help that they need. BetterHelp's goal is to make starting therapy easier and they truly do. Since it's online based, you just go on their website, you fill out a questionnaire, and you can be matched with a therapist in as little as a couple days and then you can talk to your therapist via phone calls, video chat, or messaging. It's not like you need to drive somewhere every time you have a therapy appointment and if you want to get started for yourself you can use our link betterhelp.com slash more than farmers and you'll get 10% off your first month of therapy. I like to plant my potatoes in double rows and then I just when I'm hilling them I'll hill up on both sides. I have about 18 to 24 inches in between each row just for reference. I like to make sure that I can get a wheel hoe in between here but most of the season these are all going to be mulched with leaves and so we won't actually be tilling or really needing anything in between the rows so they're pretty close together and the double row just makes so that I can pack more into this space. I like to make a stick for my kids to show them how far apart to plant these and I like for them to take the potato make sure that the top of the potato this eye is sticking up so finish these go to the end and go here finish those before you start with the next kind. I just cover these potatoes pretty lightly because I'm going to be coming back in and hilling these later on and I have made the mistake in the past of covering seeds seed potatoes but also just any seed in general too deep and then they struggle to germinate. Every year we aim to plant 40 pounds of seed potatoes for our family of six to last us for the entire year. We actually right now are just finishing off the last white potatoes from our cold room which is crazy to me. It gets me every single year how long they last what an amazing storage food it is. Last year our potatoes definitely underperformed we were very disappointed with our potato harvest last year but some years we've gotten up to like 400 pounds of potatoes off of 40 pounds of seed potatoes so some years this is like too much some years it's just right some years it's barely enough. This year I thought we were actually going to have to really skimp on white potatoes but we ate as many as we wanted and we're just now finishing them and the year before that I was giving them away because we were getting way too many. We got these potatoes planted before the rain which is very cool that was our biggest goal. I still have something inside that I'm wanting to plant out into the other garden so we're just going to quickly get this done and hurry go plant that. The weather is looking pretty chilly for the next two weeks and very rainy like some days it's like 100% chance of rain lots of wind so I would really like to get as much of these cooler weather crops out as I can because some of them really like this cool weather they don't love the heat. Potatoes much prefer to germinate in cooler weather than in hot weather. We get a lot of questions about back to Eden gardening and why we don't do the no-till gardening and honestly I didn't grow up with the wood chip gardening like nobody in the Mennonite community that I came from that I knew of anyways did the no-till gardening and so this is what I'm used to. Also we have a large space we're growing like tons of row crops and stuff and it just doesn't feel efficient to be laying down all that cardboard and all of those wood chips. I will say we did get a whole bunch of cardboard this year we are dabbling in it for a bunch of our perennials we'll see how it goes but at this point it just works really well for us to be able to till all of the space that we are growing in which is like an eighth of an acre and so for me I just don't worry about it. The next thing that I am wanting to plant is garlic. I got this spring garlic from Berlin Seeds the other day. I honestly don't plant tons and tons of garlic. I know it's weird but I just don't use that much. I use a ton of onions. Last year my spring garlic didn't come up at all. I think it was just too warm it was too late when I planted it. What I like to do is plant the garlic that stays out in the garden over winter and then it comes up at like the crack of spring but we weren't sure if we were going to be here anymore this spring and so I didn't plant it. It is a little bit later than what I should be planting it. I should have probably planted it a couple weeks ago but we still earned at our last frost date and the next couple weeks are supposed to be nice and cool so hopefully it'll be cool enough for this stuff to sprout. One of the more difficult parts of being online and sharing our story with the world is the fact that we make mistakes all the time and then the whole world gets to see them. So my tomatoes are looking very sad. I covered them with five gallon buckets over the two nights that it was supposed to be close to freezing. It didn't even actually get to freezing but the tomatoes just didn't like the cold and it ended up that some of the leaves were against the edge of the buckets and those leaves got frozen whereas I feel like if I would have just left them uncovered they might have done better. I don't know. I do think that these tomatoes will make it but they are looking very very sad and Cody's mountain man tomato is officially dead. Just could not handle it. My peppers and basil completely kicked the bucket. They are frozen. Totally frozen and I knew that it was going to be a risk putting them out early but from what I could see of the weather at the time that I planted them it looked like it wasn't supposed to there wasn't supposed to be any hard freezes and so I figured they would be okay but they just weren't. This is for sure not the first year that I have made this mistake and put stuff out too early and they got frozen. This year I only did it because they were getting so root bound inside and I miscalculated when I should plant them because last year I had a really bum grow light and so I thought it would take longer this year for my seedlings to take off but with the really good grow light and the really good potting soil they just grew so fast and were ready to put out way before I was ready before the weather was ready and so because I know that I have a greenhouse to fall back on I decided to take the risk and so now I guess I have to go buy me some new tomatoes and peppers. We wanted to get as early of a start as possible this morning with the garden to get the planting done before it rained but the cows definitely need water. I put that off for a little while. Cows have been loving it back here. They've been loving it back here. I already moved them into a new section of the pasture. The grass is not growing super fast yet so I'm afraid they're going to catch up and I'm hoping by the time they eat all this grass back here there'll be enough grass in the front. Once we get on into a little bit warmer weather I think it'll grow faster but for now it's still growing pretty slow. While we're out here let's go check the swarm trap. I'm not seeing anything. I do wonder though how that lid came off. I wonder if the wind was blowing enough and a branch pushed it but that's not good if it's about to rain. I don't want water getting in there. Now how do I get over the fence is shocking. Oops starting to rain. A nap and a matcha later and we are back to show you our burland seed haul. First the more boring stuff. This is buckwheat for a cover crop. I always like to have this on hand because cover crop time always sneaks up on us and we always do it in a hurry and so I try to just keep buckwheat seeds on hand at all times down in our cold room. We also got a bunch of fertilizer for our evergreen trees that are struggling. They're out by the road and I have a theory that they hate the salt that gets spread on the roads when it's snowy in the winter and just FYI we are not sponsored by Burland Seeds but we do have a code a discount code in the description box if you guys want to order they have a website now online. I got a bunch of our very favorite gardening gloves the wonder grip and then the cool mud ones. These are basically like second skin. I absolutely detest garden gloves. I do not wear them unless I have to but we do have some places with thistles and also like when I'm weeding the asparagus patch my fingers get all cut up from like the stalks of asparagus that are dried out if I don't wear gloves so I try to have some of these on hand. They're called nearly naked garden gloves and you can actually like feel what you're doing with your hands. I also got these tough net dishcloths. These you can like clean out the inside of glass jars and our like plastic milk jugs and stuff really well with these. Cody got some crayon rocks. He has this like gift box upstairs for his little nephews that he puts stuff in. These are going in there. He also got a smoked hot sauce. This is our favorite hot sauce. I hate anything spicy but I will put like a drop of this on just for the intense smoky flavor. This stuff is amazing and this is probably my favorite thing that we got. Check this out. It's a little stripper but it's really small. It's much smaller than the ones we have and I think that this is going to do a much better job with our ladyfinger popcorn. We also went to a little Amish store called 77 housewares. The kids love it. It's like full of all kinds of little knickknacks. I also like it because they have quality kitchen utensils and stuff. This is a stainless steel little whisk. I got one of these and I got these glass jars. They're kind of like the Pyrex ones and then just some super random stuff like rubber bands, the scraper. I keep this in my drainer for my cast iron skillets scraping food out and this is another thing that I always use for my cast iron skillets. These like chore boys is what we used to call them growing up. The kids also got a bunch of little knickknacks like little laser pointers and pocket knives and silly putty and like all sorts of things but they're all over the house. This is the other thing that I got. Every single time that go to an Amish store I buy the soft sweet brooms. This is like the only broom that I will use in my house. I have tried getting the brooms from Walmart and Kroger. They suck. To make so that we don't have to get really heavy things like seed potatoes and stuff like this shipped to our house. Oops. We make a trip to Holmes county once a year and we just kind of make a day out of it. The kids enjoy it. Burland seeds has grain mills. They have everything canning that you can possibly think of. They even have like sprouting seeds. They have stainless steel pans with plastic lids. They also have the foldable square super tough tomato cages that I rave about all the time. Anything and everything that your gardening heart could possibly desire Burland seeds will have. And by the way Burland seeds is also one of the sponsors of the seed to spoon summit that we have spoken at for the last two years and we're going to be there again this year. We have two workshops and drum roll please. This year we're going to have a booth and we convinced my brother to come be at our booth with his coffee cart and he's going to be selling my favorite strawberry matcha. He's going to be selling coffee drinks all made with local Jersey milk so you're not going to want to miss it. If you want to buy tickets you can use our code more than farmers and the link for that is in the description box. We hope to see a lot of you guys there. Can I climb that tree? Decker popcorn sheller. It's a more kosher name than little stripper.