Closing Time (I can't believe I'm saying this)

Oh look. Hey guys. Peggy's trying to bloom a little bit. How's it going boys? Nice job pulling off the dry beans. Beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes. Wow you guys have made some progress out here. Hey there darlings. Welcome back to Roots and Refuge where we are mid cleanup of the garden and in cleanup I mean tearing a lot of stuff out. Now to some of you that's unfathomable because you haven't even started to harvest much yet but here in South Carolina the heat has already started to really wreak a lot of havoc and if I go ahead and let go of the things that are on the decline of productivity it makes space for me to plant again and I can have a whole nother wave of pretty much anything if I plant it by middle of July. Hey baby. Hot day. It smells so good out here like holy basil. It also smells like sweaty human beans. Well there are a few of those. So this is actually a part of the garden that I have a very very difficult time with. I have a hard time tearing things out because I'm like maybe if I give them a little more time I can get a little more from them but there really is a point that requires ruthlessness if you are going to succession sow and do multiple waves of the garden and if you handle it with ruthlessness if you come in when things are post peak and they're really declining and you tear them out and replant you actually can get two really good peaks out of the garden so it is worth it but I actually call in Jeremiah's help on this because he has less struggle being ruthless with the dying garden. I say that while he fells one of the big massive sunflowers. See I struggle whenever I see you know. Oh they'll come back. They've been coming back. I haven't planted these in three years. One of the dead ones will like come back to life magically. Oh well I mean reseeding is kind of like that. I need you to do this job because you don't get emotional about it. You're just like moving on. Thanks for this. Thanks for the time but it's time to go. Oh look all of those are gone. I mean I actually do sing to myself whenever I'm doing this. I'm like closing time. No. Got you a cherry mater. You got me a cherry mater? So sweet. What a sweet boy. Cheers. When you're done going through the hard part of pulling everything out and cutting everything down it's nice to have a clean slate. Yeah it is nice to have a clean slate. That's right. If I want that second peak where the garden is epic looking again in September I have to do this and sometimes I don't because I hate this part so much Yes that's why you're doing it for me. I was like thinking this whole time it's like kind of like we're cleaning up mom's room for her. Is that what it feels like? Yeah. Well hey it's a nice trade. I've helped you clean up your room plenty of times. Yeah. I've got like one glove like a Michael Jackson. What'd you say? I said I got like the one Michael Jackson glove. Nice. Where's the other one? We have no idea. So all of this stuff is a little wilty looking. It's hot out here. I'm gonna give it some water though. I don't know it will make a big difference. It's just wilting because it's hot. So Ezra is over here. We're taking some dried green beans we ate off of these plants for weeks and then let the remaining ones get big enough that we can save them and replant them. So I'm gonna replant them now. Literally my least favorite job of the gardening year is this is making my call and he offered to do it for me. I was like all the hard eyes. That's romance friends. So I harvested 140 pounds of tomatoes out of the high tunnel night before last. Some of the plants had started to get sicklier than I like to let stay. That one's probably going to come out here soon. I just start ripping them out pretty ruthlessly at this point because you know it's the best way to give the remaining ones the best chance. Look at these. These are the hot streak. These guys are going to be forever on my grow list. They're this really pretty orange. That's a smaller one. A lot of them have been really big. There's a lot of green fruit right here. That's a good example of one. Isn't that beautiful? Really streaky orange. It's got like a thick red flesh. So I gave some of these plants to my friend Erin. She's in West Virginia. I'm curious to see how they perform for her and if anybody else is growing these. I would love to know your input. I will forever grow them now and then also this it's K-A-K-A-O. It's another hybrid variety. It's very much like a Paul Robeson. The difference is is it is really uniform and they are not splitting at all which that's a problem I've had with Paul Robeson since I moved to South Carolina. I didn't have it so bad in Arkansas but here they tend to split a little bit more. You know I love my heirlooms but these hybrids have just proven to be fantastic this year and this whole wall of hybrids and the high tunnel is definitely going to be something in the future. Actually this wall of tomatoes in here performing so well namely those couple of varieties that just bought them because they said they were for high tunnels and I can see now that that is absolutely true and it is kind of changing my future gardening plans just a little bit. I'll tell you about that. But first we need to check something over here. There you have it. This is my first one this year. We're gonna go in the shade of the high tunnel so I can enjoy my first peach. I wanted to turn the camera on today to give you guys a garden update and a life update or YouTube update I guess I should say with this. Y'all I wish I genuinely wish like if I had magic powers what I would do right now was give every one of you one of these peaches. Just unreal. It's just unreal how good this is. This is a white peach. I've not been able to figure out what the variety is. I couldn't find any of my records. It is one of the best things I've ever tasted and I know that's so unfair for me to hype it up when I can't tell you how to get it for yourself but I've been watching that tree every single day. I mean coming out and checking on them like far more road on their ripeness than this moment. Thank you Ezra. Great job. I love you. Y'all I filmed this whole video and when I finally just sat down to edit it the whole like second two quarts thirds of it were inaudible because the wind so we're gonna come out and finish it. I enjoyed my first peach but most of the figs are still unripe. I had a couple of them but it was a branch that had kind of like fallen and I think it ripened them faster because of that. It looks like I'm gonna have a pretty decent pomegranate harvest this year too for the first time. There's a lot on this and then I have another tree up in the orchard that has a lot on it. Let's take a peek at what the boys did. I might get rained on. Y'all see that cloud? You can smell it too. It looks much more tame in here. We actually have quite a bit of rain on the forecast for the next little bit. We had a little spill today that rained hard and heavy for a little bit. I have space to fill. Got some ground cherries. My boys are so proud when they're doing something that they know I really need and appreciate. I don't know how much you guys could tell that by what was on the first part of this video. I know them very well so I can tell when they're acting proud but when we came back in the house they were like, mom are you really glad we got your garden ready for you to plant the next stuff? There was a time that I would have really struggled with getting out of the way and letting them do that job even though I really do absolutely appreciate it. It really is a struggle for me to tear out things that could still potentially produce. It really just has been a blessing to learn to get out of the way in situations like that. Not just because it gets the job done but allowing your family to serve you is a good thing. It's good for you. It's good for them. It's good all around to allow that to happen. I know for moms, I mean I speak as a mom but I'm sure it's for parents all around. That can be difficult to do sometimes. A moment of appreciation for these Dr. Witchies. Look at this. That one's huge. It's still a little too green. So many. I'm not picking them just yet. I feel like they could go a little bit longer. So we're considering doing something here under the shade cloth. This is a new idea. We just started throwing it around so I'm not married to it. I'm just putting it out there. I like sharing my thought process with you guys. I find a lot of value in that because I mean what a hive mind here. I mean I've got all kinds of minds from all kinds of places that I get to throw my ideas at, bounce them off of and see what your opinion is. I mean you guys have talked me out of some things that I had thought for a moment but because I didn't have experience or understanding I was able to see it differently and then also you guys have helped me develop ideas to be even better than what they would have been. But Maya built this beautiful shade cloth structure as you can see and right here this middle bed is a hot mess right now because I had it completely weeded ready to plant. I didn't plant it. The weeds started coming back up. I was in analysis paralysis about what to plant and so now I just have a bunch of weeds growing and I've got bindweed trying to come up so I got to get this out before it starts going to seed. I have, I cannot believe I am saying this. Y'all are gonna be like who are you and where's Jess? I have, I have a little too much garden space I think. I have too many tomatoes this year. And here's the thing about gardening is like some years you have excellent years and some years you have really cruddy years and I typically plant on the more side just in case there are struggles and there have definitely been struggles. I think you can see here like I've had multiple situations with varieties of uh you'll hear that big bull sneeze um where varieties didn't do well. Everything is not flourishing here but enough things are flourishing that I'm really like reassessing because I mean I've brought in multiple hundred plus pound tomato harvests and they're still going strong. I mean we probably still have at least a few weeks of pretty heavy duty harvest before the plants really start getting sick and my high tunnel plants don't look like they're even remotely close to getting sick. I'm kind of leaning towards taking these garden beds under the shade cloth apart um and it's like a multi-purpose thing like there are some issues like you can see these reinforcement. Maya built these per my request very long and they're like four feet wide and they've always bowed real bad and he's come in and tried to reinforce them. We had really long garden beds in Arkansas. They weren't as tall and I think that just the weight of the soil is difficult for them. So we've like just we've talked about something to do differently uh but it hasn't been that high on the priority list. Well now this year I'm finding myself not even needing all this space and I'm still completely covered up in food. I have plenty of food. We had talked about trying to figure out how to put shade cloth up over the in-ground garden down on the other side and I was thinking about it. I was like why don't we just put the in-ground garden under the shade cloth. I don't know how well you're going to be able to see this bowing but I don't know yet. We're going to finish out this season and see but I'm thinking that it might be nice to dismantle these beds uh spread the soil out and just basically cultivate a no-dig in-ground garden space that's underneath here. This is about I don't know probably it's like three dads wide. So like close to 20 feet wide and then it's uh 60 feet long. So this is a good space. This would be plenty of in-ground garden space and I would not make this choice purely for aesthetics. I really do think this would actually be the most effective way to use my garden space by making this in-ground but also I do like the fact that by opening this up I can then see like through here from the garden the cottage garden into where our chicken coop is going to be. I just think that would be really nice. I asked Maya because obviously he built these beds and I didn't know how he would feel about taking them apart. He actually liked the idea a lot because I think it's been bothering him that they're bowing so much and he's concerned that we're going to have to address them and try to fix them at some point. So you know to him it was like okay well that's definitely an easy fix. And then we'll have this chicken yard right here and so we would just have this under shade cloth in-ground garden right next to it. And we'll still use some of this space down here for in-ground gardening but we've discussed setting up like a pretty extensive composting situation kind of inspired by Charles Dowding where he has the bins that he like turns over. Look here there's volunteer pumpkins growing all out here in the pasture. And we talked about putting that compost area here. This is where I really wanted it but I was hesitant to give up my in-ground space. I didn't plant this this year other than some potatoes down on the end because I wanted to see how I could do without it. So that's why I have like corn in raised beds and okra in raised beds. And I've got melons in raised beds but it kind of creates a chaos that I don't really love. That's probably not entirely true. I kind of like it. I kind of like it but it doesn't make a lot of sense. Like it's kind of a mess to have melons all over the walkways and things like that. So I really I'm really feel like I do want an in-ground space for those things but I also want the compostation. My current raised bed situation is more than I need especially figuring this out. Doing this whole long row of tomatoes in the high tunnel and bringing in I mean already it's probably been if I had to if I had to guess I've probably already harvested over 250 maybe upwards of 275 pounds from this this season. There's still a lot of fruit ripening. There's a lot of green fruit and because they're under shade cloth they're still setting fruit. So yeah that's pretty exciting. I never thought I would come to the place of being like hey I think we should back it off a little bit. This is too much. But realistically if I have plenty of food for my family my extended family to share with my neighbors to barter in my community you know to give to people to allow other people to come pick at some point you have to say okay beyond this it's going to be wasted because I can only pick so much. Like I only have so much time to spend in the garden and to spend in the kitchen. Also using these hybrid varieties they're just so prolific and while I will always love my heirlooms my Dr. Witches and Abe Lincolns and Carbons now have been crazy prolific it it is really nice to have a source of so much fruit that's like just so uniform and healthy and crazy productive. I picked all these two days ago and look at this so many more. Let's lay down and have a chat why don't we. I said let's lay down and then I lay down and uh tom myself out of the hammock onto the ground. So let's sit up you are very precariously perched on the end of this hammock and I'm gonna try to not tump you out on the ground but it will most definitely hurt you less that it that it just did me that was not fun. When I when I wanted to shoot this video I really wanted to like make a connection because I haven't made I haven't made a lot of videos recently and I've talked a fair bit about it I've shared quite a bit on my sub stack but as I'm tearing out half the garden you know or getting rid of all of the stuff that's spent from the heat you know it's not lost on me that I haven't shot a single garden tour this year. I've been shooting garden tours of my garden for several years I mean it's just like a huge part of gardening to me and a huge part of doing YouTube. I wish there was a way that I could like succinctly tell you oh it's xyz here's the reason and it's it's kind of a little bit of a tangle you know we've gone through a lot this last bit without wanting to go into just a ton of detail because it's so private but also I do want to live in a glass house I want to be able to share what's going on because it's freeing for me it allows me to just be honest which is what I want to be you know we started about a year and a half ago we really decided that we would like to have another baby and we began exploring that going down that road and it's been a hard road and the story is not over yet it's definitely not at a happy ending. I did have another really difficult loss this year and this one was far more physically taxing than anything I've ever gone through of that nature and I'm okay now I'm I am to the point now that I am I really am okay I'm very hopeful um I've gone through grief and all of that but it has definitely put a damper on my creative ability in a big way because when you're dealing with something that feels just so absolutely consuming of your life and your thoughts and your plans and you also it's just eating up your emotional capacity it's it's just hard and what was left over for that obviously I gave entirely to my family and that's that's probably like the biggest reason why I haven't posted a ton but it's not just that and the other parts are a little bit more complicated and I don't know that they're going to be universally understood being a content creator is such a weird thing because you're living this very public life from your home like the most private place in your life first off I've really struggled in recent seasons being on the internet not like my face being on the internet but like actually consuming stuff on the internet it's so polarizing we are living so much of our life online it's so driven by algorithms you know media is so pushed by outrage and therefore people are constantly trying to play on your nervous system and your FOMO and you're just inundated by ads telling you you're about to miss your chance and you know media telling you that the world's about to fall apart and just this constant influx it is very unhealthy in my opinion and trying to figure out how to just be a human in that world has proved to be kind of difficult for me and then also a human that adds to all the media it's been it's been hard to find that place it is the deep desire of my heart to never add to that noise I had to adjust a little bit I'm so nervous we were both gonna go fall in um yeah I don't want to be more noise and I really don't think that I am because it's always been my earnest hope to just like tell the truth and be encouraging and a source of hope and light for people there's also the truth that this has been my job and this has been the way that my family has money and we've become dependent on it which means that you have to post even when you don't feel like it or it did in previous seasons and one of the big things that Maya and I have really done in the last year is like just ruthlessly tackle our debt um I like I mean to the extent of like selling our car like we sold our side by side like just get rid of absolutely everything we can um because I want to keep creating but I don't want to have to I don't want it to come out of a place of obligation that I need to do it in order to make money because I don't feel like that best of me comes to the table when that's the truth when that's the case and so much of the noise that I think is being creative right now is driven by the desire to make money and it's not that there's anything wrong with making money we have to do that and I think that it is okay but I personally don't want my creation within me to be so tied to my need to you know provide for my family that I can't and I don't know that that will be understandable to anybody um but it's something that I've really been working through and blessedly we have been able to just take the time through this last loss through this spring through this high season through the summer and like being able to take the appropriate time to spend with my family for birthdays and holidays and and just not worry about oh I need to work oh I need to capture this oh I've got to stay in the algorithm and and that has felt a lot like loss that has felt a lot like giving up relevance and views and all of that but the truth is is nothing great has ever come in my life from striving it has always come from surrender every single time and yes steadfastness and faithfulness and showing up and hard work but not from the belief that it is entirely in my hands to make something worth that workout that never works for me and this last I would say probably the last year specifically has truly been like an exercise in surrender for me and so that's that's kind of where I've been I really want to create out of the overflow and I have actually thoroughly asked myself the question like do you want to quit doing this like do you want to quit being in the public eye do you want to quit um you know sharing yourself so openly do you want to like close the windows on this glass house but here's the thing I love to tell the story I love to create something I love to highlight what's beautiful in the world I love to teach people about the things that I'm passionate about that is never going to go away in me but there's this other massive factor I really love you guys like I love the fact that when I chose in my life to go home and focus on my kids and the little bit of the earth that I had to take care of and focus on what was going on my kitchen table and ultimately what seemed like choosing a small life by choosing like a low road and by tending what was right in front of me I love that in that season a pathway open for me to connect to so many people who had chosen the same thing um doing YouTube and creating content and living in a glass house has been hands down one of the single most impactful enriching parts of my entire life and when I think about the craziness of the internet and I think about all the noise and I think about how overwhelmed I can get and I think about getting in places of real grief and then I think about does that make me want to quit ultimately the thing I settle on is absolutely not because that would only cost me more because it would cost me this beautiful enriching community that has meant so much to me and I don't have maybe the right words and I don't have maybe the right exact succinct conclusion but the gist of it is um I know it's been irregular I think that's been unavoidable I don't know what it's going to look like going forward but god I'm glad you're here that's the bottom line thank you guys for hanging out with me today and truly all the days you do I'll bless you until next time