Live off your garden!.

All right, where are you cutting up some peppers to dry? Um, peppers and tomatoes. I'll start with some of these tomatoes we have left. Can we dry some of that eggplant for my dad too? Yeah, of course. Thin slices. Cool. Start with that actually. All right, hey folks. Hello. So we have a bunch of abundance to deal with because it's fall, or as Sylvan calls it, dealing with the abundance season. So we figured while we crack some beans open and cut some stuff up to dehydrate that we would answer some questions about growing staple crops in the garden. So we asked our community on Patreon to submit some questions and we got some awesome ones. So, uh, hang out with us and deal with some abundance while we talk about vegetables. Let's do it. Pretty much just like what we always do. Also, we know this is a little bit of a late video because we wanted to do this like a month ago, but we got a little busy building the house. If you're new here, the house that we're currently sitting in was a lot of grass just under a year ago. So we've been really busy. Yeah, but we got some great questions and we're eager to talk about them. Hopefully this will be helpful if you do have some staple crops going in the garden that you're just getting ready to harvest and process and preserve, or if you want to try growing some next year because we highly recommend it. Yeah. So let's get started. So Samuel asks, do you have any fruit or nut trees that are for calories and when will they be ready to harvest? Yeah, we do. We planted a few nut trees specifically for calories. So we did hazelnuts, pecans, and chestnuts, and those all produce nuts that can be used in a variety of ways. But the hazelnuts will probably be the first things to actually produce nuts. The chestnuts and pecans will take, you know, maybe a decade to start producing any usable amount of nuts. Yeah, we might get like a handful, but not enough to feed us for the winter. But those trees will outlive us if they're taken care of. So they'll be feeding us for the rest of our lives once they start producing, and then they'll feed the next generation after we're gone, which we think is really important to think about taking care of the land in that way, not just for us right now, but also for the future. Yeah, absolutely. But as far as other fruit and nut trees for calories, we are lucky to have a lot already on the land. We have a ton of oak trees that make great acorns. We have oil nut hickories, and we have shag bark hickories, which are basically like a pecan, except the shell is a little thicker, and I think they taste better. Oh, don't forget we... Oh, sorry. And don't forget we also have that one really big black walnut tree. Oh, right. Yeah, and it's covered in nuts this year, so we'll probably get a good harvest from that. Yeah. Oh, how does this look for drying? Skinnier? Um, no, because they'll shrivel up a lot. Okay. I think that's probably pretty good. Cool. Okay, so Puck asked, we struggle with keeping potatoes from sprouting over the winter, even layered in burlap in a 45 degree room. Any tips or tricks? Yeah, that's tricky because I feel like you're, it sounds like you're doing everything right. Right. I would say that make sure that it is fully dark where you're storing them. That is a huge trigger for them sprouting is any amount of light. I mean, the burlap will help for sure, but it still has some light that's able to get through it. Another thing is, because you're right, that about 40 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit is the ideal temperature. I think it's about 65 percent humidity, so that's not anything crazy. Right. It's pretty standard. Yeah, pretty standard. And the other thing I would make sure is not to store them with onions or like apples, but that would be kind of a weird thing to do anyway. But a lot of people will store their potatoes with onions, and the onions can release the ethylene gas that promotes like continued ripening or decay. So you don't want that next to your potatoes. Another factor that can impact it is when you harvest them. So if the potatoes aren't fully mature, they don't have the full thick skin when they're pulled up, they won't last as long in storage and they can actually rot. And the variety of potatoes that you're growing, some of them are bred to have a longer storage variety versus others that are bred for maybe like to be colorful or really tasty or maybe to produce a lot. So look that up when you're buying seed potatoes to see like roughly how long the storage is expected to be. Yeah. We tend to keep ours in a basket with, yeah, like newspaper or something over them in the darkest spot we can possibly find. Although last year we messed up and left them directly in a window for two days, and the top layer just turned totally green. But you can cut the green part off. But yeah, they will sprout if they're getting a little pinprick of light. Okay. And then Thorny Rose asks, how do you approach growing for balanced nutrition? Good question. I would say we take a balanced approach. No, but really. So Jordan does have an extensive spreadsheet where he tracks where we should put a screenshot up. So he will do things like track, especially in past years when we're building the house, how many calories we're producing, how many macronutrients, how long it would take the average person's calorie intake, how long it would last them, you know, eating just the stuff from our garden. So you can get really in the weeds with it, but it's not necessary when it comes to planting. We're not really consulting that being like, we need 1200 calories worth of X. We kind of just do a general, about two thirds of our garden is staple crops. So, you know, those are things that are calorie dense and high in starch and protein. Right. So beans, corn, potatoes, chickpeas, peanuts. Yeah. Generally grains and legumes. And that's about two thirds of what we grow every year. And then the rest is like vegetables, fruits and herbs, the things that we're using for flavor and micronutrients and, you know, vitamins and all of that stuff. Right. And you can get a year's worth of that out of a much smaller space than you can with the staple crops, because obviously the staple crops are making up the bulk of your diet. And then, you know, things like putting some chili powder on your dinner, that only takes a couple of quarts of dried chilies to get you through the whole year. So you can grow that in one row of the garden. Right, right. Okay. And then Mason asked, is there such a thing as eating beans like pinto beans fresh when they just need to be boiled a little or are those beans only ready once dry? I guess I'm a little confused about how and when beans are harvested. You can answer this one. Yes. Your beloved butter beans. Oh, yeah. So I'll start with eating beans fresh. You absolutely can. So in the South, in North Carolina, where I grew up, there is a tradition of butter beans. And that's when you eat the immature beans. Typically, it's lima beans that you get while they're still small and green. And you just saute those up or boil them up in some, you know, liquid with a little bit of broth. And it is so delicious. It's one of my favorite things to eat. You don't actually have to add butter to them. They're called butter beans because they themselves are so buttery and delicious. You can do that with any bean. It doesn't have to be lima. You do want to cook them still, but you can cook them for much less time than you would a dry bean. And those are the immature beans. So then, so I guess the first step on your bean harvest journey could be butter beans. Then you get to the stage where the beans are mature, but they're not dry. And a great way to tell when that is, is the beans themselves will start separating from the pod. And the pod gets really flimsy. Yeah, but they can still be, they're still probably moist at that point. And you can kind of tell because they'll be, they'll feel a little juicy. They won't feel hard. Like you can't, yeah, they'll be squishy. So at that point they are mature and you could dry them to store or you could go ahead and eat them. They should have all the same nutritional content as a dry bean. And oftentimes we will harvest them at this stage if we're having a really wet year, like we did this year. Yeah. Because otherwise they could just rot in the field before they have a chance to actually fully dry for storage. Right. And then finally, if you are blessed with ideal conditions as they're maturing, you can let them fully dry on the plant. So the one that Jordan has right now, where it's like crispy. Right. You can tell by the sound. If it sounds like that, it's mature. Yeah. So all that to say, you can harvest beans at pretty much any stage. It's just going to have a little bit different of a nutritional content and you need to store them differently. Like if you're getting them really fresh, if you don't dry them out, you would want to freeze them to store them rather than just putting them in a jar. Oh, I forgot about green beans. Oh, true. Before butter beans comes green beans, which I'm sure you know how to harvest green beans. Right. And Mason also asks, when a crop gets taken out by pests or some other factor, like I think some of your chickpeas this year. Yeah, RIP. What's the plan after that? Do you consider potential loss like this when planting? My larger question is, how do you handle things going wrong in your growing season? Yeah. That's a great question because that's always going to happen. Right, yeah. And part of how we plan for that is by, yeah, we expect certain things to not do well based on the weather because not every crop likes the same conditions. So if you plant a diverse mix of different crops, then some years you might have a great potato year and then not so great chickpea year. So this is one of those years because we got a lot of rainfall, which gave the potatoes plenty of water to swell up and get nice and big. But the chickpeas, their roots rotted because they really don't like sitting in water for very long. So we basically, I don't think we got any chickpeas this year. I haven't really- A handful maybe. Yeah, we haven't harvested them yet, but the plants are just like looking real sad. But alternatively in a dry year, the potatoes will probably be a little bit smaller and not produce as much. But things like beans, chickpeas, corn, they can really thrive in those conditions because the corn can get roots like six feet into the ground. The chickpeas are really efficient at using water and the same for the dry beans. So yeah, just doing a diverse mix is always a safe bet. I would also say that planting things in different areas, you know, to take advantage of either your microclimates or just the element of surprise for pests. So we always grow corn in multiple spots. We did that back when we had our, you know, community garden plots in the city where we had some in our yard, some at this plot, some at that plot. And now we do it by having our garden corn planting and also our staple crop corn planting. And that's partly to save seed, to make sure we have some distance for seed saving. But it also helps because if say a raccoon or a rodent gets into one corn patch and really devastates it, they might not find the other one. It's too soon to talk about that. I'm sorry, but it's true. You gotta prepare for these things. We did have some damage in our corn this year, which is very sad. But we'll talk about that later. Yes. So speaking of corn. And wet. Yes. Morgan asks, any suggestions for growing corn in the wet? I live in zone six, but in a maritime climate where summers are mild and damp and rarely exceed 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Ooh, that sounds pretty nice. I mean, sounds beautiful. Last time I tried to go corn, it was completely overrun with earwigs before I could harvest any. I have a small garden, but would love to try a three sisters patch. Yeah. Those are not ideal conditions for corn. The ancestor to corn is native to Mexico. So it's pretty hot and dry there. And those are the conditions that modern corn likes as well. But there are varieties that were bred more for your conditions that will do better in a cooler climate with more water. Specifically, there's a variety called Painted Mountain and another one called Montana Murado that were bred by a corn breeder in Montana. And they were bred for shorter seasons with cooler temperatures. So I would recommend giving one of those a try. As for the earwigs, we don't really deal with those too much here, but I have seen them like tunneling around in the corn before. And we just kind of like pick them off as we see them. Slushed in. Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know how to deal with those on a bigger scale. And the final thing I'll say- Would VT deal with those? Uh, maybe if they're eating the green, I assume. Well, they're not caterpillars. They're not Lepidoptera. Oh. So I don't know. I'll look it up. But another way to deal with the water is by using big mounds to plant your corn in or your Three Sisters patch. So I would do a big mound with some topsoil, some compost, and maybe even some sand mixed in to help with drainage. And then that way, the roots of the Three Sisters won't be sitting in water when it's 75 degrees and really wet so that water's not evaporating quickly enough. Makes sense. Let us know how it turns out. I'm always excited to get somebody going on their first Three Sisters patch. Yeah! And speaking even more of corn, Thea asks, Could you please talk about the different corns you grow and what you like using each of them for? I'm considering growing some for consumption rather than chook feed and am most interested in adding it to soups and in baking. Also, as a Southern Hemisphere follower, could you please do a longer form video on your tomatoes? Okay. So there are basically four types of corn. There is flower corn, flint corn, dent corn, and sweet corn. The three that you would consider staple crops are flower corn, dent corn, and flint corn. And then sweet corn is obviously the one that we pick fresh and eat green or yellow. And so the three staple crops would fall under the category of grain corn, which fun fact, corn is just the English word for grain, which is how English people described it when they were introduced to corn by Indigenous Americans or maize as they called it. Maize. So grain corn just means corn corn. It's like a chai tea situation. But that's how good corn is. Like it is the word for all grain. Yes. And it's the food so good. They named it twice. Yes. Anyway, so flower corn is a softer corn. It has a bigger starch. So it's really good for doing things like tortillas, tamales. So once it's nixtamalized, which is when you cook it in cow, you can grind it up and just use it for all kinds of things. And it does a really good job of making soft tortillas. Flint corn is much harder. It has a thicker hull. So it's great for grinding up into grits and sifting out to make corn flour or corn starch and popcorn is actually a type of Flint corn. So because it has that thick hull, when you heat it up, it builds up pressure inside the kernel and then pops and turns inside out. And then finally, there's dent corn, which is kind of a cross between Flint and flour. So it has that really chunky hull up on the top. And then beneath that, there's a soft starchy layer. So it's kind of a dual purpose and really productive. Those plants can make a ton of food in one year. So it seems like for your uses, you would probably mainly want Flint or dent corn because of doing a lot of baking and putting it in soups and stews and things like that. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think flour corn, once it's nationalized like hominy, that can be good in a soup too. That's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Oh, but you did call your chickens chooks and say you're in the Southern hemisphere. So I assume you're in New Zealand or Australia. And if so, your climate is probably really good for dent corn or flour corn because it's hotter and drier. Flint corn is bred for shorter, cooler seasons. Actually, now that I say that, that reminds me that I should have also recommended growing Flint corn to Morgan. So Morgan, I hope you're still watching this video. Flint corn, in addition to those short season flour corns is a safer bet for your climate as well. Okay. So Sarah G asks, well, she actually doesn't ask because it starts with not really a question, but did want to comment. Now that I'm getting a few pumpkins that your advice to cover them with a plastic pot and a rock or wire netting saved the majority of my pumpkins last year from the raccoons who were eating everyone. You might want to pass that along. Passing this along to all of you who might not know about this. If your pumpkins are starting to ripen or even before if they're just big and they're still green and you're worried that a pest is going to come and get them because that does happen a lot, especially with raccoons or rodents, you can actually cover them up because the leaves are the ones doing the photosynthesizing, right? So you can put like a big bucket or a pot and weigh it down with a rock to disguise your pumpkin until it's ready to harvest. That's worked really well for us too. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. So then Nathan asks, what grain are you most excited about and why? Aside from corn, of course, corn stands above them all as king, both literally and figuratively. Yeah. I'll let you take that. We can both talk about what are grains that we're excited about. Yeah. So this year we planted a big row of sorghum for the first time, which I'm excited to see how that does. It's very closely related to corn, so maybe it will have some similar properties. It looks a lot like corn. When the plant is growing, it's like almost indistinguishable. A corn stalk. And then we're also going to give wheat another try this winter. So winter wheat, you plant it in the fall and then you harvest it the following summer. The past few years that we've tried that, it just hasn't worked out. First year, we put it in a spot that wasn't ideal because it was too wet. The next year, the deer ate it all when it was six inches off of the ground. And then this year, we're going to try to protect it a little bit more and plant it in a spot where we know it will grow well because we know the land a lot better now. And hopefully next summer, we're baking some homegrown bread. Yeah, that would be awesome. I'm also excited to actually grow wheat successfully beyond like a small test patch. I would say that I'm excited about rice. I do think rice would be really good in our climate because it is so wet or our specific land is so wet. And we've grown it successfully, a test patch. The main thing is going to be figuring out how to process it efficiently because it has those really hard hulls that are difficult to get off. So we just need to figure out more about that. The other grain I really like is amaranth, although that is technically a pseudograin or pseudocereal. Grains are grass seeds, basically. Right. So since amaranth is not a grass, the seeds of the plant are not technically a grain, but they behave very much like a grain and you can pop them. We've done that in the past. Or you can use them to make things like porridge or like granola bars. And it's just such a beautiful plant and you can also harvest and eat the leaves. So I think growing more of that in the future will be a cool thing to do. Yeah. And for those who don't know what amaranth is, if you've ever eaten quinoa, that's a cultivated variety of amaranth. And then David asks, how would you protect young bean sprouts? We had some marauding rodents come through and clip most of them at the base this year. Even some that had started vining. That is such a bummer. When you see your little bean plants come up and then you come out and a bunch of them are gnawed to the ground. We have definitely experienced that. At our old place, we would get that. I think it was chipmunks a lot of the times that would come and do that. A lot of times they were just looking for a drink. Yeah, I think they cut it and just like drink the liquid from the stem. Lick the water out of it. Yeah. So I will say if they're bush beans, that is easy because you can cover them with row cover. So that's something that we do at my work a lot is we'll just put a very light row cover or insect netting over it and then weigh down the sides. So depending on the scale of your garden, you can just put a little bit and then weigh it down with rocks or rebar. On bigger scale farms, they'll cover the sides with soil. And because beans are self-pollinating, you could actually leave it on until it's ready to harvest. Usually we would take it off when they're big enough that a pest isn't really going to bother with them anymore. Obviously, if you're doing pole beans or runner beans, that's going to be not workable. So I would say you can cover them until they're so big that you can't do it anymore and then put the pole in the ground. Or you could try growing them out in a tray. Again, this is going to depend on the scale of your garden. Growing them out in a tray and then transplanting them can help a little bit because when they're not so young and tender, they're a little bit less tempting for our rodent friends and foes. Yeah. And also dealing with rodents in general, something that we started doing this year is using this little like hypersonic noise maker in the garden that, you know, it plays pitches that we can hear, but there's also pitches that rodents can hear that we can't really hear, so it doesn't bother us. And turning one of those on at night just kind of like freaks out the rodents and pushes them away from your garden. So doing that for some period of time in the growing season can make it just a less desirable place to hang out for the rats or mice or whatever happens to be chewing up your stuff. And then once things establish themselves, you know, they typically will get out of there. And then finally, NG asks, do your chickpeas hold up well in your moist Pennsylvania soil? No. Mine did pretty good during a season of no rain, but started to struggle once we started having heavy rain in our area. Yep. Also, do you ever use crop rotation for staple crops? I could see the three sisters helping avoid the need for it, but what about others? Yeah, good question. So as we talked about earlier, our chickpeas did not do good this year because we had a ton of rain all summer. And in past years, when we've had drought conditions in the summer, the chickpeas have done relatively well compared to other beans. So yeah, like we were talking about earlier, planting a diverse array of crops is always gonna ensure that you have something. So like this year, we are just swimming in black beans and pinto beans and other kinds of dry beans, but our chickpeas didn't do anything. So next year, maybe it'll be a drought and the chickpeas will do great. Chickpeas in general, they like cooler conditions and drier conditions because they're from Mediterranean around Syria and Lebanon. So that's kind of what they're used to. They grow really well in California and other Mediterranean climates, but not so well here yet because we're definitely trying to breed them to have a local variety that grows well on our farm. And then as far as crop rotation, we do rotate. I think that's generally a good idea both for pests and disease and also just for keeping what you're taking out of the soil more balanced since certain crops are really heavy nitrogen feeders and others might be drawing more potassium or boron or whatever. I certainly think that a good application of compost can help remediate any issues you would have from growing the same thing in the same place. But if you have a lot of pests and especially if you have a lot of soil-borne diseases, crop rotation is gonna help you out a ton there. I will say that you're right on the money. I think with the three sisters in terms of one of the great things about them is because you have this balance of three different crops that are kind of taking different nutrients and in the case of the legumes actually creating some of those nutrients in terms of fixing nitrogen, then you don't have to worry as much about rotating it. And there's evidence of three sisters being grown in the same spot for long periods of time and then letting that space go fallow for a little while and then coming back to it. But I definitely don't think it's one of those things where for your three sisters plot, you need to be switching it up every single year. We certainly don't. We've been growing three sisters plots in the same place at our community gardens for how many years in a row? Seven, yeah. And we add a lot of compost and fish emulsion and things like that every year. But they all did, but they did great. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There is something to be said for the fact that that's how people have been primarily farming on this land for thousands of years. So it works. Okay, so that was the final question. Thank you all so much for your awesome questions and also for helping make these videos possible with your generous support. We really appreciate it. Yeah, and we're just in the thick of harvest season right now. So we definitely plan to put out another video once we have everything in and accounted for, showing how our staple crops and the rest of our garden did this year. Yeah, and we are laser focused right now on finishing building our kitchen. So hopefully we'll be sharing a lot of videos this winter about how we live off the land and cook with all this stuff from our garden all winter long. Stay tuned. All right, thank you.